“My thing was shoplifting for drug money,” Angela Flonory says. “I would just go into stores with a duffel bag, take some sheet sets, lingerie. One time I took a big comforter. Anything I knew I could sell quick, so I could buy crack.”
Flonory, 35, squirms a little with embarrassment but speaks firmly about her past as she reclines on a comfortable leather sofa in the Brockton apartment she shares with her fiancé. Part of her addiction recovery, she says, is to own up to her past mistakes. “I made a lot of bad choices in my life, and I regret them,” she says.
She may regret them, but she cannot hide them. Her CORI (Criminal Offender Record Information) report shows all of the 20 charges she has faced in Massachusetts, right up through her last shoplifting spree at a CVS store in 2000. And every employer she could work for, as a nursing assistant, can get a copy of that record.
CORI reports provide details of an individual’s history with law enforcement, and strict regulations limit access to those certified by the state as eligible to view them. But Flonory, like many ex-offenders, keeps running across her record everywhere she applies for work. All she wants is a chance to prove that she has changed. After bottoming out three years ago, she went through a one-year “tough love” substance-abuse program at Griffin House, in Dorchester, studied at Children’s Services in Roxbury, and passed her Certified Nurse Assistant test in 2001. She goes to AA meetings, and she has a sponsor and her fiancé for support. She also does “commitments,” speaking to women about what she has been through.
Last November, she landed a job in Brockton caring for elderly patients, but was let go as soon as her CORI report arrived. Ditto a job in Taunton. And again at a third company. “Then I started just letting them know upfront, this is what you’re going to see on my CORI,” Flonory says. Her candor hasn’t helped.
Flonory is bright and articulate. She has done exactly what society asked her to do: clean up her act, stay off drugs, obey the law, learn some skills, get a job. Except that the last bit–getting a job–has been tough, in no small part due to the ready access prospective employers have to her criminal record.
The CORI system was created, three decades ago, to restrict that access to circumstances where public safety clearly outweighed the criminal offender’s privacy. But to Flonory, and thousands of ex-offenders like her, privacy is not the issue. She just wants a chance to work for a living.
These days, criminal-record checks have become a widespread employment practice, and even mandatory for jobs at schools, youth-services agencies, nursing homes, and financial institutions. It is largely left to employers to figure out what, if anything, to do with the information produced by these record checks. The result may be greater vigilance, in terms of keeping known criminals out of job placements that might be risky. But it also means more obstacles to the straight and narrow for ex-cons, who find themselves shut out of jobs in growing sectors of the economy. That’s a tradeoff society may end up paying for in other ways.
A little knowledge
Here’s why we need CORI: Earlier this year, in Key West, Fla., Christopher Lamont Bennett gained custody of his 5-year-old son on the recommendation of the state’s Department of Children and Families. Unfortunately, DCF failed to do a background check that would have revealed Bennett’s alleged history of selling cocaine, stalking, and assault and battery. On April 15, according to police, Bennett beat little Zachary to death.
“Checking references and former employers is not the best way to discern a person’s violent history,” says one veteran Bay State prosecutor. “CORI may be flawed, but it’s by far the best way to find out if someone is dangerous.”
The Florida case notwithstanding, an increasing number of people, especially employers, are finding out a lot –indeed, more than they may know what to do with–about criminal records. In the early 1990s, the Criminal History Systems Board (CHSB) processed 10,000 non-law-enforcement-related CORI reports a month, according to executive director Barry LaCroix. By 2000, the board was answering 42,000 inquiries. Today, the figure is close to 100,000 a month. Every year some 1,000 new entities– including public offices, state-funded agencies, and private companies–receive the certification that allows them to receive CORI reports on prospective employees.
Presumably, making employers aware of their applicants’ criminal histories ought to guard against crimes committed in the workplace. But crime on the job, especially violent crime, is a relatively minor societal danger. Workplace homicides are rare (roughly 700 a year nationally), and the vast majority result from robberies. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, just 2.1 percent of rapes, 3.2 percent of attempted rapes, and 4.2 percent of stabbings take place at a commercial establishment other than a restaurant or bar, and only a fraction of those are committed by employees.
requests for CORI reports each month.
If keeping ex-cons out of the workplace has benefits in safety that seem marginal, however, the dangers of keeping former criminals out of gainful employment are manifest. Hiring ex-offenders “is a risk. That’s real, and the employer needs to know,” says Sheriff Frank Cousins of Essex County. “But it’s important that when they leave prison the inmate has the opportunity to get a job, to have a little money and a place to live.”
Making it possible for ex-offenders to get jobs and places to live was the whole idea behind limiting access to criminal records. Prior to 1972, when the CORI law was enacted, pretty much anybody could call up the state Department of Correction and the Parole Board and get criminal records on anyone in the state, says Dan LeClair, former research director for the Department of Correction and now professor of criminal justice at Boston University. “It was routine,” he says.
That year, Massachusetts created the CHSB to collect the data in a single repository–and to safeguard its dissemination. Then-Gov. Francis Sargent and his successor, Michael Dukakis, believed in a process of community reintegration for ex-offenders. That included a range of programs, including furloughs, work release, and “graduated movement” from higher- to lower-security prisons as the offender prepared for release. One aspect of that strategy was the restriction of access to individual criminal records, in order to keep opportunities open to ex-offenders. The CHSB stood in the path of those seeking those records, placing the onus on the employer to demonstrate that the danger of putting an ex-con to work outweighed the applicant’s right to privacy–and the chance for a fresh start.
Records swap
Then, in 1988, came the infamous Willie Horton case, which drove a stake through the heart of the reintegration model, turning public attitudes against the idea of giving second chances to ex-offenders, especially if such chances put the law-abiding public at risk. One casualty was the privacy- protecting purpose of CORI.
The CORI law says that reports should go only to criminal justice agencies, armed services agencies, and agencies and individuals “where it has been determined that the public interest…clearly outweighs the interest in security and privacy.” Amendments to the law have since extended the right to obtain criminal-record information to those serving the elderly or disabled; child-support agencies; insurance companies; long-term care providers; the state racing commission; and school committees and superintendents. Credit providers can now check CORI records of applicants. Housing authorities and Section 8 housing providers can petition for CORI records to screen applicants. The CHSB also identifies 80 “general grant” categories, ranging from public libraries to fortune-teller licensing authorities, that qualify for CORI privileges. In 1996, the state Executive Office of Health and Human Services barred all human services providers that receive state funding from hiring candidates with certain criminal histories. Some crimes brought a lifetime ban, others a five- or 10-year prohibition. (After a backlash that included a sit-in led by Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner and court challenges, the harshest aspects of the EOHHS rules have been modified. Most importantly, the hiring entity must now provide the banned individual some means of appeal.)
The priest sex-abuse scandal further heightened the public’s fear of anyone who comes near children. In another major change, which passed last November and went into effect in February, school districts must now run CORI checks on all employees and school volunteers; summer camps must do the same for their staff and volunteers.
And lawmakers may not be done. Various bills and budget amendments proposed this year would require CORI checks on all trolley and subway drivers; all commercial motor bus drivers; all adult members of households providing foster care for adults; all applicants for state retirement benefits; all school bus monitors; and all school bus drivers. Others would give CORI access to all 24-hour businesses located on state highways; all private investigators; and all assisted-living and continuing-care facilities. Local housing authorities would be guaranteed CORI records on current and prospective tenants, and schools could check on all subcontractors and other non- employees working on school grounds. Still other bills seek to require national criminal background checks on all Department of Mental Retardation staff; provide direct CORI data access to the Board of Registration in Medicine; designate the Division of Banks as a law enforcement agency for purposes of access to CORI data; add criminal records from other states to CORI reports; and give school superintendents the right to screen students enrolling in their districts by CORI checks.
In addition, more employers are becoming aware of the CORI check as a pre-employment option. Massachusetts General Hospital only started doing CORI checks in 1997, when the Department of Mental Health began pushing it, says Jeff Davis, vice president of human resources for the hospital. Increasingly, the private sector is catching on to CORI. “Small employers are doing it more and more now, because [the state has] educated employers to know to do it,” says Donna Hobart, executive director of Spectra Management Services, an ex-offender services agency in Springfield, and past president of the Correctional Association of Massachusetts.
Judgment calls
Except in some specific cases where ex-cons are banned from a particular occupation, a CORI record is not meant as a bar to employment–that’s the ruling of various state court decisions. Rather, even when they are mandated by the state, CORI records are only meant to be taken into account in hiring decisions. But how they should be taken into account remains unclear. In one statute concerning misdemeanor offenses in foster-care placement, a lengthy paragraph orders the consideration of elapsed time; seriousness and circumstances; number and nature; offender’s age; references; reports from parole or probation officers; police reports; and the probable effect of the misdemeanor on the applicant’s ability to fulfill required duties. That’s a lot of factors for managers to weigh in a hiring decision. “I think the employers try to be fair about it, but they don’t have a lot of time,” Hobart says.
In many cases, they have trouble enough just understanding the information they’re given. A CORI report is a dry, chronologically arranged printout filled with code and jargon. Readers need a page-long list of 45 abbreviations just to decipher the disposition codes–that is, to distinguish dism (dismissed) from ss (suspended sentence) from cwof (continued without a finding). And that still assumes that the reader understands the terms themselves, such as nol. pros., or “bound over.” And that’s just the disposition. The reader also must understand the nature of the charges, distinguish felonies from misdemeanors, and spot other subtleties such as multiple charges resulting from a single offense.
“They were meant to be read by people experienced in the criminal justice system,” says LaCroix, of the Criminal History Systems Board. “We fully recognize that as more agencies are accessing our data, we have a greater obligation in training people on how to use the CORI record.” A Web-based tutorial is in the works.
Employers are “winging it”
in evaluating CORI reports.
One solution could be to simplify the report, ranking offenses by disposition or nature of the offense rather than chronology. But LaCroix is loath to tamper with the formal record. “Then we’ve become an interpreting agency, rather than a reporting agency,” he says.
But there are already value judgments inherent in the information provided to various petitioners. Simple public-access CORI reports include only convictions, while CORI reports given to entities with “general grant” status receive information on all offenses that went to arraignment, regardless of their outcomes, usually for the last 10 years. Certain types of employers, specified by state law, get whole lifetime records. Some agencies, such as the Department of Social Services and the Department of Youth Services, even get sealed records and juvenile records.
Finally, it is left to the recipient to decipher, interpret, and apply the CORI record. In the case of Angela Flonory, with her record of shoplifting, the justification for a CORI report might go as follows: At a health care facility, she would have unsupervised access to the old and infirm, whose possessions would be easy pickings. That line of argument might make virtually any jobs at a health care facility off-limits to a former criminal–and they are.
“In a hospital, it would be hard to draw a line,” says Davis, of Massachusetts General Hospital. “Almost any employee would have contact with the elderly or children.”
It comes down to one word, which you hear over and over: liability. No company wants to take the risk that it will be sued if an employee does some great harm and a court decides that the employer should have known the person was a risk because of his criminal record.
No ex-cons need apply
Not all people with criminal records are what you would think of as dangerous people. According to Fran Fajama, of the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, more than half the callers to MLRI’s CORI hotline are women–most with children, many living in shelters and facing the termination of their benefits or finding that their CORI report prevents them from getting a job or Section 8 housing.
Sheriff Cousins says he has had success speaking to local chambers of commerce, convincing them to participate in his work-release programs, then to employ ex-cons. “Most of the businesspeople are eager to participate” once he speaks with them one-on-one, Cousins says. But larger business groups have been reluctant to set standards for CORI use. Turner and other activists took their case to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce two years ago, asking the group to survey its member companies about current CORI policies, but were turned down. (A Chamber spokesperson said that CORI “is not an issue we deal with or get involved in.”)
The lack of employment standards leaves individuals with even minor criminal records in a murky world, where they have no idea how their past affects their hopes for employment. “Different companies do different things,” says Rosemary Alexander, executive director of the JobNet One Stop Career Center, in Boston. “I think they’re winging it.”
The fatalism that comes from knowing that criminal records are common knowledge among prospective employers may prevent ex-offenders from applying for jobs that they actually could get. At Massachusetts General Hospital, Davis says that most CORI records do not disqualify a job applicant from consideration. Still, he’s seeing fewer applicants with criminal records, even though the number of ex-cons in the population is up. Davis estimates that only 4 percent of his CORI checks show a criminal history, down from roughly 10 percent a few years ago. “I think word gets out that this is an institution that checks, so they don’t apply,” Davis says.
And not only at Mass. General. CORI threatens to block off entire industries from ex-cons. Health care. Hotels. Security. Transportation. Banks. Insurance. “I’ve got people who are paramedics, who can never do that work again that they’re trained for,” says Hobart. “It’s a tremendous waste of a person.”
The CORI cloud also discourages offenders from going through job training programs. “You’re going to train people for employment and when [companies] ask if they have a record they won’t hire them,” says playwright Haywood Fennel, a longtime Boston activist for minority and veterans’ rights. “Training is a waste of money. And what kind of job can they have if they’re not trained?”
“If CORI becomes a blanket that covers everyone, then you’re telling people that ‘No matter what you do, you cannot access the American Dream,'” says Benjamin Thompson, executive director of Boston STRIVE, a job-training company that prepares ex-convicts and others for employment. Thompson served 10 months in prison for armed robbery in the early 1970s, but ran a Boston prison facility in the early ’80s.
Employers are not the only ones using criminal histories to make decisions that affect the ex-con’s life. A federal law blocks financial assistance to college students with drug convictions, denying them the opportunity to pursue the education that could keep them on the straight and narrow. “It is an example of our excessively punitive attitude about drugs,” says US Rep. Barney Frank, who has been trying to change the law.
Public housing authorities also check CORIs, to keep potential troublemakers–including those trying to move in with relatives–out of their developments. Two of the largest public housing developments in Springfield, for instance, are purportedly very restrictive, banning almost anyone with charges on their record regardless of how long ago, whether time was served, and whether the individual has kept his nose clean since. Such screening presumably creates a safer environment for the residents but leaves many ex- offenders without roofs over their heads.
Increasingly, former offenders are consigned to the few occupations and the few neighborhoods that will take them. As a result, they’re congregating in a small number of inner-city neighborhoods, hanging out with other ex-cons, barely making their way. And that costs the taxpayer: A survey conducted by the Northeastern University School of Law’s Culture and Difference Program found that 38 percent of ex-offenders receive state benefits to supplement their income.
Even worse, they may have no way to resist the lure of the street. “Now they’re ready to go back to their criminal ways,” Fennel says.
“A society that does not look at life after incarceration is a society that is creating more societal problems for itself in the future,” says Turner, the Boston city councilor.
Mistaken identities
Jaason Smith, a lanky 22-year-old, reveals a tattoo on his long right arm as he warmly shakes hands. Smith was born and raised in Roxbury’s Mission Hill, where two things saved him from going down the path of trouble chosen by so many of his peers: his talent on the basketball court and the encouragement of folks at the Tobin Community Center. Combined, the two got him into George Washington University, where he was a star center and graduated with a degree in sociology and criminal justice.
Drafted and offered the chance to play ball in Europe, Smith instead returned to Mission Hill, where his old mentors at the Tobin Center gave him a temporary job. But two weeks later, Smith was fired, his supervisor escorting him out of the building. Smith’s CORI report had arrived, with a list of offenses as long as Smith’s tattooed arm. As a state-funded agency catering to children, Tobin could not, by law, employ someone with his record of violent and drug-related crimes.
Smith was baffled. He had never once been arrested. Not only that but all the crimes on the CORI report had taken place when Smith was away at GWU–some on days he was playing hoops.
Smith had been tripped up by the “alias” problem. His record is linked in the records database with another person of the same or similar name. These identity mix-ups happen often enough that the CHSB warns of them in the Frequently Asked Questions page of its Web site.
In Smith’s case, another young man from his neighborhood, knowing that Smith was out of state, had been giving the college student’s name when stopped by police. Although the offenses (entered into the system later, at arraignment) are logged correctly on the other man’s record, they are also included in Smith’s report. For Smith, that has meant a world of trouble in his chosen field.
“I definitely want to work with kids,” Smith says. “I just want to help kids the way people helped me. But I can’t, because of all this stuff on my CORI I didn’t do.” To clear his record Smith will have to go to court to get the CHSB to separate the two records. A woman with the same problem has been working for two years to clear her record, according to the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute.
The CORI data have gotten more accurate in recent years, particularly in response to the demands of the new sex offender registry, also a CHSB responsibility. As an increasing number of both felonies and drug-related misdemeanors have fingerprints attached, future reports figure to be still more reliable.
But officially, CHSB washes its hands of responsibility for cases of mistaken identity, placing the burden on those that receive the information to make sure the match is accurate. “It is up to the requesting organization to determine whether the criminal record received is in fact the record of the person being screened,” declares CHSB’s Web site.
In addition, any efforts to improve accuracy may be swamped by the increase in requests, which LaCroix estimates could jump 50 percent just from the changes to the law made last year. In about 70 percent of requests, name and birth date are enough to yield a single, precise match. The remaining 30 percent require a CHSB employee to manually sift through a list of “close matches” to determine which, if any, are the intended record.
State Sen. Dianne Wilkerson is pushing a bill aimed at ensuring accuracy in CORI reports. The Roxbury Democrat’s solution is to require more complete matching of personal data–including Social Security number and mother’s maiden name, which is currently not required and is often unavailable. The extra level of diligence would guard against mix-ups but further overburden the CHSB’s manual checkers. Wilkerson’s bill also calls for the CHSB to send the CORI first to the subject of the report, giving that person 10 days to raise objections before the report goes to the requesting agency. This, too, may be less practical than it first appears; an individual could put a hiring or housing-authority decision in a lengthy limbo just by claiming a corrupted CORI. A provision like this would have helped Jaason Smith, since the Tobin Center would have kept him employed, perhaps indefinitely, while Smith battled the courts to clear his record. But what if he had really been a violent drug dealer?
Living with CORI
According to a new report from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, as of 2001 more than 5.6 million people– one out of every 37 adults–had served time in state or federal prison, an increase of 2.4 million living former prisoners since 1974. Among black men, 16.6 percent had spent some time behind bars; among Hispanic males, 7.7 percent. And if incarceration rates remain unchanged, BJS projects that 32 percent of black males born in 2001 and 17 percent of Hispanic men will be sent to prison sometime in their lifetimes. That’s a lot of criminal records to complicate job applications for years to come.
And such complications are not limited to serious criminal histories, as Victor and Julia (who did not want their last names used)–a white, home-owning, professional couple in Watertown–can testify. A year ago, they enrolled their 4-year-old daughter, Grace, in a cooperative preschool that requires parents to help teach once a month. When the new law mandating CORI checks of volunteers went into effect in February, the school’s director was notified about Victor’s old drug charges–minor ones, all of them dismissed–from his college days. If Victor had been barred from volunteering because of his CORI, Grace would have been out of preschool. Victor got the chance to explain the situation to the executive director’s satisfaction, but the episode showed how CORI can make even a slightly checkered past a scarlet letter.
“When I talk to young people in schools,” says Sheriff Cousins, “I tell them if you get a restraining order, or a drunk driving charge, guess what? It’s going to haunt you for a long, long time.”
Some activists and legislative reformers would like to change that. One bill introduced in the Legislature this year would limit data in CORI reports given to non- law-enforcement entities to convictions and pending cases only. It would also place time limits on the records, and require CORI recipients to share the report with the person in question.
Others hope to convince businesses that ex-offenders can be a good investment, for them and society. “We need to tell CEOs the value–not just the social value but the good business value” of hiring ex-cons, says Thompson of Boston STRIVE, who suggests that former offenders are often exemplary employees because they know they cannot afford to screw up again. So far, the tactic has not produced results. A tax credit for employers who hire ex-offenders has also been proposed.
In the meantime, agencies like Thompson’s try to help ex-offenders cope with the record that follows them around. STRIVE has run a class for 11 ex-offenders, and nine of them landed jobs within two months. The Massachusetts Law Reform Institute helps people get their old records sealed or incorrect criminal histories fixed. At JobNet, Rosemary Alexander started CORI workshops when she saw more and more people getting turned down because of their records.
“It was happening so frequently, we felt we had to do something about it,” says Alexander. “We have homeless vets, blue-collar laborers, white-collar workers–all come to the sessions.”
Agencies like Alexander’s can also serve as a sort of third-party reference, providing assurances to employers that an offender is a good bet. JobNet is even planning to bond the individual for the first six months of employment–guaranteeing to compensate the employer if the worker screws up–to relieve the employer of risk.
LeClair says that’s a tempting idea, but one that carries with it the danger of abuse. A similar effort several years ago in this state to bond prisoners on work release allowed employers to use these workers risk-free–and then let them go as soon as the bonding period expired. “Just as people exploit illegal immigrants, they now exploit ex- offenders,” he says.
Indeed, advocates hear stories about ex-cons volunteering for weeks, and even months, to prove themselves to prospective employers. Fennel tells of other ex-cons who are trapped in lousy jobs, knowing–as do their employers–that their records will prevent them from getting work elsewhere.
One thing that’s not likely to happen is putting the CORI genie back in the bottle. But with ever-growing numbers of ex-offenders back on the street and looking for work–3,300 inmates were released from state custody in 2001, and thousands more from county facilities–other problems will arise if a criminal record becomes an absolute ban from every workplace. If nothing else, the state could help employers make informed and sensible use of the CORI information the law allows them to get–and take steps to prevent the kind of misuse that banishes ex-offenders from lawful jobs.
“I think the goal should not be to hide the fact that they’ve been in jail,” says Turner. “It should be to change attitudes.”
David S. Bernstein recently joined the Boston Phoenix as a staff writer.