As states across the country continue to grapple with the long-term consequences of mass incarceration, the movement to automatically seal criminal records has gained increasing bipartisan support as a practical reform aimed at expanding access to jobs, housing and education for millions of Americans.
At the center of that effort is the Clean Slate Initiative, a national advocacy organization focused on passing and implementing automated record-sealing laws nationwide. Katie Svoboda-Kindle, implementation director for the organization, said the initiative seeks not only to pass laws but also to ensure they are effectively implemented and accompanied by broader public education efforts.
“The Clean Slate Initiative is a national bipartisan advocacy organization that focuses on clean slate laws, which are state initiated automated record clearing laws,” Svoboda-Kindle said. “And we have three main focuses of our work. The first is passing those clean slate laws, those automated record ceiling laws. The second is to ensure that they’re properly implemented so that people get the benefits that they need. And then the third is a narrative change aspect of our work. So we’re seeking to shift narratives, harmful narratives about people who have records, who have arrest and conviction records.”
Traditional record-sealing systems have existed in some form for decades, but in most states they require people to file petitions, navigate complicated legal procedures and often hire attorneys. Svoboda-Kindle argued that those systems, while beneficial for people who successfully complete them, remain inaccessible to the overwhelming majority of eligible individuals.
“So record sealing laws exist in every state to some extent and have for a really, really long time,” she explained. “And so the traditional way to do record sealing would be to require a petition and that is what’s done in every situation other than clean slate.”
She pointed to research from the University of Michigan by J.J. Prescott and Sonja Starr showing that individuals who obtained expungements through petitions experienced significant economic gains afterward.
“There’s a study that came out of the University of Michigan, for example, by JJ Prescott and Sonia Starr that found that individuals who had an expungement through a petition in Michigan had an increase in wages of 22% in the year afterward,” she said.
But despite those benefits, she noted that very few people successfully navigate petition systems.
“Studies have shown that fewer than 10% of people who are eligible are able to successfully navigate those systems,” Svoboda-Kindle said. “They can be expensive. They’re often complicated legally. They have a complicated process. So you oftentimes have to hire an attorney.”
Automated sealing laws shift responsibility away from individuals and onto state systems themselves, she explained.
“And so instead of having the burden beyond the individual to file a petition, the burden shifts to the government,” she said. “The government identifies the records that are eligible and initiates the sealing themselves using this kind of new, efficient, streamlined process and goes ahead and does the sealing for everyone who is eligible.”
Pennsylvania became the first state to implement Clean Slate laws, and Svoboda-Kindle said the scale of the impact demonstrates why automation matters.
“In Pennsylvania, which was the first state to pass claims late and the first state to implement it, there have been 56 million records that have been sealed, which is incredible and would never be possible with petitions,” she said.
According to the Clean Slate Initiative’s internal data modeling, 13 states and Washington, D.C., have now passed Clean Slate laws. Svoboda-Kindle estimated that approximately 18 million people will eventually benefit once those laws are fully implemented.
The movement reflects growing recognition of the scale of criminal records in the United States. Svoboda-Kindle noted that roughly one in three Americans has some form of arrest or conviction record.
“Like 70 million Americans have an arrest or conviction record, which is crazy,” she said.
The consequences of those records extend far beyond criminal court proceedings. Research has consistently shown that records reduce employment opportunities, lower lifetime earnings and increase housing instability.
“There’s research that shows, for example, that having a record, any kind of record reduces the likelihood of a callback for a job by 50%,” Svoboda-Kindle said.
She added that the economic consequences ripple throughout the broader economy.
“I think the Brennan Center estimated it as something over $300 billion per year is lost in income due to records,” she said. “There’s another study that looks at the GDP and says that 78 to $87 billion in GDP is lost every year due to records from those economic results and consequences.”
Housing barriers remain especially severe for many formerly incarcerated people, according to Svoboda-Kindle, who previously worked at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia representing clients with criminal records.
“The difficulty that they had accessing housing was incredible,” she said. “The incredible amount of housing insecurity these individuals experienced, because if they needed to move, they did not know whether they would be able to find housing, find an apartment that would accept them in time for them to actually have a place to sleep at night.”
Background checks have become nearly ubiquitous across employment, housing and education sectors. Svoboda-Kindle said approximately 94% of employers, more than 80% of landlords and roughly 70% of higher education institutions use background checks.
“And so records are used to screen people out of opportunities really, really consistently,” she said.
She also described the long-term psychological impact of carrying a criminal record for decades.
“There’s a lot of shame with having a record and the experience of having a record sealed and knowing that it’s not going to appear on a background check is really beneficial psychologically,” Svoboda-Kindle said. “It does a lot of good for individuals.”
The expansion of automated sealing laws has also fueled broader questions about whether criminal records should play such a dominant role in employment and housing decisions at all. Svoboda-Kindle argued that the rise of background checks as a billion-dollar industry has intensified collateral consequences far beyond what existed decades ago.
“The fact that we’re in this problem is a result of many different things,” she said. “One is obviously that we have really a proliferation of policing and use of criminal legal system in this country.”
“The other aspect of this is that background checking didn’t used to be a billion dollar industry and now it is,” she added. “And so background checks are just used so, so ubiquitously in a way that they weren’t in the ’80s and even in the early ’90s.”
While Clean Slate laws focus on sealing records after people have demonstrated years without additional convictions, Svoboda-Kindle emphasized that broader reforms are also necessary, including diversion programs, changes to employer practices and additional protections against discrimination.
“We should be preventing those records from happening in the first place,” she said. “For individuals who don’t have a record yet, they should be given diversion programs so that they never get a record.”
She also pointed to research showing that criminal records often become poor predictors of future behavior after several years without reoffending.
“According to studies, anywhere between three and seven years, depending on the series of the offense, if an individual goes between three and seven years after their conviction without another conviction, that individual’s likelihood of being arrested and convicted of another crime is as low as the regular population,” Svoboda-Kindle said.
“So really after a pretty short period of time, especially for the more minor offenses, that record, it doesn’t predict future behavior,” she added. “It should not be used as the scarlet letter that it’s being used for right now in the United States.”
Svoboda-Kindle also argued that denying access to employment and stable housing can actually undermine public safety goals by making it harder for people to stabilize their lives after involvement with the criminal legal system.
“Research shows that those kinds of things like having a job and having housing are stabilizing things and do reduce recidivism,” she said. “And so if you’re making it more difficult for people to access housing and jobs, you’re going in the opposite direction.”
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