GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Attorney General Dana Nessel introduced an automatic expungement program for the state of Michigan that does not require an application.
“My department has been doing everything we can to make expungements accessible to all qualifying residents,” Nessel said Tuesday. “I’m happy to announce that the expungement process is about to get a whole lot easier.”
The program is expected to help millions of Michiganders.
“Removing barriers and those challenges just makes it a lot more easier for success for people returning back to the community from jail and prison,” Percy Glover, who spent 11 years behind bars, told FOX 17 Friday. “I was probably a snap of the finger away from going back to the lifestyle that led me to prison because I had no resources. I had no opportunity. I had no support.”
Dee Dee Taylor, founder of nonprofit Taylor Made Re-Entry, grew up with her father in prison.
“That’s a huge and traumatic experience because I’m extremely close to him and he was sentenced to life in prison as a teenager,” Taylor explained. “Every one of my experiences have been behind bars with him. I can show you a picture of me at five years old behind bars, to now 30 behind bars.”
Taylor Made Re-Entry advocates for men and women after they are released from prison— working to remove the barriers that so many of them face.
“No one wants to be labeled for the rest of life. One mistake or maybe a couple of mistakes, you know, we are human. We all make poor choices. We all can repent, recover from them and nobody should be nailed to the cross for the rest of your life,” Glover said. “It gives me the belief that we’re moving in the right direction. It gives me the hope that we will continue to move in the right direction.”
Nessel’s automatic expungement program, which is through Michigan’s Clean Slate bills signed into law in 2020, reportedly cleared the records of millions of Michiganders on its first day— Tuesday.
Automatic expungements apply to people with misdemeanors and no more than two felonies, depending on the amount of time that has passed.
It does not apply to violent crimes, such as assault or human trafficking.
Additionally, you only qualify for automatic expungement if you do not have any pending charges against you.
“This automatic expungement process is so valuable to my family and the people that I serve because it eliminates systematic barriers to housing, employment, life insurance and, not to mention, the cost that’s associated with the expungement fairs and expungement process,” Taylor said. “It shows me that awareness is there, and for a very long time, people were not aware of the systematic things that were happening behind bars and with prison reform and things of that nature.”
If you do not qualify for an automatic expungement, you can go through the traditional expungement process by filling out an application.
For more information on Michigan’s Clean Slate laws, click here.
