Helen Caraballo seemingly got a break a dozen years ago when she was convicted of a low-level felony in a drug conspiracy case: A judge gave her a suspended sentence, sparing her time in prison.
“But since then, I have been serving another sentence — not the one that the judge imposed, but one that has been very real with employers, landlords, schools and professions, ” Caraballo said Monday at a celebratory news conference.
Caraballo, 35, of New Haven, offered herself as an example of the tens of thousands of residents who will benefit in January when Connecticut’s long-delayed “clean slate” law goes into effect, freeing her of a record that cost her housing and employment and complicated her ambition to get a nursing degree.
[What to know about Connecticut’s ‘clean slate’ law]
Gov. Ned Lamont, key lawmakers and the mayors of New Haven and Bridgeport joined CONECT, the coalition organized by houses of worship, at the Community Baptist Church to celebrate.
Signed by Lamont in 2021 and originally scheduled to take effect at the beginning of this year, the law set out to automatically erase criminal records of people seven years after the date of their conviction for a misdemeanor or 10 years after the date of their conviction for certain low-level felonies if they hadn’t been convicted of other crimes.
But the Lamont administration announced late last year that erasures for tens of thousands of people who would likely benefit from the clean slate initiative wouldn’t happen until the second half of 2023, attributing the holdup to outdated technology and outstanding legal and policy questions.
[RELATED: CT’s ‘clean slate law’ faces delay, and supporters yearn for answers]
After $8 million in upgrades to information technology, the slates are about to be wiped clean for about 80,000 next month.
“Because of this, I won’t have to explain to anybody what I went through,” Caraballo said. “And hopefully they won’t judge me because of my record, and I’ll just be able to get into nursing school. This has been the best Christmas present that I could ever have.”
Controversial when first proposed five years ago, the notion of criminal-record erasure has been embraced by some major corporations, most notably JP Morgan Chase & Co., which was represented Monday at the news conference. About 10% of its hires last year had records deemed irrelevant to their jobs.
With one in three Americans having an arrest record, Lamont said society cannot afford to banish those who have made a mistake. He told Caraballo, who has been certified as a nursing assistant and eventually found employment at Yale New Haven Hospital, that erasure was not a gift.
“This is also something you’ve earned, and we need you too desperately,” Lamont said, noting the tight labor market. “And I want you to send that signal loud and clear that many of us make a mistake in life. We’re held accountable. We come back. It’s not a lifetime sentence.”
The implementation delay caught many supporters of the effort off-guard and left them searching for answers. It soon led to a public commitment from Lamont that full implementation would happen during the latter half of 2023. That was followed up by the legislature’s passage of House Bill 6918, a law that made technical and clarifying changes to the original bill to shore up policy holes.
[RELATED: Lamont commits to fully implementing Connecticut’s ‘clean slate’ law in 2023]
As of this past weekend, the information technology system responsible for the automatic erasures is up and running, said Marc Pelka, the undersecretary of criminal justice policy and planning for the Office of Policy and Management.
The automatic erasure portion of clean slate will not require any action from people who’ve completed their sentences and endured the seven- or 10-year waiting period as outlined by the law. People with convictions prior to the year 2000 are also potentially eligible, but they must first petition the court.
In an interview Monday, Pelka said the state expects that by the end of January, more than 80,000 people will receive erasure under the clean slate law, totaling roughly 178,000 convictions due to some people having multiple convictions on their record.
The number of erased convictions will likely increase to nearly 270,000 by the end of June 2024, he said, after the state processes certain DUI convictions and completes an evaluation of convictions identified as needing a manual review.
The state is also in the process of seeking demographic information to get a comprehensive understanding of who will primarily benefit from clean slate, Pelka said.
“I would say this is an example of information technology providing social justice and relief to people,” Pelka said. “The goal of this initiative is to leverage IT system capability to lower barriers to education, employment, housing for people who have completed their sentences.”
Clean slate’s supporters have frequently talked about the need to help people formerly convicted of crimes earn an education, maintain a job and attain housing — and to not punish them further when they have already faced consequences and have low rates of recidivism.
A study from Michigan, which passed a clean slate law in 2020, found that less than 1% of people who had a violent crime expunged from their records were reconvicted of another violent crime within five years.
Connecticut advocates have also highlighted how a person’s race determines who’s punished and limited in access to basic needs in the state. Black men in Connecticut have a 48% conviction rate, and both Black women and men are more than three times more likely than their white counterparts to have a felony conviction, despite accounting for less than 13% of the state population.
Rodney Moore serves on the Congregations Organized for a New Connecticut’s criminal legal reform team, an organization that did the early work advocating for clean slate. Moore said the initiative will have an overwhelming positive effect on people of color, who were disproportionately affected by laws dating back to the so-called war on drugs during the 1980s.
“In the case of a lot of these Black and brown people, they’ve been serving this time, and then the time that they served, the records still follow them,” Moore said. “So even whenever they’re going to go to school, whether they’re going to try to get a job, even some type of training to better themselves … that’s over their head.”
Philip Kent, a civil attorney who also works with CONECT’s criminal legal reform team, said that clean slate is both an “enormous opportunity” and an “inflection point” for Connecticut residents, particularly those to whom the state has promised a second chance.
“We want you to come back to the community. We want you to be able to contribute in the best way that you can,” Kent said. “We want you to have that second chance and be a part of the larger society in the way that you probably always thought you were going to until whatever happened happened.”
The original clean slate bill progressed through the 2021 legislature following conversations among lawmakers over which crimes should be eligible for expungement. Lawmakers who opposed early versions of the bill sought a narrow list of eligible crimes rather than including more serious felonies. Lamont especially favored a tapered list of nonviolent crimes and said the list could expand after seeing results from the first effort.
The governor signed the bill in June 2021. He doubled down on his support for the law in 2022 while on the gubernatorial campaign trail and said the state was working to implement it.
But weeks before implementation, Lamont announced the delay, later promising a full rollout during the latter half of 2023. In the meantime, his administration sought to promote the erasure of cannabis-related misdemeanors for roughly 44,000 people under a different law also considered part of clean slate.
The advocates had been talking about clean slate since 2018, and the lack of full implementation came as a disappointment to them and the beneficiaries of the legislation, even with the anticipation that it was going to be a yearslong campaign.
“To have to suffer one more day was an injustice,” said Phillipe Andal, the senior pastor of New Haven’s Community Baptist Church and co-chair of CONECT, about the delay. “This should’ve been years ago, and folks’ live are at stake.”
Sen. Gary Winfield of New Haven and Rep. Steven Stafstrom of Bridgeport, Democrats and co-chairs of the Judiciary Committee, said last year that it was a “complex” and “robust statutory scheme.” They also acknowledged that it would have been helpful to have known and talked about any hindrances related to the bill earlier in the process.
In response, the legislature passed House Bill 6918, which made technical and clarifying changes to the original measure. It added certain motor vehicle violations to the list of offenses eligible for erasure while, under certain circumstances, ruling out DUI offenses. It made ineligible people convicted of a family violence crime on or after Jan. 1, 2000, in addition to people convicted of serious firearm offenses.
It required that by Jan. 1, 2024, the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection post and maintain on its website the list of offenses eligible for expungement. And it opened the door for DESPP to review the records of people who believe that their convictions should’ve been expunged.
“This has been a long time in the making. This is transformational legislation that is going to positively improve the lives of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Connecticut residents,” Stafstrom said. “We all wanted this to happen as expeditiously as possible, but it also was important to get it right.”
Winfield joined in the celebration, but sharply noted that the state still is not close to providing educational and employment opportunities that will keep young people from getting arrested in the first place.
“There is a lot of work to do,” Winfield said.
The press conference ended with Tammy King, who will benefit from the erasure law, flipping over a chalk board with criminal-justice statistics. She called the governor over. Together, they started to wipe it clean.