Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins, center, speaks at a Players Coalition Charitable Foundation news conference in Atlanta during Super Bowl week last January. (David J. Phillip/AP)
Original post 8/26/19 by Nick Fierro / The Morning Call
Malcolm Jenkins approaches the start of his 11th year in the NFL and sixth as a member of the Philadelphia Eagles with an extra sense of satisfaction.
No, he hasn’t received the contract extension he’s been seeking. He’s not even thinking about that, in fact, leaving all the details up to his agent. “That’s what I’m paying him for,” he joked. “He takes 3% of my contract to do that.”
What really has the veteran safety grinning from ear to ear is seeing and hearing about all the people who’ve been affected as a result of the Pa. Clean Slate Act that was signed by governor Tom Wolf last year and went into effect this June. Jenkins and former Eagles teammates Torrey Smith and Chris Long had long campaigned for that reform, and their presence on Capitol Hill the day after they played a Monday night game in 2017 helped persuade lawmakers to accelerate the process.
The bill allows for individuals to petition the courts for their records to be sealed if they have been free from conviction for 10 years for offenses that resulted in a year or more in prison and have paid all court-ordered debts. It also allows automatic sealing of records for second- or third-degree misdemeanor offenses that included a less than two-year prison sentence if a person has been free from convictions for 10 years.
Also sealed now are the criminal history records related to charges that resulted in non-convictions.
Incredibly, one in three Americans have a criminal record, according to New York governor Andrew Cuomo. This is in part due to the fact that the FBI considers anyone arrested on a felony charge to have a record — even if no conviction follows.
Jenkins on Monday explained how happy he was to finally see this helping people who hadn’t been able to help themselves before this law passed.
“It’s big,” he said. "We followed up just to see how it was doing, and within months of them implementing this thing, millions of people had their records expunged. What that means is, they’re able to, you know, not be discriminated against when it comes to jobs, housing, loans, all type of things. They are able to be productive, and contribute to society in a meaningful way. And that changes people’s lives.
“We’re talking about people having a record that follows them for over 10 years and it’s still affecting their ability to get employment. That’s wrong. So we’ve been excited to see not only the bill passed, but now how many people are actively affected by that one third of the population having some kind of criminal record? There’s a ton of people who are dealing with these issues. It’s a scarlet letter that’s been following them around since they were teenagers.”
Before this, Jenkins contends, so many with minor convictions and some with none at all were essentially stuck.
“All the ways you move upward in society or climb the social ladder, you [were] locked if you had any kind of record. So to remove that barrier, I think, helps a lot of people."
Just another example of how Jenkins and the Players Coalition that he co-founded is making a difference.
Morning Call reporter Nick Fierro can be reached at 610-778-2243 or nfierro@mcall.com.
