Detroit Today: Expungement law giving up to a million Michiganders second chance

This week, Michigan began automatically expunging certain criminal misdemeanor and felony convictions for eligible residents. The action began as part of the state’s Clean Slate Act, which became law in 2021.

Attorney General Dana Nessel estimates up to a million residents — about 10% of Michigan’s population — will have convictions expunged. This week alone almost half of them will be conviction free.

University of Michigan law professor JJ Prescott and Safe & Just Michigan CEO John Cooper joined Detroit Today to discuss what this means for the state and the overall push for criminal justice reform.

“If we’re going to say we want people to have a fresh chance…we ought not make them jump through a bunch of hoops in order to get there.” — JJ Prescott, University of Michigan

Listen: How automatic expungements can benefit Michigan.

Guests

JJ Prescott is a law professor and co-director of the Empirical Legal Studies Center at Michigan Law. He co-authored a study, finding that Michigan residents receiving expungements have extremely low subsequent crime rates.

“What the automatic expungement law is really aimed at,” says Prescott, “is recognizing that if we’re going to say we want people to have a fresh chance — that we really think that they are ready to return to society — we ought not make them jump through a bunch of hoops in order to get there.”

John Cooper is the Chief Executive Officer of Safe & Just Michigan. He says the Clean Slate Act is thoughtfully tailored to determine which offenses should and should not be eligible for automatic expungement.

“There’s 2.8 million people in Michigan with criminal records in a state of 10 million. And many, many of those people are suffering and struggling because of those records,” says Cooper. “And we don’t have to keep them public. In fact, the evidence says we shouldn’t.”