Olha Yarynich, Contributing Photographer

Helen Caraballo eagerly forked over $88 to the Connecticut government in February to run a background check — on herself. 

Connecticut’s Clean Slate law has long promised to erase the criminal records of formerly incarcerated people like Caraballo, who spent three months in jail in 2011 because of a low-level felony conviction. Though the program was signed into law in 2021, unexpected technology issues pushed back the rollout of the automatic erasures to Jan. 31 of this year.

When Caraballo checked her criminal history in February, she felt optimistic about her record’s erasure. Just two months before, she had appeared at a Clean Slate press conference, where Gov. Ned Lamont lauded her efforts to turn her life around since her felony conviction. Caraballo, a longtime New Havener, is now a mother of five and a patient care coordinator at Yale New Haven Hospital with hopes of attending nursing school.

She was crushed to see that her record was still marred by the felony.

“I haven’t been in trouble,” Caraballo said. “I’ve been doing something with my life … It was just a mistake that I made years ago that I’m still having to deal with.”

Under Clean Slate, 119,383 Connecticut residents are eligible for automatic erasures, a number that encapsulates people with seven-year-old misdemeanor and decade-old, low-level felony convictions. 

At last December’s press conference, Lamont promised to erase the criminal histories of more than 80,000 formerly incarcerated people by the end of January of this year. Just 13,626 records have been wiped clean so far, according to Rick Green, a spokesperson for the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection — the state agency overseeing the automatic erasures. 

“There have been persistent and continued problems with data systems and data quality, and this has dramatically slowed the erasure process,” he said.

Green explained that outdated technology and flawed data, some of which is non-digital, have complicated the already challenging process of criminal record erasures, which require the state to collect and verify information from local and federal law enforcement agencies.

Advocates at Congregations Organized for a New Connecticut — a faith-based social justice group that spearheaded the Clean Slate campaign — and other proponents of the program are frustrated by the continuous delays. 

“This is really affecting people’s lives and whether they can get jobs, whether they can get housing, whether they can get credit, whether they can go back to school or get professional licenses,” Matt McDermott, a spokesperson for CONECT, told the News.

Over 60 percent of formerly incarcerated people are currently unemployed, a percentage four times the U.S. peak unemployment rate in 2020, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. People with criminal records also struggle to secure housing. A 2018 report found that formerly incarcerated people are nearly 10 times more likely to be homeless than the rest of the population. 

McDermott noted that the automatic erasures were initially set for January 2023 but were delayed so the state could carry out costly computer upgrades. He believes the persistent technology issues show that the state “clearly had not done their homework” to facilitate the program’s rollout. Once the upgrades had been made, Lamont announced the new rollout date of Jan. 31. 

Dave Bednarz, a spokesperson for Lamont, emphasized the governor’s frustration with the continued delays and his commitment to fully implementing the program. 

“Governor Lamont signed the Clean Slate bill into law because he believes that keeping minor crimes on someone’s permanent record for their entire lives can cause more harm than good,” Bednarz wrote to the News. “Since [the] passage of the bill, he has directed his staff to coordinate with DESPP and other involved agencies to make this program a priority, and he has committed millions of dollars in state bond and operating funding to complete its implementation. That commitment will continue.”

Green pointed out that other states with Clean Slate legislation have also faced setbacks. New Jersey, which manually wipes criminal records, is facing a large expungement backlog. Delaware’s program is experiencing a three to five-year delay in completing automatic erasures, and Utah has implemented a three-year pause on new criminal records submitted for erasure.

DESPP hired an outside contractor in July to address Connecticut’s technology issues and speed up the erasure process. According to Green, the Indiana-based software quality assurance company, iLAB, is taking a “top to bottom look” at the complex data systems across various state agencies. 

“It does seem like they’re taking the delay seriously,” McDermott said. 

Record erasures will resume in 2025, Green said, but he emphasized that the state does not have a set timeline for the program’s full implementation. McDermott hopes all eligible records will be wiped by midway through 2025.

As for Caraballo, she learned she was not eligible for Clean Slate earlier this year, despite advocates telling her she was eligible at last December’s press conference. She has an unclassified felony conviction — driving a vehicle with someone who was delivering narcotics to an undercover police officer — which is not one of the low-level felonies eligible for erasure under the law.

Still, she shares the frustrations of others who are eligible and continues to support the program’s full implementation as she advocates for her own record to be expunged. 

Caraballo began applying for a pardon soon after learning she was ineligible for Clean Slate. By the end of the month, she’ll hear if her application was accepted, denied or if she needs to meet with the board of pardons. If accepted, Caraballo will be allowed to apply to nursing school.

“My felony has stopped me from doing a lot of things, so this would finally break me free from those chains, and I would be able to finally move on with my life and fulfill a lifelong dream of being a registered nurse,” she said.

Connecticut is one of 12 states with Clean Slate legislation.

Correction, Dec. 6: Records erasures will resume in 2025, but not necessarily in January.