As briefly described in a recent NYT op-ed (on March 20, 2019; link here for those who can get behind the NYT pay-wall), Professors J.J. Prescott (Mich.) and Sonja Starr (Mich.) submit an increasingly discussed policy--a push for increased expungements of criminal convictions--to data. As the paper notes, motivating the increased policy attention to expungements are concerns about "reentry barriers faced by people with criminal records." Contributing to an under-developed empirical literature on the possible impacts of criminal expungements is a paucity of public information on expunged criminal records. In Expungement of Criminal Convictions: An Empirical Study, Prescott and Starr lever their access to "complete, deidentified criminal records from the Michigan State Police on all individuals who had obtained criminal record “set-asides” (Michigan’s term for record-sealing) as of March 2014, as well as full criminal history records for much larger comparison groups of individuals with convictions that were not set aside."
The paper's careful attention to research design addresses one (but not all) traditional threat to identification posed by selection bias. By adopting a within-person design--and not comparisons between those received expungements and those who did not--the specification's identification is not distorted by the likely (almost assured) systematic differences between expungee and non-expungee sub-groups. That said, even the paper's within group design can not fully blunt potential distortions owing to variations in the timing of an individuals' expungement application. A summary of key findings is included in the abstract.
"Laws permitting the expungement of criminal convictions are a key component of modern criminal justice reform efforts and have been the subject of a recent upsurge of legislative activity. This debate has been almost entirely devoid of evidence about the laws’ effects, in part because the necessary data (such as sealed records themselves) have been unavailable. We were able to obtain access to deidentified data that overcomes that problem, and we use it to carry out a comprehensive statewide study of expungement recipients and comparable non-recipients. We offer three key sets of empirical findings. First, among those legally eligible for expungement, just 6.5% obtain it within five years of eligibility. Drawing on patterns in our data as well as interviews with expungement lawyers, we point to reasons for this serious “uptake gap.” Second, those who do obtain expungement have extremely low subsequent crime rates, comparing favorably to the general population—a finding that defuses a common public-safety objection to expungement laws. Third, those who obtain expungement experience a sharp upturn in their wage and employment trajectories; on average, within two years, wages go up by 25% versus the pre-expungement trajectory, an effect mostly driven by unemployed people finding jobs and very minimally employed people finding steadier or higher-paying work."
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