#CleanSlate Revisited

With the ground-breaking Clean Slate law going fully into effect this week in Pennsylvania, we revisit a conversation we had with criminal justice reform leaders at the kickoff of the campaign last November.

Last fall, Pennsylvania became the first state to implement Clean Slate — a record-clearing law that scrubs old and minor arrests and convictions via automation. This week, that automation goes fully into effect. The result: Hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians getting the second chances they’ve earned and the birth of a movement spanning both coasts, with similar bipartisan legislation moving forward in states across the country.

This week, we go back to the start and revisit Rebecca’s conversations with some of the leaders and advocates behind this movement and the people who will be helped by it.

Heard on this week’s episode:

• Sharon Dietrich, Litigation Director at CLS of Philadelphia
• Ronald Lewis, small business owner and Clean Slate advocate
• Neera Tanden, president of Center for American Progress
• Malcolm Jenkins, co-founder, Players Committee
• Will Heaton, Vice President of Government Affairs, Just Leadership USA
• Tori Verber Salazar, District Attorney, San Joaquin County, California
• Daryl V. Atkinson, Co-director, Formerly Incarcerated, Convicted Peoples and Families Movement; Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress
• Tameshia Bridges Mansfield, Program Officer, W.K. Kellogg Foundation
• Jared Rodriguez, President and CEO, Calder Group; Business Coalition, Safe and Just Michigan

This week’s transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. Folks who know me and folks who listen to this show will know that there are few things closer to my heart than the intersection of poverty and criminal justice. And in particular, the barriers that can come with having a criminal record, a minor record, an old record, it almost doesn’t matter what type of record, almost every criminal record can be a life sentence to poverty in this country. And for tens of millions of Americans, that is an inescapable reality. So I’m really excited to bring listeners some good news for a change, especially in a nonstop parade of terribles almost every single week, which I personally feel somewhat guilty putting in front of you and putting into your ears.

And so that’s why this week we are so excited to announce that a bipartisan national campaign has just launched and the Center for American Progress is part of it with a whole range of partners to bring a new idea that just became law in Pennsylvania to states across the country. That idea is called clean slate, you’ve heard about it on this show before and it’s about making sure that a criminal record is no longer a life sentence to poverty. The idea is about automating criminal records sealing or expungment so that people can truly move on with their lives rather than being haunted by a criminal record for decades after an offense occurred which is what happens to so many people right now. And so to mark that launch of a national campaign that now has the potential to help tens of millions of Americans, as more and more states follow in Pennsylvania’s footsteps after Pennsylvania passed and signed into law the Clean Slate Act earlier this year, I’m really excited to feature a range of highlights from this week’s campaign launch through a whole bunch of different voices.

But before we do that I can’t think of two better people to join me for a conversation about clean slate than my dear friends Ronald Lewis and Sharon Dietrich. Now folks who listen to this show might actually be familiar with both of those names because you have both made appearances over the years on Off Kilter but Ronald you are a Philadelphia resident, you’re also one of the biggest Eagles fans I know and a father and many other things. And Sharon, listeners of this show will know you’re my former boss from when I used to be at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia but there’s a lot more about both of you that I want to bring in so to tell a little bit of the story of how the three of us got working on clean slate going on all the way back to 2014, Ronald you’re actually one of Sharon’s former clients. Would you share a little bit of your story of how you became an advocate for clean slate and for issues to do with criminal records.

RONALD LEWIS: Hi, my name is Ronald Lewis and I became an advocate because in 2004 I got myself in a little trouble. One of them was a retail theft, it was a misdemeanor. And two weeks later I got in a little more trouble, I had a conspiracy charge. It was another misdemeanor. Didn’t serve any jail time, I went out, I was trying to move on with my life, the road blocks started. I couldn’t get employment. I couldn’t go on trips for my daughter. So I reached out to Sharon Dietrich and we started this journey together.

VALLAS: And Ronald, part of what you often talk about and actually what I heard you talk about when you spoke at the bill signing ceremony from when clean slate became law so there I am reading the last page of the book first, and we’ll get to that. Is your experience of what that criminal record has meant to you even though it is so old, as you mentioned. So how has your criminal record impacted you even though it’s almost fifteen years old at this point?

LEWIS: It impacted me on numerous ways, like I said, the basic necessities of living, I couldn’t provide for my family. I couldn’t go on class trips with my daughter. It was like a blackout on my family. My name was no longer my name and like I said, the bare necessities of living, so it effects that.

VALLAS: And one of the areas it’s impacted you perhaps more than almost anything else has been in the employment context. A line that you actually wrote in a op-ed years ago for TalkPoverty.org has stuck with me and it’s what I think about almost every time someone brings up the issues of a criminal record creating employment barriers for somebody and that’s that you said that, “So many doors had been closed in your face you know what wood tastes like.”

LEWIS: Yes, yes, that was factual, that’s real. I don’t think people understand the impact. People that go through it understand the impact of it but the impact is real. We talk about feeding my family, keeping the lights on. You’re talking about going on trips with your daughter, you’re deprived of all that. You make a mistake and you’re deprived of all that, you understand what I’m saying? Your life is really not your life no more. So I couldn’t do nothing, so it makes you feel worthless, and I’m not even talking about dollars and cents. I’m talking about the bare minimum of fatherhood, class trips with your kid, and things like that. And everybody’s looking like you have two heads; jobs that you know you’re qualified for and they love you until that piece of paper comes back and then you’re somebody different.

VALLAS: And we’re talking here about a 15 year old misdemeanor record.

LEWIS: Correct.

VALLAS: Is what you have just to be clear.

LEWIS: Correct, 15, 16.

VALLAS: No Sharon, Ronald is your former client and he actually came to you because he was facing these kinds of employment barriers. How did you get involved working on clean slate? Tell us a little bit of how you come to this work.

SHARON DIETRICH: Well I came to legal aid 30 some years ago as an employment lawyer. And when I started back then I did what all employment lawyers did, I did discrimination cases, I did wage cases. What I did not do was criminal record cases because back in the late 1980s that wasn’t a thing. But as the 1990s rolled along we started to see more and more people in our clientele who their main need was to deal with their criminal records. So we took up that banner because that’s what our clients needed for us to do. And in particular they wanted to get their records expunged and what we learned was that we could keep doing more and more and more expungments and go as fast as we could and we could not even begin to keep up with the number of people who needed them. So out of that reality is where the idea of clean slate came from.

VALLAS: And what you’re describing is a petition-based process. That’s why you’ve got all of these people having to be helped one by one by one. These are folks who, to be clear, they are eligible under the law to have their record cleared and yet because it’s such a complicated process, because it can be really expensive and because a lot of them get turned away from legal aid because you guys don’t have enough resources to help everybody. What we’re ending up seeing is something that some folks are now starting to call the second chance gap. That the vast majority of people eligible to have their records cleared aren’t getting that kind of help.

DIETRICH: Yes, that’s absolutely right and we always knew that because even if we could do say, 3,000 cases which is what we did in the most recent year, we were well aware that there were hundreds of thousands of people, even more that needed their records to be cleared and there was just physically no way that could be done. You can’t have enough hearings in court. You can’t file enough petitions to achieve what people needed and what they were entitled to because they were eligible.

VALLAS: Now that’s the idea behind this clean slate concept. Bring us now to present day. I already read the last page of the book outloud and people probably know spoiler, clean slate became law in Pennsylvania earlier this year which is why we’re having these conversations and the backdrop for it becoming a national bipartisan campaign but Sharon help us understand, what was that story of how the bill became a law?

DIETRICH: The story was that we went into a legislative environment of divided government, which is something we talk about a lot these days in Pennsylvania the general assembly was Republican control, the governor is a Democrat and it was an environment in which in the past expungement bills did not pass easily. But we went in with the Justice Action Network, a bipartisan coalition and secured bipartisan sponsorship including then-Senator Scott Wagner who ended up running against Governor Wolf in the general election this year and really from the jump, everybody got behind the idea that it is silly for people not to get what they’re entitled to and record clearing just because the mechanism doesn’t exist for that to happen. And that since the technology does exist that would allow basically you’d put a query into a computer to say seal the records that fall into these criteria, everybody understood that that made good sense. And honestly we built and built support including not only Republicans and Democrats and eventually the district attorneys, but even the members of the Player Coalition came to support the bill so it almost became inevitable that it had to pass.

VALLAS: So the bill became law. Now you are in the process of working with the state to implement it so that people can actually get their records now automatically cleared if they’ve remained crime free for a set period of time. That’s how that bill and that now that law is structured. Ronald, what is this going to mean to you and also what is this going to mean to your community?

LEWIS: My community, it means hope, it means survival, it means actually getting a second chance and not just a slogan. It means a glass of cool water on a hot, hot day. It means fathers can be fathers and do fatherly things. It means that my name is my name and the mistake I made was a mistake and we can move on with life. It means, it’s funny because I run across a lot of people and there’s so many Ronald Lewis’s out here that just haven’t had the platform to have a conversation. And all people really want is an opportunity, you understand what I’m saying? An opportunity to right their wrongs and be able to live.

VALLAS: And Sharon do we have a sense of how many people are going to be helped in Pennsylvania now that this Clean Slate Act has become law?

DIETRICH: Well Ronald is right that there are many, many, Ronald Lewis’s out there and the district attorney’s office, District Attorney Krasner in Philadelphia has done some analysis of what we think clean slate will do. And the early returns are that we think that 22% of convictions will be able to be automatically sealed. That’s of all convictions and that we’re talking about upwards of 150,000 people being helped by this law.

VALLAS: So a huge number of people, I want to be clear, obviously this is not the end all be all when it comes to criminal justice reform. There is a lot else that needs to happen to make that system fair for people and to ensure that we’re not locking people up and throwing away the key and never thinking about what happens when they come out. But that is a huge, huge impact just from one piece of legislation.

DIETRICH: That’s right. Those are hundreds of thousands of lives that are going to be changed in the ways that Ronald has just described.

VALLAS: And Ronald, in the last couple of minutes that we have, there are states now across the country that are looking to take up this idea of clean slate. Looking to follow in Pennsylvania’s footsteps. What is your message to state legislators or other folks who might be listening and thinking about whether this is something that they want to see come to their state.

LEWIS: The same way we recycle trash, let’s recycle these people. Let’s save some lives. That’s it.

VALLAS: Powerful words to end on, Sharon any other notes from you as folks are hearing this and thinking about what clean slate could mean in their state.

DIETRICH: I think we’re looking at a new paradigm for how to help people and it doesn’t depend on things being done one by one. It’s a place we should have been a long time ago but I’m glad we’re getting there now and I hope that all the other states that can will follow Pennsylvania’s footsteps.

VALLAS: Sharon Dietrich is the litigation director at Community Legal Services and my former boss, big sis, mentor, many other things. Ronald Lewis is a resident of Philadelphia, a huge Philadelphia Eagles fan, Malcolm Jenkins that one’s for you and a father and someone who has been one of the strongest and most ardent advocates of clean slate from day one. Thank you guys to you both for making the time and coming on the show and I’m so thrilled to be in this with you.

LEWIS: Thank you.

DIETRICH: Thank you Rebecca.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

NEERA TANDEN: Alright everybody, we’re going to get started. Good afternoon, my name is Neera Tanden and I’m president of the Center for American Progress and I’m really thrilled to welcome all of you here for this very important day. Before we begin, I want to thank our partners at the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, the Kellogg Foundation and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation for making this event possible and a lot of work possible.

The United States is a nation that believes in the ideals of compassion and redemption. And as a people we cannot allow a single mistake to consign our fellow Americans to a lifetime of poverty. But today, after decades of failed criminal justice policies as many as 100 million Americans now have some form of a criminal record. In the digital era, even a minor brush with the law can create lifelong barriers to securing a decent home, a well paying job or a better education, no matter how long ago that offense took place. That is just wrong. But what makes matter worse, these barriers don’t just harm those Americans who have already paid their debt to society, it can hurt their families for years down the road. In fact, CAP has found that nearly half of all children in our country have at least one parent with some form of criminal record. The sad reality is that tens of million of people with criminal records have the legal right to get their records wiped clean so they can move on with their lives and yet most find themselves unable to do so. Many can’t afford a lawyer or costly court fees while others aren’t even aware that they have the ability to clear their records.

It is long past time to close what has become known as America’s second chance gap. That’s why CAP is so proud to have partnered with the Community Legal Services of Philadelphia to develop a policy known as clean slate, which automates record clearing for people who have remained crime free for a period of time. Earlier this year, thanks to the incredible leadership of a diverse bipartisan coalition, Pennsylvania became the first state in America to pass clean slate legislation. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians who have paid their debt to society will now get a true second chance. A second chance they deserve. And I want to thank everyone here today who played a part in making this possible including state Representative Jordan Harris. Can we give him a round of applause?

[APPLAUSE]

Today CAP is thrilled to announce the launch of a bipartisan campaign with more than 25 organizations to bring clean slate to states all across the country. Our lunch comes at an incredible important moment, a moment of renewed efforts to pursue criminal justice reform at the federal level. At CAP, we’ve consistently advocated for sentencing reform that applies retroactively along with meaningful prison reforms that will not contribute to existing racial disparities. But as we see the latest event as they unfold we cannot lose sight of the fact that the federal system represents a small fraction of America’s criminal justice system. And that’s why today’s work is so important. in the meantime, leaders at the statewide level have a tremendous opportunity to take major steps forward to passing clean slate laws.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

MALCOLM JENKINS: Following decades of over-criminalization, as many as 100 million Americans or one in three of us now has some type of criminal record. In a digital era with nearly 9 in 10 employers, 4 in 5 landlords and 3 in 5 colleges using criminal background checks, any criminal record, no matter how old or minor can haunt you for life and put employments, housing and education permanently out of reach. But the lifelong stigma that comes with a criminal record makes zero sense. In fact, it makes us less safe as people who can’t get jobs are more, not less likely to resort to crime out of desperation. In theory, most states provide a way to get your record clear after you’ve paid your debt to society, but in practice it’s just too hard. People need a lawyer they can’t afford, must pay a fee that is too high and must navigate a overly complicated legal process.

That’s why last year former NFL player Anquan Bolden and I co-founded the Player Coalition, a 501(c)3 charitable foundation and a 501(c)4 advocacy organization created to impact social and racial inequalities in the areas of criminal justice reform, police-community relations and education and economic advancement. I and my fellow Player Coalition members were proud to see our great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania lead the nation in solving this problem and passed the Clean Slate Act this year. [MUSIC] Now when people’s records are automatically cleared if they are crime free for a set period of time, no lawyer, no fee necessary. We’re proud supporters of this bill and we’re excited to other states following suit including Michigan, Colorado, South Carolina and more.

And folks who don’t agree on anything else coming together to support them. Just because you made a mistake in the past doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to contribute in the future. Let’s pass clean slate everywhere.

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: Hey everybody, my name’s Rebecca Vallas, I am the Vice President of the Poverty to Prosperity program here at the Center for American Progress. But I’m also going to put on one of my former hats and wear that today too, which is actually how I come to these issues. I am a former legal aid lawyer, a recovering legal aid lawyer I would say although not recovering really well because it’s still what drives my work on these issues every single day. It’s a lot of fun and really thrilling and a real honor to be in the room with so many leaders on these issues. Those who are coming up on the stage and also all of you in the audience, seeing a lot of familiar faces out there. So thank you for being with us today. Before I introduce the panel I introduce the panel acouple of housekeeping items because that gets to be my role too so I guessI’m wearing three hats. So #CleanSlate is what folks should be using if they are tweeting, you want to join the conversation on Twitter. You can also check out the new website that actually has a lot more information about the campaign that Neera just mentioned and Mark and David mentioned as well, the clean slate campaign coming to states across the country that website is cleanslatecampaign.org and you can find a lot more about clean slate there. And I’m also going to flag the toolkit the clean slate toolkit that was distributed when you checked in and registered so grab that if you haven’t seen it yet, a lot more information and resources in there as well. But I’ll put on the first hat and the main hat I’ll be wearing today as the moderator of this next fantastic panel and I’m gonna ask my fellow panelists to come up here as I call them by name. [LAUGHTER] so we’ve already screwed up guys, we’re off to a great start, panel.

So in addition to my current boss Neera having just been on this stage, we’re gonna bring up also my former boss so guys be nice to me, make me look good, okay? So Sharon Dietrich, the litigation director at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, come on up Sharon, and our partner in this clean slate design. [APPLAUSE] You’re getting cheers, Sharon, look, you’re popular. We’ve got Tameshia Bridges Mansfield who’s a program officer at the Kellogg Foundation, whom were so grateful to as such an important partner in this work. [APPLAUSE] We’ve got District Attorney Tori Verber Salazar who is the District Attorney of San Joaquin County, California. District Attorney Salazar, thank you so much for being with us today. [APPLAUSE] We’ve got Jared Rodriguez who is the CEO of the Calder Group, he’s also the guru of the business coalition working with Safe and Just Michigan on the clean slate campaign thanks so much for being with us today, Jared. [APPLAUSE]

And then we have a slight change in the agenda, which is that Daryl Atkinson of the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s and Families movement had hoped to be with us today. But his flight got canceled because as you may have noticed it’s lovely spring weather out there. So he is sad not to be with us today but we are incredibly lucky to have another all-star working on these issues with us in his stead and that — Will I’m piping you up here you got to live up to this and that’s Willie Heaton. He’s the Vice President of Government Affairs at Just Leadership USA. Will thanks so much.

[APPLAUSE]

Oh you guys haven’t even sat yet! Take a seat folks, all right, o to get right into it because we heard a lot of fantastic discussion already about why folks who agree on pretty much nothing else including sports it turns out, I think I didn’t know that until today, are coming together around this clean slate concept. But before we get into kind of more of the details about where each of you are coming from Sharon, I want to start with you because we heard from Ronald before about his own personal story and what clean slate is gonna mean to him and to his community but you’re actually Ronald’s former lawyer and so we’d love to hear you tell a little bit of the story of how Ronald came to you and and how that ended up actually becoming the origin of the clean slate idea.

DIETRICH: Thanks, Rebecca. So I started at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia 30 years ago as an employment lawyer. And never in my early days would it have occurred to me that I was going to spend my days at events like this talking about criminal justice, because back in the late 1980s this was simply not an issue that we saw all thatoften as part of our employment law practice. But beginning in the 1990s and speeding up with every passing year for at least two decades more and more people came to CLS to say hey, my real employment problem is that I have a record and I can’t get a job and I can’t keep a job when I get it and the background check is always bad.

And so Ronald was one of those many people and many of my clients have stories just like Ronald’s, he’s a particularly articulate spokesman for it but there’s so many people that have the same story of having some minor transgression when they were young so we came up with many strategies and I should say to quantify how important this issue is to low-income people who have employment needs now, we get about 1,500 new cases a year. Of that 1,500, just employment cases, a thousand of that are about criminal records. So it is far and away the single most common reason people come to CLS for employment law help. We came up with all kinds of strategies to try to address that issue, oh thank you, but eventually it occurred to us that we needed to do a healthy part of our practice being expungement work or sealing work because most people when they came to CLS said, I want to get my record expunged. They didn’t say I want to sue an employer or I want to sue a background check company. They said I want to expunge my record because they knew that what that meant was basically a new lease on life that they could get any job and they could get any apartment.

So we at CLS started to do a serious employment law practice and we started at about 600 cases a year, 600 criminal cases a year that we would expunge and we realized that wasn’t cutting it because it wasn’t even you know, beginning to meet the need and so we came up with all kinds of strategies to do that better and faster. One of my colleagues created a piece of software that builds expungement petitions. You’ll hear more about that tomorrow if you’re coming to tomorrow’s event. We did expungement clinics and we pushed and pushed and pushed and did five times as many cases in five years so that was about 3,000 and guess what? We still weren’t even close to meeting the need for, that our community alone in Philadelphia was presenting much less across the state. So that’s what brought me to the issues that eventually led to clean slate.

VALLAS: And Sharon just to stay with you for a moment to sort of tell this story a little bit further. So that was the problem that you at Community Legal Services and your colleagues there were seeing. But a big part of this actually had to do with the fact that it was a petition-based system. This is why people were coming through your doors needing a lawyer’s help. We heard a little bit about that from Mark and David before as well. So help us understand how did that then become the birth of the idea for clean slate?

DIETRICH: Well for one thing, we practically crashed the first judicial district’s docket by how many petitions we filed. And as I said, we were only filling 3,000 a year but that was enough to make all the petitions line up, and you needed months in order to get your petition heard and what was insane about it was that all the cases were really the same, you know, they just involved creating the same form petition where you had to insert a whole bunch of information and then it got filed and then a DA looked at it and either objected or didn’t and then you would appear in front of a judge and then the judge would push the paper on to the clerks, and the clerks would push the paper on to somebody else. So it was just a very labor-intensive system and even though we were not charging our clients unlike many clients elsewhere, it was just something that was never gonna work on a sustained basis in a large way.

VALLAS: This was something I remember seeing when you were my boss and I was working on these cases too, and so true story, the idea for clean slate was sort of born out of a glass of wine of me and Sharon banging our heads against the wall going man, there’s got to be a better way to do this and bring help to more people. And so clean slate was born and so the short version then, how did this become law? And then I’m gonna bring in other folks.

DIETRICH: So, we had enough experience working with databases, public databases in Pennsylvania that we understood that you could put in a computer query and basically say, these their criteria to seal or expunge a case and that computer could exercise that and do it in a broad way. So we intellectually understood this was entirely possible from what we knew of our work with the state police in Pennsylvania, with the administrative office of Pennsylvania courts. So we were fortunate that the Justice Action Network, which at that point I think was a fairly new bipartisan criminal justice reform coalition decided to make clean slate a priority. And we came up with a bill but more important we came up with prime sponsors. And for the first time we had Senator Scott Wagner, which may be a common name, a name you’ve heard in this room even if you’re not from Pennsylvania. Senator Wagner just ran against Governor Wolf for governor of Pennsylvania, was kind of an up and coming very conservative Republican star, was an employer and he agreed to be one of the prime sponsors of the bill along with a more traditional business oriented Republican in the other House. And along with two Philadelphia Democrats.

And from that initial part where we got those four very different sponsors together on the bill, this thing just moved really quite nicely. And I should say, Pennsylvania is not a state that is eager to make big bold expungement changes. Our expungement rules are not so hot in Pennsylvania compared to what a lot of other states do. But everybody could see the good sense of if people have rights let’s figure out how to get them enforced. And so we rolled along pretty nicely with all kinds of unusual partners that we — I wouldn’t even say we faced a lot of opposition. what we mostly faced was some skepticism about whether the technology would work, working with OPC, the courts, and the state police we determined that it would. We at one point get kind of stopped up in the system and Malcolm Jenkins who you saw in the video came out to Harrisburg to help us. Eventually the Pennsylvania prosecutors also said that they felt comfortable with the bill. I saw Greg Rowe here somewhere. So ultimately we had a big old event at the end of the session, which featured pretty much anyone who was anyone saying that this bill should be passed and it was one of the more extraordinary bipartisan efforts you’ll ever see.

VALLAS: And a Republican-controlled legislature teaming up with a Democratic governor.

DIETRICH: Correct.

VALLAS: Including during a race where it was, they were on opposite sides competing for the governorship. So really a one for the memoirs in a lot of ways. So will I want to bring you in next. So one of the, we’ve been talking mostly today about the United States criminal justice system but I often find and I think a lot of folks increasingly are finding that looking overseas and seeing how other countries do this is actually really helpful and instructive because the way we do it in the US ain’t the only way, spoiler alert, and actually along these lines there was a major delegation that recently went to Europe, to Germany and Norway, shout-out to the Vera Institute of Justice which led that. And one of the things that that for example, came out of that visit was that when you look at European countries like Germany and Norway there isn’t even the concept of the loss of rights. And so they don’t even have these conversations about the restoration of rights right. So this is really uniquely a United States problem. From the perspective of someone, and JL USA is a group that is is all about people with records being the leaders and the change makers on these issues, from that perspective, how does clean slate fit in with the kinds of thinking we need to be doing on criminal justice reform?

WILL HEATON: Thanks Rebecca for being, giving the opportunity to be here and I’ll do my best, you know, sort of, channel Daryl’s thoughts through a lot of this conversation. But I think going to your point about this recent trip over to some European countries, our CEO Diana Hoskins joined Daryl Atkinson on this trip with a number of other leaders. And when we were talking about this after she had come home I think the biggest thing that really rang out was the fact that nobody loses their human dignity. And what we do with our criminal justice system in this country is rob people of their human dignity in the way that we treat them throughout every step of this system. And I think even for myself, you know, I caught a federal felony conviction about 12 years ago now and what was really kind of I mean many things that was striking to me about it was when I went into the courtroom for my sentencing hearing, I mean it was a, you know, my crime caught national attention. It was on the front page of The Washington Post multiple times but it was like this entirely huge packed courtroom facade of just like parade, like with all of this attention around what this sentence for me was going to be. And then I remember you know when I finally finished up you know my probation several years later, I just walked out of the probation office one day and that was the end of it, and it’s like nobody ever knew anything, and I was just they kind of like signed a piece of paper and it was done. And you know, for me, like what I had to endure during that time just pales in comparison to what so many other individuals in this country endure. And I think what Mark Holden had said earlier I wanted to mention this again you know these famous words of Bryan Stevenson about how you’re better off being rich and guilty than innocent and poor in this country happens every single day to thousands and thousands of people.

And even when you finish your sentence, that criminal record continues to haunt millions of Americans. Ronald and I were talking before this panel started and he was like you know this clean slate initiative is fantastic but what we really need to be focusing on now is getting people into jobs. And my colleague Lester Young who does a lot of our organizing for Just Leadership in South Carolina, when he’s working with people in these communities across that state, that’s the first thing that he’s hearing about. It’s not just the criminal record, it’s that I’m being completely locked out of any ability to lead a fulfilling life. And in doing that, I’m like losing my own human dignity and so I think to come back to just the importance of clean slate what this is is that it’s an important step in that I think automating this process you know takes the economic barrier out of this, and the fact that just even the time somebody might have to take to go to their lawyer’s office that brings them away from their job that could threaten their employment. But I think it’s just the beginning of what we need to be doing and thinking about how much bolder we need to do.

And you know I mean even like in my circumstance with the felony conviction, clean slate passes, you know, even if it’s only covering a misdemeanor charge, I’m not going to be eligible for that and I’m not in any circumstance you know where I necessarily need to have that felony expunged. But for a lot of other Americans they don’t have that that privilege and right. And so I think it’s just it’s a good reminder to us of just a lot of the like monumental structural barriers that afflict a lot of people in this country and that this is the first of many steps that we need to be taking to address those.

VALLAS: And Tameshia, I want to bring you in next from your perspective at the Kellogg Foundation. Your portfolio there is about employment, and obviously the Kellogg Foundation cares a great deal about kids and families and that was really our beginning of conversations about these issues was about the impact on kids and on families. Neera mentioned in her opening and there was a little bit of discussion in the earlier panel about just that striking number. I got to tell you, when CAP was doing that analysis we almost fell out of our chairs. Never in our wildest dreams did we expect the number was going to be as high as nearly half of kids in this country having at least one parent with a record. And that was a conservative estimate, which breaks my heart every single time say that out loud. Shed a little bit of light for us on on what this means to children and to families and how Kellogg got involved.

TAMESHIA BRIDGES MANSFIELD: So thank you for that. So at the WK Kellogg Foundation children are really at the heart of everything we do. And so what we know is that kids live in families, families are a part of communities, and in order for parents to fully show up for their children they have to have access to a quality job in order for their communities to be safe they have to have people in those communities who are able to fully reengage and commit back into those communities. So kids, parents, and families are really at the center of all that we do. And so when we really think about this issue, it was that issue around half of children having a parent or a caretaker or someone who’s in justice involved. And I use that language, justice involved, very specifically because it’s not just about incarceration right, it’s about someone who’s been arrested, it’s about someone who has another type of a conviction that blocks them out. And so what we know like you said is that when folks have a conviction or have some type of a contact with the justice system it locks them out of employment. And that locking out happens at the point of application. If you know you have to apply for a job and you know that question is going to be on there folks aren’t going to go and apply for that job. If you know that going to find an apartment in a place for you and your family to live it’s going to cause that issue to come back up, that may block you as well. And so all that creates enormous amount of instability in the lives of children. It means that children are homeless, it means that they have a parent who can’t fully show up and be present in their lives, and it creates all kinds of levels of secondary and primary trauma in those children’s lives. If you look at issues around adverse childhood experiences and the ASA scores and folks who know things about trauma-informed care and you look at the indicators of trauma and children’s lives, having a parent who is incarcerated is one of those markers. And so when kids, the things that happen in kids lives as their children impacts their trajectory going forward. And when children have high incidence of trauma in their lives as kids, that then impacts their risk for chronic illness, their risk for workforce instability going forward, and their risk of getting caught up in the system. So for us it really all goes back to children and how having that parent really impacts, having that parent who’s justice-involved impacts their lives and their ability to have a parent who’s fully present, fully engaged, and fully able to provide in their lives.

VALLAS: District Attorney Salazar, so we heard a little bit earlier about that that sort of refrain everyone knows so well, tough on crime. And there’s almost no one who more comes to mind than the face of a prosecutor when you think about who those advocates for tough on crime policies used to be pretty much across the board. Now you’re here sitting here not as the person we have to persuade that this makes sense, but actually as a champion for reform and for automating record clearing like through policies such as clean slate. How did you as a District Attorney come to these issues and shed a little bit of light for us on your perspective inside the system that gets so burdened by this one-off petition process that Sharon was describing earlier?

TORI VERBER SALAZAR: Thank you for the opportunity. Really and I ran for office in 2014, and I ran on tough on crime. There’s no doubt I was endorsed by law enforcement, I come from the San Joaquin County, the seat of the county, is Stockton had one of the highest crime rates in the largest city at the time before Detroit to go bankrupt. So everything that could be going wrong was going wrong. We were economically struggling, crime was rising, gang violence was high, narcotics were coming up and down the corridors. It was a very difficult, very tough time. And so when I came into office I had that chance to sit there and look and say we know what’s not working because I’m getting that result every day. How can we see what it looks like to work? And part of being out there and campaigning and knocking on people’s doors is when you knock on people’s doors, you realize how many people are living with a criminal history so it’s in my community it’s significant number. Forty percent of my community is foreign born, 25 percent of my community lives below the poverty line, 15 percent above that is precariously close to it.

A lot of that is driven and is driven by the criminal justice system and what we have done in the policy and the implementation that we have done. And the racially discriminatory impact that it has on my community, not only from the destruction of families to neighborhoods to communities to the economics of it to the morale and in just the whole spirituality of our community was being defined by this, and not being allowed to succeed. It was as if you put the hand on somebody’s head and continue to push them further, further down into poverty. And that was never what I got into this job to do, nor the people I work with. So that’s when we started to take a really hard look at what are we doing and why are we doing this and what can we do to change? And so we broke it down into three simple categories — what can we do before to keep people from coming into the system, if they’re currently in the system what can we do to get them out, and if they were out of the system how can we clean it up and allow them that opportunity? And that was basically the three areas we just tackled because otherwise it was too overwhelming because there were so many areas where we had failed, and we had let our current community down and hadn’t been successful and what I what was the intent to accomplish.

So we looked at programs and developed programs that allow us to defer people out so they don’t even come. So over 75 percent of our youth offenders do not even come into the system. They go into other wraparound services and alternative programming and now we’re moving that into our adult population as well. And we’re looking at in programs that we run in within our office that allow individuals to have the opportunity to not come into the system, but to do some work to make themselves in a better position. Snd then if they’re currently in the system, California has had a number of propositions that have come through since 2015. Proposition 47, 64, 57, you know we like our propositions in California. But what we’re doing is we’re saying we’re going to erase it, we’re going to clean up the mistake, we’re going to acknowledge it, we’re going to apologize, and I have apologized. And we’re going make it better. So what we’ve done is any of those crimes that are listed in those propositions we now go back and dismiss and seal. And it’s so important too is in some cases you can only dismiss because there are a few technical things in the law that we’re working to change right now, but dismiss and seal, seal is important because you really have to seal that record.

And so that’s going to allow us to tackle all kinds of cases. All as a matter of fact, we just had Department of Justice run our, to give you an idea, 250,000 hits came through on marijuana cases for my county that I’m going to go back and clean up and we’re gonna dismiss and seal. We’ve done 25,000 already on Prop 47. But what we realized is that the technology was killing us because my county isn’t an influence, you know we’re not we’re not a county of billionaires we’re a county of hard-working people were an ag community and we needed help. So organizations like Code for America, Fair and Just Prosecution, Institute for Innovation, clean slate, all these wonderful partners have come to us. And what’s amazing about this is you give us the tools and the power to be successful. And so what that has done is Code for America runs the rap through an algorithm and then prints it out into a petition or excuse me, puts it into a petition and then forwards it to the court. San Francisco who’s our partner in this program, their court is even allowing just to do a spreadsheet. That’s how fast it’ll be because if we do petitions the courts only going to be able to absorb about thirty five, fifty like you were saying, three thousand and we could do a thousand a day on a spreadsheet so that’s going be, that two hundred fifty thousand all of a sudden seems like it’s doable in 2019 versus looking out at three thousand for three years you’re looking at twenty year project and that’s not fair to people, and that’s not right. This should be quick, justice should be swift and it should be quick. So those kind of partnerships and that kind of technology has allowed us to take it take it so much further and what it’s done for us, what I’m truly grateful for is it’s brought all these wonderful minds together, all of this energy together and then we started to say why are we doing any of these cases? Because really when you look at a criminal’s case and like you were talking about yours, it really is kind of a contract if you will in the simplest of terms. I literally make an offer, your attorney accepts or you accept and then there’s consideration given. There’s time given there’s probation, given parole or whatever the case may be. But once it’s completed the contract is now null and void why does it keep going? Why does it keep going? But instead I say yeah you’ve done everything right, you’ve obeyed all the laws, you’ve completed probation and parole, but you know what, I’m going to punish you for the rest of your life and you’re gonna be a felon for the rest of your life. I am going to keep you there forever. That wasn’t really, that was never the deal. And that’s not not written, what rehabilitation in California, we literally have the word rehabilitation, it’s California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in it. So we we feel that now we’re looking at every case and saying okay how can we move this off people’s history? And the only exceptions would be you know prior offenses for super strikes we have those in California and 290 registerable offenses, there are some exceptions. I’m not saying every case but I would say about 90% of those cases could be looked at, whether they’re misdemeanors and felonies and removed off. And the ones that we need such as driving under the influence or things like of that nature would remain on but the other ones really are there to keep you from being successful and what we’ve seen is by allowing people the opportunity and we’re doing it without even knowing it, we’re doing it ex parte if you will because we don’t have the means to get in contact some of these cases are older and they didn’t before cell phones and emails and they’ve moved on. But we’re doing it on to everybody every name that we have. Because we want to make sure that people have the opportunity to be successful and what J-pal is doing which is a great partnership because what we foresee is when you’ve been told your whole life that you cannot have traditional employment by I mean traditional that means you’re getting taxed and w-2s and all the great stuff that we get to do. If you’re not getting that done, then you’re getting paid under the table, which we see a lot of abuse. Where you’re getting not paid sufficiently there’s no health care retirement, or plans like This. So we want to see people get more traditional employment. But what we believe is we because you’ve been told your whole life that you cannot achieve success because of that phone or even that misdemeanor conviction that you don’t have the tools and resources to be successful in employment.

So J-PAL and I were going through 10,000 of our files randomizing them and then looking and seeing which one’s of those comparing them with records are filing or have gone into traditional employment. We believe the number is going to be below and from that we’re asking our legislation to enact and give our community-based organizations more resources to help. Because once you do get your record clean, now you’ve got to get an employment and you have to have those employable skills and you have to have that ability to know that you are employable. Because we have told you your whole life most you know from your youth to your adult that you are not employable. Now we need to change that so we’re not only thinking about what we’re doing today but what we’re gonna do tomorrow when we see these results and have better opportunities for individuals to do well out there.

VALLAS: Well Daryl Atkinson has managed to join us, Daryl I hate to tell you you’re a little late.

DARYL ATKINSON: You all got to start chartering me a plane.

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: I don’t know that we at CAP are the ones that have those connections these days, I hate to tell you. Well so Daryl Atkinson, we’ll recognize you and maybe is there are way to bring you to the, yeah? We’ll do a little half-sies? You want to come up and join us for the second part? Fantastic, great, alright so round of applause for Daryl Atkinson.

[APPLAUSE]

[LAUGHTER]

Nevertheless, he persisted. So Daryl, do you want to talk a little bit now that you’re here about the formerly incarcerated and convicted peoples and families movement and how you guys are coming to these issues?

DARYL ATKINSON: The way that I like to think about FICPFM and it is a handful of alphabet soup, but we’ve learned to say other alphabet soup so I’m sure we can learn to say this one. The way that I’d like to think about it is that we’re building the AARP for formerly incarcerated people. And so what does that mean? When you think about the AARP and it being a locus of power when you think about the issues that that older Americans face. Before any changes are made to prescription drugs or Medicare or what have you, believe me, they talk to that interest group before they make any of those changes. So we’re attempting to build the same power base for formerly incarcerated people, coming off two huge wins in both Florida and Louisiana. Florida the restoration of voting rights for 1.4 million folks, we partnered with Desmond Mead and the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition to convene over a thousand formerly incarcerated people this past September in Orlando. We did canvassing, we got get out to vote, we touchd 82,000 voters in two hours and we’re attempting to build that kind of power all across the country and issues. Because when you change power dynamics what’s possible from a policy perspective expands and that includes issues like clean slate and criminal record mitigation. So that’s what we’re attempting to build and that’s what we hope to bring to this partnership.

VALLAS: Thank you so much for your partnership and for your clear dedication to making it here today, we really appreciate it. So Jared, I want to bring you into the conversation here. So we heard a little bit earlier about how this is not just a set of issues that have an impact on individuals. It’s not just a set of issues that have an impact on families. They impact whole communities, they impact even the entire national economy. Another number that always knocks me out of my chair when I hear it, it comes to us from our friends at the Center for Economic Policy Research is that shutting people with records out of the labor market is costing the national economy as much as 87 billion dollars per year just in lost gross domestic product. So obviously a huge economic piece of this that has all kinds of macro implications. You’re here today and what you spend your time in Michigan doing is sort of working with the business community on these issues. How does the business community and employers come to this set of issues and why are you here also as a champion of the idea called clean slate?

JARED RODRIGUEZ: Well thank you for the opportunity to be here, and I love going last. But the I contend that our greatest natural resource in our country is our people, our greatest export is our knowledge and we are clearly missing an awful lot of our talent pool and our knowledge. So something’s got to change. The business community with the unemployment rate in our country and in Michigan as low as it’s been in decades we have a limited talent pool. We know that if people have records if certainly does restrict economic activity and productivity. We have workforce shortages, clear talent gaps that are going unfilled, community safety, number one issue in Michigan for the reason why the business community wants to get involved in any kind of corrections or prison reform as well as clean slate. The business community has also said that if we invest in people it will yield great returns. So the business community has kind of stepped up, taken over a little bit of the dialog from traditional advocates in this space, but they have they have really stepped up because of community safety, talent, and savings if it’s on the list it’s quite a bit far down the list, if not last. And the reason being is because they see any savings that come out of this, prison closures, what-have-you is opportunities to reinvest. And by reinvest they want to reinvest in training. They want a talented workforce for returning citizens when they come out so that they can hire and put to work.

Statistics show and the data shows that if we do have jobs out there for returning citizens that they are less likely to reoffend and recommit any kind of crime and obviously if they are out there as the data shows, I think it’s four to seven years without any other reoccurring offense, they are no more likely to reoffend or commit another crime than anyone else in our society or neighborhoods. So the data has been a real driver in this effort. The business community has taken some bold steps in Michigan to say we will hire returning citizens, in fact we will invest our own resources and do some trainings while people are 24 months from departure or returning into our neighborhoods, let’s get them training let’s get a skill ready and if we can we’ll interview before folks get out so that we can offer jobs. So it’s just a little bit of a twist on the thinking but it is going to yield some very good results as as far as that number one concern of community safety. So those are the main reasons why the business community has really stepped up and said we need to do something different because what we’ve always been doing is not working.

VALLAS: Michigan is, of course, one of the states for folks to be watching as we gear up for state legislative sessions next year because of some fantastic work that you and partners at Safe and Just Michigan and other organizations are doing to bring clean slate there. So heads up audience, we’re about to go to you, this is your moment so get ready be thinking of your questions make them hard. This is clearly a very smart panel but in the meantime I’m gonna kick that off by going back to you one more time Sharon just to give us a preview. Now that clean slate is has been signed into law in Pennsylvania and you’re now in the implementation phase of that as we speak. You’re sort of taking a break from that to come and hang out with us here today to talk about it. What do we know about how many people are going to be helped by the the Pennsylvania version of this law?

DIETRICH: So during the legislative campaign we kind of took it on faith that this was going to do something big. And quite honestly I didn’t know want to know how big it was going to be because I thought it might be scary to some people. And now that we’re post passage of the bill, those numbers are looking as big as I thought and maybe even bigger. So one number I’ve been told one of the things that we’re doing in Pennsylvania is sealing non-convictions. Charges were brought against you and dropped there you’re found not guilty, those can go in background check reports and often do. I’ve represented hundreds of people who lost jobs because of arrests that they were not convicted of. The number we’ve been told is that hundreds of millions of charges are going to be automatically sealed, hundreds of millions. So that’s just for the non-convictions. DA Krasner’s office has been doing some analysis of some data to try to extrapolate how many misdemeanor convictions may be sealed, and the early returns there are also extremely promising. Of the five-year period that was and now was analyzed the number of people to be helped with just convictions was 147,00. These are all people who don’t have to file petitions now that will just automatically get their records sealed.

And that number could be higher if if we are able to deal with certain implementation barriers that I am working on. And that number of convictions accounts for 22% of all convictions. So the numbers really are turning out to be as extraordinary, if not more, so than we hoped when we went into this.

VERBER SALAZAR: Rebecca I might just have found this one of the things that we’re looking to implement in 2019, and I’m very grateful who traveled with me here today is the public defender for my county, because you have to work with your public defender. You have to have a partnership in making this work as well as the courts to really make this successful, but so yes thank you for my public defender here, Mariam Lyle, she’s the awesome. She’s the best public defender of San Joaquin County has ever had, let me tell you. And so we work on this collaboratively but one of the things that she and I are trying to role out this year is that when you are convicted of whether it be a misdemeanor or a felony and you get a three year usually informal probation for a misdemeanor or five year for a felony in California. At the end of that date if there’s no nothing new then we seal it right then, seal it right. And then and we’re done and we don’t have to go back and do hundreds of millions of cases and clear it up. And so that’s what we’re looking to implement in San Joaquin County next year is a policy that we’re rolling it out first in misdemeanors and then in our felonies. That there is that it’s done then on that date and you don’t have to come back to court unless there’s something you want to discuss. So I’m hoping that that will catch on and move throughout the state’ too, because that’s really gonna save people having to come back into the system, get back with their attorney and miss time from work and things like of that nature.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.