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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.
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, these children may not be able to secure employment or housing due to their criminal records -- even if they were never convicted in the first place.
These children 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 literally hundreds of criteria that may disqualify an individual, and as such very few people have actually been able to improve their prospects through the law.
Our goal is to change that. We're working on developing applications to help offenders navigate the extremely complicated process of sealing or expunging their records, helping make the 45,000 word law more understandable to those needing to navigate it. We're also looking to help advocates push for further reforms, gathering data on how removing specific barriers to sealing and expungement might let more people move on from events in their childhood.
This repository (and wiki) primarily deal with that second task -- gathering and using data to get insights into how changes to the law would impact eligibility across Massachusetts. For more information on the application side of things, check out our other project documentation here.
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.
Find out more about the data side of the project or check out our FAQ!
- Our form for sealing juvenile criminal records lives here.
- Other states have similar projects in motion at these links:
- Illinois: http://www.expunge.io/
- Louisiana: https://lasc.libguides.com/c.php?g=464003&p=3238887
- California: http://sealitca.org/ ; https://info.codeforamerica.org/clear-my-record-toolkit
- New Jersey: https://www.lsnjlaw.org/Pages/Expunge.aspx