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ACCESS AND OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL >> Clean Slate
Campaign Brief:
Clean Slate
Expungements change lives by making good jobs and affordable housing easier for justice-impacted families to find. Until Michigan’s Clean Slate laws took effect in 2021, getting criminal records expunged was expensive, confusing, and most people with convictions were not eligible. Automatic Expungement, which took effect in 2023, has sealed over 1 million people’s old convictions without requiring them to apply. But there is more we can do to improve these reforms and help even more people.
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Background
A criminal conviction may bring a jail or prison sentence that lasts a few years, but anyone who has a misdemeanor or felony on their record can tell you that the consequences of having a criminal record last much longer than the sentence itself. Employers and landlords routinely discriminate against people with a criminal record. Parents who have felonies on their record often find schools won’t allow them to join their children on field trips or help out in the classroom. A criminal record can also make it harder for justice-involved people to get loans, get into universities or get professional licenses — among many other hurdles they face.
Getting an expungement — erasing that record — can change a life overnight. A 2020 study from the University of Michigan found that people who received an expungement saw their wages rise an average of 23 percent in the year after. Even though the even benefit of expungements was obvious, the process of getting one was so inaccessible and daunting that it scared off most people who should have qualified for them. Before Clean Slate came along, just 6.5 percent of people who qualified for expungements sought them within 5 years of becoming eligible.
Making expungements easier to get and making them available for a greater number of offenses became one of our key priorities. In 2019, Safe & Just Michigan kicked off an effort to bring Clean Slate laws to Michigan. Clean Slate policies expand access to expungements and increase the number of offenses eligible to be expunged. We found support on both sides of the aisle and in both chambers of the Legislature, and Clean Slate was passed into law in October 2020. Specifically, these laws:
- Expanded eligibility to up to three felony convictions and an unlimited number of misdemeanors. However, no more than two assaultive convictions can be set aside, and multiple convictions for the same crime are ineligible if they have a maximum penalty of more than 10 years in prison.
- Allow multiple convictions that arose out of the same event and occurred within a 24-hour period of each other to be counted as a single conviction for the purpose of an expungement. This is the case as long as the offenses: (a) are not assaultive, (b) do not involve use of a dangerous weapon, and (c) are not punishable by more than 10 years in prison.
- Reduce the waiting period for an expungement to three years for non-serious misdemeanors and permit applications for multiple felonies after seven years.
- Make most traffic offenses — which are 50 percent of all criminal cases in Michigan — potentially eligible for expungement. First-offense DUIs were added to the list of offenses eligible for expungement beginning Feb. 19, 2022.
- Creates a process for people with misdemeanor marijuana convictions to apply for expungement if the conduct at issue would be legal under current law.
- Directs the state to create a process to automatically expunge some criminal records. Automatic expungement came into effect on April 11, 2023.
Vision
Clean Slate — a set of new laws that increased access to expungements and automated the process in many cases — has already been incredibly successful in Michigan. The first three years of the new Clean Slate process yielded 31,782 petitions for expungements. The first year of automatic expungement alone resulted in the expungement of 1,405,819 records from 912,416 people. Among them, 283,428 people saw their criminal records completely cleared. To date, over 5 million convictions have been automatically sealed by the Michigan State Police and state courts. This helps Michigan families find better places to live and attain financial security. In fact, our Clean Slate program has been so successful that other states are patterning their laws after ours.
However, as we help people with their expungement petitions, we are noticing a few places where the laws can be improved. For instance, confusing language leaves judges unsure whether they are allowed to expunge an older offense if it was followed by a more recent conviction. In addition, thousands of charged cases remain open and pending due to human error at the court level or neglect by the prosecutor’s office. Many of these “hanging charges” block an otherwise-eligible person from receiving an automatic expungement and are not being cleaned up in a systematic way.
Legislation to resolve these questions and make Clean Slate more effective and efficient will benefit everyone.
Solution
We need two simple legislative fixes:
- First, we need to eliminate or modify the rule that makes any intervening conviction a barrier to automatic expungement . This rule against an “intervening conviction” is preventing approximately 450,000 convictions from being expunged. However, the rule against intervening convictions didn’t exist until Clean Slate came into effect in 2021. Before then, judges used their own discretion to determine whether it was appropriate to give an expungement to a petitioner. We trusted judges then, and we should do it again.
- Second, we should add non-conviction records (arrest, charges) to the automatic expungement, which will address the “hanging charges” problem, as well as ensure that old arrest and charge records are sealed in a timely way and do not continue to appear on background checks.
In the 2023-24 legislative session, a bill to fix the intervening conviction problem in the petition process passed the State House during the lame duck period but ran out of time in the State Senate. A similar law to fix the intervening conviction problem in automatic expungements did not advance in the Legislature. We plan to continue working on both bills, and add bills on non-conviction records to the package.
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Background
When Michigan passed its Clean Slate laws in 2020, they contained a promise that our state would create a system to automate the expungement of most kinds of misdemeanors and some kinds of felonies. When our Automatic Expungement system came online in April 2023, our state was the first in the nation to automate the expungement of felonies, and our Automatic Expungement is now looked at by other states as an example to follow.
In the first week that Automatic Expungement took effect, it transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Michiganders, with 1,195,368 convictions expunged. However, the state didn’t include a mechanism for notifying people whose convictions had been cleared. That meant that people whose records had been automatically cleared might not know about it and could still be needlessly telling potential employers and landlords that they have a criminal history.
Vision
Solution
We have both short- and long-term solutions to the challenge posed by a lack of a notification system for Automatic Expungement.
The long-term solution is to create an online portal that allows people to quickly and easily find out whether any of their old criminal records have been expunged. Until a person knows their record has been cleared, they will continue to tell prospective employers and landlords that it is not, potentially excluding them from jobs and housing. We are currently working with stakeholders in the state government to create a plan for this portal, though it is a complicated process that will require the cooperation of several government departments, including the Michigan State Police, the State Courts and the Michigan Department of Corrections. The system will also require funding to maintain, and we have supporters in the Legislature who are interested in helping us fund this work.
In the short-term, we have created an online tool to help people figure out whether their old convictions might be cleared through the automatic process, or whether they might benefit from applying for an expungement through the petition process. This is a quick and free questionnaire, and should it indicate that your convictions might be eligible for expungement via the petition process, it points you to some resources to help you get started. You can find the online assessment tool.
