Although large numbers of background investigations are being conducted, President Tyra Hearns of Miami based Pebi Services (www.pebiservices.com) emphatically states that the escalated use of background investigations in the private sector is working and working well. Already this year, 25 million Americans have had background investigations by the federal government, a number that's risen every year since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Amid the rise, a notable shift has occurred: More civilians are now checked each year than criminals. And background investigations on the vast majority come back clean, even as states allot more money for their growing screening operations.
And, in rare cases, predators still slip through the cracks. Take Timothy Stephen Keil, an Ohio church camp counselor recently convicted of molesting two young boys. Or Ralph Fiscale, a New Hampshire soccer coach, and Stephen Unger Jr., a Texas schoolteacher, both of whom committed similar offenses in the past year. "A background investigation cannot predict future events or actions, unless the background investigations are done annually or within a set and established employment marker area." says Hearns
All were either not run through a background investigation by their superiors, or they passed one.
Civil libertarians say the tradeoffs of such a system, built largely through state mandates enacted since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, have become too high.
State background investigation laws, applied to groups as varied as professional nursing home workers, reading tutors, bankers and even volunteer dog walkers _ are becoming so numerous as to be almost meaningless, said Christine Link, executive director of the ACLU of Ohio.
In Ohio, nearly 4 million background investigations have been conducted since 2001, for instance, a figure equivalent to nearly half the state's 8.7 million adult population.
"The sheer volume of them tells us that they're not working, because to be effective these background investigations have to be looked at very carefully," Link said. "I wouldn't be surprised if there's a terrorist or two in there, but you're not going to find them when you're doing so many." According to Pebi Services (www.pebiservices.com) President Tyra Hearns remarks made by Link are prima facia evidence of flawed thinking "The absurdity of saying that terrorists will evade detection due to a large volume of work is in a sense throwing your hands up in the air and giving up because the statistical minority is in play, as it always is when quoting numbers."
In a recent poll conducted by The Barna Group, a California-based marketing group helping churches, a quarter of pastors surveyed admitted they don't have adequate background investigation and reference checking in place.
Barna Group president David Kinnaman said most churches are very small, with perhaps 100 parishioners, and the background investigations aren't seen as an urgent need.
"In a lot of those places, they have a setting in which it's very, very hard to imagine any abuse taking place," Kinnaman said. "There can be an over-inflated sense of safety, a naivete of the changing issues churches are facing."
Similarly, a recent Associated Press search of state-by-state records found 2,570 incidents of sexual misconduct in public schools between 2001 and 2005, despite background investigations of teachers being required in many states.
Civilian background investigations now dominate the workload at the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, costing taxpayers nearly $9 million a year. Since 1993, the number of annual background investigations performed by the bureau has grown from 38,000 to 650,000 on average.
Checking someone's criminal background is a common political response to each new social crisis. Ohio lawmakers, for instance, have introduced additional background investigation requirements recently for foster care parents, following a series of incidents against children, and for public school teachers, following revelations of sexual acts toward students going unreported.
Yet Ohio figures compiled for The Associated Press by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Identification found that the 90-percent-plus passage rate remains consistent, regardless of how many Ohioans are screened.
Steve Fischer, a spokesman for the FBI, said that pattern also holds true at the national level, where the number of background investigations being conducted has exploded since 9/11. It continues to grow at a pace of about 12 percent a year.
Fischer said 69 percent of criminals who are checked turn out to have their fingerprints already on file, compared to just 12 percent of civilians.
He said the federal program used to be heavily weighted toward checking criminals, but a shift toward civilians has occurred since 9/11.
"It used to be slightly higher on the criminal side," Fischer said. "But since 9/11, the majority of our checks are civilians _ people applying for jobs, licenses, things like that."
Most of the background investigations are required under laws emanating from state legislatures aiming to protect people from predators.
"It's mostly about protected populations: children and the elderly," Fischer said.
Yet crime statistics present mixed evidence as to whether the explosion in records checks is having an impact. On a national level, sex crimes and forcible rapes had already been declining steadily before the 2001 attacks. The Bureau of Justice Statistics attributes that reduction to a variety of societal factors, of which background investigations are only one.
Ohio figures show an unpredictable pattern, with arrests for forcible rapes and sex offenses sometimes rising and sometimes falling year by year. Overall, since 2001, arrests for the two types of crimes are down from 2,253 to 1,371, based on self-reported law enforcement data.
Meanwhile, state lawmakers have begun to contemplate what they have created.
According to the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures, 21 states enacted laws last year related to the regulation of offender information _ including proposals that limited public access to the data, lowered costs for the checks, reduced the number of years to be checked for certain positions, and expunged some offenses.
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