Opinion: Foreign affairs that are important for business, society

With the adoption of recreational marijuana, the word detox has entered our vocabulary. But what does it mean and why should the business community care?

I sometimes confuse criminal forgiveness with the concept – but that is not entirely correct. A criminal pardon is what happens when someone is pardoned, and expungement is the process of erasing a criminal record — or erasing it from the public record.

Why does business care about demolition laws? In a word, human power. In other words, our economy and society suffer when people are disenfranchised. Young adults sometimes make stupid mistakes that go sideways for decades. Those mistakes can block them from education, employment, and financial opportunities. If so, how does that person get to the point where they can or want to contribute to society?

Everyone knows that incarceration is expensive, but the consequences of a criminal record are even more expensive. In the year The “throw away their locks and keys” theme that dominated political discourse in the 1980s, ’90s and beyond seemed like a healthy platform that everyone could support—no one, not even criminals, was in favor of more crime. But rhetoric begets policy, begets criminal convictions with guaranteed results and becomes an expensive nightmare for our government. We now find ourselves desperate for workers in communities with extremely low criminal convictions and poverty. This is not accidental.

Thus, we now find ourselves in an era of criminal justice reform—one of the few policy categories with broad bipartisan support. Deportation is one of many aspects of the reform. A fresh start puts people back into the workforce and into the tax base. It provides pathways to education and highly skilled jobs. It helps people get into the traditional banking system and makes the dream of home ownership and the economic benefits that come with it more attainable.

I think we can all agree that it is in the best interest of our society to have healthy, independent individuals and families. But half of our nation’s children have a parent with a criminal record. In my first semester of law school, I learned the purposes of punishment: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution, and restitution. Now, many years later, when I think about the continuance of justice and why it needs to be done away with – I think of the word redemption. It is to save the individual, the family and the community.

Another positive action of removal is that it reduces recidivism and increases public safety. If you tell a young person convicted of a crime that they are marked with a scarlet letter for the rest of their lives, they have very little incentive to deviate from the path that led to those early bad decisions. In most cases, they can reoffend. However, if society has a way to clear that 19-year-old’s record and provide them with light at the end of the tunnel, we encourage behavior change that greatly reduces the likelihood of re-offending.

Hopefully, you were or are now convinced that layoffs are good for business and our community. But there is a problem. The process for most expenses is expensive and complicated—and surprisingly few people are getting that fresh start. Our Missouri legislators have greatly expanded eligibility over the past four years and their efforts are greatly appreciated. The Springfield Metropolitan Bar Foundation has hosted a dozen clinics to help people understand and overcome addiction. We have enrolled more than 2,000 individuals for those clinics, and through our partnership with Legal Services of Southern Missouri, most of them receive free legal assistance. Unfortunately, of the tens of thousands of Greene County residents who are eligible under that law, only 216 have had their records expunged as of September 2022. If we want to feel the effects of this criminal justice reform, we need another way and passage. Update 3 can help pave the way.

Missouri now has a constitutional “automatic” expungement of a criminal record for certain marijuana offenses. A bill introduced earlier in the 2023 legislative session by Sen. Curtis Trent would greatly expand automatic expungement for nonviolent offenses. The bill has the support of a variety of organizations from the business, labor and faith communities, and I personally work for its passage.

Christa Hogan is the Executive Director of the Springfield Metropolitan Bar Association and the Springfield Metropolitan Bar Foundation. She can be reached at chogan@springfieldbar.com.