(Cross-posted from The COFAR Blog)
A little more than two years ago, I wrote about a man who had served a year in prison in California for having sex with a minor before violating probation and fleeing to Massachusetts where he took a job driving people with intellectual disabilities to day programs.
I noted that this individual’s out-of-state conviction was not picked up in an in-state background check done on him in Massachusetts. That was because a longstanding bill that would require that national background checks be done of people hired to work in the Department of Developmental Disabilities system had not yet been enacted by the Massachusetts Legislature.
It’s now two years later, and the DDS national background check is still pending in the state Legislature. In the past two years, it was approved by the Judiciary Committee, but never got out of the House Ways and Means Committee.
This year the measure (H. 1674) is pending once again in the Judiciary Committee, awaiting a scheduled hearing before the committee on July 9. This much-needed bill has been filed each year going back as long as a decade by Representative Martin Walsh of Boston. It has never been clear to us why the bill has never made it through the legislative process or who has opposed it.
National background check legislation for new DDS hires has long been supported by a wide range of advocacy organizations for the developmentally disabled. We know of no advocacy groups that have voiced any opposition to it.
The Patrick administration and the Legislature appear to support national background checks in general. In 2010, the state upgraded its criminal records database to make it compatible with databases in other states and the FBI. And last year, Governor Patrick signed a bill into law (Chapter 459 of the Acts of 1012), which requires that all persons hired to work in public, private and parochial schools in the state as well as employees of contractors to the school systems and child care organizations undergo national background checks. Massachusetts apparently became the last state in the nation to impose those requirements.
However, the DDS in Massachusetts still hasn’t been authorized to require that the people whom the Department or its providers hire also submit to national background checks. H. 1674 would provide that authorization.
State regulations currently authorize DDS to require only that Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) checks be done on individuals hired to work in both state and privately operated facilities in the DDS system. However, CORI records list only criminal arrests and convictions in Massachusetts and do not identify any convictions a job applicant might have from another state. A national background check system would fill in those potential gaps in the records of persons seeking to work with intellectually disabled persons in Massachusetts.
In enacting the requirement for national background checks for school employees, legislators maintained that such checks would prevent people with convictions for abusing children in other states from coming into contact with Massachusetts schoolchildren. But schoolchildren aren’t the only ones who are at risk for sexual and other types of abuse. People with developmental disabilities are at high risk as well.
H. 1674 appears to have numerous checks built into it to protect the rights and privacy of persons applying for DDS positions. The measure would give persons seeking DDS employment the right to inspect and contest the accuracy of out-of-state records and would require the Criminal History Systems Board to help resolve any such contested records within 30 days.
In addition, H. 1674 would require that only information from other states regarding convictions and open cases be made available to DDS or providers considering individuals applying for employment. Juvenile records would not be made available. The national background checks system would be jointly overseen by the Criminal History Systems Board, the Disabled Persons Protection Commission, and the State Police.
Clearly, this legislation is long overdue. The question is whether this will finally be the year for it.
The reason for delay in the past may have been due to our records not being compatible with the national records system. That may also be why we WERE the last state to enact the requirements.
Now that they ARE compatible, there’s no reason why the national check couldn’t supercede the CORI, with MA being only one more component to be searched – except that CORI board employees might lose jobs.
I run CORI on all my volunteers, and when asked why it is necessary I point out that I am disclosing the name and address of a disabled person to the volunteers working with them, and want to keep clients as safe from robbery and exploitation as possible. There are MANY non-profits that feel the same and would like to be able to check better. Most do CORI now, but are aware their loaf is halved.
might explain why a national background check bill wasn’t approved before 2010, but it doesn’t seem to explain the delay after that. I’ve talked at times with Rep. Marty Walsh, the prime sponsor of this bill, starting as far back as 2006, and he never noted that incompatibility as the reason the bill has continually been held up.
You know, in 12 step programs, there is the axiom “Failing to plan, is planning to fail” – in this situation, “Failing to investigate” is a form of failing to plan.
That’s quite the gaping hole it seems given how easy it is to move among states.
One reason there is no national background check for persons working with people with disability is that these are often entry-level jobs, and the governor has worked persistently to reform the Massachusetts CORI so people with a past can get to work and have a future. As someone who is now CORI-ed annually, and once had to wait six-weeks to start a job because of a 30-year old dismissed misdemeanor (they board couldn’t read the microfiche) — I am generally in favor of this. So enthusiastic was Governor Patrick, however, that he rushed CORI reform for state workers as an executive order before the legislature even debated the issue. COFAR, for which I then worked, lobbied against this executive order being applied in jobs where people work with DD — at that point one could get an overnight job in a state-operated group home with less record-check than was still being applied to a bus driver for typically developing teenagers. The legislature rectified this discrepancy eventually, in favor of the lowered (but generally accepted) state standard for criminal record checks that we have now.
Massachusetts has many such laws which are the product of an odd but effective coalition of organizing criminals and civil libertarians — former State Senate President Bulger embodied this coalition. We may get those national background checks — they are even more important to person with ID in community settings than those in facility care. But activists should understand the complexity of the issue for liberal thinkers. Winning a national check for people working with vulnerable populations requires public opinion to respect the medical privacy of persons usually deemed incompetent, and the professionalism of those who work with them. It is almost a union issue, although any union activist knows what is wrong with national background checks in general cases.