Legal Question in Criminal Law in Wisconsin

In theory, only convictions, not arrests, are supposed to be considered for employment applications and for most other purposes in our society. Public databases which are easily available online, however, allow anyone, including potential employers, to discover information about mere arrests and to secretly consider it for any purpose they wish. If your case was reduced to a municipal ordinance violation, this would not be considered as a criminal conviction in Wisconsin. If you were asked if you had ever been convicted of a crime, you could therefore honestly answer "no" to that question if you only had an ordinance conviction. Depending upon how thorough the background check was, arrests and ordinance convictions could show up, particularly if you were fingerprinted. All arrests where anyone was printed are reported to the FBI national crime information computer where they are usually retained forever. Background checks for law enforcement or other high security jobs are generally likely to turn up such information, while an application for a job as a field hand may not.