Author: CCRC Staff

Editorial staff of the Collateral Consequences Resource Center

“Certifying Second Chances”

This is the title of a provocative new article by Cara Suvall, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School, and Director of the Youth Opportunity Clinic.  The article, forthcoming in the Cardozo Law Review, catalogues and analyzes the costs and burdens that deter people from accessing certificates intended to enhance employment opportunities.  Professor Suvall focuses particular attention on certificate programs in Tennessee, Georgia, and New York, which vary widely in eligibility criteria, administration, and legal effect.  She highlights the learning, compliance, and psychological barriers that limit effectiveness of existing certificate programs, and describes proposals to lower those barriers. Here is the abstract: Policymakers around the country are grappling with how to provide a second chance to people with criminal records. These records create collateral consequences—invisible punishments that inhibit opportunity in all facets of a person’s life. Over the past seven years, states have repeatedly tried to legislate new paths for people trying to move on with their lives. State legislators passed more than 150 laws targeting collateral consequences in 2019 alone. But what happens when these paths to second chances are littered with learning, compliance, and psychological costs? The people who most need these new opportunities may find […]

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How states reduce jury diversity by excluding people with a record

Last month, the Prison Policy Initiative released a report called Rigging the Jury, showing how all 50 states reduce jury diversity by excluding some people because of their criminal record, in some cases permanently. The report, which includes a map, table, and detailed appendix explaining each state’s policies, shows that: 44 states bar people with felony convictions from jury service when they are no longer incarcerated. (By comparison, 30 states bar voting by those who are not incarcerated.) 6 states go even further, barring people with some misdemeanor convictions from juries. 7 states bar legally innocent people from juries if they are called to serve while charges are pending against them. The report also explains how excluding people with records makes juries less diverse (e.g., one  in three Black men have felony convictions), why jury diversity is essential to the fairness of a trial, and what must be done to fix this unfair system.                           The full report is here. Note: Our Restoration of Rights Project also provides state-by-state and 50-state information on loss and restoration of rights to serve on a jury due to a record. We […]

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Applying for SBA COVID-19 relief with a criminal record in 2021

Last Updated: September 9, 2021 In December 2020, Congress authorized additional COVID-19 financial relief for small businesses and nonprofits, available through the Small Business Administration (SBA). The SBA’s two primary programs for COVID-19 financial relief are the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which provides forgivable loans to small businesses and nonprofits to help keep their staff employed during the crisis; and the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program, which provides advances and loans to small businesses and nonprofits that experience a temporary loss of revenue due to COVID-19. After the first COVID-19 relief bill, the CARES Act, funded these programs in March 2020, the SBA imposed broad criminal history restrictions on applicants. In the face of pressure, the administration relaxed those restrictions several times over the course of the following months.  In March 2021, the Biden Administration removed an additional restriction.  In this post, we review those developments and describe the SBA’s current criminal history policies, also available on the SBA’s website (PPP and EIDL). To summarize, as a result of developments to date, the SBA now excludes from PPP relief only a narrow category of people with a criminal record: those 1) actually incarcerated or with pending felony charges; […]

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Access Barriers to Felony Expungement: The Case of Illinois

Currently, 33 states authorize the expungement or sealing of at least some felony convictions.i However, recent research has shown that only a small percentage of eligible individuals actually complete the court petition process required to obtain this relief in most jurisdictions.ii In the fall of 2020, as an outgrowth of its work surveying record relief laws in the 50 states, the Collateral Consequences Resource Center (CCRC) decided to take a closer look at barriers that prevent people with felony convictions from accessing relief intended to benefit them. Ideally, the most efficient way to overcome access barriers would be to make sealing automatic, dispensing with the requirement of filing individual petitions. However, the move toward automatic sealing is in its early stages,iii and we anticipate that petitions will remain the primary way to clear felony conviction records in most states for the foreseeable future. Accordingly, it is important to minimize barriers to petition-based relief at every level. In order to minimize barriers, they must first be identified and documented. We have therefore begun work on a project to analyze barriers to petition-based sealing of felonies in a number of different states. This will hopefully encourage those states to reform their process […]

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After a haul of record relief reforms in 2020, more states launch clean slate campaigns

Yesterday, the Clean Slate Initiative, a bipartisan national effort to automate the clearing of criminal records, announced four new state campaigns in Texas, New York, Oregon, and Delaware, joining ongoing campaigns in Louisiana, Connecticut, and North Carolina to advocate for automatic record relief legislation. This announcement follows a productive year for record relief reforms in 2020, when Michigan became the sixth state to enact automatic relief for a range of conviction records, the most expansive such authority enacted to date. In total, 20 states enacted 35 bills and two ballot measures creating or expanding record relief (i.e. expungement, sealing, set-aside) last year. Michigan, along with three other states, also enacted major legislation expanding eligibility for petition-based conviction relief. Kentucky and North Carolina authorized the automatic sealing of many non-conviction records (with simplified petitions for others), consistent with a 2019 model law on non-conviction records developed by a group of practitioners under CCRC’s leadership. Other reforms addressed marijuana offenses, victims of human trafficking, juvenile records, and more. Below we summarize 2020’s record relief reforms, broken down into six categories: general conviction relief (9 states, 14 laws), automatic conviction relief (4 states, 5 laws), non-conviction records (4 states, 4 laws), marijuana offenses […]

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