Yeah, I think we’re too hard as a nation on ex-cons. But they’re not heroes because they went through self-imposed hardships (and almost always at the expense of someone innocent). And they’re certainly among the lower rungs of honesty by categorization. Nowhere near the top.
If this sounds harsh, just act their victims.
The hardships aren't self-imposed, our justice system is specifically and intentionally retributive, imposing punishment for its own sake rather than imposing consequences with the goal of rehabilitation. And we're talking here of additional ad-hoc social punishments beyond the terms of the sentence that make finding a job harder.
The level of personal discipline it takes to get released and stay "good" on probation is far beyond what we expect from workers in general and almost certainly stricter than either of us requires for ourselves. The level of humility and, frankly, debasement it takes to find a willing employer with a felony conviction is if not heroic at least saintly.
If you want to know why this is, I would recommend Discipline and Punish by Foucault. Our present systems of justice go back hundreds of years, when a crime was considered an attack on the sovereign, aka the King, or the Prince. Back then crimes were punished by Hanging, or Torture, and it was done as an exercise of terror. The primary purpose of this wasn't the prevention of crime (Do you really think royalty cared if peasants killed each-other?), but rather punishment for disobeying the King.
All modern systems of Law are essentially still medieval systems, and it's why crimes that happen exclusively between two people are prosecuted as Person v. State of Whatever. The process of justice isn't for the criminal, it's to remind the rest of us of the total power of the State.
Kinda hard to raise an army to fight the adjacent royal when one town's contingent hates some other town's contingent more than they hate the enemy.
But yeah, they mostly let the peasants do whatever so long as the particular whatever wasn't potentially bad for them.