Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity - Criminal Record Expungement & Pardons — Projects

Stage

Testing

README

Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity (PLSE) is a non-profit legal aid organization that focuses on helping people overcome the barriers they face as a result of criminal records.

The project we are currently working on is building out an expungement petition generator for PLSE. The application takes in PDFs of clients' criminal dockets and returns fully formatted petitions to expunge the clients' criminal records. Having a clear criminal record helps those clients to better find work, housing, and services.

This project is built with React.js, Django, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. A few other tools we use are the Parsimonious python library for parsing PDFs and Digital Ocean for deployment.

https://github.com/Philadelphia-Lawyers-for-Social-Equity/docket_dashboard (This may be marked private, join our Slack to connect with the #plse-expungement team to learn how you can help.

https://www.plsephilly.org/

Roles needed

Developers with React.js and Django skillsets
Developers and data scientists with PostgreSQL and MySQL skillsets
Don't fit the above? Join the slack channel, so we can find in something in the project for you!

Project Activity
Log Buzz

Update #4

Hello! We are currently working on wrapping up the initial build for PLSE and hope to move into maintenance mode by the winter.

The expungement petition generator is mostly together and we are currently working on: - Adding the ability for many of a single client's dockets to be processed simultaneously to save PLSE lawyers time in generating petitions - Getting a specific dataset out of the database PLSE owns - Improving the parser to better read the docket PDFs

Feel free to connect with us on Slack if you want to join us!

Update #3

Hi everyone! We need help in a couple of areas:

1) PDF parsing 2) Database development/management 3) Web development

We are going to be parsing PDFs into a database and creating a new "expungement generator." If you're interested, message me on Slack!

Update #2

Hi all! We urgently need some help with our scraping project. Right now, we need people who can read a CSV file and scan for outliers. Once we get through that, we are going to start posting additional tasks in the Slack channel. If you can help, join the conversation on Slack!

Update #1

Hi everyone! Quick update about where we are in this project. I am envisioning it to have three projects nested within it: 1) collecting data and securely storing it; 2) building a new, internal generator that retrieves this collected data to generate expungement paperwork and screen for sealing and pardon eligibility; and 3) potentially linking this generator with our pardon app (in development), which assists people with filling out the pardon application.

At the moment, we are in early stages of the data collecting/scraping. To stay updated on how this progresses, join the Slack channel! I will be posting most of the updates there. Also, send me an email at zuk@plsephilly.org so that I can send you a volunteer confidentiality form. Looking forward to updating you all soon!