Our Voice
A GCSU athlete was arrested last Thursday because she broke her probation for a former felony conviction (see the story on the front page). She then managed to elude police and escape the premises, and has still not been found.
That’s not what this “Voice” is about.
A convicted felon was on our campus entirely unreported. She was able to do this because she lied on her application, in the box that asked “have you ever been accused of a crime, other than a minor traffic violation?” She must’ve checked “No.”
The University admitted her without a second thought, without running any sort of background check at all. Then again, why would they need to? I mean, we’re supposed to be honest on these forms, but at the same time, we’re supposed to put our very best foot forward to try to charm the University into admitting us into their ranks.
Heck, we’d lie too in order to attend. Especially if we knew the policy on background checks was apparently so slack.
So we had one felon on campus. Her offenses included theft by credit card fraud and forgery, which while illegal are not as dangerous as other felonies, such as arson or murder.
But what if an arsonist or a murderer were able to slip through the cracks in this same way and work their way into GCSU?
Perhaps this is a bad example. Anyone who committed crimes of this magnitude would likely still be in jail, not on probation as our athlete was. But the principle is the same: is there a good system for ensuring the safety of those who enroll in the University?
According the Department of Student Affairs, anyone who does admit to a crime on their application will have their cases reviewed by a committee, who will then decide who will and will not be considered for acceptance. This is a good system for situations like these, but no committee stands in the way of someone who lied on their application.
So what is the school to do? A background check on every applicant would be incredibly time consuming and expensive, and so few applicants would be caught that it would be a terribly inefficient use of time and money.
Even running the name of every applicant through a Georgia or national felon database would be ridiculously time consuming and might not turn up results because of glitches in the system.
The Red and Black at UGA exposed a convicted sex offender last year. How did their testing process not catch him? His name was spelled incorrectly on the Georgia database, so he was not filtered out of the applications process.
Tiny little mistakes can add up, to create potentially disastrous results.
Fortunately, the situation up there was resolved and the student had committed no crimes while he attended, and here at GCSU our student’s former crimes were not violent. But what if one does manage to attend? Is there any way to prevent this from happening?
We at The Colonnade don’t have a good answer for this question. The only thing the school can do at this time is to simply trust applicants to be honest, and hope that anyone who does lie will not continue to commit crime once they arrive.
It’s not a great solution, but what else is there to do?
Oh, and we’d like to wish Public Safety good luck finding our missing athlete.
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Nov 9 2007. Filed under Opinion, Our Voice.
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