Dangerous Records

Whenever anyone begins volunteering at the Philips Brooks House Association (PBHA), one of the first forms you have to complete is a Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) request form. PBHA and other volunteer organizations and employers use CORIs to screen applicants to protect the populations which they serve from potentially dangerous criminals. Although CORIs may seem logical (why wouldn’t we want to protect middle school students from criminal offenders?), the composition, abuse, and widespread access to CORI by private employers have created serious racial and penal injustices.

When CORI was created in the 1970s as a database for criminal records, it was intended to improve both the efficiency of the criminal justice system and “to safeguard the privacy of the CORI subjects, so that this obviously embarrassing and damaging information about them would get into the hands of only people with a clear need to know the information,” according to a report by Ernest Winsor of the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute.

Over the past decade, however, employers in all sectors of the job market have used CORIs to indiscriminately deny jobs both to former criminals and the accused (persons who are acquitted of charges still have those charges added to CORI). Record holders are also denied public housing, loans, and spots in colleges. The widespread abuse of CORIs makes the re-entry of former criminals into society nearly impossible, perpetuates the “revolving door” in prisons, and leads to blind discrimination and glaring injustice.

This issue concerns the whole state; 2.8 million of 6.5 million Massachusetts residents have CORIs and all workers and volunteers must undergo background checks before they can work with “sensitive” populations, i.e. children, the elderly, and the ill. Yet CORIs are practically unintelligble, both to employers and the people who have them because they are full of recondite abbreviations. This becomes a problem when employers use them to screen applicants, as CORIs are typically used.

People with CORIs cannot ascertain the accuracy of their records, and employers use them as an indiscriminate way to weed out applicants; they order CORIs for all job applicants and dismiss applicants if they have a CORI, often without bothering to determine what the charges were or distinguish between guilty and innocent, convicted or released. All this ignorance and misunderstanding violate the implicit trust employers are granted when the government allows them to see this sensitive information.

CORIs are necessary and relevant, but not to the degree at which they are currently abused. A 2003 University of Chicago study showed that criminal records are disproportionately more damaging to black applicants. White applicants to entry level jobs with criminal records were called back by employers 17 percent of the time, while only 5 percent of black applicants of similar age, gender, education, personal presentation, and work experience were called back. “People are using CORIs as a proxy for their own racist hiring practices,” says Jamila R. Martin ’07, a member of Harvard’s Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM), which is advocating for CORI reform.

CORIs contribute to a cycle of unemployment and crime which pervades our cities. A convicted felon who wants to reform and become a productive member of society will have a hard time proving this to a potential employer or college. For example, six of the top ten employers in Boston are hospitals with blanket no-CORI hiring practices, even in their janitorial or food services staff.

With CORIs inhibiting most legitimate options for making a living, former convicts return to crime as their only way to survive. If America really wants to fix its obscene crime and incarceration rates, it has to examine the causes, one of which is a high rate of recidivism. People return to crime for a number of reasons, but without question, one is that they face a lack of alternatives. Discrimination against CORI-holders, particularly when the record is irrelevant to the job for which someone is applying leads to higher rates of recidivism, which hovered at nearly 70 percent in the 1990s.

People with CORIs are highly concentrated in specific urban areas, so that the issue of CORI reform also becomes one of community. The cycle of unemployment continues when youth start getting records after police round-ups. Martin says, “If it’s clear that jobs and college are not attainable, then why would you put the effort into school? Better to drop out and make money on the street. Of course, as soon as you do that, you get picked up by the cops, and then you have a CORI and all you can ever do is make money on the street.”

The blanket use of CORIs not only perpetuates the cycle of crime by encouraging recidivism, but also hurts innocent individuals who have committed no crimes at all. The CORI system must be reorganized for clarity and accuracy. Further, access to the records should be restricted to only those who have a legitimate need for this sensitive information. To prevent discrimination, employers should be able to prove the relevance of an applicant’s record if they deny him a job.

The egregious faults with the current CORI system significantly damage the lives of innocent civilians and former convicts alike. If we require our politicians to be “tough on crime,” we must also demand that our courts and bureaucracy administer justice fairly to those who have served time in prison and those who have been acquitted.



Rachel M. Singh ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Matthews Hall.