{"id":2497,"date":"2013-06-12T19:07:39","date_gmt":"2013-06-12T19:07:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gnof.org\/?p=2497"},"modified":"2013-06-12T19:12:30","modified_gmt":"2013-06-12T19:12:30","slug":"getting-back-on-track-with-the-justice-and-accountability-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staging.communify.me\/gnof\/getting-back-on-track-with-the-justice-and-accountability-center\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Back on Track with the Justice and Accountability Center"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F96601547\" height=\"166\" width=\"100%\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Adrienne Wheeler hears a similar story from her clients every day.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey\u2019ve been applying for jobs for months and months and months,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re unemployed. They\u2019re getting services from the state, or otherwise from family, from friends, from a church, anywhere else just to survive and it\u2019s exhausting.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But Wheeler is not a job counselor. She\u2019s an attorney and co-founder of the Justice and Accountability Center. This New Orleans nonprofit helps people expunge or seal records of arrests and convictions for nonviolent crimes. Law enforcement and the courts can still access these records, she says, but the process offers something else.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFor jobs, because that\u2019s really what this is about, the people who see us want to get a job and their employer has said I could hire you, if you could get this expungement, or they\u2019ve been denied multiple times because of this record and they need it so they can get a job.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Justice and Accountability Center got its start in 2011, when Wheeler and fellow co-founder Ameca Reali were fresh out of law school. They wanted to make a difference in the city\u2019s criminal justice system, and Reali says they zeroed in on ways to open more opportunities for former offenders, to help them stay out of trouble down the line.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere was this whole area of the criminal justice system, after a person is released from custody or supervision, where no one was working really, or very few people were working,\u201d says Reali. \u201cAnd there were so many people cycling out of the system who needed that support that we could come in and help.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>On one level, the Justice and Accountability Center is trying to make the expungement process easier for eligible people to access and navigate on their own. Right now, that process can take up to a year and cost hundreds of dollars.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, the group also conducts hands-on legal work to secure expungements, and it operates a hotline for people seeking help.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhat we see is that a number of folks who can afford the process they can get to it very easily,\u201d says Wheeler. \u201cThey can seal that record, they can make that happen, so the likelihood of coming back, because they can have sustainable employment, it decreases. So the folks that we see don\u2019t have the money to do that, so it\u2019s an opportunity that they\u2019re not given access to.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Wheeler says the issue is of particular concern for communities of color, since the existence of a criminal record, even for arrests that never led to conviction or for relatively minor offenses, can be used as a smokescreen for discrimination, disqualifying individuals not only from jobs but for some types of housing and training programs. That\u2019s why the Justice and Accountability Center sees expungements as a way to put clients on equal footing for opportunities to move their lives forward.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe want them to be able to re-engage in their communities and have meaningful lives, whatever that means to them, after they leave the criminal justice system,\u201d says Reali. \u201cIf we can help them do that by getting them back to work, getting them into school, by allowing them to go back and live with their family then that\u2019s success for us.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>Written by Ian McNulty for the Community IMPACT Series and produced by WWNO in partnership with the Greater New Orleans Foundation. To learn more about the Justice and Accountability Center of Louisiana, <a title=\"Justice and Accountability Center\" href=\"http:\/\/www.jaclouisiana.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">click here<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Adrienne Wheeler hears a similar story from her clients every day. \u201cThey\u2019ve been applying for jobs for months and months and months,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re unemployed. They\u2019re getting services from the state, or otherwise from family, from friends, from a church, anywhere else just to survive and it\u2019s exhausting.\u201d But Wheeler is not a job&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":2498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[392,394,390,393,391,100],"class_list":["post-2497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-our-community","tag-accountability","tag-criminal","tag-justice","tag-legal","tag-mcnulty","tag-wwno"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v19.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Getting Back on Track with the Justice and Accountability Center | Greater New Orleans Foundation<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/staging.communify.me\/gnof\/getting-back-on-track-with-the-justice-and-accountability-center\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Getting Back on Track with the Justice and Accountability Center | Greater New Orleans Foundation\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Adrienne Wheeler hears a similar story from her clients every day. \u201cThey\u2019ve been applying for jobs for months and months and months,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re unemployed. 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