WHAT'S WRONG
If you ever got convicted of a crime, even if it turns out someone made a mistake, you’ll have a criminal record. Anyone that does a background check, like an employer, sees that you have a criminal record and that’s it. You lose out.
Even something false or small can stop you from getting honest work, housing, education, and other opportunities.
WHAT ARE WE DOING?
A partnership of youth justice advocates, including Citizens for Juvenile Justice want to make expunging your record easier and want to advocate for changes in the very restrictive law. They and Code for Boston are working together on three main goals:
1. Make it easier for folks to apply for expungement.
2. Show policy makers exactly what parts of the law are stopping most people from expunging their records.
3. Digitally organize to advocate for changes to the law.
HOW CAN YOU GET INVOLVED?
Enter your contact info and someone from the project will reach out to you to with more info! In the meantime, join the Code for Boston slack team and find us on the #clean-slate channel:
https://communityinviter.com/apps/cfb-public/code-for-bostonWe're looking for help with:
- Connecting with the people that are hit hardest by this and listening to what the problems are.
- Designing and building technology with that community that helps with those problems.
- Connecting with the broader community of stakeholders
- Looking at whatever data we can find to make estimates about how changes in the law could affect the situation.
Right now we're looking specifically for people who have tried to either seal or expunge their records, project managers, liaisons, community outreach, user researchers, data analysts (excited to play with dirty data), designers, and programmers.
For coders: We're mainly using Python in both our data and other tech work, though JS pops in now and then. We're also working with YAML and Mako with the form creation framework we're using - Docassemble.
