"The consequences of a run-in with the
law can persist for decades after the formal sentence has been served.
People with records face major barriers to employment, housing and
education, effectively condemning them to second-class citizenship.
In
recent years, criminal justice reform efforts have increasingly focused
on finding policy tools that can lower these barriers. The most
powerful potential lever is the expungement of criminal convictions,
which seals them from public view, removes them from databases, and
neutralizes most of their legal effects....
For many years, debates about expungement laws have been missing
something critical: hard data about their effects. But this week, we
released the results of the first major empirical study of expungement laws. Michigan, where our data came from, has an expungement law that exemplifies the traditional nonautomatic approach."
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