How Criminal Records Are Stored

The Criminal Justice Department in nearly every country maintains extensive databases that can be accessed by the masses. A criminal history record contains the details of any arrests and subsequent dispositions related to an individual. Storage of criminal records and ready accessibility to them helps:

* Carry out background checks of dubious individuals
* Identify individuals possessing criminal backgrounds
* Identify felons and persons prohibited by law from purchasing firearms
* Carry out background searches of individuals entrusted with child, elderly, or disabled care
* Identify persons with histories of domestic violence and stalking

It is thus critical that you know how criminal records are stored.

Where Criminal Records Are Stored

In most countries, criminal records are treated as public records. Searching for records had once been a daunting task, but not anymore. The introduction of electronic record maintenance procedures has meant that criminal records can be filed easily and are accessible with only a few clicks.

The Internet is replete with criminal record databases, some free, and others requiring a nominal subscription. But it is always a good practice to access criminal records through reliable government agencies. For these, you should know where criminal records are stored in the federal domain.

Federal Access to Criminal Records

The Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division operating under the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is a central repository of criminal records. It provides these records to local, state, federal, and international law enforcement bodies, and also in select instances to the private sector, academic bodies, and government-run agencies.

To simplify the process of exchanging criminal records across states, the FBI works with an “index-pointer” system, called the Interstate Identification Index (III.) This is a record of persons arrested on charges of felonies or grave misdemeanors under state or federal laws.

The FBI maintains exhaustive criminal records and as per data collected on December 2006, there were more than 81 million criminal records in the files of the state databases. 91% of these or 74 million were automated. All the states, the District of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico have automated some portion of their records in either the criminal history record file or the master name index. 80% of the records or about 65 million are III accessible. The records are stored at this site of the Bureau of Justice Statistics: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/crs.htm.

The Department of Justice also maintains a firearms application registry. Since federal law considers possession of firearms by or transfer to prohibited persons illegal, background checks are necessary in each case of a firearm application. The Brady Act had been commissioned in 1994 to uphold this rule. The state background checking agencies access the application data in this repository to conduct their background checks.

As per data collected on July 2009, all the 50 states in the United States and the District of Columbia have centralized sex offender registries (SORs.) The states also regularly update records in the National Sex Offender Registry.