Category: Education

CCRC launches major study of non-conviction records

CCRC is pleased to announce that we are undertaking a major study of the public availability and use of non-conviction records – including arrests that are never charged, charges that are dismissed, deferred and diversionary dispositions, and acquittals.   Law enforcement agencies and courts frequently make these records available to the public allowing widespread dissemination on the internet, both directly and through private for-profit databases.  Their appearance in background checks can lead to significant discrimination against people who have never been convicted of a crime, and result unfairly in barriers to employment, housing, education, and many other opportunities.  Research has shown that limiting public access to these records through mechanisms like sealing and expungement is valuable in economic terms for those who receive this relief, and improvements in their economic status will in turn benefit their families and communities.

While almost every U.S. jurisdiction makes some provision for limiting public access to non-conviction records, such relief varies widely in availability and effect, and is often difficult to take advantage of without a lawyer.  What’s more, arrest records may remain accessible on the internet long after official court files have been made confidential or even destroyed.  While CCRC’s Restoration of Rights Project now includes state-by-state information on how non-conviction records may be sealed or expunged, our new project will examine the operation of applicable laws more closely.

The first phase of this project will produce by early June 2019 a detailed inventory of the laws in each U.S. jurisdiction for limiting public use of and access to records of arrests and/or judicial proceedings that do not result in conviction.  Among other things, this inventory will examine both: (1) categorical or automatic relief (such as general confidentiality laws and limits on considering non-conviction records by employers and licensing boards); and (2) case-specific relief (such as sealing and expungement, either automatic or by application).  For this second type of relief, the study will look at eligibility criteria (including waiting periods and overall criminal record), procedures (including filing fees or other financial barriers), and effect (entities excepted from restrictions on access and use). It will also note where state law or court rulings permit redaction of records so that dismissed charges may be sealed even if one or more charges in a case do result in conviction.

After completing the research phase of the project, CCRC will consult with scholars and practitioners to prepare a nationwide analysis, examining specific issues across all jurisdictions, identifying patterns and gaps in existing laws and policies.

The second and final phase of the project will be launched at a roundtable meeting on August 16-17, 2019, hosted by the University of Michigan Law School. The roundtable will produce a set of policy recommendations and model legislation aimed at neutralizing the effect of non-conviction records.  Professors JJ Prescott and Sonja Starr of the Law School faculty will serve as conference hosts and collaborators on this second phrase.  A number of legal scholars, practitioners, judges, law enforcement officials, and legislators have already agreed to participate.  At least three of those invited themselves have criminal records.  We expect to have several technology experts at the table to advise about the operational implications of the policies and legislation we are considering, in light of how states manage their criminal records systems.

Following the August roundtable, we will finalize its recommendations and model law with the assistance of scholars and other experts; publish them in a report; and promote them widely in the academic and advocacy community.

The principal value of this project will be to inform and strengthen efforts underway in legislatures and advocacy organizations across the country to mitigate the disabling effects of a criminal record on the lives of people who have one, on their families and on their communities.  We believe that reforming the law is as important a part of the reintegration agenda as advocating for and providing services to those who are seeking a second chance, and we hope this project will be the first stage of a larger national law reform effort to address access to and use of all types of criminal records. In light of the intense interest in legislatures across the country in mitigating the effect of criminal records, as evidenced in our 2018 report on relevant laws passed just last year, there is an obvious need for such guidance.  The first months of 2019 have evidenced an even greater level of legislative interest, on which we expect to report again shortly.

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Living with a marijuana conviction after legalization (updated)

Jacob Sullum, senior editor at Reason, has written a fabulous article about expungement of marijuana convictions in places that have since legalized marijuana: so far 10 states, DC, and the Northern Mariana Islands have legalized.  The piece is currently available to Reason subscribers and will be available to the public in the coming weeks (we will update this post with the link).

Sullum tells the stories of eleven individuals, from the jurisdictions that have legalized, who describe how their marijuana convictions have impacted their lives before and after legalization.  He documents the lingering legal and social sanctions that burden people long after they have served their sentences, sanctions that “seem especially unjust and irrational in the growing number of U.S. jurisdictions that have legalized marijuana for recreational use.”

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SUNY bans the box on admissions application

On September 14, the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY), the nation’s largest comprehensive university system, voted to ban the box in its admissions process.  It is the first university system in the country to reverse its decision to engage in criminal history screening and remove the question from its admissions application.

The resolution laying out the policy change references the advocacy of the Education From the Inside Out (EIO) Coalition, including a 2015 case study of SUNY conducted by the Center for Community Alternatives, “Boxed Out: Criminal History Screening and College Application Attrition.”  That study found that about two-thirds of the nearly 3,000 SUNY applicants who disclose a felony conviction each year do not complete the application process (compared to only 21 percent of the overall pool of applicants) and thus are never considered for admission.  It concluded that this is the result of the daunting – and sometimes impossible – supplemental process triggered by that disclosure as well as the stigmatizing nature of the inquiry itself.

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Ban the other box – Suspension and expulsion shouldn’t be a bar to college

University application form

The following piece was originally published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on the US criminal justice system.  Even though criminal records and school disciplinary records are entirely distinct, they both pose similar, often unjust, obstacles to higher education.  Consideration of both types of records in the admissions process can have the troubling effect of excluding qualified and motivated young people — particularly those from minority communities — from America’s colleges and universities because of past mistakes that have little to do with academic potential or the protection of public safety.

The story is familiar: a high school student grabs another student’s iPhone at lunch and tries to sell it. He is caught, arrested, and booked into juvenile hall. He is also suspended. If universities and colleges follow the recent recommendation of the Obama administration, colleges will not consider the student’s criminal record in the initial stages of the admissions process. These recommendations, contained in a recently released “Dear Colleague” letter by Education Secretary John B. King, represent a significant step in removing barriers to education for people with criminal records. And just this week, over a dozen colleges and universities signed on to the White House’s Fair Chance Higher Education Pledge.

Unfortunately, the letter and the pledge are silent about another common question on college applications: Have you ever been suspended or expelled from school? For the teenager who stole the phone, this means that while his criminal record may not ruin his chance to be admitted to college, his school disciplinary record just might.

More than 3 million students are either suspended or expelled from schools each year and when they are, a discipline record is generated. While the barriers created by criminal records have begun to receive much-needed attention, the barriers created by school discipline records have been largely overlooked. The Department of Education report that accompanies King’s letter mentions school records only in passing, without taking a firm position. Like criminal records, school discipline records can, and do, jeopardize young people’s chances to succeed. Like criminal records, school records are a scarlet letter.

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Feds nudge colleges to go “beyond the box”

1024px-US-DeptOfEducation-Seal.svgThe Department of Education (DOE) is asking colleges and universities to reconsider the use of criminal record inquiries on admissions applications in a new report released on Monday. The report, Beyond the Box: Increasing Access to Higher Education for Justice-Involved Individuals, looks at how broad inquiries into applicants’ criminal histories may deter people with criminal records from applying for post-secondary educational opportunities.  It also suggests steps schools can take to ensure that their admission processes promote second chances for qualified applicants with criminal records, including banning the box on initial applications.

According to the report, “A survey of postsecondary institutions found that 66 percent of them collect CJI [criminal justice information] for all prospective students, and another 5 percent request CJI only for some students.”   The Common Application, a uniform application used by nearly 700 schools, has since 2006 asked whether a person has been convicted of a misdemeanor or felony, “or other crime.”   Some schools that use the Common Application allow applicants to opt out of disclosure, or delay criminal history inquiries until a preliminary admissions decision has been made.  Other schools use their own non-standard applications which may require disclosure of convictions, arrests, or mere allegations of misconduct.

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New York Times weighs in on college applications and criminal records

BoxedOut.untitledThe New York Times has published an editorial about the recently issued report of the Center for Community Alternatives on the deterrent effect of questions about criminal records on applications for admission to the State University of New York.  (See the piece about the report “Boxed Out: Criminal History Screening and College Attrition” by CCA Director Alan Rosenthal published in this space 10 days ago.)  The editorial notes that the 24 campuses of the CUNY system do not include “the box” asking about criminal record on their application forms and have reported no safety issues as a result.  Perhaps this will be one of those rare cases where effective public advocacy highlighted in editorial pages will actually have a concrete result.

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Expanding college opportunities for prisoners in California

DegreesofFreedom2015_ReportCoverLast week was an exciting one for proponents of the expansion of college opportunities for people who are currently incarcerated or who have criminal records.  Two reports were released that propose strategies to break the cycle of recidivism, promote public safety, and de-escalate mass incarceration by opening up post-secondary educational opportunities.  It is fitting that both reports come at a time when America is reflecting on the events of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama, fifty years ago, and envisioning where the momentum of Black Lives Matter will take us.  It is the intersection of an historic civil rights struggle, the human rights movement that confronts “mass criminalization” and the racial divide in the U.S. today.

The Stanford Criminal Justice Center and the Warren Institute at the UC Berkeley School of Law issued a report from the Renewing Communities Initiative, Degrees of Freedom: Expanding College Opportunities for Currently and Formerly Incarcerated Californians.  It was released just days after the Center for Community Alternatives (CCA) in cooperation with the Education from the Inside Out Coalition (EIO Coalition), issued its report, Boxed Out: Criminal History Screening and College Application Attrition, the subject of an earlier post on March 4, 2015.

 

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Criminal history screening in college applications

BoxedOut.untitledLast week the Center for Community Alternatives in cooperation with the Education from the Inside Out Coalition released Boxed Out: Criminal History Screening and College Application Attrition. With this new study and report we build upon our 2010 study, The Use of Criminal History Records in College Admissions Reconsidered. The Reconsidered study showed that a growing number of colleges and universities are asking about criminal history information during the application process: two-thirds of the colleges and universities we surveyed reported that they do so. Yet, as we discussed in the Reconsidered study, there is no empirical evidence to indicate that criminal history screening makes college campuses any safer.

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Wisconsin attorneys volunteer to help students facing expulsion

raceclassExpulsion or suspension from school, not surprisingly, does not bode well for academic success.  Students are much less likely to graduate when they miss significant time in school or have to change schools because they have been suspended or expelled.

Incidents at school can have other serious and lasting consequences.  In Wisconsin, because 17-year-olds are considered adults when charged with criminal violations, high school students can face probation, jail, or prison, as well as all the adverse collateral consequences associated with a criminal record.  One serious consequence unique to students is that alleged misconduct in school can also result in a suspension or expulsion from school.

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“Arrests as Regulation”

Eisha Jain, a fellow at Georgetown Law Center, has posted on SSRN an important and (to us) alarming article about the extent to which mere arrests are beginning to play the s3984426260_07b0b8ca51ame kind of screening role outside the criminal justice system as convictions. In “Arrests as Regulation,” to be published in the Stanford Law Review in the spring, Jain argues that arrests are increasingly being used systematically as a sorting and screening tool by noncriminal actors (including immigration authorities, landlords, employers, schools and child welfare agencies), not because they are the best tool but because they are easy and inexpensive to access.

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