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June 05, 2007
MA: Changes eyed in Mass. criminal record system
Weirdly, this is a Gazette story (Northampton) that fails to mention anything at all about western Massachusetts. Maybe the Advocate story inspired it. Lois
Changes eyed in Mass. criminal record system
By Jordy Yager
Daily Hampshire Gazette- June 5, 2007
BOSTON - Even before Manuel Jesus Rodriguez came to America in 1977, a man with a similar name and birth date had established himself as a career criminal in Massachusetts.
The law-abiding Manuel Jesus Rodriguez was born Dec. 23 and is from Guatemala. The criminal, Manuel Rodriguez Jr., was born Dec. 22 and is from Puerto Rico.
Every year in the early 1980s, Manuel Jesus, who has never been charged with a crime, would stop at the police station to run a necessary criminal history check before heading to City Hall to renew his vendor's license.
For the first two years the report came back empty. But on his third such trip he received a different response.
"They told me, 'Oh, you have many felonies, we can't approve you,'" said Manuel Jesus. "But I have no record - I told them it wasn't me."
Manuel Jesus, the upstanding worker, had been mistaken for Manuel Jr., the criminal of no relation. As a result he was entered into the state's Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) system, preventing him from renewing his vendor's license.
The CORI system catalogues the criminal histories of more than 2.8 million Massachusetts residents, using names and dates of birth. Because the system does not use unique identifiers, such as fingerprints, there is room for error like the one in Manuel Jesus' case.
"We're in the cyberspace era, we're supposed to have the best technology," said Manuel Jesus, now a caseworker at Mainspring, a housing coalition for the homeless in southeastern Massachusetts.
Need for change
Politicians and community advocates cite scenarios like Rodriguez's to argue for a change in the commonwealth's 35-year-old criminal record system.
Gov. Deval Patrick has renewed his call for revamping the system. The Legislature is contemplating a bill its sponsor says would lessen recidivism and give those listed in the system a chance to remove roadblocks to getting a job.
"The best way to reduce crime is to provide for acceptable ways to earn a living and have housing," said state Rep. Michael Festa, D-Melrose. "This bill is going to substantially change policy in order to make it more possible to re-enter society."
The CORI law was created in 1972 to organize the haphazard criminal justice system and make criminal records more accessible to police, prosecutors, probation officers and judges.
There were safeguards for the rights and privacy of the CORI subjects, limiting the necessary information to those with a clear need to know.
"It came about with actually the best of intentions, in order to protect individuals from their criminal history and their past being put out into the street," said Horace Small, the executive director of Union of Minority Neighborhoods, a Boston-based community organization.
But as time has passed, more and more employers have gained access to the system.
"There are 10,000 separate entities that have access to an individual's CORI and they don't know how to read it. It's an impossible document to read unless you've been trained to read it," said Small.
The CORI check of a job applicant contains every charge brought against the individual, even if they were not found guilty. That can be enough to deter an employer from hiring the candidate.
"If you've got a pile of strangers, you're probably going to get rid of the ones with CORI's first," said Brandyn Keating, executive director of the Criminal Justice Policy Coalition, a Massachusetts non-profit organization that backs changes to the CORI system.
Now, felony charges such as grand theft, assault and battery with a deadly weapon, or manslaughter remain available to non-law enforcement persons for 15 years. Misdemeanor charges such as drunkenness, vandalism and other crimes not punishable by more than 12 months of incarceration stay in the CORI system for 10 years.
Under Festa's bill, the record of misdemeanor crimes would be cut to three years and felony crimes to seven years.
His bill would limit the records available to employers and other private agencies to convictions or open cases. It would also require them to take a training course offered by the Criminal History Systems Board in how to understand a CORI report.
Patrick also favors limiting the scope of the CORI check process for employers by making the record searches relevant to the job position. He wants to make it easier for CORI subjects to wipe the slate clean.
"After people pay their debt to society, and they should, then they should come out and meet the expectation we have, which is that they will rejoin the active and constructive society," he said, in a recent call-in interview with WBUR. "But if we make the record keeping so full of inaccuracies, as it is, and we give such broad access to information about even minor offenses, so that CORI effectively becomes a life sentence, then we are ultimately doing ourselves, I think, collectively, a disservice."
Other groups, such as the Boston Foundation have weighed in. The community foundation recently released a study of CORI that suggested the system incorporate fingerprints into their tracking methods.
Festa's legislation has spurred a debate about how much oversight is too much and how much is necessary to protect the safety of employers and their workers.
While House Minority Leader Brad Jones, R-North Reading, supports removing not-guilty verdicts from employer-requested reports, he also favors providing greater public access to the records of convicted criminals.
Advocates of change argue that the system, designed to protect society, can have the opposite effect. Keating said that without a legitimate avenue of employment, ex-offenders are more inclined to relapse into criminal tendencies.
"If people can't provide for themselves, they have to turn to the means they know," she said.
Jordy Yager reports for the Gazette from the Boston University Statehouse program.
Posted by lois at June 5, 2007 10:42 AM