Detroit's Project Clean Slate marked ten years and 20,000 criminal records cleared this week. The free expungement program runs out of the city's Law Department and serves Detroit residents working to seal old felonies and misdemeanors.
The program launched in 2016. Eligibility expanded under the state's Clean Slate Act, signed in 2020, which automated some misdemeanor expungements and broadened the categories of offenses that could be sealed by petition. The city program walks residents through the petition process at no cost.
The 20,000 figure is cumulative. It counts records cleared since 2016, not in the last twelve months alone. The growth curve since the Clean Slate Act took effect has been steeper than in the first four years of the program.
An expunged record is the unlock for a long list of downstream things. Job applications. Housing applications. Professional licensure. Loan applications. The bottleneck a decade-old conviction creates is well documented and well measured.
The program does not handle all expungements. Federal records are out of scope. So are some categories of felonies, including most violent offenses, by state statute. Detroit's program staffs the petitions for what is eligible.
The ten-year mark is a milestone the Law Department took the day to acknowledge, but the bottleneck the program addresses has not gotten smaller. Michigan still has hundreds of thousands of residents carrying old records that would be eligible to seal under current law. The Detroit-resident share is one slice of that.
Free clinics, walk-in hours, and online petitions are all in scope. Residents apply through the city's Law Department.
