Record Clearing

Records of a person’s criminal history prevent people from full citizenship long after their sentences have been served. Background checks are a standard part of job and housing applications, limiting people with criminal records to “felony-friendly” forms of employment - temporary work performed in dangerous conditions or under the table - and housing - exploitatively expensive rentals in unsafe areas. Even in places with “Ban the Box” laws, employers and housing providers can still legally deny applications based on an un-expunged record.

Clearing a person’s criminal record is called “expungement” in Oregon. Charges which meet complex requirements are eligible for expungement. The statutes - ORS 137.225 and 137.226 for adult expungement and ORS 419A.262 for juvenile expungement - combine for over 6,000 words. The complexity of these statutes makes it impossible for a person to determine eligibility on their own. As such, the market rate to hire an expungement lawyer is over $1,000 per case. So even for people who are eligible under Oregon law, practical barriers effectively restrict expungement to those who can afford it.

Therefore, reduce the cost of expungement services as much as possible. Our expungement analysis is free, and we charge only a $100 to prepare paperwork (including notarization and fingerprints). By streamlining our processes and partnering with community organizations, we can reduce the cost of expungement to less than 10% of the market rate,

Recovery Communities

Recovery is a broad concept. It doesn’t just refer to recovering from the drug addictions which resulted in the criminal records our project seeks to expunge, but also the trauma which resulted in those addictions, and the trauma of being involved with the criminal justice system. To be clear, our project provides expungement services for anyone who asks for it, not just people who identify as being “in recovery.”

Communities are the basis of many people’s recovery. They provide a system of mutual accountability and a communion on which to provide healing. Communities are also the vehicle of our project. We rely entirely on the networks of social service providers, grassroots organizations, and motivated individuals to help us get the word out, and also to house our clinics in each city.

The success of our clinics requires contributions from everyone in the recovery community, most directly our participants. Our limited-representation clinics mean that participants who receive paperwork will be responsible for filing their paperwork and paying associated court fees. We do our part by walking through the process of filing at our clinics and always being available to answer questions about the process. The mutual obligations of between us and our participants can be found at this link.

Rural Oregon

Rural does not refer only the agricultural regions of Oregon, but to an aspect of the State’s political geography which pits the Metropolitan Area against the rest. The opioid crisis hit the rural areas of the country especially hard. https://www.fb.org/issues/other/rural-opioid-epidemic/. But metropolitan areas were more willing and able to devote public resources to aiding people in crisis.

Oregon ranks first nationally in pain-reliever misuse. This result comes from the 2017 National Survey of Drug Use and Health, which also found that Oregonians’ access to addiction and mental health treatment was third to last. Access to public resources to overcome addiction is is difficult to come by in the metropolitan areas, but almost non-existent outside of it. This includes not just the medical and community resources that people need to gain control over addiction, but the legal resources.

We seek to make our services available everywhere, especially in rural communities. We actively encourage people to reach out to us - all of our clinics are initiated by people who had previously attended a clinic or reached out to us first.