This lawyer believes in second chances. Now AI is providing a boost

Noella Sudbury is the founder of Rasa Legal, a startup that is using artificial intelligence to help tens of thousands of people seal or expunge their criminal records. Meredith Rizzo for NPR hide caption

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Since her days as a public defender in Utah, Noella Sudbury has been obsessed with solving a problem: How do you help someone with a criminal record get a job?

Sudbury had grown frustrated seeing so many people dedicate themselves to changing their lives but still fail to secure housing or work once background checks were run.

A history of arrests involving drugs or retail theft — the most common offenses — can scare off employers.

"They make assumptions that someone's dishonest, or they're going to steal," she says. "We should have a presumption of innocence, but unfortunately, you see something that scares you, and you make a subjective decision."

Research has shown that, in fact, people who have gotten their criminal records cleared are less likely than the general public to commit a crime.

Back in 2018, Sudbury began running expungement clinics in Salt Lake County. Every time, hundreds of people would show up, some with their children in tow, others driving hours to get there. Every time, by 9 p.m., Sudbury was turning people away, telling them the lawyers had to go home.

The process was laborious. It would take lawyers up to an hour just to piece together what was on someone's record to figure out if they were eligible for expungement under state law.

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Sudbury recalls one man who arrived with a rolling suitcase filled with all kinds of documents.

"The amount of paper was so voluminous that he couldn't carry it all. And I'm like, 'This is nuts because all of this could live in a digital format,'" she says.

That led to an idea. What if she could access all of the information the background check companies use?

"Could I build an app? Could I use technology to reduce my time?" she remembers thinking. "I just believed it was possible."

Speeding up record clearance to help secure jobs

Now, amid a barrage of news about AI-related layoffs at tech companies like Uber and Meta and widespread fear that AI will decimate all kinds of entry-level jobs , from paralegals to junior accountants to customer support, Sudbury is leaning heavily into AI to help people get jobs — by speeding up the record clearance process for those who are eligible.

The tech team at her startup Rasa Legal has brought her idea to life, building an app that can determine whether someone is eligible for expungement in just three minutes. AI has also cut the time it takes Rasa's lawyers to file a petition for expungement by more than half.

Rasa Legal's website currently allows users in three states to determine in about three minutes whether they are eligible for expungement. Emily Bogle/NPR hide caption

"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," she says.

Sudbury estimates that legal aid organizations doing record clearance work might be able to serve a few hundred people each year. Since launching its app in 2022, Rasa has helped clear the records of 34,000 people in three states where it's currently operating: Utah, Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Across the country, Sudbury knows it could help potentially millions more.

Precise numbers are hard to come by, but it's long been estimated that more than 70 million adults in the U.S. have some kind of criminal record, a number extrapolated from FBI and state data. These include felonies, misdemeanors and, in some cases, arrests without convictions — all things that can show up on background checks.

In a 2020 paper , professor Colleen Chien of 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 this the "second chance expungement gap."

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"The criminalization of poverty"

Virginia Mireles knew she looked terrible on paper.

"Five felony records, all due to my drug addiction," she says.

Mireles' story is like so many others seeking help from Rasa. She grew up in poverty in Tucson, Ariz., and began using heroin at 14.

"Unfortunately, an older uncle decided that was his way of taking care of me," she says.

She was incarcerated for the first time at 24. For more than two decades, she cycled in and out of the Arizona prison system. While behind bars, she says, you think a lot about how you're going to change. But when you get out?

"You can't rent a house under your own name, and you can't find a job that's going to help you support your family," she says. "So now you just feel terrible about yourself because your family's looking at you like — 'I thought you were going to be different.'"

Virginia Mireles spent decades grappling with addiction and cycling in and out of the Arizona prison system. After a collective 17 years incarcerated, she used Rasa to expunge her criminal record and now works with the company, talking potential clients through the record clearance process. Meredith Rizzo for NPR hide caption

Sudbury, whose mother grew up poor in rural Utah, calls this "the criminalization of poverty." Too often, she says, the root causes of people's problems — mental health, trauma, substance use and poverty — go unaddressed.

"What I saw when I became a public defender was the faces of my mother's family members," she says. "We were using a broken system to punish those people instead of treating them for what I saw as largely health issues."

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Expungement as an economic tool

Most states allow for some criminal records, including misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies, to be sealed or expunged as long as the individual remains crime-free for a period of time, ranging from one to 10 years. In recent years, a number of states have passed clean slate laws to make record clearance automatic for low-level crimes and non-convictions.

Those efforts are backed by research that shows not only are people less likely to commit new crimes if they have steady housing and jobs , but within a year of expungement, people's wages rise by an average of 22%.

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 says. "One of our biggest champions was the business chamber, because employers needed people in jobs."

Still, even in states with clean slate laws, there are many people with records that can only be cleared through a court petition. So in Sudbury's mind, Rasa's work has only just begun.

A state-by-state process

Sudbury's goal is to bring Rasa's services to every state, but it's a monumental challenge. There's no national expungement law, no one database that AI can just scrape for records. Each state has its own laws, systems and forms. Sometimes, counties have their own forms. Some still use paper records.

For each new state, Rasa works to establish data-sharing agreements with courts, corrections agencies, probation departments and private vendors. Sudbury's team then uses AI to code cases, analyze eligibility and build forms specific to that state, based on what records can be cleared under the law.

Sudbury's goal is to bring Rasa's services to every state, but doing so is a challenge given each state has its own laws, databases and even forms. Some counties have their own forms. Meredith Rizzo for NPR hide caption

Rasa is also using AI to draft the statements that get sent to court, explaining to the judge why the expungement should be approved. Rasa's lawyers review everything that is sent out, because the technology has made mistakes, especially early on.

Still, Sudbury has been struck by how quickly AI has learned to write a successful petition, "to now, where it sounds like I wrote it myself," she says.