Expunge.io is a website designed for people with juvenile records in Illinois to kick of the process of expunging, or erasing, those records.
This project grew naturally out of our work with Mikva Challenge and their Juvenile Justice Council in our joint CivicSummer program. We interacted with youth on the JJC about what interested them, where their research took them, and what issues mattered most to them. Here’s what we had to say on project launch. Cathy Deng is the developer who made this happen.
Our current work revolves around this grant from the Knight Foundation given to Chris Rudd and Mikva Challenge to “update expunge.io with new design and new features that will make the web-app more appealing and effective for its users”. We’re conducting focus groups and talking to lots of youth about the current site so it can be optimized for their needs.
Chris Rudd runs the Juvenile Justice Council of Mikva Challenge
Our overall goal in projects like this (websites that rely on existing offline processes related to complex government workflows) is to “flood the box”. That is, to send as many residents as possible to be helped by the existing process.
One thing we love about this project is that it’s not about technology. It’s not about developers. It’s not about an app. It’s about working with the people who actually do the work. We also care deeply about the policy that drives the process to which we are driving people. In a blog post titled, “Getting at the Root of Issues with Juvenile Records”, we wrote about problems in the Data For Sale business:
As long as juvenile records are obtained and trafficked by unethical data purveyors, the eventual expungement of that record can have limited value.
In this instance, the solution is to make it as easy as possible to kick off the long process of expungement. In other examples, we nudge Twitter users to create 311 service requests, or show residents citywide health data while showing them places near them to improve their own health. All of this is in line with our software philosophy:
We believe in making the smallest amount of software to be useful to the largest amount of people in connecting residents to their government, their institutions, and each other.
Expunge.io is a great example of this, and it is completely driven youth.
