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Background

For many folks who have had run-ins with the criminal justice system, punishment doesn't end with the end of their sentence. Well past the period of incarceration, a criminal conviction can follow a person around for the rest of their life, preventing them from accessing housing, employment, and services which might otherwise help them integrate back into society.

The State of Oregon provides a way for people to remove a limited set of items from their records, but the rules for determining which items are eligible are complex and prone to error when applying them by hand. As a result, expungement analysis is expensive in Portland - ranging from $1,000 to $2,500 when performed by private attorneys.

The goal of this project will be to democratize the expungement process by making it available to all Oregonians, regardless of their ability to pay. It further seeks to provide these services in the communities that need them the most.

To accomplish this, Code for PDX is creating analytical software to help expungement providers at the Metropolitan Public Defender's office quickly determine which items on an applicant's record are eligible for expungement.

recordsponge.com

What we’re building

For the first phase we will build an application that scrapes criminal record data from the Oregon eCourt Case Information website. We will then analyze that data and return results for each criminal record.

In the future we want to make the expungement analysis public. We would also like to look at the possibility of streamlining requests for expungement.

The backend is being built with Python and the frontend is in React.