Of the many leeches in the cottage technology industry feeding off the legal system, one of the most disturbing is the criminal records business.  With all those pop-up ads that appear when you try to get a telephone number or a resume, offering to run a criminal records search, there must be somebody buying as there are plenty of people selling.

While there may be some justifications for selling criminal history of adults, though there are far more reasons why they shouldn’t be sold, the paradigm shifts when the records being sold are those of children.  You did realize that some state legal systems sell the records, didn’t you? It’s not like they give them away and pass up a revenue raising opportunity.

Eight states make juvenile records publicly available. Three sell them, including Washington State.  And they go cheap.  Via MYNorthwest :

In selling juvenile records, [Bailey] Stober [executive assistant of the Washington State Commission on African American Affairs] says we’re trading a young person’s life for pennies.

“About 27,500 records a year are sold and we only make $19,000 as a state in revenue off of it, so we’re talking about 69 cents per name for a kid’s future,” he says.

Companies have contractual agreements with the state to be able to gather felony records in a mass download. Those companies then make the information available on the Internet. Landlords, employers and educational institutions can do a simple search and find the information.

But surely the records of juvenile can be sealed or expunged so that they disappear into the ether, right?

“Within days of your 18th birthday, we sell those records online. So you can get your record sealed all you want to. We’ve already sold your record and it’s online,” Stober says. “Sealing it does nothing. When those employers, apartments and landlords go to do the records checks, they’re pulling what’s on the Internet, not what the state has sealed or hasn’t sealed.”

This is a problem for anyone, but a far greater, and more outrageous, problem for kids.  On the one side, the ostensible purpose of a juvenile justice system is that we recognize that their brains aren’t fully developed, that they make mistakes, do dumb things and consequently have created a system designed for the specific purpose of limiting the consequences to distinguish them from adults, and allow them to move beyond their wayward childish conduct so they can move forward toward a useful, law-abiding life as an adult.

These are good things. These are the things we hope to encourage.  We want children to have a second chance, an opportunity to leave their juvenile mistake behind them so they can go on to accomplish great things as an adult.

Except the internet doesn’t forget.  Once a company purchases a criminal history dump from Washington State, it’s in there forever.  Every sentence becomes a life sentence, because the crime will follow the person for the rest of his or her life.

Is it really a big deal?  Well, yeah. It really is a big deal.

“I was talking with a girl who has a juvenile record for something that happened in her house when she was a teen,” says Representative Ruth Kagi. “It was a very violent household and she spat at her father. Her father called the police and she was charged with assault. She is now finding that that is a real barrier for her to get a job as a 20-year-old.”

“I met a young man who was 16 years old and he stole his mother’s car. He wanted to go on a joy ride with his friends around town. Mom called the police and said, ‘Can you find my kid, scare him, and bring him home because I don’t want this happening again?’ The police found her son and arrested him for auto theft and he spent two years in a juvenile prison. While he was in prison, he was able to get his GED and his associate’s degree”…
 
When the young man started applying to private colleges, he couldn’t get financial aid because of the felony on his record.

He finally got into a college without financial aid. He now has a bachelor’s degree in communications yet can’t get a job or an apartment because his juvenile record lists him as a felon.

When “checking out” a potential employee, tenant, student, the effort stops dead at the word “felon,” if not at the fact that the person has a criminal record at all.  There are too many young people looking for jobs, apartments, seats in college to spend too much time with the bad seeds. Nobody is going to make the effort to investigate the underlying offense, the circumstances, the person behind the crime.  If there’s a crime, there is another kid waiting behind him without a record.

This gives rise to a permanent underclass that will have constant problems getting an education, a job, a home, all for some dumb move made as a kid.  Maybe even for something that should never have resulted in a conviction at all, but for lack of parental love and assistance, an assembly-line system and even judges looking to make their own buck off them.  But once it’s sold to some vulture business, it follows them forever.  All for about 69¢ per child.

While there is legislation pending to limit the sale of criminal histories to juveniles who were convicted of “serious” crimes, as if nothing could go wrong with that because government records are so well maintained, people would never be confused between the crime charged and the crime convicted and the same faults of tainting a child for life for something they did when they were 12 were outweighed by the public’s curiosity, this is a disaster in the making. 

Not only have they “paid their debt to society” assuming there was really a debt to pay, but have been tarred for life for conduct committed when they were too immature to understand the significance of their acts.  And so we ruin lives for fun and profit.  Is the 69¢ worth it?

H/T FritzMuffKnuckle