This series has spent a lot of articles documenting Minnesota laws that sit unused. Here is the opposite — a Minnesota law that worked, at scale, fast. I'm going to give it the same scrutiny I give the failures, because a program that delivers deserves to be recognized exactly as clearly as one that doesn't.
The problem the old system created
An old criminal record — even a dismissed charge, even a decades-old low-level conviction you long ago moved past — quietly blocks people from jobs, apartments, and loans for the rest of their lives. Minnesota law let you clear an eligible record. But you had to know you qualified, hire a lawyer or navigate the petition process yourself, pay the fees, and wait.
So almost nobody did. Research on Minnesota's "second chance gap" found that of roughly 470,000 Minnesotans with records eligible to be cleared, only about 5 percent ever got them cleared — a few thousand a year. At that rate, clearing the backlog of people already eligible would have taken about 173 years. Meanwhile that gap was costing Minnesotans an estimated $2.4 billion a year in lost earnings, and it fell hardest on Black and Native residents.
A right that 95 percent of eligible people never exercise isn't really a right. It's a maze most people never find the entrance to.
What Minnesota did — and what it delivered
The Clean Slate Act (Minn. Stat. § 609A.015, effective January 1, 2025) flipped the burden. Instead of making people petition, it made eligible expungement automatic — the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension identifies qualifying records and seals them, no lawyer, no filing, no fee. Eligibility covers dismissals and exonerations, completed diversions, and certain convictions after clean waiting periods (two years for a misdemeanor, longer for more serious offenses). And crucially, the law was retroactive — it reached back to the records already sitting there.
Here's the delivery, from the BCA's own numbers: as of mid-2026, of about 2 million potentially eligible records, roughly 1.9 million had been sealed — about 98 percent — with the rest in final court review. Sealing began in June 2025.
Sit with the contrast. The old system cleared a few thousand records a year and would have needed 173 years. The new system cleared 1.9 million in about one year. That is what happens when a government stops making people ask for a right and simply delivers it. It's the single most effective thing I've seen Minnesota government do in this entire series, and it cost a fraction of what the lost-earnings gap was costing.
Why it matters — the economics are not close
This isn't just fairness; it pays. The definitive study of expungement (Prescott and Starr, in the Harvard Law Review) found that people who get their records cleared see their wages rise more than 22 percent within a year, and that expungement recipients have "extremely low" subsequent crime rates — they are, as a group, rule-followers who got a second chance and used it. Clearing a record turns a person who was locked out of the workforce into a taxpayer. There are very few public policies with a return like that.
The gap that's left — because the record doesn't fully die
Now the scrutiny, because a program this good still has a leak, and pretending otherwise would violate the standard of this series.
Sealing a record in the government's files does not erase it from the private background-check industry. Data brokers and screening companies scraped and sold these records long before they were sealed, and nothing automatically pulls the record back from a private database that already has a copy. So a Minnesotan whose record was lawfully sealed by the state can still have it surface in a private tenant screening or job check — the exact harm the sealing was supposed to end.
Minnesota does have a law making screening services liable for reporting sealed records (the remedy is $1,000 or actual damages, plus fees), which is real. But the enforcement depends on the person catching it, and the private-data copies keep circulating. There's also an interstate gap: a record sealed in Minnesota can still be visible through multi-state databases. And a 2026 change gave the BCA authority to unseal records in some circumstances — worth watching so a delivered right doesn't quietly erode.
What we can do
Protect the delivery. Clean Slate is a genuine success; the first job is to keep it funded and running as the eligible pool grows, and to make sure the BCA's unsealing authority stays narrow.
Force the private industry to honor the seal. The most important fix is to make the background-check and data-broker industry actually purge sealed records, with penalties that bite and enforcement the person doesn't have to drive themselves. This connects directly to the data-broker article in this series — a record you can't get back from a broker is a record that was never really sealed.
Tell people it happened. Many of the 1.9 million Minnesotans whose records were sealed don't know it. A simple notification — you're cleared, here's what that means for your next job application — turns a database change into a life change.
And finish the cannabis piece. As the cannabis article documented, marijuana-record expungement is running through a separate, slower board with a backlog. The people promised relief there deserve the same automatic delivery Clean Slate just proved is possible.
Minnesota built the thing that works. A government that can seal 1.9 million records in a year, automatically, for free, has shown it knows how to deliver a right instead of just declaring one. That's the model for everything else in this series. Now make sure the private data economy can't quietly un-deliver it.
First the facts. Then the fix.
Sources
Minnesota Clean Slate Act, Minn. Stat. § 609A.015 ("Automatic Expungement"), verified verbatim against raw text at revisor.mn.gov — the three eligibility categories, the waiting periods, the BCA as the administering engine, and the retroactivity clause; created by 2023 Minn. Laws ch. 52, art. 7, § 12, effective January 1, 2025. Delivery figures from the BCA's "Expungements" data page as of July 14, 2026 — approximately 2,026,769 potentially eligible records, 1,888,375 expunged (about 98 percent), and the remainder in Judicial Branch review, with sealing beginning June 2025. The "second chance gap": Paper Prisons Initiative, "Minnesota Second Chance Expungement Gap" (Chien et al.) — roughly 470,000 eligible Minnesotans, about 5 percent uptake, roughly 2,700 clearances a year, an estimated 173-year backlog, an estimated $2.4 billion in annual lost earnings, and documented racial disparities. Economic evidence: Prescott & Starr, "Expungement of Criminal Convictions: An Empirical Study," 133 Harv. L. Rev. 2460 (2020) — about 6.5 percent of eligible people obtain expungement within five years under petition systems, recipients' subsequent crime rates are extremely low, and wages rise more than 22 percent within a year. The private-screening gap: Minn. Stat. § 332.70 (business-screening-service liability for reporting sealed records) and the interstate-visibility and 2026 BCA-unsealing provisions. National context: the Clean Slate Initiative (14 states and D.C. with Clean Slate laws). Cannabis-record cross-reference to this series' cannabis article and Minn. Stat. §§ 609A.055 and 609A.06.
The 1.9 million figure climbs as court review completes and reflects the mid-2026 BCA data; other states' individual clearance totals were not independently verified and are not stated. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.