Imagine your past mistakes haunting you, no matter how much you’ve changed. For millions of Americans, that’s a reality, as a criminal record – even for a misdemeanor – can become a lifelong burden.
But a handful of news organizations are taking groundbreaking steps to help people move forward: they’re reviewing old stories and considering removing names or deleting entire articles.
It’s a radical idea, but it’s giving people a second chance in the internet age.
Speaking to the Guardian, Chris Quinn, editor of Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer newspaper, said: “In the old days, you put a story in the newspaper, and it quickly, if not immediately, receded into memory.
“But because of our [search engine] power, anything we write now about somebody is always front and center.”
The new efforts are critical, as more than 70 million Americans have prior convictions or arrests – roughly one in three adults.
The problem has been exacerbated as tech firms have gobbled up ad dollars, causing consolidation and redundancies in the local news industry. Fewer reporters means less time to follow stories to their conclusion, leading to some misleading old news articles not reflecting the final result of a police investigation or court case.
Saun Hough, director of partnerships for Californians for Safety and Justice, an advocacy group that has fought for mass expungements, said reporters often capture a one-sided, law enforcement narrative about an arrest, then fail to follow up.
Someone jailed for drug trafficking may ultimately be convicted of possession, or a woman arrested for prostitution could later be confirmed a sex-trafficking survivor, he said.
It can take years for cases to be adjudicated, but a report based on an initial arrest might be the story that follows someone through life.
“It creates this constant sense of anxiety that many people live with,” said Hough, noting that crime stories generally lack context about a person’s traumas or struggles that led to the incident.
“People wake up every day and pray that they don’t have to talk about what the newspaper wrote about their arrest and relive that. You have this thought in your mind that you’re one Google [search] away from everything being ripped away.”
These types of cases are what prompted Quinn to pioneer a “right-to-be-forgotten” experiment in 2018, motivated by the many inquiries he would receive from subjects describing the harms of past crime coverage and pleading for deletion. “People would say: ‘Your story is wrecking my life. I made a mistake, but … I’ve changed my life.'”
The Oregonian, based in Portland, is another publication that has launched a “clean slate” program, allowing people to request the removal of mugshots, names, or even entire articles about minor offenses. The paper also offers the option of deindexing articles, so they don’t appear in search results.
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Therese Bottomly, the paper’s editor, told the Guardian: “These folks are going to be our neighbors, our co-workers and hopefully contributing members of society someday.
“So should we figure out ways to at least not be an unnecessary barrier to re-entry for something truly minor and in the past, and for which somebody has paid their debt?”
The concept has since spread and ow includes the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Bangor Daily News in Maine and New Jersey’s NJ.com.
Editors say the programs have inspired newsrooms to be more deliberate in their current coverage, leaving names out when irrelevant and thinking through the consequences of photos in crime stories.