More than 350,000 criminal history reports will be issued by the Indiana State Police this year so teachers can be licensed, prospective parents can adopt and nurses can provide health care.

But the State Police's criminal database is full of holes, with gaps in arrest and conviction data so vast that even police officials say no one should rely on the reports to provide a complete picture of someone's criminal past.

Of the nearly 1.1 million criminal histories on file with the State Police, officials in the agency's record division say they are confident that about a third of those are complete and accurate.

"It's not complete at all, and it's irresponsible to rely on those reports," said Paul Barada, founder and president of Rushville-based Barada Associates, which specializes in helping employers conduct background checks. "It's better than nothing -- but just barely."

With more than a dozen employee vacancies in its records division, State Police officials are struggling with a backlog of criminal records on paper that date back to the 1930s. Many of these records have never been entered into the database because there weren't enough people to do the work. The responsibility for maintaining this criminal history database, however, doesn't rest just with the State Police.

County law enforcement agencies and court clerks don't always send arrest records, good fingerprints and conviction information to the State Police.

A Bedford, Ind., company called ProsLink, which collects criminal conviction data from 80 county prosecutors' offices and sends it to the State Police, has had technical difficulties that have resulted in the loss of an unknown number of criminal convictions to the database.

And yet the State Police continues to field more requests each year for criminal histories, as more jobs require this background search. The fees for criminal history checks range from $7 to $39 -- with the most expensive searches requiring fingerprints. A fingerprint criminal history search -- which can be requested only by the individual undergoing the check -- returns more information from the State Police's system.

Everything must match

Even as the police agency works to improve the reliability of its searches, problems persist.

One of the biggest obstacles: matching someone's arrest record with a conviction. A conviction won't appear in a limited criminal history search if the State Police don't have an arrest record, and fingerprints, to match it. The State Police have data on 400,000 convictions that are off-limits in a limited criminal history search because there aren't matching fingerprints.

Fingerprints are important because police don't want to give out wrong information for a number of reasons -- including liability concerns.

State Police have so far refused to include information from the Department of Correction in a limited criminal history search, even though the agency has records it could use, because of the fingerprint issue.

Records of people in prison would offer a more complete picture of criminal convictions, officials agree. Indiana State Police Maj. Fred Pryor said his agency is re-evaluating its decision now that the prison data is being matched to the right person with fingerprints.

Pryor said the State Police must walk a fine line between offering complete and detailed criminal history information with ensuring that the criminal history belongs to the right person. "It's bad enough not to have complete information, but it's worse to get it wrong," he said.

That's the rationale behind the narrow name search method for criminal history, which creates another barrier to obtaining criminal histories.

To search the database by name, the spelling must be exact for first and last name. A date of birth, sex and gender also are required. All fields must match exactly. A search of Jon Smith won't turn up a record if the criminal history information is under Jonathan Smith, for example.

Reliability issues

The State Police relies on ProsLink to provide much of the information on criminal convictions across the state. But there have been problems with ProsLink's reliability.

This company, which has received $2.1 million in taxpayer money since 1999 under contracts awarded without competitive bidding, started as a service for prosecutors to share criminal history data. In 2000, the State Police tapped into it so they could improve their database.

ProsLink, which has a $720,000 contract for 2004 and 2005, is partly responsible for Marion County criminal history data that is missing from the State Police database. For an unknown period of time, Marion County's data wouldn't transmit to ProsLink because the modems weren't working. When the data didn't reach its proper destination, it was lost. County officials are still trying to determine how much data the State Police didn't receive so they can resubmit it.

"Marion County will probably point the finger at us but there's nothing I can do about that. And, after all, we are partially to blame," said Donald J. Hickman of ProsLink in an April 28 e-mail to some state officials. Stephen Johnson, executive director of the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council, said he knew there were problems in Marion County. "Our greatest fault was we didn't hound them enough," he said.

Marion County Clerk Doris Anne Sadler, who is responsible for sending Marion County's criminal conviction information to the State Police, wants to avoid using ProsLink as the middleman. The transmission problems prevented child molester James Altes' conviction from showing up in a criminal history search for three months. Altes received a 72-year prison sentence in Marion Superior Court on Feb. 20.

"I have great concerns that we are relying on a third party vendor to transfer data -- and we don't even have a contract with them," she said. "This is obviously a serious problem."

Contract not with state

ProsLink's contract is with the Prosecuting Attorneys Council, which is not a regular state agency. Johnson, the executive director, is named by fellow prosecutors and not the governor. The agency, however, still gets state tax dollars and about a third of its roughly $1 million budget goes to ProsLink.

An audit report from March 2003 cited Johnson's agency for paying ProsLink $100,000 for a project without an approved contract, in violation of state law. Hickman, a former Lawrence County prosecutor, runs ProsLink out of his law office in Bedford. There, Scott Hickman, Hickman's son and an officer with ProsLink, told a reporter that he couldn't talk about what the company does. He said only his father, who is vacationing in Mexico, could talk about the company.

In an e-mail interview from Mexico, Hickman said problems in Marion County, which he described as isolated, have had a positive effect: "It prompted everyone in the system to fix problems and get things done that had been needing attention for some time."

Despite those problems, most agree the company's link with the State Police has improved the criminal history database. In 2003, 150,782 convictions were matched with arrests and made available through a limited criminal history search. That's a sharp increase from 2000, when only 15,723 convictions made it into the system.

Paper trail

Further automation is making it easier to maintain a better criminal history database. New fingerprint technology called Livescans, installed in 36 criminal booking sites across the state, allows jails to send arrest and fingerprint records directly to the State Police's computer system.

Even with the computer system, though, the State Police must still maintain paper files. More than 1 million file folders -- color coded so they're easily found -- line dozens of shelves on the third floor of the State Police's downtown headquarters. "It's frustrating when we hear about criminal history data not being complete, and everyone here understands the impact that has," said Chris Sheets of Holt, Sheets and Associates, the Indianapolis company contracted by the State Police to improve its computer database systems. It costs the State Police about $1 million a year to manage its records.

Even though the State Police collected about $1.6 million in fees from criminal history searches in 2003, the agency didn't get to keep a penny to invest in improving the database. By law, the money goes into the state's general checking account.

Indy Star

-- Anonymous, May 31, 2004