Clean Slate Law Hits Milestone
At a glance:
Connecticut’s Clean Slate law has now automatically erased criminal records for over 150,000 residents, targeting eligible misdemeanors and low-level felonies.
Records are cleared after 7 years (misdemeanors) and 10 years (felonies) if individuals stay out of trouble; serious offenses are excluded.
The state is investing up to $16.6 million to improve the system and address challenges like notifying people of erased records, as implementation expands.
About five years after it was first passed by legislators, Connecticut’s Clean Slate law recently reached the milestone of automatically erasing the criminal records of more than 150,000 Connecticut residents.
The Clean Slate law, first passed in 2021, allows for many residents’ misdemeanor convictions and certain low-level felony convictions to be automatically erased if they complete their sentence and remain out of legal trouble.
Misdemeanors will be erased after seven years and felonies after 10; serious crimes, including family violence, sex crimes, weapons offenses, and assaults, are exempt from erasure under the act. It covers convictions on or after January 1, 2000; people with older offenses qualifying for erasure must petition for that support.
State leaders recently announced that about 150,000 records wiped are a major accomplishment, but that’s opened up a new issue: Connecticut has wiped so many records that it’s struggling to notify members of the public when their convictions are erased, Connecticut Public reported. That’s despite a delay in erasures due to technical issues that took time to fix after the law was passed; initial erasures began in 2023.
State officials are now looking for the best way to implement wide-scale notifications regarding wiping convictions.
The state is investing as much as $16.6 million through 2026 to implement and improve the system, CT News Junkie reported. That’s helping advance the intent of the law, which was to ensure that Connecticut residents with low-level criminal convictions and clean records for long periods of time could overcome past stigmas and apply for jobs, housing, and more.
Nationally, nearly 20 million people are expected to have records that could at least partially be cleared through a Clean Slate policy, which 13 states have adopted as of today.
By Joe O’Leary