Who's soft on crime now?

LIEUTENANT Governor Kerry Healey has been trying to portray her Democratic opponent, Deval Patrick, as soft on crime. She has done this largely based on the issue of who should have access to records from the state's Criminal Offender Record Information system, or CORI. To hear Healey tell it, the CORI issue puts her and Patrick at opposite extremes, with the safety of Massachusetts streets hanging in the balance.

But in May 2005, when Healey spoke at a public forum sponsored by the Boston Foundation about CORI reform, she sounded an awful lot like Patrick -- and like a number of criminal justice experts who recognize that the CORI system is sometimes inaccurate and often indecipherable. It can block ex-offenders and others trying to ``go straight" from finding housing or jobs. As a result, they can have a harder time getting back into society, making them more likely to return to crime.

``We no longer can simply be dumping offenders back into society and hoping for the best," Healey said at the time. ``We need to take an active interest in making sure that the 20,000 men and women who are leaving our jails and prisons each year have jobs and have housing." She went on: ``One of the concerns around that is the impact of CORI on offenders' ability to get housing and employment -- the key legs of the stool, if you will, to post-release success."

From those comments, Healey sounded more like Patrick's running mate than his opponent. Yesterday, Patrick summed up his position: ``. . . we expect that after the debt is paid, people will rejoin productive society. And that means people need to get a job. They need to be able to get an apartment. They need to move on. We need a system that protects the public safety, and part of that means enabling people to have a second chance. That's not what we have with CORI the way it is right now."

In 2005, Healey raised concerns about the inaccuracies and difficulty in interpreting CORI records and agreed in part with reforms proposed by the Crime and Justice Institute, a Boston-based research group. But when asked yesterday to explain what about the CORI issue makes Patrick soft on crime, the Healey campaign kept to the script. ``Kerry Healey wants to make the information more accessible to employers; Deval Patrick wants to hide it," a spokewoman said repeatedly.

Yet Patrick's position aligns closely with the views of criminal justice experts, who point to mounting evidence that in some cases, minor offenses end up haunting people for years. Contrary to general perceptions, CORI is not a system that tracks convictions. It's a system that tracks any encounter a person may have had with the criminal justice system, including dismissals and acquittals.

This is not a choice between tough and soft, but between indulging voters' fears about crime or speaking to their intelligence by explaining the problems with the current CORI system. Healey was on the right side of that choice last May.