Over 1.5 million alleged delinquent offenders appeared in juvenile court in the United States in 2009.  Approximately 59 percent of these individuals were adjudicated delinquent, an analogous disposition to conviction in criminal court.  While it is a common misconception that a record of juvenile adjudication is not visible to the public, state specific statutes dictate whether these records can be obtained by a potential employer, institution, or future prosecutor.  As a result, these records of adjudication may create significant hardships beyond the sentence imposed by the court.  These potential “collateral consequences” have recently been documented by the American Bar Association.  

In this paper I quantify these hardships using cross state variation in expungement and sealing statutes, which provide a legal remedy allowing the criminal activity to be treated as if it never occurred.  I detail each of the pertinent state statutes and compare their terminology and provisions.  I also present a conceptual framework that describes the incentives created by expungement.  In my empirical work I focus my analysis on the difference between automatic states, where an offender’s record is automatically expunged, and application states, which require a petition of the court for expungement.  I show evidence at the state level indicating very few observable differences between these states using demographic measures, economic indicators, and measures reflective of the juvenile and adult justice systems.  I also present results from self-collected data where I find that the rate of expungement is near zero in application states and near one in automatic states.  Finally, using individual level data I estimate a positive effect of expungement on college attendance and future earnings along with a negative effect on future arrest.  Point estimates suggest that individuals who have been adjudicated delinquent in an automatic state are approximately 10 percentage points more likely to attend college in their lifetime than juvenile delinquents in application states.  Similarly, individuals adjudicated in automatic states have average income in their late twenties that is approximately 23 percent larger than former juvenile delinquents from application states.  Ex-offenders from automatic states are also approximately 13 percentage points less likely to be rearrested in the future.  These findings can inform policymakers about the impact of juvenile delinquency records, the utilization of the expungement process, and the social costs and benefits of expungement.