Senate bill would deliver relief to small biz owners with a record

*UPDATE (7/7/20):  “SBA throws in the towel and Congress extends the PPP deadline” After Congress authorized hundreds of billions of dollars for small business relief during COVID-19, the Small Business Administration (SBA) imposed restrictions on applicants with an arrest or conviction history.  These barriers, neither required nor contemplated by Congress, impede access to the two major relief programs for small businesses, nonprofits, and independent contractors: the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program. A major development in Congress signals the likely elimination of most of these restrictions, which would make crucial economic assistance newly available to many small business owners with a record.  On June 4, Senators Rob Portman (R-OH), Ben Cardin (D-MD), James Lankford (R-OK), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced the Paycheck Protection Program Second Chance Act.

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CCRC statement on recent events

CCRC stands with those opposing police violence against black people and other forms of racism throughout society.  Black lives matter. Our organization promotes public discussion of how criminal records are used to hold people back in civil society.  Discrimination based on a record hits the black community harder than any other, thanks to the long history of officials using the criminal law as a weapon to keep black people marginalized and subjugated. Most recently, we have documented the Small Business Administration’s decisions to exclude many people from COVID-19 relief due to arrest or conviction, which disproportionately harms minority business owners during an already precarious moment.  We have also covered felony disenfranchisement litigation in Florida, where a federal judge held unconstitutional the denial of voting rights to people who have served their time but still owe restitution and fines they cannot afford to pay. In this time of national turmoil, many protesters have been and will continued to be arrested. Most will be released without charges, some will be charged, and some will be convicted.  But every single one of them will end up with a criminal record. Very few states make it easy to avoid the stigma that even a […]

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Florida felony disenfranchisement law held unconstitutional

This evening the district court issued its opinion in Jones v. DeSantis finding, as expected, that Florida’s system for restoring voting rights to those convicted of a felony is unconstitutional. The opinion is at this link, and its summary by the court is below. Additional details of the decision and the court’s order are reported in this article from the New York Times, and we will report further on the case, including next steps, in a few days. The State of Florida has adopted a system under which nearly a million otherwise-eligible citizens will be allowed to vote only if they pay an amount of money. Most of the citizens lack the financial resources to make the required payment. Many do not know, and some will not be able to find out, how much they must pay. For most, the required payment will consist only of charges the State imposed to fund government operations—taxes in substance though not in name. The State is on pace to complete its initial screening of the citizens by 2026, or perhaps later, and only then will have an initial opinion about which citizens must pay, and how much they must pay, to be allowed to […]

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Upgrades to the Restoration of Rights Project

We are pleased to announce the completion of a major project to upgrade our flagship resource, the Restoration of Rights Project (RRP).  The RRP is a free on-line compendium of legal research that describes and analyzes the laws and practices relating to criminal record relief in the United States.  The improvements we have made will make it easier for our readers to gain both a snapshot and more detailed understanding of how record relief laws and policies operate within each of the 50 states, D.C., 2 territories, and the federal system.  They will also facilitate comparisons of how different states address various types of relief, producing a national-level picture against which each state can measure its progress. This major undertaking was a collaboration between CCRC staff and four students at Yale Law School: Jordan Dannenberg, Kallie Klein, Jackson Skeen, and Tor Tarantola.  We thank these students, as well as YLS Professor Kate Stith, for their excellent contributions to our mission of promoting public engagement on the issues raised by the collateral consequences of arrest or conviction. The state-by-state profiles, summaries and 50-state comparison charts from the RRP are what we rely on in preparing periodic and year-end summary reports on new […]

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New efforts to channel federal relief to small business owners with a record

*UPDATE (7/7/20):  “SBA throws in the towel and Congress extends the PPP deadline” After Congress authorized hundreds of billions of dollars in funds for small business relief during COVID-19, the Small Business Administration (SBA) imposed restrictions on applicants with an arrest or conviction history.  These barriers, neither required nor contemplated by Congress, impede access to the two major relief programs for small businesses, nonprofits, and independent contractors during the COVID-19 crisis.  The two programs are the newly created Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the ramped-up Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program. Three developments within the past week signal major pushback against or the possible reversal of at least some of these burdensome restrictions, which unfairly deny relief to worthy applicants. First, at least 65 organizations submitted five public comments in opposition to the SBA’s criminal history restrictions for PPP relief.  Our organization joined 25 other groups in submitting a comment asking the SBA to rescind or modify the regulation on legal and policy grounds, citing recent court decisions that suggest the SBA may lack authority to impose record-based disqualifications at all. These comments are the most recent expression of what has become a wave of bipartisan opposition to the SBA’s exclusionary […]

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