Author: Beth Johnson

Beth Johnson serves as Managing Director of the Collateral Consequences Resource Center (CCRC). She is also a Managing Partner of Rights and Restoration Law Group, a woman-owned, Chicago-based social justice law firm focused on eliminating legal and systemic barriers imposed by past arrest and conviction records. She dedicated the first fifteen years of her twenty-year legal career to Cabrini Green Legal Aid (CGLA), leading the newly established Criminal Records Program, then serving as Director of Legal Programs and Senior Policy Advisor. Over her career, she has represented thousands of clients across Illinois and trained, mentored, and supervised hundreds of attorneys and law students. In addition to direct legal representation and support, she has collaborated with individual advocates and coalition partners to help pass more than a dozen laws that reduce collateral consequences, mitigate the harm caused by incarceration, and expand record relief options. She is a published author through the Illinois Institute of Continuing Legal (IICLE), “Expungement and Sealing: A Lawyer’s Guide” (2016, 2021, 2024).

Illinois poised to enact Nation’s broadest automatic sealing law

On October 30, 2025, the Illinois General Assembly approved HB 1836, making Illinois the 13th “Clean Slate” state. Illinois will also have the broadest automated record-sealing program of them all.   The Governor’s signature will launch the implementation toward an automated record-sealing process to bridge the “second chance gap” for an estimated 2.2 million people with an Illinois criminal record. After necessary preparatory measures, sealing of existing conviction and non-conviction records is scheduled to begin in January 2029. Illinois’ law will apply to most of the misdemeanor and felony convictions for which petition-based sealing is already authorized, with the same short waiting period. In addition, Illinois will now join the large group of states for which sealing of non-conviction records is mandatory and accomplished immediately upon a favorable case disposition. Building on a Legacy of Progress Illinois already leads the nation with one of the most expansive petition-based sealing laws. Since 2017, when lawmakers passed HB 2373, most felony conviction records have been eligible for sealing relief, after a comparatively brief waiting period of just three years from the end of a sentence. That law marked a turning point, expanding eligibility from only nine felony convictions to nearly all, with just […]

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