Partner Profiles
Mia Burcham
Helping People Trapped in a Cycle of Criminalization
Our newest Partner Profile is proof that youth isn’t always wasted on the young. Meet Mia Burcham, 26, a student research assistant with the University of Arizona Law School’s Civil Rights Restoration Clinic (CRRC), led by Prof. Andy Silverman in Tucson.
In just the past few years, Mia—a native Tucsonan raised in Texas and Oregon—has received her undergraduate degree, served constituents in need of federal aid like FEMA assistance and Social Security disability benefits, crisscrossed the country working for a U.S. senator, enrolled in law school, and helped launch expungement clinics for multiple organizations in southern Arizona.
Phew.
“When I got to law school, I realized that I really missed the interactive, client-focused aspect of social work that I was doing serving a U.S. senator’s constituency. And I was struggling to ground those concepts I was learning in law school without putting them into practice,” Mia said.
“I’ve seen how the ability to expunge these charges can be life-changing for people who have lost opportunities because of their record.”
So, not long after Arizona’s new marijuana expungement law went into effect in 2021 after the passage of Proposition 207, Mia didn’t hesitate to sign up to assist the University of Arizona chapter of the National Lawyers Guild to help them organize expungement clinics before joining the Reclaim Your Future campaign and its partner, the CRRC, this past May. Along with fellow research assistant Rebecca Cohen, Mia is largely responsible for helping the RYF team in Pima County plan expungement clinics and make legal services more accessible.
“It became obvious to me even before I began working at the clinics that both felony and misdemeanor marijuana convictions were especially burdening people with less access to legal help—poor people, people of color—and trapping them in a cycle of poverty and criminalization,” Mia said. “So, I’ve seen how the ability to expunge these charges can be life-changing for people who have lost opportunities because of their record—because of a small amount of something that’s finally been legalized in our state.
“The clinics,” Mia added, “have been a profound reminder to me of the inequities of our criminal legal system.”
