The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Petigny-Perry might seem like a very different man, though, if you’re looking at another document: his criminal record. That document runs about four pages long, beginning with a minor larceny arrest in 1971, when Petigny-Perry was 17—so long ago that, he says, that he can’t even recall the details of the incident.

There were other arrests, too, including a charge of assaulting a police officer that Petigny-Perry suggests had more to do with heavy-handed policing in his hometown (“I’m a black man in Springfield, and I jumped on seven police officers? Come on.”). In his 20s, Petigny-Perry committed several armed robberies of Springfield-area grocery stores, using the money, he says, to feed his addictions to cocaine and heroin. Those robberies landed him in prison. He was released in 2001, after serving 18 years and seven months.

In reality, of course, it’s impossible to define any person by the words on a few sheets of paper; neither his resumé nor his record can begin to capture who Petigny-Perry is, who he was, how he’s changed over his 53 years of life. Many of those changes, in fact, took place during his years behind bars: He kicked his drug habit and took advantage of the sort of prison programs—academic classes, vocational training, personal counseling—that have dried up in recent years. After his release, Petigny-Perry lived for a time at the Honor Court, a local rehab program that focuses on community service, finished a degree at UMass, and began a new career in the human service field.

But no matter who Petigny-Perry is now, his criminal record will always be with him. And he’s not alone: About 2.8 million people have records (commonly known as CORIs, short for Criminal Offender Record Information) with the Massachusetts Criminal History Systems Board. They include anyone who’s ever been arraigned in court—even if the person was found not guilty, or if the charges were later dropped. And, depending on the circumstances, those records might be considered when they apply for a job, for housing, for a loan—creating, critics say, sometimes impassable roadblocks to the very things that ex-offenders need to make a successful start at a new life.

Petigny-Perry is part of an increasingly vocal collection of activists who are pushing to change the CORI system. Their goal isn’t to eliminate the system, they say, but rather to make it fairer to people with records, more useful to the public—and, ultimately, more likely to serve the interest of public safety. To get there, they need to persuade a lot of people: nervous voters who worry about high crime rates, nervous employers who don’t want the liability that comes with hiring someone who might pose a security risk, nervous legislators who don’t want to be tagged as weak on crime.

They also need to force a public conversation about what we, as a society, really want from our criminal justice system. Are jails and prisons really part of a “corrections” system, where offenders can reform their ways and atone for their misdeeds? If so, by what standards should we decide that a person has changed for the better and poses no risk to the rest of us? Should someone who’s committed a crime be forever marked by it? Most fundamentally, do we believe that people can change?

“People have this notion: I did my time; I paid for my crime. But that’s not true,” Petigny-Perry says. “Because anybody who can get their social security number can find [their record] and give them their own form of justice.”

T he CORI system was created by the state Legislature in 1972 to modernize the maintenance of criminal records. Cumbersome paper records were replaced by a computerized format that was used primarily by people within law enforcement: police, judges, parole and probation officers, prison officials. Ironically, the new system was also intended to protect the privacy of people who had criminal records, by tightening up guidelines about who could see those records.

Any time a person is arraigned before a Massachusetts judge, a CORI is created. The record includes personal information (date of birth, social security number, occupation, spouse’s name) and the charges he or she faces. The record is updated as the case proceeds through the court system to its conclusion, including sentencing. If the person is found not guilty, or if prosecutors drop the charges, that information is included, but the CORI does not disappear.

While access to CORI records was initially limited mostly to law enforcement officials, over the years the number of organizations with access to CORIs has grown dramatically. According to a 2005 study by The Boston Foundation and the Crime & Justice Institute, more than 10,000 organizations have been certified for access to CORI records, up from just 2,000 in 1993. Those groups that, by law, have the right to review CORIs include public housing agencies and organizations looking to hire employees to work with “vulnerable populations,” such as schools, summer camps, nursing homes and hospitals.

In addition, other employers and agencies can apply to the Criminal History Systems Board, or CHSB, for permission to see CORIs in cases where, they argue, the interest of public safety outweighs the privacy rights of the subject. This group might include hotels, airlines or security firms. Individuals may also request CORIs in certain cases, including if the subject is currently on probation or parole or has recently been released from prison.

What records they see varies depending on who they are; at a minimum, applicants usually receive a report showing the subject’s prior convictions and pending charges. In some cases, the report will include things like juvenile convictions, charges that were dismissed or continued without a finding, or cases where the subject was found not guilty.

According to the Boston Foundation/Crime & Justice Institute report, the CHSB processed more than 1.4 million requests for CORIs in 2005, more than three times the number in 1998. Over the years, the state Legislature has passed new laws expanding who has access to these records. In some cases, the organizations aren’t just granted access, but are in fact mandated to evaluate the CORIs of job applicants.

The reason for this expansion is obvious and largely understandable; who wouldn’t want the reassurance that their baby’s daycare provider isn’t a violent psycho, that their grandmother’s home health aide doesn’t have a weakness for other people’s prescriptions, that the cashier they just hired doesn’t have a history of sticky fingers? There are legitimate public safety concerns that make the CORI system necessary—a point even would-be reformers take pains to make. But, they argue, the current system is filled with weaknesses and injustices and, in the long run, can compromise rather than improve public safety.

In part, the problem springs from the presentation of a CORI. Originally intended for law enforcement officials, the reports can be daunting reading for a lay person. The Mass. Law Reform Institute—a Boston-based legal services organization working on CORI reform—publishes a document called “The CORI Reader” (available at www.mlri.org/cori_project), which attempts to explain the complicated system. The document includes a six-page glossary of the various abbreviated legal terms that turn up on CORIs, an alphabet soup of CWOF (continued without a finding) and DWOP (dismissed without prejudice), HWB (held without bail) and FILE NF (filed no finding). Tossed in for good measure are several Latin terms: NOLO (Nolo contendere), NP (nolle prosequi).

Those terms might make sense to a prosecutor, but will they to the human resources manager at a corporation, or the owner of a small business looking for help? While the CHSB does offer training and information on its website about interpreting CORIs, employers are not required to take the training, and most don’t, according to the Boston Foundation report.

And while some employers may take the time to read the report carefully, others, activists fear, will automatically disregard any job applicant who has a CORI. This can be especially problematic when a person has a record for a minor incident, like a traffic violation, or when she was ultimately found not guilty, or the charges against her were dropped. Even a lengthy CORI report doesn’t necessarily mean the subject has been arrested many times; a report stemming from a single charge could have multiple entries, each reflecting court dates, pleas and dispositions.

“If you talk to the average person about CORI, most people think we’re talking about an ex-offender who’s coming right out of jail,” notes Richard Ward, program officer at The Boston Foundation. “But most people who have CORIs never served a day in prison.”

And as the number of organizations with access to CORIs has grown, the records system has become strained. The CHSB staff and budget has not kept pace with the increased demand for records. That, The Boston Foundation notes, opens the door for increased errors in reports, a problem compounded by the fact that Massachusetts, unlike most states, does not use fingerprints to verify the identity of subjects in its criminal records system.

Complicating matters are the numerous private companies that do background checks. Type “criminal records” into Google and you’ll find a flood of sites, with names like criminalsearches.com and sentrylink.com. Unlike official CORIs, which are only available to certain organizations or with the approval of the governing board, anyone with a credit card and a computer can hire one of these private companies to check out a job applicant, a potential babysitter, a new boyfriend.

But because these companies are unregulated, they present a host of problems, critics say. There’s no guarantee their information is correct or current, for instance; because they often gather their information from incomplete public records—a police log at the station house or a daily docket at a courthouse, for example—it may not include later information that shows a favorable outcome for the subject.

T he Boston Foundation took up the CORI issue several years ago, after holding a series of community meetings in response to a spike in violent crime. “This issue of CORI kept coming up over and over again, a steady drumbeat,” Richard Ward says.

“It was a difficult issue to talk about,” he says. On one side were employers and others who feel that public safety demands complete disclosure of criminal records; on the other side were people who’ve committed relatively minor offenses and believe their records create unwarranted roadblocks, or those who’ve changed their lives dramatically but fear they’ll never be granted a fresh start as long as their CORIs haunt them.

The foundation, Ward says, has worked to maintain a neutral position. Ultimately, the group decided to avoid the more controversial questions, like whether records should be automatically sealed after a period of time, or if more restrictions should be placed on who can access CORIs (“There are good arguments on both sides,” Ward says). Instead, the foundation has opted to focus on how employers use information from criminal records. “Our feeling is, if this is going to be used by employers, we need to know they’re using it [correctly],” Ward says.

The Boston Foundation has organized a task force of interested parties—business and non-profit representatives, ex-offenders, victims’ advocates—to come up with recommendations for making the CORI system more workable, both for people with records who want a fair shake in the job market and for employers who might want to help someone re-entering society but are concerned about liability, or lack the tools to assess who truly poses a risk and who doesn’t.

“Everybody’s looking at this as a public safety issue,” Ward says. “I think it’s more of a workforce issue”—particularly given Massachusetts’ dwindling workforce.

“We have a lot of empty seats,” adds David Trueblood, public relations director at The Boston Foundation. “We can’t afford to lose people who could be important contributors. … We can’t say, ‘If you’ve ever offended, you’re just out of the game.’”

Don Petigny-Perry knows firsthand the challenge of getting back into the workforce after prison. His criminal record resurfaces every time he applies for a job, and different employers have had different responses. When he applied for his job at HCAC, he says, it was a pretty straightforward procedure: Management reviewed his CORI, then a hearing was held where he addressed his record and explained how he’d changed. After he was hired, the agency held annual reviews to make sure no problems had cropped up. He went through a similar process when he was hired at the Hampden County Sheriff’s Department—where, he says, he was a sort of poster child for the sheriff’s celebrated reintegration programs.

Things were more complicated when Petigny-Perry applied for his job at the Grove Street Inn. After several interviews—at which, he says, he was upfront about his record—he was hired. But on his first day on the job, he says, he was told by a manager he’d have to leave, after someone in Human Resources spotted his felony conviction.

“I was so humiliated,” Petigny-Perry says. He decided to fight the decision.

Because ServiceNet receives state money, it’s bound to follow the strict CORI guidelines set by the Department of Health & Human Services. In 1996, H&HS issued a directive to private agencies with which it contracted: Before the agency could hire any employee who would interact with clients, it must do a CORI check. Applicants who’d been convicted of any of several dozen crimes—the list ranges from murder, rape and kidnapping to perjury, marijuana trafficking and mayhem—could not be hired. In some cases, depending on the crime, the ban would be lifted after a determined waiting period; in other cases, the ban was permanent.

That directive was challenged in court. A Superior Court justice found the lifetime ban unconstitutional and ordered H&HS to provide a means for a job applicant whose record put him on the lifetime ban list to challenge that decision.

The challenge process is long and complex—unduly so, say critics. The applicant must provide a letter from a criminal justice official saying he would not pose “an unacceptable risk” if he were hired. If he can’t obtain that letter (and it’s likely he won’t, according to the CORI Reader, “since these officials are generally trained not to make such certifications”) he needs to get a similar letter from a mental health professional with a relevant background. Next, the hiring agency must conduct an evaluation to determine whether the applicant poses a threat to clients, based on things like his age when he committed the crime, the seriousness of the crime, its relevance to the work he’d be doing and evidence of rehabilitation.

Petigny-Perry says it took him eight months to complete the appeals process, collecting letters of recommendation, undergoing a psychiatric exam and writing a narrative about his rehabilitation process. Then he had to sit down with a ServiceNet staff member and explain his CORI, item by item. “It was really invasive,” he says.

In the end, Petigny-Perry was rehired, to the same job he’d been sent home from all those months before. Going through the process was a worthwhile experience, he says, because now he at least has all the paperwork ready the next time he applies for a job. “Now that I’ve gone through the process it at least eliminates the glass ceiling. As tedious as it was,” he says.

Petigny-Perry says he doesn’t think CORI checks are unfair or unwarranted when the circumstances call for one. But he would prefer to leave it to the state Criminal History System Board to handle appeals and determine whether an ex-offender is ready to work in sensitive positions. That would put the power in the hands of experts trained in issues of crime and recidivism, and take it out of the hands of employers and human resources staff who don’t necessarily have the training to make those kinds of decisions, and who may bring their own biases and prejudices into the process, he says. “It’s a power dynamic. If people know you have a record, it’s like a scarlet letter.”

I n the Legislature, state Rep. Mike Festa, a Democrat from Middlesex County, has filed the Public Safety Act of 2007-2008, which would make significant changes to the CORI system. The bill would shorten the time period before a conviction record could be sealed. Right now, an offender can petition to have a felony conviction sealed after 15 years and a misdemeanor after 10; under the bill, they could be sealed after seven and three years, respectively. The bill would also make it easier for a subject’s record to be sealed if the charges did not result in a conviction.

In addition, the proposed law would create two versions of CORI reports: Law enforcement officials and employers who work with vulnerable populations would be given the subject’s complete record; other entities would receive CORIs that show convictions and open cases only. The bill would also toughen up anti-discrimination protections for ex-offenders, making it illegal to refuse a person a job simply because he or she has a CORI (exceptions would be made if the record shows a recent conviction for a crime related to the work he or she would be doing).

Locally, Festa’s bill is co-sponsored by state Rep. Ben Swan (D-Springfield). There are more than 30 other pieces of CORI reform legislation kicking around the State House, including several filed by Rep. Cheryl Coakley-Rivera, another Springfield Democrat, although Festa’s is the most comprehensive.

Similar legislation was considered last year. Because it was developed too late in the 2005-06 session to be filed as a bill, advocates instead tried to get it passed by attaching it to the state budget. While the Senate approved the amendment, the House—where Speaker Sal DiMasi is generally cool to attempts to make law by attachments to the budget—did not. In the end, legislators created a commission to study CORI reform—a move that, to many, felt like a stalling tactic.

Indeed, nothing ever came of the commission. But reformers hope to build on the momentum of last year’s effort to get the new bill passed. The key, says Brandyn Keating, executive director of the Boston-based Criminal Justice Policy Coalition, is educating legislators and the public about what the proposal would and would not do. For instance, activists aren’t looking to limit in any way the information available to law enforcement officials. The reforms, would, however, limit the information some reviewers would receive if it’s deemed irrelevant—“keeping misdemeanors out of the hands of the shift manager at Subway,” Keating explains. None of the proposed changes would affect the state’s sex offender registry, which is managed under a separate system—a point CORI reformers are especially anxious to make.

“We’ve had a very reactionary way of doing public policy relating to criminal justice over the last 16 years or so,” says Keating, who, like many, points to the Weld administration as a turning point in the state’s approach to dealing with offenders. The “lock them up and throw away the key” approach might appeal to voters, but, over the long term, it’s done little to improve public safety, critics say.

“That’s why we call it the Public Safety Act. We think it enhances public safety to get people back in the mainstream,” says Tony Winsor, an MLRI staff attorney and author of the CORI Report. “The Bill Weld, ‘the more we punish people, the more we enhance public safety’ [approach]—that’s bullshit.”

Research shows that an ex-offender is less likely to end up behind bars again if he or she is able to find housing and a job. “To construct unnatural barriers for those needs to be met is very illogical and counterproductive,” Keating says.

Lois Ahrens of Northampton, founder and director of the Real Cost of Prisons Project, thinks CORI reform has become inevitable. “It’s one of those tipping point things,” she says. “There’s so many people with CORIs right now, and it’s affecting so many people”—the people with the records, their families, employers.

The Boston City Council and Mayor Tom Menino have both called on the Legislature to reform CORI laws, and Gov. Deval Patrick has spoken about the need to reform the system. Those positions are not without political implications, though: Menino took heat for his policy of not checking new hires’ CORIs after a public works employee with a history of drug and traffic violations ran down an elderly woman with a snow plow last winter. And Patrick backed away at least temporarily from his support for CORI reform during last fall’s gubernatorial campaign after opponent Kerry Healey began attacking him as weak on public safety.

Meanwhile, in some communities, parents and politicians continue to push for more background checks on employees and volunteers, especially in schools. In Boxborough, for instance, school officials have adopted a policy to check all volunteers, regardless of whether they have unsupervised contact with kids. “We decided to CORI everyone, and that way we don’t have to worry about it,” the superintendent explained to the Boston Globe .

Perhaps the most significant resistance to CORI reform comes from the state’s district attorneys, who have taken an official position against changing the system. Plymouth DA Timothy Cruz, president of the Mass. District Attorney’s Association, has been quoted saying all criminal records should be available to the public; to bolster his case, Cruz points to widely reported violent crimes, such as the 2002 rest-stop murder of a woman by a convicted rapist who was working at a Burger King there.

“The DAs have enormous influence in the Legislature,” notes Tony Winsor. “The general sense of the average legislator is: ‘If the DAs don’t like something, then I don’t dare like it, because then I’ll be labeled as soft on crime and won’t be re-elected.’”

“A lot of the knee-jerk reaction we get from DAs and law enforcement is because of misunderstanding,” Keating says. “It’s actually in the best interest of law enforcement that people be able to get appropriate employment. … It’s in everybody’s best interest.”

Indeed, Keating believes reformers have support within law enforcement circles, from prosecutors to cops on the street. County sheriffs, who deal directly with ex-prisoners’ reintegration into society, are considered a particularly sympathetic group.

“You can put us in the category of those who feel CORI needs reform,” says Rich McCarthy, spokesman for Hampden County Sheriff Mike Ashe. Ex-offenders trying to re-enter society often already face numerous challenges: substance abuse, a lack of marketable skills, an inadequate education. Unnecessary barriers created by CORIs make it that much harder.

“We have 2,600 sentenced people we release each year into the community,” McCarthy says. “Either they bridge back into the community, or they’re going to fall off the cliff. … This is the kind of thing that hopefully we can coalesce around, because it’s smart public safety policy.”

A t its root, the movement to change the CORI system comes down to matter of faith: Do we believe that someone can do something wrong—sometimes gravely, horrendously wrong—but still, ultimately, be a worthwhile person, someone of value to the larger society?

“Hopefully people can make mistakes and change,” Ahrens says. “Not because of [prison-based] rehabilitation, because there isn’t rehabilitation. But because they’re young. Because they stop being addicted to drugs. Because they’re no longer drinking.”

And just below the surface of the CORI reform question are other, stickier issues, from the racism many consider inherent in our law enforcement system (“Policing is targeted in neighborhoods of color,” Ahrens says. “If you’re African-American, or you’re Hispanic, you don’t start out with a level playing field.”) to our decision to treat drug addiction as a crime, not a health problem.

“It’s about deep-rooted ‘isms’—racism, classism,” Petigny-Perry says. He’s not convinced there’s enough momentum to fix what’s wrong with the CORI system, he adds. “But the more conversations that peel back these layers, the better.”

That includes a conversation about society’s responsibility to ex-offenders once their sentences are over. “We lock [people] up to hold them accountable for their actions. But we don’t hold society accountable for what happens to them,” Petigny-Perry says. “Is there a need for prisons and jails? Yeah. But what happens afterward? … I think we’re failing people as far as preparing them to reintegrate back into the community.” •

mturner@valleyadvocate.com
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