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Welcome to the Clean Slate project data branch GitHub repository! If you haven't heard of us before, check out our project overview here, and other project documentation here.

What's Wrong

Each year, thousands of Massachusetts children and teenagers become involved with the criminal justice system. In Massachusetts, children between the ages of 12 and 18 may be arrested, charged in court, removed from their homes, and confined in secure, locked facilities. Once released, they may not be able to secure employment or housing due to their criminal records -- even if they were never convicted in the first place.

People may be able to clear their records under MA G.L. c.276, § 100E-100U, a 239-part law passed in 2018 allowing sealing or expungement of certain criminal records that occurred before a person's 21st birthday. But the law is extremely complicated, with hundreds of criteria that may disqualify an individual. As such, very few people have been able to improve their prospects through the law.

What We're Doing

Data Work: Change the system.

We're looking to help provide advocates with information to share with legislators, policymakers, and other community members. We are gathering and using data to identify how many people are currently eligible to have their records sealed or expunged, and how changes to the law would impact eligibility across Massachusetts.

This repository (and wiki) primarily deal with our data work.

App Work: Change people's lives.

We're also working on developing applications to help people navigate the extremely complicated process of sealing or expunging (which are two different things) their records, helping make the 45,000-word law more understandable to those needing to navigate it.

For more information on the application side of things, see how to get started.

The code for our juvenile sealing petition (form) lives here.

Who We Are

We are Code for Boston, a group of civic hackers dedicated to improving civic life and social good in Greater Boston. Check out our other projects on GitHub or find out more about us on our website. For this project, we've partnered with Citizens for Juvenile Justice (CfJJ) as our primary stakeholder.

What to Read Next

1. See how to contribute.
2. Find out more about the data side of the project.
3. Find out more about the app side of the project.
4. Check out our FAQ!