In a cheerful Hunting Park community center, alumni joined other attorneys and law students in April to battle an insidious form of injustice: inaccurate criminal records.

The alums gathered for training by the Criminal Record Expungement Project, an organization that helps ordinary Philadelphians clear up incorrect or out-of-date information from arrest records.

Co-founded by Mike Lee, Class of 2009, C-REP has expunged more than 500 criminal arrests for people in and around Philadelphia since 2010.

Criminal records can undermine a person’s ability to find work or housing, Lee said, even when they bear outright errors or charges that resulted in acquittals.

Although Pennsylvania law specifically prohibits hiring policies that bar workers simply because of an arrest record, Lee said, many employers do just that.

Lee’s organization operates regular clinics to help Philadelphia residents remove misplaced blemishes that may appear on their criminal records, but it also aims to broaden awareness throughout the legal community.

“It’s important to educate the legal community,” Lee said during the training workshop for lawyers and law students.  “It can change how you see clients with a criminal record.”

The April 7 training session had been organized by alumna Jaimee Moore, Class of 2010, a contract attorney with Christian Legal Clinics of Philadelphia.

The workshop prepared attorney volunteers for a clinic the CLCP was preparing to operate on behalf of residents of the city’s Hunting Park neighborhood the following week.

CLC opted to begin working on expungements after local pastors voiced concerns that members of their congregations could not find work because of criminal records, Moore said.

“That served as a foundation for us to try to do something,” Moore said, adding that the CLCP began working with 16 clients as a result of the April 14 clinic and plans to incorporate expungement work into its regular clinics in the future.

Several other members of the law school community took part in the training: Karla Cruel, Class of 2013; Daniel Colbert, Ted Oswald and Daniel Popkave, Class of 2011, and Hyunmyung  Helen Park, Class of 2010.

“It is reinvigorating to see so many fellow Drexel alumni and students passionate about the human rights of survivors of the criminal justice system and the necessity of criminal-history record reform,” Lee said.