Pure board love is sweeping across the countryoffering many of the estimated 70 to 100 million people with a criminal record option to have their journal deleted. The benefits seem straightforward: making a criminal record no longer publicly available should reduce discrimination in housing and employment. The policy aims to give people a second chance, especially those who were unfairly targeted to begin with. Expulsion has largely been designed as a way of addressing the flaws of a justice system rooted in racial hierarchies and discrimination.
The key to this new wave of legislation is the effort to make disposal automatic by shifting the burden to the state instead of the person with the record and automating the process as much as possible using technology. These policies are a welcome relief from cumbersome expulsion processes, such as ineffective, confusing and costly lawsuits, which caused most people to drop out of the expulsion process or never try at all, which created a “second chance hole“En examination in Michigan, for example, found that only 6.5 percent of those eligible for deportation completed the process successfully. By making the process both automatic and automated, many hope that expulsion can reach more people, especially those who cannot afford a lawyer, or who understandably do not want to re-enter the justice system, even for the purpose of registration sealing. Over a dozen states has implemented automatic journal approval, including eight states that allow automatic mitigation for cannabis-related convictions.
Unfortunately, many states lack the necessary data infrastructure to effectively seal criminal records. ONE massive backlog in California has left tens of thousands of people legally eligible for record approval still waiting. And new research in California – whose pure blackboard law, AB 1076, automates the expulsion process for people arrested after January 2021 – shows that these promising new laws can have the unintended consequence of increasing racial inequality because of how narrowly they are written. Individuals with more serious records or repeated contacts with the criminal justice system are often excluded from pure whiteboard policy. But the question of who has a more serious criminal record is deeply structured by the race, neighborhood, and income of the person arrested and charged.
Pure slate love received broad bipartisan supportt. But making laws politically tasty on both sides of the aisle can result in a narrow policy. And while proponents point out common sense benefits of criminal record, public opinion for deportation is mixed: A recent public opinion examination found that nearly 55 percent of respondents were opposed to deportation on the grounds that having public access to criminal records “maintains social security.” However, the same survey found that less than 15 percent of respondents believed that a person should never be able to get a deportation, and support for the record approval policy increases for property and drug-related offenses, and after a person has remained crime-free for seven to ten years. Both the dominant political framework and public opinion have encouraged deportation policies for only low-level, non-violent crimes and for those who have proven that they can remain crime-free.
The dichotomy between violence and non-violent crime is a bit complicated: Many states consider one wide range of offenses as violent, including things most people would consider non-violent, such as burglary, drug crimes, and embezzlement. And “crime-free” is a more nuanced concept than we often think. For the purposes of registration policy, criminal conduct is often measured by new arrests or criminal charges and convictions. But living in one overpolitical neighborhood may lead to an increased likelihood of being stopped by the police.
New research from California looked at over 2 million Californians who have been arrested at least once. Black people were more likely than other racial groups to have been convicted of a criminal charge (87.3 percent, against 79.4 percent of the total), and of those convicted were more likely to have a crime (73.3 percent). percent against 58.1 percent of the total number). 40 percent of black people are excluded from being excluded because of that type of crime, compared to 26 to 31 percent of people in other racial groups. This means that a disproportionate proportion of blacks have a criminal conviction that disqualifies them from being excluded. Even among people with crimes in other racial groups, blacks were less likely to get a sentence that fit the criteria, and they were much more likely to have been jailed for their sentence, making even more people unable to get record approval.
“What our study shows,” study authors Alyssa Mooney, Alissa Skogand Amy Lerman told me in an email exchange, “is that automation of registration approval alone will not be enough to reduce racial differences in who has a criminal record. … What will be needed to actually reduce the racial gap “in the criminal records, is a policy change that extends the right to record records to a wider range of cases. This is not a technological problem; it is a political problem.”