| One reason for the difference, at least in the case of very serious crimes, might be that bad debt is often either due to bad luck, or due to mistakes on your part that you learn from and are much less likely to make again. For example you might get laid off during an economic downturn and not be able to find a new job in time to avoid missing payments. A few years later, when you have gotten back on your feet and caught up on everything, there is not much reason to believe that you are a bad credit risk. Or maybe you don't appreciate how big an impact high interest rates on credit cards can have when you carry a large balance. You can easily learn from this and not make that mistake again. If short, as you note people can change, and in the case of bad debt there is a good chance that they have done so after a few years. And if they haven't, they will probably have newer bad debt on their credit report to take the place of the expired items. Compare to a very serious crime, such as child molestation. You don't do that because of bad luck or poor judgment. To do that you have to be seriously broken mentally, and modern medicine does not yet know how to fix that level of broken. You are very likely as dangerous 30 years from now as you are today. In short, except in rare cases the people who do these kind of crimes do not change. They just learn to be more careful to avoid getting caught. |
I'm talking about things like petty theft, drug possession/petty trafficking, and impaired driving. Those are crimes that people can change from.