Chicago Expungement Process For Marijuana Inexpensive, Forward Thinking #ExpungeMyRecord

https://www.weareiowa.com/news/national-news/group-to-help-chicago-clear-pot-arrests-before-legalization/

Good work, Illinois.

A nonprofit with the technology to analyze criminal records nearly automatically will help the county that includes Chicago clear tens of thousands of convictions for marijuana possession as Illinois gets set to allow the recreational sale of the drug.

Code for America will provide a digital system to tackle the task at no taxpayer cost and in a fraction of the time it would take bureaucrats to slog through decades of cannabis arrests and convictions, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said at a news conference in Chicago on Tuesday.

California is using the organization’s “Clear My Record” program to erase tens of thousands of records in four of its counties, including Los Angeles County.

[…]
Jennifer Pahlka, founder and executive director of San Francisco-based Code for America, which provides digital programs for a variety of government services, said she began Clear My Record after California legalized recreational marijuana in 2016. It was initially an online platform for people seeking marijuana conviction expungements to avoid a paper chase. She said 12,000 people successfully navigated the original process, but it seemed too slow.

“Why have all of those steps? It’s already the law that this is no longer a crime,” Pahlka said. “Let’s get this off the person’s record so that they can apply for jobs, get housing, get student loans, all of the things that they’re held back from.”

Code for America relies mainly on philanthropic giving from donors including Google, the Knight Foundation, Luminate, Microsoft and Kaiser Permanente.

The Cook County project marks the first time Clear My Record will leave California, where it’s in the process of clearing 75,000 marijuana conviction records in Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco, and San Joaquin counties.

The Clear My Record software, loaded with the Illinois law’s parameters allowing for record-clearing, analyzes digitized records, identifies those eligible, and can produce a court-ready record. It will also produce reports on convictions for possession or delivery of 30 to 500 grams of the drug, which can be expunged under the law in a more involved process that the defendant must initiate.

Full article: https://www.weareiowa.com/news/national-news/group-to-help-chicago-clear-pot-arrests-before-legalization/