Working To End Record Based Discrimination
During this Second Chance Month, even as new threats to our rights and freedoms emerge almost daily and the fear of losing hard-earned legal protections from discrimination has become all too real for far too many of us, it is worth taking a moment to consider our system impacted community members for whom discrimination, both public and private, has long been, and continues to be, the norm. People with past experience in the juvenile and criminal legal systems are routinely and legally denied housing, jobs, education, and more solely on account of their records.
We know that the juvenile and criminal legal systems target Black and Brown youth. Substantial scholarship over the last two decades has demonstrated how legal systems and police practices -- from the war on drugs to broken windows, stop and frisk, and the school and child welfare to prison pipelines -- have been used to replace black codes and Jim Crow laws with mass incarceration. The widespread access to and use of records magnifies and sustains the harms of this racial discrimination and oppression.
Through record-based discrimination, we have turned every sentence, in one form or another, into a life sentence.
While all record-based discrimination is wrong, the use of juvenile records for discriminatory purposes is particularly cruel and hypocritical. Extensive research across countries and time periods continues to prove the existence of the age-crime curve, where we see crime rates increase substantially during adolescence and early adulthood, but decline dramatically by the late twenties and early thirties. The age-crime curve effectively demonstrates that it is rarely ever appropriate to treat someone who committed a crime (or crimes) in their earlier years as a likely or even potential criminal later in life.
Moreover, America’s juvenile legal system was created at the dawn of the twentieth century to rehabilitate children while ensuring they are held accountable without the stigma of criminality imposed by the criminal system. To that end, juvenile court rooms were traditionally closed to the public, while proceedings and records were sealed.
Unfortunately, despite advances in brain and behavioral science that the Supreme Court has told us requires that children be considered and treated differently than adult offenders, the juvenile legal system of today nonetheless has more in common with the criminal punishment system than with the ideals of its original founders. Consistent with the juvenile systems’ evolution from rehabilitation to punishment, juvenile records have been steadily stripped of many of the confidentiality protections they were once afforded.
Only strong laws can prevent system-impacted youth from facing a lifetime of harm and discrimination. At Juvenile Law Center we have spent the last two decades advocating for greater protections for juvenile records to ensure that all young people have the opportunity to fulfill their potential. In 2007, we published a know your rights guide and assisted young people in Philadelphia expunge their records. Then, in 2014, we published the first 50-state juvenile record scorecard in the nation, offering a tool to stakeholders around the country to help identify gaps in their juvenile record laws while providing a roadmap for how to strengthen them. In 2016, we published Future Interrupted, documenting the myriad ways juvenile records impose collateral consequences on young people that harm them for the rest of their lives. Finally, in 2020, we published our second 50-state scorecard to demonstrate how little progress states made since our first publication.
We continue to advocate for better laws to protect juvenile record confidentiality and ensure that records are expunged after a young person’s case is closed. While we have a long way to go, it is important we celebrate the victories along the way. One of those victories recently came here at home. After years of coordinated advocacy as part of the Pennsylvania Juvenile Justice Taskforce, our state legislature passed a version of automatic juvenile record expungement into law last year.
Passing automatic expungement laws like Pennsylvania’s is critical to offering our young people the opportunities they need and deserve. Every state should make automatic expungement the law of the land so all our young people can thrive.
