SACRAMENTO, Calif. — More than 150 formerly incarcerated Californians and their allies gathered at the state Capitol this week to argue that completing a criminal sentence should mean the end of punishment — not the beginning of decades of barriers to housing, employment and economic stability.
The gathering for TimeDone Day celebrated California’s emergence as a national leader in automatic record clearance, with advocates saying more than 18 million criminal records have been cleared under legislation enacted in recent years. But speakers repeatedly warned that thousands of people remain trapped by old records, outdated court systems and collateral consequences long after completing their sentences.
Nearly one in five Californians — an estimated 8 million people — live with an old arrest or criminal conviction, according to Californians for Safety and Justice. Approximately 90% of Californians with a criminal record are now eligible for some form of record relief, much of it automatically and without cost.
For Cameron Clark, executive director of Developing Organizing Visions for Everyone and a TimeDone chapter leader in Vallejo, the contradiction is fundamental: California tells incarcerated people to rehabilitate themselves, then continues punishing them after they return home.
“We got a system that everybody has agreed to set in place called the California Department of Corrections,” Clark told the gathering. “And it’s called corrections for a reason. You commit a crime, you become incarcerated, we correct that behavior.”
“And then they put an R on the back of it, rehabilitation,” Clark continued. “And so now we’re not only getting corrected, but we’re being rehabilitated.”
Clark described incarcerated people pursuing education, vocational training and rehabilitation programs, only to discover upon release that their criminal records continue to exclude them from jobs and housing.
“We get in there and we work and we handle our business and we push out industry and we get certificates and we get certifications and we get all of these things that the department said that we was going to get through correction and rehabilitation,” Clark said. “And then we come home and they say, no, no, no, no, that’s no good. It’s not good enough.”
That cycle, advocates said, demonstrates how a criminal conviction can operate as a lifetime sentence even when the formal sentence imposed by a court has ended.
“Time Done exists as a movement because we know that when an individual makes a mistake and they serve their sentence and they come home and they complete their probation, they complete their parole, they complete all of the requirements set forth to them, the punishment doesn’t end there,” said Saad Soliman, national director of TimeDone.
Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, D-Los Angeles, connected record clearance to California’s broader debate over affordability, incarceration and public safety.
“You know the thing they don’t talk about with the affordability crisis? How unaffordable mass incarceration is?” Bryan said. “How unsustainable it is to spend $150,000 per person per year to lock you inside of a cage?”
Bryan argued that public safety depends less on continued punishment than on giving formerly incarcerated people meaningful access to education, employment and economic stability.
“California streets are the safest they’ve been in 40 years,” Bryan said. “And the reason for that is because we’ve shut down prisons. The reason for that is because we’ve divested from mass incarceration and started to invest in communities.”
“Because we recognize that if you give people employment, good education, a chance at the California dream, that’s what creates safety,” Bryan continued. “That if you invest in care and not cages, that creates real safety.”
Californians for Safety and Justice used TimeDone Day to release an impact memo examining more than a decade of record-relief efforts in California. The organization argues that clearing records is not simply a criminal justice issue but an economic one.
Estimates cited by the organization indicate felony conviction records cost California roughly $20 billion in gross domestic product annually by restricting access to jobs and higher-paying careers. Research cited by advocates also indicates people receiving expungements experience an average 22% wage increase within one year, as unemployed people obtain jobs and underemployed workers move into more stable positions.
“The goal is to make sure that the promises of California that were made on paper become real in people’s lives,” said Tinisch Hollins, executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice.
“This work does not stand apart from or in competition with the work that we lead to improve the lives of survivors and victims of crime in California,” Hollins said. “It’s the same mission coming from two different directions — stabilize lives, heal communities, open doors to access and opportunity.”
“We help people rebuild after conviction or harm,” Hollins added. “And when we help survivors heal and access the resources we need, we’re building safety for everyone in the state of California.”
Assemblymember Ash Kalra, D-San Jose, a former public defender, said the consequences of contact with the criminal legal system can begin before conviction and continue long afterward.
“We know that for years, criminal justice policies have emphasized incarceration, over rehabilitation and prevention, resulting in as many as one in five Californians having a criminal record,” Kalra said. “And even after completing their sentence, for many Californians, having a criminal record often creates barriers that bar them securing housing and employment.”
Kalra said his experience as a public defender convinced him that representation should extend beyond resolving the immediate criminal case.
“As a former public defender, I’ve seen firsthand the benefits of giving individuals the opportunity to complete rehabilitation and turn their lives around,” Kalra said. “In fact, it was over 20 years ago that I started the expungement program in the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office, understanding that the role and goal of public defense isn’t simply to resolve the cases, but to try our best to ensure that no one ever comes back into the criminal justice system again.”
Kalra also emphasized how even brief incarceration can destabilize someone living paycheck to paycheck.
“Even 48 hours in lockup, you can lose your job,” he said. “You can miss your rent payment. You don’t get your kid from daycare. They get kicked out of daycare.”
“These are real, real impacts that sometimes folks that are so ingrained in the system, the DAs and the judges think, oh, it’s only a day or two,” Kalra said. “They don’t understand what that day or two means for people that are actually living real lives in our community.”
Sen. Elena Durazo, D-Los Angeles, pointed to SB 731, California’s sweeping record-sealing law, as evidence of how dramatically the state has changed its approach.
“Before SB 731, there were an estimated 8 million Californians who had past arrests or convictions on their records — eight million Californians,” Durazo said. “They are our families, our neighbors, our coworkers, churchgoers.”
“We invested millions of dollars into rehabilitative services, counseling, and providing an opportunity to rebuild a new life for themselves,” Durazo continued. “Since the passing of SB 731, our communities have seen the benefits, and people’s records are being expunged — millions of records.”
Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, said AB 2384 would build on California’s existing record-relief framework.
“AB 2384 is the next phase of record relief in the state of California,” Lowenthal said. “It does build on the progress that we’ve made by ensuring that more people who have demonstrated rehabilitation have a meaningful opportunity to move beyond their past.”
“A mistake should not become a lifelong barrier to employment, housing, education, or opportunity,” he added.
For speakers who have personally experienced incarceration and reentry, those barriers were not abstract policy questions.
Dr. Nicole Petway, deputy director of Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency in Oakland, described giving birth to her third child while incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla and later overcoming illiteracy, addiction and other barriers before earning a graduate degree and becoming a therapist.
“I gave birth to my third child in Chowchilla State Prison,” Petway said. “I was able to hold my child for just a couple of hours before I was back in the institution for count time.”
Even after earning a clinical master’s degree as a marriage and family therapist, Petway said her record remained an obstacle to professional licensing.
“I still had to fight the BBS to get my license,” she said. “But what better person to provide therapy to a broken community than someone who’s been able to bring it up?”
Petway said the consequences of reentry policies are visible in basic needs — groceries, transportation, housing and the ability to reunite families.
“After 33 years, I have custody of my disabled daughter,” she said. “You couldn’t have told me that I would get custody of her back.”
Terrance Stewart, membership director for TimeDone, similarly described record relief as affecting entire families.
“Time Done is life-changing, you know, and community changing,” Stewart said. “Because what we believe is that real redemption heals and makes our communities safer.”
“And that provides opportunities for me to be the father that I truly am,” Stewart added. “Now I participate in PTA meetings, and I am applying to be a coach to my son’s YMCA.”
Clark offered another example, describing a woman who sought record clearance because she wanted to become a nurse but believed her conviction prevented her from doing so.
Clark said he later learned she was waiting outside his office with her four children, wearing medical scrubs.
“Here’s this lady standing there with her four kids and she had scrubs on,” Clark said. “Because I remember when she came to get expunged, she said she wanted to be a nurse, but she couldn’t be a nurse because of her old record.”
“She’s sitting here with her kids crying, telling me, ‘Hey, my record was expunged. I’m in my second week of nursing school,’” Clark said.
Philip “Rock” Lester, TimeDone’s Los Angeles chapter coordinator, said he has watched similar transformations among people obtaining record relief.
“They’re so proud of it,” Lester said of people receiving confirmation that their records had been expunged. “And then seeing these people in person after that, you can just see the difference in the person to where it looks like there was a weight that was just lifted off of their shoulders.”
“You can see it in their posture,” he said. “You can see it in their walk. You can see it in their attitudes.”
But Lester cautioned that California’s laws do not automatically translate into relief for everyone entitled to it. Outdated local court databases, mismatched records and administrative errors can prevent eligible people from receiving clearance.
“There are systems in our local courts that is kind of outdated,” Lester said. “And then sometime the paperwork or the information doesn’t matches up what is in the DOJ, Department of Justice.”
“There’s people who has been promised the opportunity of getting their records expunged,” he continued. “They beat the criteria, but they’re being denied simply because of an infraction or something that is messed up with the paperwork against the local courts, outdated systems.”
Those implementation problems are among the issues advocates hope to address through the newly launched California Record Clearance Coalition, which Californians for Safety and Justice said will bring together reentry organizations and legal service providers to increase public awareness and advance policies making record relief more accessible.
For Clark, the issue ultimately comes down to whether California means what it says when it tells incarcerated people that rehabilitation can lead to a second chance.
“Time was done a long time ago,” Clark said. “Time was done once we picked up that dictionary or college book while we was incarcerated or decided to go to the criminal and addictive thinking class or get a train to make a better life for ourselves.”
“We have to really make sense of what’s taking place here,” Clark added. “This is not a game. This is life.”
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