Above: Chris Rudd (second from left) director of the Juvenile Justice Council at Mikva Challenge, with other Knight Prototype Fund recipients. Photo by Michael Bolden.

The stigma of having an unsealed juvenile record can hurt employment opportunity for youth even years later as an adult. And the legal process for expungement – or erasing that record – can be tedious in some states across the country.

In 2013, the Juvenile Justice Council at Chicago-based civic education organization Mikva Challenge was examining ways to reduce recidivism in Cook County, Ill. The team’s research found that 25,000 young people in the area were arrested in 2012 and only 70 youth requested expungement. But all 70 were granted it. Looking at the high success rate at the time, the council wondered: Why weren’t more people filing for expungement?

Chris Rudd, director of the Juvenile Justice Council, said they believed the existing expungement resources could be improved. That was when Expunge.io was born. Expunge.io is a free service to guide anyone in Illinois with a juvenile record through the expungement process. (Actual expungement in Illinois costs $124 for a single arrest, $64 for additional arrests; fee waivers are available for qualified individuals.) Rudd said sometimes the records aren’t even serious convictions: It could be that a youth was with friends, police stopped them, and officers just collected and recorded information. Expunge.io helps streamline the process to determine if someone is eligible for expungement via a questionnaire and provides access to a lawyer in the Cook County area to help guide through the legal process.

Expunge.io received $35,000 in support from the Knight Prototype Fund in 2014 to further develop the service. The fund helps innovators take early-stage information ideas from concept to demo. Participants join a cohort of other projects, receive human-centered design training and typically spend six months developing their ideas.

Rudd said that Knight funding helped with producing advertising material and with holding focus groups in three areas of Chicago that had the highest rates of youth incarceration. The team received feedback on what youth liked and didn’t like about the platform.

Traditionally, the process for expungement in Chicago involved going to police headquarters, getting a copy of your rap sheet – which requires fingerprint verification – waiting a week or two, filing a petition to the court to get the record expunged, and, finally, going before a judge who would make the “yes” or “no” decision. Among those that originally started using Expunge.io to guide them through the process, Rudd said his team found there was a large drop-off rate of users at a certain point. Many people abandoned the process when it came time to physically get their criminal records from police headquarters – a place that holds unpleasant memories for many, Rudd says.

“We started saying that they should not have the fingerprint terminal in police headquarters. It should be more accessible to young people,” Rudd said.

So to streamline the process, Expunge.io worked with partners to install a new fingerprint terminal at the juvenile court building, where pro bono lawyers help out the users. Reducing that bottleneck in the process made the whole experience more efficient: Expunge.io users can now talk to a lawyer, get fingerprinted more easily, the lawyer can immediately do necessary paperwork and the user then just waits for his or her court date.

Expunge.io created such buzz about juvenile expungement in Chicago that it eventually led to the mayor’s office reaching out to ask students to lobby the state senate. The result: A state bill passed in June 2014 that implemented auto-expungement in Illinois. In Chicago, 17,000 juvenile records are now auto-expunged per year, which “astronomically changes the landscape,” according to Rudd, while 8,000 records still have to be manually addressed.

“Expungement is not a topic that most people are thinking about every day,” he said. That’s why his team has been pushing advertising campaigns on public transit (a recent spring campaign doubled traffic to Expunge.io) to get the word out about this free resource.

Expunge.io is an open-source project and the code is available on GitHub for anyone. Rudd hopes other states follow suit. Similar efforts are underway in at least four other states: Pennsylvania, Maryland, Louisiana and California, he said.

Rudd said the project demonstrates the importance of the youth voice: “I think this shows the need for government to start asking young people what they think about things that affect them, because you will be tremendously surprised at the answers that they come up with and how useful they are.”

“This thing [Expunge.io] is … such a simple idea, but no adult had thought of it.”

Vignesh Ramachandran is a Bay Area-based freelance writer. He can be reached via email at [email protected].

The next deadline for the Knight Prototype Fund is Aug. 17, 2015. Apply at prototypefund.org.