The General Assembly considered a spate of bills this session authorizing both statewide and fingerprint-based national criminal background checks on employees in a wide variety of circumstances. Unfortunately, many of those bills passed over ACLU objections. Among the bills: one allowing DCYF to obtain the entire criminal record history, including arrests not followed by convictions, of its employees; a bill giving municipal recreation departments the authority to obtain full statewide criminal checks on any employee or volunteer “serving the community”; and a bill requiring all nurses to be fingerprinted for employment and subject to adverse action based on undefined “disqualifying” criminal records.
The only positive note was the General Assembly’s failure to pass the most egregious of these bills (H 5628), an Attorney General bill which would have required virtually all employees of 415 care facilities and other licensed caretakers for the elderly and infirm to undergo national background checks, regardless of whether or not they are ever alone with a patient. This legislation lacked an appeal process required by federal law, and required employees to pay for their own background checks. Disturbingly, it also set up a system whereby employers were notified if their employees were ever arrested of any crime, regardless of its relevance to their work and regardless of the outcome. The United States Bureau of Justice Statistics has acknowledged on several occasions that the national database used to complete these checks is riddled with errors. Since the state has obtained some federal grant money to implement a fingerprinting program for these facilities, the legislation will be back next year. Read our concerns regarding the expanding use of fingerprinting here, read our letter to the governor asking for a veto of several bills concerning criminal record checks here, and a summary of our opposition to the aforementioned Attorney General bill here.
