The Dangerous Myth That Juvenile Criminal Records Are Sealed Forever

“There’s no state that’s fully protecting records in a way where they’re confidential throughout the court proceedings and then immediately expunged upon conclusion of the case,” attorney Riya Shah told Vocativ.

Shah works at the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia and consulted on the Maine report. The center has put together a national report card assessing how different states handle such records. If found that few states make records inaccessible to the public by sealing them or physically destroying them. Shah stressed that while the overall grades are subjective, the underlying metrics, like which states force young offenders to petition for their record to be sealed, and which states make such records available to the public, are a matter of legal record.

“Until your record affects you, you don’t actually know if it’s going to affect you,” she said. Juvenile records generally won’t show up on regular public records databases like PeopleSearch, but they will be available on more comprehensive sites used by employers, military recruiters, and college admissions officers. “There’s just so many cases where you hear, ‘The job market is really hard and there are 300 people applying to this job, and I’m going to go with the kid who doesn’t have the record.'”