This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 10th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

People with criminal records have rights, but criminal records are easily obtained,

and those records can be used to disqualify

someone from employment or housing.

So what is the proper role of a rap sheet?

James Jacobs is author of The Eternal Criminal Record.

He spoke with Cato's Tim Lynch about his new book yesterday.

This is the first really wide-ranging book about criminal records that has ever appeared and I really try to get

a big picture overview of all kinds of criminal records, where they come from, how they're constructed,

how they're disseminated who gets access to them, how they're used and how they're abused.

Along the way, I stop on many different policy issues and choices we've taken and possible alternative policies that we might take in the future.

You said you got into this research because of your earlier work on gun control. Can you explain that?

In the 1990s I was working on a book on gun control and a good part of that book was about the Brady law and Brady

law was passed in 1993 and a key feature of it had to do with making it possible to to check people prospective gun

purchasers records to see if they were ineligible to purchase and possess a firearm.

Because of the concern that the Brady law not impose a waiting period, the gun rights advocates put into the law and they got as part of the compromise package a requirement that the FBI have up and running within five years a national

Insta check system that would enable the gun seller to determine in real time immediately

whether the prospective purchaser had a disqualifying criminal record.

That led to hundreds of millions of dollars being pumped into the states and localities to

improve police records and court records. It enabled the system to actually

be implemented on time in 1998 and it left us with a huge

...