To some extent, of course, the answer is obvious. But we think it useful to note some of the general problems of having CORI and to highlight a recent, quite specific, government policy which has been particularly hurtful to a lot of people who have turned their lives around and want not only to "make it" in the straight world but want to help others who may be in -- and wanting to get out of -- a life of alcohol abuse, drugs and/or other crime. 

There Are Many General Dangers in the Use of CORI, including that it:

• Causes delay in any screening process, sometimes so great that the applicant has to give up and try elsewhere;^[31]
• Is often very difficult to read and understand, with one apparent effect that gatekeepers who see a CORI report with many entries (which sometimes all relate to the same incident) often conclude, without further study or investigation, that the CORI subject has a long criminal record and should not be hired, given housing, a loan, insurance, etc.;
• Is often inaccurate, in part because court clerks and probation officers make mistakes which are sometimes not discovered until years later when the mistake comes out in a CORI report; in part because the CHSB staff does not have, or does not take, the time to do visual reviews of what the CORI computer produces from the only two CORI­subject-identifying data elements it checks, name and date of birth (see footnote 29); and in part because its name/date-of-birth-based system is not backed up by fingerprints, photographs or other identifiers which are not dependent on the name a person gives upon arrest or arraignment. The result is that CORI reports sometimes match the CORI of person A with person B, and vice versa. All of this may mean that the CORI subject may have to go to extraordinary efforts to get rid of a bad and wrongful "rap";
• Is often un-predictive of future behavior, largely because most criminal records are acquired in the late teens or twenties, and many ex-offenders - especially if addiction drove them to crime and they have conquered the addiction - mature out of criminal behaviors;
• Stigmatizes its subject often far beyond the extent of the crime and certainly far beyond the time that the record is generally available to the public under the CORI law; and,
• Tends sometimes to leak out, like toxic waste, from the supposedly confidential files which it is meant to be kept in while the user uses the information and before it is meant to be destroyed.

[31]See discussions in question 4 about the number of CORI requests that come in to the CHSB.