Jail Records

Jail records are among the most important and the most sensitive data gathered by public institutions. The limits of access to court and jail records is one of the more battled issues concerning the freedom of information. For many people the ability to check if the strangely-acting neighbor is a known sex-offender, or if their new potential business partner has ever been sentenced for a financial fraud is an important mean of self-protection. On the other hand, there are hundreds of thousands people across the united States who at one time or another had problems with the law. Many of them after receiving the punishment started a new life. Revealing their past might cost them their jobs or families. A public and unlimited access to jail records would put them in constant danger even though they have already paid for their wrongdoings.

What most people miss however, is that the real problem with jail records lies elsewhere: in our practical ability to check them and then connect a record to a real person. What most people do not know is that there is no such thing as a truly nationwide jail record check. Even the FBI database does not cover the whole country or all kinds of crimes. The accessibility of many local databases is still limited and there are many counties that still do not offer a complete database of criminal records. To make situation even worse, we have to remember that jail records are only a small part of the problem. The fact that there are at three kinds of criminal records (arrest, criminal court, and corrections) only adds to the practical difficulty of the search. The fragmentation of the data makes checking jail records untrustworthy to say the least. We can easily confirm that someone is (or rather may be) a former criminal, but we can't really check if he or she is innocent or not.

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To make the situation even worse, jail records are just as prone to mistakes as anything else. While many jail records have a picture of an offender attached, there are still some who have only the person's name. What is more, human mistakes sometimes cause wrong names to be connected with the prison sentences. It does not happen very often, but since most companies offering access to jail records operate on databases with between 60 and 130 million entries each, even a 99.99% accuracy still leaves 6 to 13 thousand mistakes in a single database.

For all those practical reasons, any check of jail records gives us only partially complete data. While contacting a company providing jail record and criminal record checks is generally a good idea when we want to confirm our suspicions, the results may never be considered as final proofs. here is simple no way to see if someone is a good citizen or not. If you want to be sure, you need to perform a few other checks, including a social security number check in order to learn anything hard.

Jail Records