What to do when your “permanent record” is wrong?
by digby
Apparently, you’re just screwed. I would imagine this is no different than anywhere else:
One of the little-noticed side effects of New York’s long, failed experiment in arresting huge numbers of people on minor charges is a tidal wave of erroneous and incomplete information that has polluted literally millions of electronic files, in ways that make innocent people look like criminals.
The same city and state agencies that caused the problem — including the NYPD, the Office of Court Administration, the district attorneys, the state Legislature and the Dept. of Criminal Justice Services — now have a political and moral obligation to fix the mess they made.
Anybody who’s seen police dramas on television knows the phrase “rap sheet” (an abbreviation for Record of Arrest and Prosecution), the official summary of a person’s encounters with the justice system. In real life, unlike on TV, information often gets placed on a person’s rap sheet that is outdated, incomplete or just plain wrong — and under current rules, the burden of discovering and correcting the errors falls almost entirely on the person whose life has been turned upside down by the mistakes.
And you thought cleaning up a credit report was frustrating?
To understand the dimensions of the crisis, check out citylimits.org/investigations, where the nonprofit news website City Limits just published the findings of a group of investigative reporters from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
In one case, a woman arrested for shoplifting in Poughkeepsie 20 years ago turned her life around and began working toward a Master’s degree at an Ivy League university — only to discover that her dream of teaching in New York City schools is at risk because her rap sheet erroneously shows no resolution of the case.
In reality, she’d been to court and agreed to a deal in which the record would be sealed after completing a sentence of community service (which she performed). Multiple trips to Dutchess County to correct the file have not resolved the issue because in most agencies there’s nobody specifically in charge of fixing rap sheet errors.
That’s one of the most benign examples. And this sort of thing is going to get a lot worse as all records of one’s life will travel with you forever nowadays. There will never be a way for someone to be a Don Draper and reinvent himself, leaving his whole past behind again. It would be impossible. And that’s a new thing in America. And that was one of our big selling points: you didn’t have to be what your were born into. But what does one do when the information that’s out there is wrong? In this case you can appeal to the government to fix it although that seems to be thankless task. But what about all the other crap that’s out there about all of us?
Privacy is one of the major issues of our time and we are really confused about what it means, where to draw the lines and who should be able to decide what’s private and what isn’t. I don’t know how we’ll sort it out. I do know that humans cannot live in a glass bubble with no privacy whatsoever. We are animals who have to be able to hide from time to time.
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