CORI editorial

GLOBE EDITORIAL

Broken criminal records
May 22, 2007

PEOPLE CONVICTED of crimes in Massachusetts aren't exiled to faraway Devil's Island or Siberia, and the vast majority of those sent to prison in the state do get out at some point. So then what? Ex-cons are less likely to fall back into crime if they can establish law-abiding lives upon their release.

Unfortunately, some aspects of the current criminal offender record information system, better known as CORI, have become obstacles to rehabilitating offenders. Recently, a task force convened by The Boston Foundation and the Crime and Justice Institute made a series of valuable recommendations on how to improve the status quo. As the Patrick administration ponders potential changes to the CORI process, the task force's report should be the starting point for discussion.

The CORI system, originally intended as a tool for law enforcement, is now used extensively by private employers. Yet some information is entered incorrectly, and the system spits out lots of raw data that are easily misread. A case that never ends in a conviction can generate a CORI file of daunting length.

Ensuring the accuracy and relevance of data available to police and employers is vital. The task force calls for a verification system that would use fingerprints to make sure CORI data is associated with the right person, and for simplifying the format of reports that go to users outside law enforcement, such as potential employers. These reforms should be no-brainers. This page would go a step further and allow the typical private employer access only to convictions and open cases.

The unruliness of CORI data dovetails with the reluctance of many employers to hire ex-offenders. Such hesitation is encouraged by regulations of the state Executive Office of Health and Human Services. Department rules severely limit the ability of the department or its contractors to hire ex-offenders for jobs involving "potential for unsupervised contact" with patients or clients. The logic is obvious: Nobody has a divine right to work in the health field, children must not be entrusted to the care of sex offenders, and people with convictions for beating or scamming the elderly should not work in nursing homes.

'If anything comes out, you're out.' Yet the list of offenses that triggers hiring restrictions is long; it includes everything from murder to making annoying phone calls. Under the rules, more serious charges warrant "lifetime presumptive disqualification" from employment. But even that list covers a broad variety of incidents -- lousy judgment calls as well as outright villainy. As the task force report notes, an assault and battery conviction can stem from striking a helpless senior citizen or from a long-ago bar fight. Ex-offenders are allowed to challenge the presumption that they pose a threat, but the process can be complex and expensive.

Overbroad or not, the rules are hugely influential, because they apply directly to more than 1,000 employers, and many other companies follow them voluntarily. Furthermore, HHS explicitly states that its restrictions can be applied even to employees who don't have unsupervised contact with patients. As a result, people with CORI records of any sort can have trouble getting hired in any capacity in a major field of the state's economy. The mere existence of a record is a deal-breaker for many employers, said task force member Benjamin Thompson, executive director of the Boston unit of the job-training nonprofit STRIVE, at a forum earlier this month. "People don't read CORI reports" in detail, he said. "If anything comes out, you're out."

Yet some healthcare jobs can be suitable for ex-cons. Not every job in the field involves easy access to pills or regular contact with clients. Some jobs even draw on the experience of ex-prisoners, who can be effective in persuading others to stay clean.

Wisely, the task force urges HHS to take a nuanced approach -- to base hiring criteria upon the circumstances of an ex-offender's case and to encourage employers to make a full review of applicants with CORI files. This would not require action by the Legislature; the Patrick administration on its own could write new rules. The task force also proposes expanding the Criminal History Systems Board, which oversees CORI, by adding members versed in workforce development and offender rehabilitation. This helpful change would require legislative action.

Public safety first It's possible to oversell the benefits of reforming the criminal-records system. The task force report treats the issue as a way to expand the state's labor supply, and it recommends that economic-development interests be represented on the CORI board. In fact, the criminal-records system should continue to be judged by its merits as a public-safety tool -- as long as policy makers understand that efforts to prevent recidivism are a vital part of public safety.

The barriers to re entry are high. Of the Massachusetts inmates released in 1999, 44 percent had a new conviction within three years. But some offenders do find their way back into society. Consider Thompson, the task force member who served time in New York for armed robbery more than three decades ago but later earned a graduate degree from Harvard and served as penal commissioner under Ray Flynn, former Boston mayor. To maximize ex-offenders' chances of finding steady work, the state needs an accurate criminal-records system and regulations that allow employers the flexibility to examine individual applicants on their own merits.

And government agencies, including HHS, need to be willing at least to hear low-risk offenders out. At the CORI forum, Parole Board chairwoman Maureen Walsh put the issue succinctly. "If we're going to tell people to take a risk on hiring people, we as the state have to do it. If the state itself isn't doing it, how do we dare ask other people to do it?"

Gaining sympathy for offenders is never easy. But public safety demands an honest effort to get ex-cons into steady jobs.<