App determines expungement eligibility in about three minutes
Rasa’s app now determines whether someone is eligible for expungement in about three minutes, and AI has cut by more than half the time it takes the company’s lawyers to file a petition. The 10 to 12 hours it once took to help an individual clear their record has fallen to about five hours, Sudbury told NPR. Rasa also uses AI to draft the statements sent to court explaining why an expungement should be approved; the company’s lawyers review everything that goes out because the technology has made mistakes, especially early on.
“What that means for me as a lawyer is that we can scale our impact far beyond what would be possible if we were relying on human beings,” Sudbury told NPR.
The efficiency gains let Rasa keep its fees low: checking eligibility on the app is free, an attorney consultation costs $25, and moving forward with expungement is a flat fee of $500 per case that covers full legal representation and all government and court filing fees — a fraction of what private attorneys typically charge, NPR reported.
Sudbury wants to bring Rasa’s services to every state, but said doing so is a monumental challenge. There is no national expungement law and no single database the AI can scrape for records; each state has its own laws, systems and forms, some counties have their own forms, and some jurisdictions still use paper records. For each new state, Rasa works to establish data-sharing agreements with courts, corrections agencies, probation departments and private vendors, then uses AI to code cases, analyze eligibility and build state-specific forms.
The scale of the underlying problem is vast. An estimated more than 70 million U.S. adults carry some kind of criminal record — felonies, misdemeanors and, in some cases, arrests without convictions — a figure long extrapolated from FBI and state data, according to NPR. In a 2020 paper, Colleen Chien, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, estimated that at least 20 million people could partially or fully clear their records under existing law but have not done so. She calls that the “second chance expungement gap.”
Research cited by NPR shows that people who have gotten their criminal records cleared are less likely than the general public to commit a crime, and that within a year of expungement, people’s wages rise by an average of 22 percent. Most states allow some records, including misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, to be sealed or expunged as long as the individual remains crime-free for a period ranging from one to 10 years, and a number of states have passed clean slate laws making record clearance automatic for low-level crimes and non-convictions. Sudbury led the campaign to get Utah’s Clean Slate law passed in 2019; the vote was unanimous.
“Because of the benefits to the economy, to low-income people, to public safety and reduced recidivism costs, there was just tremendous bipartisan support,” Sudbury told NPR. “One of our biggest champions was the business chamber, because employers needed people in jobs.”
Even in states with clean slate laws, many records can only be cleared through a court petition, according to NPR. A criminal history can make it harder to secure housing or work: Sudbury told NPR she grew frustrated watching people dedicate themselves to changing their lives, only to fail to secure housing or work once a background check was run. A history of arrests involving drugs or retail theft — the most common offenses, according to NPR — can scare off employers.
Virginia Mireles is among the people Rasa has helped. She grew up in poverty in Tucson, Arizona, and said she began using heroin at 14. She was first incarcerated at 24 and cycled in and out of the Arizona prison system for more than two decades, spending a collective 17 years behind bars. After release, she said, she could not rent a house under her own name or find a job that would help her support her family.
Mireles still had five felony records when she met Sudbury at an event on restorative justice in 2023. In less than five minutes on Rasa’s app, she saw that her felonies could be cleared — all of them. She now works on Rasa’s client onboarding team, talking with people who have gone through the company’s screening process about whether to move forward with expungement.
Sudbury said she has no plans to replace those client calls with AI; for people who have faced countless barriers, having a chance to talk with someone like Mireles can be as powerful as finding stable housing or work. “It is possible for people to change, but not if they don’t believe they can,” Sudbury told NPR. “Not if someone else doesn’t believe they can.”