Inside a National Initiative to Help Wipe Past Convictions "Clean"

Last month, the Clean Slate Initiative announced the launch of campaigns in four states with the goal of passing laws that automatically expunge, or “clean,” many of the past criminal convictions of people who haven’t committed a subsequent offense.

The initiative, which was inspired by the successful 2018 campaign to pass the nation’s first Clean Slate law in Pennsylvania, now has a national steering committee that includes the Center for American Progress, R Street and Code for America.

The organization has also attracted big-name funders, including Arnold Ventures, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. In 2019 alone, they committed $30 million to the effort. The New Venture Fund is acting as the initiative’s fiduciary.

Sheena Meade was the first person hired by the initiative. She helped restore voting rights to more than 1.4 million Florida residents with 2018’s Amendment 4, and has since worked for Galaxy Gives as its criminal justice program officer. She now serves as Clean Slate’s managing director.

Meade told Blue Tent that the initiative plans to hire two more campaign managers to lead and provide strategic guidance to organizations in the field. Jesse Kelley, formerly the government affairs manager and criminal justice and civil liberties manager at the R Street Institute, joined the Clean Slate Initiative as a campaign manager this month.

Roughly one-third of Americans (and their families) stand to benefit

The economic, social and personal stakes of the initiative’s work are staggering. Imagine being unable to get a job, rent an apartment, live with or even visit your own children, or qualify for basic government assistance like food stamps or educational subsidies—all because of a transgression decades in your past. All of these are among the 45,000 potential consequences for a past criminal conviction, many of which can weigh down individuals and entire families for a lifetime or more. As The Atlantic reported in 2015, one-third of American adults have some kind of criminal record, and nearly half of children in the country have at least one parent whose economic and educational prospects are hampered by a past criminal record.

Pennsylvania is one of only three states with an automatic expungement law. Utah passed a clean slate bill in 2019, and late last year, Michigan passed the most extensive bill so far, including some non-assaultive felonies in past convictions that qualify for automatic expungement. Many other states require a frequently expensive petitioning process and have different rules for what kinds of past convictions can be expunged. According to the Restoration of Rights Project, eight states and the federal government don’t allow expungements at all.

Hitting the ground at full speed

In the group’s initial push, the Clean Slate Initiative is working with local organizations in New York, Texas, Oregon and Delaware to pass laws that include automatic expungement of past convictions. But they’re hardly stopping there. The initiative is either active, or gearing up, in several other states, as well.

Michigan, Utah and Pennsylvania are in the implementation phase, and the four states in the newly launched campaign “will be dropping bills soon,” Meade said. Meanwhile, the initiative is working in North Carolina, Louisiana, Colorado and Connecticut, and “we’re excited about Missouri, [we’re] about to start working in Missouri.”

Supporting the people “closest to the pain”

Rather than opening Clean Slate Initiative offices and creating separate state campaigns of its own, Meade explained that the national organization is dedicated to supporting “our partners on the ground,” local groups that are already advocating for clean slate protections in their respective states. In Oregon, for example, a Clean Slate coalition of more than 30 groups including the ACLU of Oregon, the Oregon Cannabis Association and the Portland Business Alliance joined together to advocate for clean slate legislation. The initiative’s partner in Oregon, Sponsors, Inc., is led by directly impacted individuals.

“We believe the people [that are] closest to the pain [are] closest to the solution,” Meade said.

That support can take a multitude of forms from financial to strategic. “Think about us as the hub,” Meade said. “We want to make sure our partners on the ground are leading around the strategy and how they want to move the bill forward” in their individual states. The role of the national initiative is to provide needed resources, whether that means consulting on strategy, providing technical assistance or writing a check.

Large funders, a flexible grassroots approach

Meade and representatives of two of the initiative’s funders interviewed by Blue Tent said everyone involved recognizes that not all local grassroots organizations have the infrastructure to handle the reporting and tracking requirements traditionally required by large funders.

Working at Galaxy Gives, Meade said, “gave me insight on how the money moves within philanthropy,” as well as the fact that philanthropy is frequently a top-down situation. “‘We have the big idea and we got the big pockets and we think you should do this.’ And actually, I’ve taken the opposite approach,” including focusing on effective implementation of existing Clean Slate legislation in addition to pushing for new bills.

At the same time, Meade added, the initiative’s funders know that she understands both the needs of people in individual organizations and that the funders need some accounting of how their money is being spent.

Ana Zamora, founder and executive director of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s recently created Justice Accelerator Fund, told Blue Tent that “as funders, we must be prepared and ready to be flexible with our funding so that we may feed organizations that are led by directly impacted people and help those organizations build the capacity. What that means is we have to be willing to not do things as strictly as philanthropy typically does.”

“We put a lot of faith in Sheena and try not to restrict her ability to manage the effectiveness of our partners on the ground,” said Kevin Madden, executive vice president of advocacy at Arnold Ventures. “We don’t have an approach where we want to put too much of an emphasis on process or paperwork or anything like that. Instead, we want them to report back what they think they need in terms of resources—and resources are not just dollars, [but also] time and effort.”

But while the initiative and its funders are flexible in terms of their strategies and funding processes, they do have some bottom lines when it comes to policy.

“While any bills to expand record-clearing eligibility or to automate part of an existing system are of interest to the Clean Slate Initiative, we have some policy minimums that we strive to achieve in each piece of legislation,” said Kelley, the initiative’s new campaign manager, with retroactivity and automation of expungements being key goals.

“Primarily, we want the largest number of people possible to obtain relief under clean slate legislation,” she said.