Clean Slate Laws Spread From Pennsylvania to Red and Blue States

On June 28, 2018, Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania signed a bill that changed the meaning of paperwork. Under the law that had been in place, a person with an old minor conviction could, in some cases, ask a court to seal the record. In practice that meant finding the right form, paying fees, sometimes hiring a lawyer, waiting for a hearing, and hoping. Most people who were eligible never did any of it. The new law, known as the Clean Slate Act and passed as Act 56, flipped the default: for certain old, low-level records, the state itself would do the sealing, by computer, without anyone filing anything. The bill had been carried by a Republican and a Democrat in each chamber, passed the legislature with overwhelming support, and was signed by a Democratic governor. It was the first law of its kind in the country. Within a few years, a deeply red state in the Mountain West and a deeply blue one in the Northeast had both adopted versions of it.

In short: Clean slate laws automatically seal certain old criminal records after a person has stayed out of trouble for a set number of years, instead of making them petition a court. Pennsylvania went first in 2018, and states of both parties followed. The case for them rests on fairness, on evidence that very few eligible people ever use petition-based systems, and on the economic cost of locking people out of work for mistakes made long ago.

The gap between eligible and sealed

Most states have had some way to expunge or seal old records for decades. The problem was never the existence of the remedy. It was the gap between who qualified and who actually got relief.

That gap turned out to be enormous. The most cited study, by the law professors J.J. Prescott and Sonja Starr at the University of Michigan, looked at Michigan's petition-based system and found that only a small fraction of eligible people, well under one in ten, had obtained an expungement within five years of becoming eligible. The people who did succeed tended to see their wages and employment rise afterward, and they were rarely convicted of new crimes. In other words, the remedy worked for the people who reached it, and most people never reached it.

The reasons are familiar to anyone who has dealt with a courthouse. People do not know they are eligible. The forms are confusing. Fees add up. Taking a day off work for a hearing can cost a shift or a job. Legal aid organizations run expungement clinics, but they cannot reach millions of people one case at a time.

Clean slate laws answer the gap with a simple idea: if the state already knows who qualifies, the state should do the work.

What Pennsylvania actually did

The Pennsylvania law is narrower than its name suggests, which is part of why it passed. It provides for automatic sealing of three main kinds of records: arrests that did not lead to convictions, summary offenses (the state's lowest category, things like disorderly conduct or minor retail theft) after a period without new convictions, and certain lower-level misdemeanors after a longer period, usually ten years, without new convictions. Serious and violent crimes are excluded, as are some specific offenses. People who owe court-ordered restitution have faced limits in the program as well.

A sealed record does not vanish. Police, courts and certain employers that are required by law to run checks can still see it. What changes is what most landlords, most employers and most members of the public see when they run a background check. For many people, that is the difference between a callback and silence.

The law took effect in stages starting in 2019, and the state's court system worked through a backlog of old cases with automated matching. Pennsylvania's courts have since reported sealing many millions of cases under the program, a figure that tells you how many people had been eligible all along and done nothing because the system asked them to.

How a Republican and a Democrat sold it

The Pennsylvania bill's sponsors in the House were Sheryl Delozier, a Republican from Cumberland County, and Jordan Harris, a Democrat from Philadelphia. In the Senate the sponsors included Scott Wagner, a conservative Republican businessman who later ran for governor against Wolf, and Anthony Hardy Williams, a Democrat from Philadelphia. That roster is worth pausing on. Wagner and Wolf were about to face each other in a bitter election, and they still ended up on the same side of this bill.

The arguments each side made were different and complementary. Republicans emphasized work: employers in Pennsylvania, like employers everywhere, were short of workers, and a record from fifteen years ago kept otherwise qualified people out of jobs. They talked about families and about redemption, about the idea that a person who has stayed out of trouble for a decade has earned the right to stop being defined by the worst day of their twenties. Democrats emphasized racial fairness, because Black Pennsylvanians had been arrested and convicted for low-level offenses at disproportionate rates, and about poverty, because the petition system's costs fell hardest on people with the least money.

The coalition outside the legislature was broad too. The Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, and Community Legal Services of Philadelphia were early champions. Conservative and libertarian groups, along with business associations, backed it on employment grounds. That mix later became the model for a national campaign to pass similar laws elsewhere.

The objections, taken seriously

There are real arguments against automatic sealing, and a fair case for clean slate has to meet them.

Employers have a right to know. Some business owners argue that they should be able to make their own judgments about an applicant's history, especially for jobs involving vulnerable people or money. The answer is that clean slate laws leave intact the background checks the law already requires for sensitive positions, such as working with children or in financial services. What they seal from ordinary view are minor offenses that have been followed by years of law-abiding life.

Public safety. Critics worry that sealing records hides real risk. The research here is helpful. Criminologists including Alfred Blumstein and Kiminori Nakamura have studied how the risk of a new arrest declines over time for people with old records. Their work found that after enough years without a new offense, a person's risk becomes close to that of someone with no record at all. Clean slate waiting periods are designed with that finding in mind.

Victims. Some victims' advocates have raised concerns about people sealing records while still owing restitution. Pennsylvania and other states have built in limits to address this, and reasonable people can argue about where to draw those lines.

Accuracy and implementation. Automated systems depend on accurate court data, and many states' records are messy. That is a legitimate operational concern, and it is one reason many states phased in their programs over a year or more.

I think the case for clean slate survives these objections, and it is strongest precisely where the critics are most worried: it leaves the serious cases and the sensitive jobs alone and focuses on the very large number of people whose old minor records are doing nothing but harm.

From Pennsylvania to Utah to New York

After Pennsylvania, the idea moved fast and without regard to the usual partisan map. Utah, governed by Republicans, passed a clean slate law in 2019. Michigan followed in 2020 with a bipartisan package signed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer and passed by a Republican-controlled legislature. Connecticut, Delaware, Virginia, Oklahoma, Colorado and Minnesota adopted versions in the years after. New York enacted its Clean Slate Act in 2023 after a long campaign.

The laws differ in which offenses qualify, how long the waiting periods run and how quickly sealing happens. Some states include certain felonies; others limit relief to misdemeanors and non-convictions. But the core move is the same everywhere: replace a petition with an automatic process.

What is striking is how little the politics of the state seem to matter. A Republican legislator in Salt Lake City and a Democratic one in Albany can reach the same conclusion for different reasons, one talking about the labor market and redemption and the other about civil rights and poverty. The national clean slate campaign has made a point of recruiting sponsors from both parties in every state it works in.

Why a record follows a person for decades

To see why this matters, it helps to understand how criminal records travel. Decades ago, an old conviction lived in a paper file at a county courthouse, and finding it took a trip and a clerk's time. Today, court records are digitized, and private background-check companies buy, scrape and resell them in bulk. An employer or landlord can run a check in minutes for a few dollars. A misdemeanor from a quarter century ago can appear on a screen next to a job application as if it happened last month.

That shift made the old petition systems far more consequential than their designers intended. A record that was once practically invisible became one of the first things a stranger learned about you. Most employers now run some kind of background check, and many landlords do as well. People with records report being turned away from jobs they were qualified for, from apartments they could afford and from volunteer roles at their children's schools.

There is also a cost that lands on everyone else. When people who have stayed out of trouble cannot find steady work, families lose income, tax revenue falls, and the risk that someone slides back into crime goes up. Researchers and business groups have estimated that excluding people with records from the labor force costs the economy a great deal each year. The exact figures vary by study, which is a good reason not to lean on any single number, but the direction is not in serious dispute.

Clean slate laws do not change what private companies already copied before a record was sealed, and that is an honest limitation. Some states have paired sealing with rules meant to push background-check firms to update or drop sealed records, and federal fair-credit-reporting law imposes some accuracy duties as well. The effect is not perfect. It is far better than the status quo it replaced.

Where progressives can do better

There is one place where progressives sometimes make this harder than it needs to be. Clean slate is a fairness and economic-mobility policy, and it wins when it is sold that way. When it is framed only as a racial justice measure, it is still right on the merits, but it loses some of the conservative legislators whose votes have made it pass in states like Utah and Oklahoma. The racial disparities are real and should be named. They do not need to be the only argument. A clerk at a hardware store in a rural county with a twenty-year-old marijuana conviction is also on the list, and making sure that person hears about the law is good politics and good policy at the same time.

The other lesson is about implementation. A law that promises automatic relief and then stalls in a court technology office for years damages trust. Advocates in several states have had to push agencies to follow through. Passing the bill is the beginning of the work.

The people behind the background check

Picture a woman in her late thirties applying to be a medical assistant. She has a certificate, references and years of steady work in retail. At nineteen she was convicted of a misdemeanor for shoplifting. Under a petition system, that conviction shows up on the background check the clinic runs, and the clinic, which has fifty applicants for the job, moves on. Under a clean slate law, the record has been sealed for years without her ever needing to fill out a form, and she gets the interview. That is not a hypothetical in the sense that it might never happen. It is a description of who the laws were written for, and of millions of people whose records states have since sealed.

What you can do

Clean slate is a state issue, which means state legislators decide whether it happens where you live, and many residents in states that have passed it still do not know whether their records qualify.

1. Ask your state legislators where your state stands. Use the representatives page to find your state legislators by address, with phone numbers, contact forms and their latest votes. If your state lacks automatic sealing, ask whether they would sponsor it. If it has a law, ask how implementation is going.
2. Find legal aid near you. The organizations directory lists legal aid and justice reform nonprofits by state; many run record-clearing clinics and can tell you whether old cases still need a petition.
3. See the bipartisan pattern. The common-ground page shows bills Congress passed with support from both parties, which helps when you are making the case to a legislator from the other side.
4. Follow the issue. The criminal justice reform topic page gathers coverage of sentencing, reentry and record sealing.

The Pennsylvania law began with a simple observation: the state already knew who qualified. Everything since has been an argument about whether the state should act on what it knows. More states keep answering yes.