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The idea of a “clean slate” is simple. If you’ve been convicted of a nonviolent crime, finished your sentence, and kept your nose clean for a while, then—the thinking goes—you should be able to get on with your life. Everyone wins if you do. But your criminal history is like a stain. Potential landlords and employers may spot it on a background check and recoil.
Twelve states, including our neighbor Oklahoma, have already passed “clean slate” laws that remove the stain by automatically sealing or fully deleting certain criminal records, thus clearing offenders’ path to reintegration. Missouri could become the thirteenth if a bipartisan bill that’s nearing the finish line in the state House of Representatives finds favor in the Missouri Senate and the governor’s office.
“It’s not that radical,” argues Mallory Rusch, the St. Louis-based executive director of Empower Missouri, an anti-poverty nonprofit that has pushed for the law for several years. Her reasoning: The Show-Me State already has on the books a 2012 statute that allows folks convicted of certain offenses to petition the court to seal their records. A successful petition makes a record invisible to almost everyone (except those in criminal justice, such as police, prosecutors, and judges). But petitions are hard to advance without a lawyer, Rusch says—and lawyers cost money. According to Empower, roughly 518,000 Missourians are eligible to have records sealed, yet only about 1 percent have actually done so. The Missouri House bill would seal eligible records automatically.
“It’s a boring tech upgrade,” says Rusch. “It’s putting a tech-based solution in place to stop people from having to jump through a million hoops to get what the government has already said they should be able to have.”
The bill, being handled in the House by Rep. Bishop Davidson (R-Greene County) and in the Senate by Sen. Brian Williams (D-St. Louis), wouldn’t change which convictions are eligible under state law. A whole slew of them would remain off the table: dangerous felonies, violent crimes, sex offenses, various financial crimes. The most commonly sealed convictions, Rusch predicts, would be those for drug offenses and what she calls “crimes of poverty” (e.g., shoplifting).
Not all those convicted of drug or “poverty” crimes struggle to find housing and work after serving their sentence, but enough do to justify a policy tweak, advocates say. A recent survey commissioned by the advocacy group Clean Slate Initiative and conducted by YouGov connected with 800 people who had arrest and conviction records in Pennsylvania, Utah, and Michigan. The survey found that 39 percent of them reported extreme or some difficulty getting and keeping a job and paying bills, and 31 percent reported difficulties finding housing—all due to their arrest or conviction. (To play loosely with numbers: 30 percent of half a million Missourians with records would be 150,000 people having this kind of trouble, if our state paralleled those three.)
But would automated sealing of their criminal records really help such Missourians? The evidence from other states is scant because clean slate laws are relatively new. As Rusch says, “the data is still emerging.”
In 2018, Pennsylvania became the first state to pass clean slate legislation. One thing it did was to automatically seal records of all arrests that never resulted in convictions. A recent study found that this had “no effect” on the employment outcomes of beneficiaries. Rusch counters that you could expect the effect to be greater for the convicted, because the stigma is greater for convictions. And another thing about Pennsylvania: According to the CSI/YouGov survey, more than two-thirds of respondents there didn’t even know about the law. Respondents across all three states who did know reported improvements in areas such as work and housing after record clearance. (The Missouri bill has language ensuring the convicted would learn about the process both at their sentencing and release.)
The Missouri Chamber of Commerce, in any case, is a backer of clean slate. At a House committee hearing on the bill in February, its representative told lawmakers that the chamber supported it on the belief that it would open up job opportunities and also lower recidivism rates. (A representative from a chapter of the Association of General Contractors also spoke in support.)
One opponent has been the Judicial Conference of Missouri—but only on logistical grounds. Eric Jennings, the conference’s counsel, attended the hearing and said the state courts didn’t have the tools to set up the record-sealing apparatus within the bill’s timeframe. Pennsylvania’s set-up had been easier, he argued, because it has a defendant-based system; Missouri, by contrast, has a case-based system, so it’s harder to find all cases related to a single person, which is necessary for processing. “We do not oppose the policy decision that you want to make,” Jennings told the committee. “We want to be able to implement it, and we don’t want to give false hope to anyone if this is passed and we can’t carry it out.”
But Davidson says that in the most recent version of the bill, the timing of the rollout has been loosened to allay the courts’ concerns. The fiscal note still reflects an early estimate by the Office of State Courts Administrator that 287 court clerks would be needed to manually process records, but Davidson dismisses it. “I don’t think the fiscal note is anywhere near being correct,” he says.
Rusch insists that automation is doable—especially because the proposed bill does not require paper records to be sealed, only digital ones. Which is not to say that the entire process can be automated, she adds: Offenders who still owe court-ordered restitution to victims are not eligible for automatic sealing. Restitution balances are held with prosecutors, she says, so their offices will have to chip in on implementation as well.
On the political side, bills like this one often hitch a ride into law on the backs of much larger “omnibus” bills in the same subject matter. But this year, the criminal-justice omnibus bill has already been moved through both chambers and been signed by Kehoe, one of whose priorities was exerting more influence on the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. Still, clean slate does have the support of the House leadership, Rusch says, so if nothing else, the legislative work this year could lay a foundation for next. “Even if we can’t get it through the Senate,” she says, “we still believe House progress sets up the bill in a much stronger position for passage next year.”
The bill certainly has bipartisan support, which Davidson attributes partly to the likelihood that many of his colleagues in the General Assembly know people who’ve needed another shot. It may go even deeper than that, he suggests: “I think it’s very American to believe in a restorative system that prioritizes the victim and their restoration, but always keeps an eye toward a person committing the crime and their restoration as well.”
