You deserve to have agency around your personal data and the information that different governmental offices have about you.
This includes accessing and understanding:
Your record
Your eligibility for expungement
The expungement process
Terms used
The criminal justice system makes this unnecessarily complicated. This website and tool aim to support you to take more control of your record data by defining aspects of your record and preparing you for the expungement process. There is power in understanding and controlling your personal data, and we hope that this tool is a step towards those goals.
There are also most likely many aspects to this data and processes that you understand on a deeper level than this website can capture because of your personal interactions with these systems. Though the authors have worked in and/or had interactions with the criminal justice system, we acknowledge it is impossible to describe every complexity and situation, especially within a system that is often unjust and seemingly arbitrary.
The concept and practice of Data or Digital Defense was created by the Detroit Community Technology Project as part of their Data Justice work. Check out their Digital Defense Playbook for more activities on understanding your data, data surveillance, and community safety.
Criminal record and booking data is incredibly hard to find in a format to analyze expungement because of inconsistency of reporting requirements. The categories of data that the FBI requires of its Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) standards don't line up with what the criminal justice and court system considers when evaluating cases for sentencing, and by extension, expungement.
An additional tool to translate and define criminal charge codes and statutes
Different formats of this tool - printable booklets, more accessible charts and tables
Additional research on best practices on the information needs and information seeking considerations for this community
We are both graduate students at UNC Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. This website and worksheet are a project for the course INLS 690: Community Data Lab.
Jess Epsten (they/them) is a white queer and genderqueer southerner raised in Durham.
Jade Squires (she/her) is a white queer Latina of mixed-Mexican heritage born in rural north-central NC who has spent most of her life in Durham.