When the CORI law was originally put on the books in the early '70s, stimulated by the availability of federal money, there were two purposes:

1. to make the criminal justice system more efficient, by putting criminal records "on line," so that they would be instantly available to police, prosecutors, probation officers, judges and other functionaries, and
2. to safeguard the privacy of the CORI subjects, so that this obviously embarrassing and damaging information about them would get into the hands of only people with a clear need to know the information.

In the course of the last 30 years or so, the law enforcement-efficiency purpose has persisted and been morphed, it sometimes seems, into unthinking "tough-on-crime-ism;" but the privacy purpose has been increasingly restricted, by statutory changes, regulations, actions and policies of the executive branch and discretionary decision-making of the CHSB.