Keep juvenile court records closed—really closed
Think about this.
You got into a fight when you were 12 that led to two counts of assault and battery. You lived in a rough Boston neighborhood. Kids fought. This episode earned you probation.
Move forward. You’re now 14 and holding down an after school job. Fast forward and you become your high-school valedictorian. You get a degree from Duke. You apply for a job in Chicago to work with at-risk kids. Suddenly, you are blindsided. You thought your juvenile court record was sealed. You never expected this episode would impact your adult lie.
Unfortunately for too many, that’s not the case. It is one thing for juvenile court records to be sealed and another for them to be expunged.
In the first case, details of the case may remain out of public view. However, the fact there was an arrest is still out there and can haunt the juvenile in later life.
“There is a misperception that juvenile records are confidential and automatically destroyed when a youth is no longer under court supervision. The reality is that juvenile records are widely accessible long after a young person has become an adult,” said Riya Saha Shah, author of Scorecard Report and staff attorney at the Juvenile Law Center.
Juvenile court records pop up
Ashlie Tyler didn’t have to imagine all this. She lived it. At 22, she completed the paperwork to seal her record. Then it popped up in a job background check when she was 28. “My heart sank,” Tyler told The Boston Globe. “I thought this must be a mistake.” She hired a lawyer to unseal her record—is there a Catch-22 in this?—so her potential employer could see she was not involved in a serious crime.
Her story has a happy ending. Her potential employer read the file and gave her the job.
There are millions of kids arrested in the Unites States every year who aren’t so lucky. Of them, 95 percent were busted for non-violent crimes. Get arrested and voilà, get a juvenile record. Many states have no expungement mechanisms. Massachusetts is one of them. However, there is a move to change that.
The state Senate in Mass. recently passed a bill allowing people with juvenile court records to petition for removal of misdemeanor offenses from their records as long there were no serious crimes involved. The House is lagging and only looking at expunging those records that have an inaccurate complaint or where the youth had been part of human trafficking and the charge involved drugs and prostitution.
Not great, but a step in the right direction.
Federal REDEEM Act
Senators Cory Booker and Rand Paul wanted to take more steps on the federal level. In 2014, they introduced the REDEEM Act that would allow the records of non-violent juveniles to be sealed or expunged.
“A youthful mistake should remain just that—a youthful mistake.” Booker said. “It shouldn’t follow a person around for the rest of their lives, stopping them from finding a job and pushing them back into crime.” After passing both Houses of Congress, President Obama signed REDEEM into law. Wouldn’t it be great if all states had strong sealing and expungement laws that would keep juvenile records private?
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