Connecticut, a Superior Court judge noted the other day, is a "second chance" state, a state whose criminal law offers offenders many options for avoiding convictions and permanent criminal records.

For the youngest offenders, juvenile court and its records are secret. For adults, "accelerated rehabilitation" is a "get out of jail free" card for first offenders, postponing prosecution for a set period and then dropping the charges and sealing records from public inspection.

With the "alcohol education" program, everybody gets one exemption from prosecution for drunken driving as long as no one has been seriously hurt. While indignant posturers like Mothers Against Drunk Driving rail against the crime, they never complain about the program, and every driver who drinks and drives in Connecticut knows that his first arrest will be a freebie. Whenever someone is prosecuted in Connecticut for drunken driving where there has been no serious injury, it means that he was caught once before but let off through the alkie-ed program.

Prosecutors can decline to prosecute a case, recording it as a "nolle prosequi," whereupon the charges vanish after a year without any judgment. This happens when prosecutors don't want to bother with minor offenses or get talked out of it by defense lawyers.

And people can have their criminal records sealed by getting pardons from the state Board of Pardons and Paroles.

But while the law may require courts to seal up many of their records, it can't require news organizations to do so, and most in Connecticut don't, or at least don't admit it. As a result the public's only access to information about innumerable criminal cases now comes from news archives and Internet sites, largely those of newspapers, since television and radio news is so superficial. Increasingly, people are checking these archives as a prerequisite to hiring or undertaking social relationships, and people with criminal records increasingly are appealing to news organizations to remove records from archives lest their pasts catch up with them.

So far this month the Journal Inquirer has received four such requests - two involving people who were charged with drug crimes but escaped prosecution for reasons other than innocence, one involving someone who escaped prosecution for theft for reasons other than innocence, and one who was convicted of rape and burglary. One request was made by a doctor who wanted to hire a nurse who he said had overcome a drug problem, but he said he would not hire her if her criminal record remained public. He was not willing to tell his patients that he considered the nurse rehabilitated. His patients, the doctor said, would research her on their own and he wanted the newspaper to help deceive them. Such are medical ethics in Connecticut.

As people increasingly falsify or conceal their pasts, other people increasingly want access to background information. Why should they be denied it? Of course many people should get second chances; otherwise they would have no way of making a living. But why should people not have access to the information on which to base their judgment on awarding second chances?

After all, Connecticut is not just a "second chance" state; it's also a "thousand chance" state. Criminals here have to work hard to get into prison. Nearly every outrageous crime is committed by someone with a long record whose minor offenses were nullified by many second chances and thus grew into criminal careers. Then people marvel at the shocking news reports and wonder why the criminal-justice system couldn't take hint after hint after hint.

Making judgments on second chances isn't always easy. Even the best judges may not get it right. But no judgment at all is possible when history is erased, which too often is the objective of Connecticut's public policy.