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Last week, cities around the country hosted free legal clinics to clear or seal low-level criminal records, helping hundreds of people get better access to employment and resources, and showing just how far behind states are in removing these barriers themselves.
As part of the second annual National Expungement Week (NEW), organized by Equity First Alliance and Cage-Free Repair, dozens of participating groups held more than 40 events in 30 cities across the US to offer free legal assistance and other social services, such as health screenings, voter registration, employment workshops, and even free meals.
Lawyers, legal students, and other volunteers helped attendees to expunge or publicly seal prior convictions, charges, or arrests for minor crimes like cannabis possession—a process that varies by state and locality and is almost always difficult, despite laws permitting at least some form of cannabis use within 30 states and the nation's capital.
The coalition behind NEW also hopes "to highlight the need to fully integrate those disenfranchised by the war on drugs within their respective communities," organizers said. “Too many people are locked up in this country, and far too many people are still locked out of society long after they’ve completed their sentence," explained Torie Marshall, Director of Programs at Cage-Free Repair, in a statement. "This week offers a way to provide legal relief and wraparound services to justice-impacted people and their families while calling for automated expungement."
The number of participating cities nearly doubled since last year, when 298 people had their records cleared or sealed (creating a public benefit of over $3 million in 2018 alone, according to organizers) and over 400 received other key social services.
Volunteers are still processing the results of last week's events, but the outlook is good; according to Equitable Hemp founder Rosalie Flores, who's helped organize NEW events for the past two years, the number of people who came to a Denver clinic almost tripled since last year.
In a phone interview, Flores also said that the program's success illustrates how important it is, and how easy it would be, for legal cannabis states like Colorado to take up the torch themselves.
Flores, who's been working in the cannabis industry for three years, and splits her time between Colorado and her home state of New Mexico, said she "immediately recognized" a big problem in that industry—one that many of the most well-funded and aggressive cannabis ventures out there don't seem to acknowledge, incidentally.
The problem, in short, is that Black and Brown individuals and communities who have developed and nurtured US cannabis, taking many pains and risks and paying an enormous price, and whose ancestors brought this versatile plant to our country in the first place, are being systematically kept out of the industry and denied its benefits now that the plant has gone mainstream.
Some of the exclusion results from a lack of financial equity in this competitive, rapidly consolidating field (and, in my opinion, the often thoughtless-to-arrogant behavior of big investors and others new cannabis players).
But it's also due to the arrests and charges these communities disproportionately have endured for decades: having a minor criminal record, even an arrest without a charge (which is oddly hard-to-remove, in Colorado), continues to keep millions of Black and Brown Americans from entering cannabis or other industries, from accessing housing, loans, and other resources, and away from their families.
"I was so excited to get into this space, and so disappointed to see people like myself not being able to join it," Flores said. It's why she decided she to get involved in her community with NEW, and to promote equity everywhere. "I reached out to Adam Vine of Cage Free, and we talked about how hard it is for people of color to enter the industry. It blew my mind."
Because of the many different, often complicated impacts of a cannabis-related criminal record, Flores said, she reached out to probation officers, courts, and police stations nearby to make them aware of the events, and get their help promoting them.
See also: Could Acreage Suits, Canopy Pricing Be Big Cannabis' Wake-Up Call?
Next year, she also plans to contact case managers, and perhaps bring materials or events to their locations. Even in pro-cannabis states like Colorado, which has raised over $1 billion in revenue from legal cannabis since 2014, people still struggle to jump through all the necessary hoops to clear their cannabis-related records, likely including many of the most experienced workers in the industry.
"The cannabis community here hasn't really done much outreach; it's a bubble," Flores said. "I have a sales and marketing background, and it feels like they're missing a whole demographic."
At the same time, states like New Mexico—which has long struggled with low employment or educational options and high crime, and now has a burgeoning cannabis industry—are also particularly in need of programs to quickly get people back on track, Flores said. "It makes a lot of sense as a first step in social equity, but these are also people who weren't harming anybody."
"I grew up in a very brown, very poor community with [frequently] the lowest-rated school system in the country, and among the highest crime rates," she continued. "There has to be reinvestment: states where people don't have employment choices, and are committing crimes to survive, should be the first to get on board, really."
Today, Flores said, "I think states have a really good opportunity to find out what's going on in their communities, see what other states are doing, and decide what changes are needed. Sometimes it's a comprehensive list, and sometimes it's little steps."
To cover the costs of hosting events and filing attendees' documents, her group and others relied on local sponsors as well as funds from NEW's three national sponsors this year.
In the future, Flores and the rest of the coalition hope that states and municipalities will pay for and provide these services regularly—until the process of clearing retroactively moot criminal records becomes automatic, of course, which can't come soon enough.
