Need help sealing or expunging a criminal record? Pensacola workshop will teach you how.

There are over 6 million Floridians with an arrest record, many of them for nonviolent offenses.

Still, that criminal record often prevents them from securing employment, education and housing according to the Alliance for Safety and Justice.

A local organization is trying to help Escambia County ex-offenders clean up their records and improve their quality of life through an Expunge and Seal Workshop on May 6.

“We want to give back to our community. It's not so much about us, it's about giving back and I believe that God put us on Earth to give back, he gave his own life for us,” said Reginald Benjamin, co-founder of event organizer Justified Incarcerated Outreach Ministry. “So, why shouldn't we give back to people that are less fortunate because they have made a mistake?"

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Justified Incarcerated Outreach Ministry was started in 2015 as Reginald and Joan Benjamin sought ways to help people in the Pensacola community and across the country with incarceration and recidivism rates.

They have worked with county jails and juvenile detention centers and provided services such as donating clothes for people coming in and out of incarceration, buying bus tickets for inmates to go back home, providing suits for court dates and hosting a Christmas party with a toy giveaway for children whose mothers are incarcerated.

In the last year, they've had community members repeatedly ask them, “How do we get our record expunged once we get out, especially for people who may have had their charges dropped?”

The Benjamins started researching and discovered Broward County area State Attorney Harold Pryor and other officials had started hosting workshops teaching members of the public how to get their records sealed or expunged.

They decided to create their own workshop and invited speakers such as Assistant State Attorney John Molchan, who will explain the State Attorney’s part in the application process.

When a criminal history record is sealed or expunged, the public will not have access to it, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. However, certain governmental or related entities still have access to the sealed record information in its entirety. When a record has been expunged, most of the entities would not have access to the record without a court order.

The May 5 event will delve more into the distinctions, the eligibility requirements and will allow people to fill out applications afterwards. Currently, it costs $75 for an application to be processed in Tallahassee at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

The event will be held at Brownsville Church at 3100 W. De Soto St., and Evon Horton, lead pastor, said he thought the event could benefit the community and surrounding areas.

The keynote speaker for the workshop will be Larry Weglarz, former president of Expungement US Veterans Inc., a nonprofit that paid for veterans who fell under poverty line to have their record sealed or expunged at no cost.

He has seen how even if a person has not been convicted and their case has been sealed, employers can still see a person has something sealed.

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Instead of asking if applicants have ever been convicted of a crime, employers now ask, "Have you ever had a record sealed or expunged?” Weglarz said.

Florida, in Weglarz's perspective, is one of the most difficult states in the country to expunge a person’s record because if a person has ever been found guilty of or pled guilty to any crime, be it a city ordinance, county ordinance or misdemeanor, they are not eligible for a sealing or expungement in the state of Florida.

He said he believes there are certain crimes that cannot be forgiven, but that there are many nonviolent offenses and mistakes people make in their youth that shouldn't haunt them forever.

“We go through life and sometimes we make poor choices and we make bad decisions and those people are judged on that decision for the rest of their life,” Weglarz said. “If they have a former or prior conviction, they can never get that arrest off the record, even though it's been dismissed and I just don't think that's fair.”

Weglarz is working to push a bill through the Florida House of Representatives, HB 605 Expunction of Criminal History Records, which expands the eligibility requirement to allow for the expungement of a person's criminal history after a certain amount of time.

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In the near term, Justified Incarcerated Outreach Ministry is seeking help from the community such as sponsors to help pay the $75 processing fee for people's applications, volunteers to help manage the event and businesses, churches, and organizations to help host workshops.

The organization's goal is to bring in more people to support the event that includes the Sheriff Department, law firms, the courthouse and others to help improve the lives of the many people in Escambia County wanting a second chance.

“There's a lot of people that's here in Pensacola but they're struggling. They're struggling with jobs, they’re struggling with trying to find houses, and now if you have certain things on your record you can't even move into an apartment complex,” Joan Benjamin said. “And so seeing that and seeing what some people are going through and seeing people that are actually trying to change their lives and trying to live for the better, that's what makes us want to bring new programs in here to help the people of this community so we can change the numbers around.”

Want to go?

• Where: Brownsville Church, 3100 W. De Soto St.

• When: 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., Saturday, May 6

For more information call 850-324-8779 or email Justified Incarcerated Outreach Ministry at justifiedministries@aol.com.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Pensacola's Brownsville Church hosting expunge and seal workshop