OPINION

Common-sense legal reforms could put more people to work by clearing certain convictions

Other states have protected public, removed barriers to getting people to work after convictions

Allie Boldt
  • Allie Boldt is Legal Research Director for the State Democracy Research Initiative at University of Wisconsin Law School at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
  • She says making it easier to expunge certain convictions from criminal records would help workers get licenses, employment after paying debt to society.

Imagine someone you know is in the wrong place at the wrong time and is accused of committing a theft. On the advice of their lawyer, they decide to plead guilty. Because it’s their first offense, the judge decides that if they comply with their sentence, the crime will be erased – or expunged – from their record. In some states, expunging a conviction removes any resulting barriers to getting hired and licensed to work. But in Wisconsin, expungement does not wipe away a conviction. That conviction can still prevent someone from getting a job, even after they serve their sentence. 

The Wisconsin Legislature is considering a bipartisan bill that would make it easier for a judge to order that a criminal conviction be completely erased from a person’s record. The new law would be an important step to make Wisconsin’s workforce more inclusive. Common-sense reforms to remove professional barriers, including but not limited to SB 38/AB 37, would benefit the state’s workers and employers alike, without compromising on consumer protection. 

Right now, Wisconsin’s expungement rules are overly restrictive compared with other states. In addition to not actually removing a conviction from a person’s record, only people under 25 years old are eligible for expungement. And Wisconsin is the only state where judges must decide to expunge at the time of sentencing, rather than after the sentence is completed, a 2018 Wisconsin Policy Forum report found.

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Under SB 38/AB 37, judges would face fewer restrictions on when they can order expungements. What’s more, employers and government bodies could no longer consider an expunged offense a “conviction” to stand in the way of getting a job or professional license. 

Allie Boldt

This would make Wisconsin’s law more like Missouri’s, where expungement is more widely available and completely restores someone’s record. Since expanding access to expungements in 2018, Missouri lawmakers are now considering another bill to automatically expunge certain nonviolent offenses. As a Missouri Budget Project analysis points out, expungement makes individuals “13% more likely to be employed and on average see a 23% increase in annual wages.” Missouri is considering this bill at least in part to address its workforce crisis. 

While the expungement reform being proposed in SB 38/AB37 would be an important step forward, there are other key steps we can take to remove inflexible professional barriers for Wisconsin workers with criminal records. 

Well-designed professional regulations protect consumers. To be sure, many of us would probably be wary of getting a haircut from someone who had committed a serious offense while engaged in the practice of barbering. However, even well-designed laws can have damaging consequences. Due to racial disparities in our criminal legal system, professional licensing laws tend to disproportionately exclude people of color, who are more likely than white people to be policed, prosecuted and sentenced harshly when convicted. Racial disparity in sentencing is of special concern here in Wisconsin, where Black residents are imprisoned at a higher rate than in any other state.

Wisconsin’s professional regulations intensify these imbalances by inflexibly restricting or banning people with felony convictions from obtaining the credentials they need for jobs matching their skills. I saw this first-hand as a former credentialing attorney for the state, where I reviewed applications for professional licenses. Those reviews included whether someone’s conviction record restricted them from obtaining a professional credential, such as a private security guard permit. Under Wisconsin law, a person convicted of a felony cannot qualify for a private security permit, regardless of how much time has passed or other surrounding circumstances–not even expungement.  

Inflexible restrictions like this can lead to unfair outcomes, including for workers coming from states that categorize certain crimes as felonies that Wisconsin considers lesser offenses. For example, at one point, Illinois law considered a retail theft of more than $150 to be a felony. Such a conviction would automatically block someone from getting a Wisconsin private security permit, regardless of how much they had accomplished in the meantime, and even if an employer wanted to hire them for the job. In Madison, this same theft offense could be considered a mere municipal ordinance violation and thus would not automatically prevent someone else from obtaining the exact same permit.

Common-sense laws to remove unfair barriers to work such as these would help grow Wisconsin’s workforce in the face of our looming labor shortage. That helps workers, businesses, and our state as a whole.  

Allie Boldt is Legal Research Director for theState Democracy Research Initiative atUniversity of Wisconsin Law School at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.