Distributional Consequences of Expunging Juvenile Delinquency Records: The Problem of Lemons

While it is easy to agree that there may well be a subset of delinquents whose records should be expunged once they have remained free of legal trouble for a certain length of time, states differ on who should decide when expungement is appropriate and on what material should be expunged. These differences in turn have a substantial effect upon the distributional consequences that flow from the decision to expunge a given juvenile's record.