Crime is an act or omission that the law makes punishable. It can also be the breach of a legal duty, that is treated as the subject matter of a criminal proceeding. Common law recognizes only two classes of crimes- serious crimes or felonies and minor crimes or misdemeanors.
A criminal record or crime record is the summary of an individual’s contacts with law enforcement agencies. It provides details of all arrests, convictions, sentences, parole violations as well as dismissals and not guilty verdicts committed by an individual. In addition, the criminal record may include information about height, weight, eye and hair color, identifying marks, different names used by the person, different dates of birth, social security numbers used, fingerprint classification, race, and state and federal identification numbers of the individual. There is no single repository for all this information about a person.
We collect criminal record information from a variety of federal, state, and county public records, including state police departments, department of corrections, county courts, offender registries, municipal jurisdictions, federal fugitive files, state courts, district courts, traffic courts in states available, state and county criminal record repositories, prison parole and release files, probation records, records from other state agencies and Interpol public records. We do not report on police arrest records.
Some states have statewide repositories that collect criminal records from all counties in that state; but there are many variables such as how states and counties define criminal records. The two most common sources for criminal records are the Administrative Office of the Court and the Department of Corrections. These state laws are often loosely enforced based on the cost, which can cause information gaps. backgroundchecks.com has many statewide repository sources in our criminal conviction database. In addition, wherever we can we add local records from counties to supplement the information on the state level.
Finally, federal criminal records are different from records that may be stored in state repositories or counties. Crimes committed on a federal level include drug trafficking or other charges with similar ramifications. Some federal criminal records may originate from state or county level crimes and those types of records may reside in county or state repositories.
Most jurisdictions classify an offense as an infraction, misdemeanor, or a felony.