“Managing Collateral Consequences in the Information Age”

“Managing Collateral Consequences in the Information Age” is the title of a symposium issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter.  It is composed of papers prepared for a Roundtable conference on criminal records issues jointly sponsored by the American Law Institute and the National Conference of State Legislatures in January 2018, and associated primary source materials.  The issue’s Table of Contents shows the breadth and variety of topics covered. An introductory essay by Margaret Love summarizes the approach to managing collateral consequences in the revised sentencing articles of the Model Penal Code, and the seemingly contrary trends in criminal records management in state legislatures in recent years.  She describes each of the papers in the issue, and policy recommendations tentatively reached by participants in the January Roundtable.

  • Alessandro Corda of Queens University (Belfast) contributes a discussion of “American exceptionalism” in criminal records matters, and proposes a way of neutralizing their malign effect.
  • Scholars and practitioners describe how relief schemes work (or don’t work) in states as diverse as:
    • North Carolina (John Rubin, UNC/Government)
    • Tennessee (Joy Radice, UT/Law)
    • Nevada (Sen. Tick Segerblom and Nick Anthony, NV Legislature)
    • California (Jack Chin, UC Davis/Law; Eliza Hersh)
    • Indiana (Josh Gaines and Margaret Love, CCRC)
  • Douglas Berman and Nora Demleitner write about subsets of the collateral consequences problem (sex offender registration and marijuana decriminalization).
The issue also publishes the provisions of the Model Penal Code: Sentencing on non-conviction dispositions and on collateral consequences, and a collection of reports and other materials from the Collateral Consequences Resource Center.
The University of California Press has generously made available to non-subscribers the entire FSR issue for downloading at this link.