Why expungement of criminal records is a big lie.

The Salt Lake Tribune recently reported that people convicted of crimes many years ago who thought their convictions had been expunged by the Utah courts are finding that their record continues to show up in routine background checks. The problem appears to be that private background-checking companies are not notified when the court expunges a conviction, and so do not purge their databases.

One young mother who volunteered to be a parent helper for her son’s youth football team was mortified when a background check turned up a conviction for check forgery that had been expunged years before.

One might well ask why the football team felt it necessary to do a background check on this volunteer mom. The answer lies partly in post-9/11 paranoia, and partly in the seductive ease with which a record can be checked.

What used to require a trip to the courthouse can now be accomplished by pushing a few buttons on the computer and paying $15. There are now hundreds of background checking companies that harvest data and make it available for a modest fee, and many state records systems are now on line. Most systems allow checking by name and date of birth, which produces many false positives.

One might also ask what rules govern the hundreds of background-checking companies that now control the destiny of the 65 million Americans who have a criminal record.

The answer: very few. Those that exist are both unclear and hard to enforce.

Nowadays, the objections to expungement are far more practical. In addition to broader public posting and private dissemination of criminal history information, the ever-expanding list of individuals and entities given special access to expunged criminal records has further diminished the value of relief mechanisms that depend on concealment. I recently wrote in an article in the Howard Law Journal that expungement schemes produce “understandable anxiety in the community about a remedy many see as premised on a lie.”

Margaret Colgate Love's Scholarly Papers can be downloaded
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=283189

Howard Law Journal, Vol. 54, No. 3, 2011
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1802180

Link:
http://www.thecrimereport.org/viewpoints/2011-06-expungement-of-criminal-records-the-big-lie