Clean Slate Resource Library

An advocacy tool for Clean Slate campaigns to help craft clear and compelling communications that will raise awareness, build understanding, and inspire action.

Locate legal service providers in a state or territory. Please note that contact information for legal aid organizations, bar associations, and other organizations that engage in record clearance work is provided for informational purposes only. The NRRC and CSI do not endorse or recommend any organization or individual referenced on the site.

This compilation of expungement laws and forms is a great overview if you’re looking for information about the types of records that may be expunged or sealed in your state, as well as forms to apply for record relief.

The Paper Prisons Initiative conducts empirical research to measure, study, and narrow the Second Chance Gap - the difference between eligibility and delivery of relief from the criminal justice system. This website provides reports and information on state “second chance expungement gaps” - the difference between eligibility and delivery of expungement - using the methodology described in America's Paper Prisons: The Second Chance Gap (Mich. Law. Rev. 2020).

Using administrative and other data, this study finds that among a host of petition-based second chance opportunities, to shorten sentences, restore one’s vote, and clear one’s criminal convictions, only a small fraction (less than 10 percent) of those eligible for relief actually received it.

This paper is a first attempt to measure the cost of “paper prisons” of limited economic opportunity due to expungable records and restorable licenses, in terms of annual lost earnings. Analyzing the literature, the paper estimates the annual earnings loss associated with misdemeanor and felony convictions to be $5,100 and $6,400, respectively, and that of a suspended license to be $12,700.

The primary focus of this research project was to assess the design, scope, implementation, and costs of record clearance through clean slate initiatives in eleven states, selected in consultation with The Clean Slate Initiative. Program staff documented the legal, policy, operational, and technical challenges that the states confront in planning and implementing the record clearance objectives of clean slate legislation.

Laws permitting the expungement of criminal convictions are a key component of modern criminal justice reform efforts and have been the subject of a recent upsurge in legislative activity. This debate has been almost entirely devoid of evidence about the laws’ effects, in part because the necessary data (such as sealed records themselves) have been unavailable. The authors of this paper were able to obtain access to de-identified data that overcomes that problem, and use it to carry out a comprehensive statewide study of expungement recipients and comparable non-recipients in Michigan

Despite modest declines in recent years, the large and decades-long blossoming of the prison population ensure that it will take many years before the United States sees a corresponding decrease in the number of former prisoners. Using data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), this report estimates that there were between 14 and 15.8 million working-age people with felony convictions in 2014, of whom between 6.1 and 6.9 million were former prisoners.

This report provides an update to the 2012 Broken Records report. Today, the background screening industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, with about 94% of employers and about 90% of landlords using background checks to evaluate prospective employees and tenants.

Californians for Safety and Justice brought together a group of content expert stakeholders to pool knowledge and conduct research based on the experiences of people with convictions and opportunities for reform.The Second Chances Advisory Committee met six times between May and October of 2017 to discuss and collect current institutional research and experiential knowledge on the lifetime consequences of having a conviction in California. This report is the culmination of that work.

The results presented here are based on a 1,000-sample national online survey of registered voters conducted from April 25 to May 1, 2018 by the Center for American Progress and GBA Strategies. The same survey was administered independently to 500 registered voters in both South Carolina and Michigan—two states currently considering clean slate legislation during the same period. The findings presented here are for the national survey only. All three surveys are on file with the authors.