A criminal record shouldn't ruin a career

It’s well-known that private background checks frequently contain misinformation. At the East Bay Community Law Center in Berkeley, California, our Clean Slate Practice sees hundreds of clients each year who have a criminal record and are seeking employment. From a decade of experience, we know that private background checks produced by CRAs are riddled with an unacceptably high number of errors. For example, private background checks often associate a criminal offense with the wrong person based on the similarity of their names. Other common errors include reporting an old offense as having occurred recently, or mistaking the severity of an offense—such as reporting a misdemeanor as a felony, or failing to note that a conviction was dismissed. Often, private background checks even include information that they are legally prohibited from reporting, such as arrests that did not result in a conviction.

Replacing background checks with fingerprint-based background checks will not eliminate these same mistakes, and may not even substantially reduce their frequency. Criminal record information passes through many hands in law enforcement, the court system, and the DOJ and FBI themselves. Errors can be introduced at any stage of transmission before it ends up in state DOJ and FBI databases. Further, crucial information may not even be transmitted to the databases in the first place: According to a 2013 National Employment Law Project report, roughly 50 percent of the FBI’s criminal history records are incomplete and fail to include information on the final disposition of an arrest. On top of all that, false positives or mismatches based on similar names—which are often identified as the biggest problem with private background checks—can still occur in fingerprint-based background checks because arresting agencies do not always fingerprint everyone they bring in. Those criminal case records are still sent upstream to the DOJ and the FBI, and while statistics are hard to come by, we know from experience that they can, and sometimes do, become erroneously associated with the wrong person.