Utah is at the forefront among Western states when it comes to expunging people’s criminal records. | Illustration by Maddy Olson

When Amy Daeschel was 37, she had 12 foot surgeries in one year and was given Oxycodone for the pain. Daeschel, who had been a bartender for 19 years, considered herself a “contributing member of society.” “I went to college,” she said. “I was married in my church. I was successful in my career.”

But Daeschel developed an addiction to the opioids. She was dealing with a lot beyond her foot pain: her mother’s death, a divorce, custody issues with her children. When she could no longer get the pills from a doctor, she started buying them on the street. When the expense was too high, she switched to heroin.

“This is when I fell to my lowest point,” Daeschel, now 41, said recently. Within three months, she was living on the streets of downtown Salt Lake City. During her period of homelessness and drug use, she went to jail six times on misdemeanor charges. Each time she begged for help, but each time she was denied a spot in the county-run treatment program because she lacked an extensive criminal record.

On her seventh arrest, during the controversial Operation Rio Grande that cleared the city’s open-air drug market, Daeschel managed to get treatment and begin the process of recovery. Once sober, she faced a new challenge: living with a criminal record.

Daeschel’s past crimes haunted her. After treatment, she was denied housing in no fewer than a dozen apartments because of background checks. “It’s a heavy psychological weight that you carry long after you have put in the work to get sober,” she said.

A criminal record can make finding housing difficult. It hampers chances for employment, public assistance, and student loans — even decades after the original legal troubles. But, through an expungement program offered by Salt Lake County since 2018, folks like Daeschel have a better shot at erasing their criminal record than just about anyone else in the country.

Expungement is generally petition-based and involves eligible individuals applying through the state to have nonviolent criminal records removed after a mandated period of time has passed. Salt Lake County’s accelerated process — including single-day events in which dozens of people clear their records — is so far yielding positive results. And, beginning in May 2020, certain offenses in Utah will be subject to automatic expungement.

Tucker Samuelsen, management analyst for the county’s Criminal Justice Advisory Council (CJAC), emphasized just how critical expungement is for individuals who have served their sentences. The majority of people who received help from the county, he said, had “better housing or employment opportunities, pay raises, or a promotion within six months” of expungement.

Most Western states allow expungement or record sealing in some fashion, but usually under very limited circumstances. For example, Montana allows expungement of misdemeanor violations once in a lifetime, and Idaho’s law only applies to individuals who have been victims of sex trafficking. Despite a much broader allowance for expungement in Utah, government officials noticed that few people were actually going through the process.

The most common reasons for not seeking expungement, a 2018 Salt Lake County case study found, were cost, complexity of the process, and the length of that process. Armed with this information, the CJAC set out to make expungement cheaper, easier, and more accessible.

They started in April 2018 by hosting a series of Expungement Day events. In the five weeks prior to the first event, the county received 471 calls from individuals seeking expungement. At the event, 40 attorneys worked with 52 individuals, 32 of whom eventually had their records cleared. Still, 100 people had to be turned away due to time constraints, which led to more Expungement Days in June and November of this year.

“The last thing we wanted was to prematurely close up shop when we still have thousands or tens of thousands of individuals who need an expungement but can’t get one,” Samuelsen said.

Following the events, Salt Lake County received a grant to hire Jake Smith, the county’s first expungement navigator. Smith said his job is to “assist the public who are unable to receive help at the events, as the request for help vastly outnumbers the amount of help we can provide.”

This year, Smith has made contact with more than 1,000 individuals. Of the 464 people he’s helped file expungement applications, 257 of them have had offenses cleared.

When he meets with clients, Smith offers insight into whether individuals are eligible for expungement, and helps those who are going through the process themselves by, for instance, pointing them toward instructions provided by the Utah Courts Self-Help Center. The grant that funded Smith’s position also provides financial support for individuals who cannot afford the filing fees and other expenses of expungement applications.

The criminal justice council has also created a working group of community leaders in Salt Lake County. They meet bimonthly to discuss “existing expungement roadblocks,” Smith said, and collaborate on ideas and strategies for removing those barriers.

Samuelsen’s office has sent out follow-up surveys to individuals who have participated in Expungement Days. “This has allowed us to continue collecting data and identify places where individuals can slip through the cracks,” he said. The results have been good for those who did receive help, though. According to Salt Lake County’s data, every individual who received help at the first Expungement Day said they were happier, less stressed, and better situated to move on with their lives after expungement.

Using national data, University of Michigan researchers found that, within two years of release, people with expunged records earn 25 percent more money than those with criminal records. Just 6 percent are arrested again within a five-year stretch.

While expungement certainly provides benefits to those with criminal records, it provides a robust financial boon for everyone. Researchers estimate that the United States takes an $87 billion hit to its GDP each year because individuals with criminal records are under-employed or excluded from the workplace altogether.

Still, some fear that erasing criminal records is too lenient, regardless of a person’s circumstances. Smith noted that he’s seen “blacklash” to his work on social media.

Samuelsen said that “not all criminal records are created equal,” so it’s important for expungement efforts to include public education about what crimes are eligible, and where financial support is coming from.

Utah will remain on the forefront of record expungement. This year, the state Legislature passed a “clean slate” law that will automatically remove eligible criminal charges after a designated period of time. Utah is the second state, after Pennsylvania, to pass such legislation; California passed a similar law in October.

Because the Clean Slate Law was widely reported in Utah, Smith said that some people are under the impression that offenses will just “fall off” their record. But automatic expungement, once available, will only apply to certain crimes. And until May 1, 2020, individuals will need to continue working within the framework of the current petition-based process. Smith acknowledged that Utah’s new law isn’t a panacea. But, he said, “I think this is a major leap in the right direction.”

Daeschel agrees. Though she has been able to find work, as an addiction-recovery advocate, she still worries about the stigma attached to her criminal record. She recently was approved for expungement, but she said it will cost more than $1,000 in fees to finalize. Until she can pay, Daeschel will carry her record with her, a constant reminder of the life she has worked so hard to leave behind.

“It’s like a scarlet letter you carry around, never being able to move beyond your past,” she said.

This post has been updated.