New year, new partnership, with the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office, on “Digital Juneteenth” initiatives.
While California’s “Clean Slate” laws automate record expungement, many individuals remain unaware they’ve been cleared. Drawing inspiration from the spirit of Juneteenth—where freedom required awareness to be realized—in 2024, Paper Prisons launched a “Digital Juneteenth” research initiative to address the how and what of notifying people of their new clearances, to work, access housing, volunteer and give back.
Our plan:
– Short Term: Using successive Randomized Control Trials (RCTs), we’ll test which messages, delivery methods, and framing actually reach people.
– Medium Term: Using behavioral insights, we will to try to help people spiral up, by not just notifying them but also offering county services like letters for employers and referrals to county social services and beyond, and potentially using AI to scale same.
– Long Term: Using RCTs, we’ll evaluate the impact of notification on real-world administrative and economic outcomes, at the state and county levels.
Though it’s taken about 18 months to secure the funding, IRB approval, and partnership agreements, several of us are now embedded inside and have started to get to work. In my next post, I’ll share an early look at how our work is unfolding and why it suggests notification is a worthy research subject and the potential missing link between policy success and human impact.
In this work, Paper Prisons is honored to build on the legacy of the legendary Professor Ellen Kreitzberg, who introduced us to Deputy Public Defender and Santa Clara University School of Law adjunct professor Jake Rhodes with whom we are partnering to ensure that “automated” relief doesn’t mean “invisible” relief.
Our Juneteenth Research Agenda: https://lnkd.in/g724whHA
Our oped supporting California Clean Slate: https://lnkd.in/gVJZgAa
Learn more about the Santa Clara Public Defender:
https://lnkd.in/gkb3hZB9
With thanks to the The Clean Slate Initiative for their focus on impact as measured by impacted lives and willingness to support unconventional research, and our embedded Paper Prisons team including Dylan Margolis (‘26, Data Science), Magali Urresti (MSW ‘26), Kyla Bourne (post-doc, UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society/ Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS)), and expert advisor Alonzo L Harvey, as well as Laura E. Chavez, PhD, brilliant research director at the Clean Slate Initiative. University of California, Berkeley – School of Law
