LD 1911 - An Act to Automatically Seal Criminal History Record Information for Certain Crimes
UPDATE: Referred to the Judiciary Committee. Carried over to 2026.
After decades of over criminalization and mass incarceration, 25% of Mainers now have a criminal record.1
Their record continues to punish them even after they have successfully completed their sentence and repaid their debt to society.
Their record is a permanent barrier to education, employment and housing stability.
Digital access to criminal records makes it easier for employers to disregard suitable candidates based solely on a prior criminal conviction.
Similarly, banks, educational institutions and landlords use this information to disqualify applicants.
These criminal records punish families and children whose only crime is having a family member who has a record.
The community is no less safe when eligible records are sealed, even for crimes of violence. These individuals are no more likely than the general population to commit a new offense 4-7 years after their most recent offense.2
In Europe, “giving the public broad access to criminal records would be contrary to ‘fundamental’ considerations of privacy and human dignity protected by the European Convention on Human Rights”3
Record sealing allows individuals an opportunity to develop the social capital that deters them from future law violations while improving familial outcomes and stimulating the economy.
Clean Slate legislation proposes to automatically seal criminal records after a number of years unless there have been further offenses. LD 1911 proposes 5 years for most misdemeanor convictions and 10 years for most felony convictions.
Maine has a fairly unique system that allows records to be sealed rather than destroyed.
Sealed records remain available to law enforcement and courts for legitimate purposes including background checks when legally required for specific employment such as childcare.
The first state to pass a clean slate law was Pennsylvania in 2018. Since then, clean slate laws have passed in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Utah and Virginia.4
Research shows that people who remain crime-free for a certain period are no more likely to commit a crime than anyone else in the general population. Clean Slate policies recognize this reality while maintaining the necessary checks and balances to ensure fairness and security.5
Research suggests that individuals with sealed or expunged criminal records actually commit crimes at a lower rate than the general adult population.6
Evaluation research shows that, even after accounting for the recipient’s employment history and broader economic trends, average quarterly wages rise by about 23% within a year of record sealing, an increase driven mainly by unemployed or marginally employed people finding work.7
Evaluation research also shows that recidivism rates for sealing recipients are extremely low. (ibid)
Recidivism rates are drastically lower in states with Clean Slate sealing of criminal records.8
States like Michigan and Minnesota, which pair record-sealing policies with robust reentry support, have some of the lowest recidivism rates in the nation. This points to the strategic value of clean slate laws in advancing public safety goals while reducing strain on criminal justice systems. (ibid)
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1 Dr. Laura Chavez, Director of Research & Data, Clean Slate Initiative, https://www.cleanslateinitiative.org/public-resources/me-public-comment-092424; Center for American Progress, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/clean-slate-toolkit/ For an excellent recent overview of the literature and research on these issues, see the John Jay College of Criminal Justice report, Beyond the Record.
2 ‘Redemption’ in an Era of Widespread Criminal Background Checks, by Alfred Blumstein and Kiminori Nakamura, https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/226872.pdf
3 Margaret Love, Collateral Consequences Resource Center, https://ccresourcecenter.org/2022/07/27/how-europe-manages-access-to-criminal-records-a-model-for-u-s-reformers/
4 Society for Human Resource Management, 2024, https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/employment-law-compliance/clean-slate-laws-are-spreading.
6 Center For American Progress, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/expunging-clearing-criminal-records
7 J.J. Prescott and Sonja Starr, Power of A Clean Slate, Regulation (Summer, 2020) https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2020-06/regulation-v43n2-3.pdf reporting on evaluation of Michigan’s laws. See also, “Expungement of Criminal Convictions: An Empirical Study,” by J.J. Prescott and Sonja B. Starr, Harvard Law Review 133(8): 2460–2555 (2020). “Michigan’s expungement law has been on the books for more than 50 years, although it has been amended (mostly expanded) in the last decade. It was, however, unchanged from 1983 to 2011, the period we study. There are tens of thousands of individuals who received relief before 2011, allowing for the measurement of long-term outcomes in a large sample.”
8 S. Anderson and J. Snider, R Street Institute, https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/navigating-a-new-normal-automated-criminal-record-sealing-and-expungement/
