Books and academic articles

“Certifying Second Chances” (3/24/2021) - 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 [...]
Study measures gap between availability and delivery of “second chance” relief (3/19/2021) - Professor Colleen V. Chien of Santa Clara University has published a major empirical study in the Michigan Law Review that examines the gap between eligibility for and actual delivery of relief from contact with the criminal justice system, a construct she calls the “second chance gap.” (The term is defined with examples here.) Last week, Chien led a team of [...]
Study: Texas diversion provides dramatic benefits for people facing their first felony (2/23/2021) - Increased use of diversion is a key feature of America’s new age of criminal justice reform. Whether administered informally by prosecutors or under the auspices of courts, diversionary dispositions aim to resolve cases without a conviction—and in so doing, conserve scarce legal resources, provide supportive services, reduce recidivism, and provide defendants with a chance to avoid the lingering stigma of [...]
Online Criminal Records Impose ‘Digital Punishment’ on Millions (2/11/2021) - We are pleased to republish this excellent article by Andrea Cipriano, which describes a new study of online non-conviction records, with permission from The Crime Report. The study concludes that law enforcement records may remain freely available online indefinitely, notwithstanding state laws calling for automatic expungement of such records. (For more information on expungement of non-conviction records, see CCRC’s 50-state [...]
“Trump’s Theater of Pardoning” (12/6/2020) - The piece reprinted below is the first part of Bernadette Meyler’s contribution to a Symposium published by the Stanford Law Review on her book Theaters of Pardoning. It is as cogent a guide to understanding President Trump’s pardoning practices, and how they differ from those of his predecessors, as anything else we have seen. If, as Prof. Meyler argues, the message [...]
The Purgatory of Digital Punishment (8/17/2020) - It doesn’t matter whether they’re accurate—criminal records are all over the internet, where anyone can find them. And everyone does. By SARAH ESTHER LAGESON On a frozen December day in Minneapolis, William walked into a free legal aid seminar, to try to fix his criminal record. Lumbering toward a lawyer, his arms full of paperwork, William tried to explain his situation [...]
How to expand expungement: base it in retribution instead of rehabilitation (6/8/2020) - A thoughtful new article by Brian Murray recommends a new way of conceptualizing expungement that should make it easier for reformers to justify facilitating access to this record relief. In “Retributive Expungement,” forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Murray argues that expungement should be seen as a way to end warranted punishment rather than to recognize and incentivize rehabilitation. [...]
Broken records: criminal history errors cost jobs and housing (12/20/2019) - Ariel Nelson of the National Consumer Law Center has authored an important new report, Broken Records Redux, which describes how errors by criminal background check companies harm consumers seeking jobs and housing. In particular, the report shows how background screeners continue to include sealed and expunged records in criminal background check reports, omit disposition information, misclassify offenses, mismatch the subjects of [...]
Model law proposes automatic expungement of non-conviction records (12/11/2019) - An advisory group drawn from across the criminal justice system has completed work on a model law that recommends automatic expungement of most arrests and charges that do not result in conviction. Margaret Love and David Schlussel of the Collateral Consequences Resource Center served as reporters for the model law. It is available in PDF and HTML formats. “Many people may [...]
Algorithms, Race, and Reentry: A Review of Sandra G. Mayson’s Bias In, Bias Out (11/5/2019) - In true Minority Report fashion, state actors are increasingly relying on algorithms to assess the risk a person will commit a future crime. Unlike Minority Report, these algorithms simply estimate the likelihood of rearrests; they do not offer the absolute answer to future criminal behavior that condemned the defendant, Tom Cruise, in the 2002 action film. Still, criminal justice actors [...]
CCRC scholarship round-up – August 2019 (8/7/2019) - Editor’s note: This past year has seen a burgeoning of scholarship dealing with collateral consequences broadly defined, from lawyers, social scientists, and philosophers. CCRC’s good friend Alessandro Corda has selected fifteen notable articles published in 2018-19, with information, links, and abstracts. They are organized into five categories: (1) Legal collateral consequences (2) Collateral consequences and criminal procedure (3) Sex offender registration [...]
Commercializing criminal records and the privatization of punishment (7/12/2019) - The deeply ingrained, indeed, constitutionally protected, U.S. tradition of the public trial and public records has led to a system where there are few restrictions on public access to criminal record information. Europe, by contrast, is more willing to limit the press in service of important goals such as reintegration of people with convictions. Alessandro Corda and Sarah E. Lageson [...]
“Invisible Stripes: The Problem of Youth Criminal Records” (6/8/2019) - This is the title of a paper by Professor Judith McMullen of Marquette University Law School. Professor McMullen points out that “the efforts of today’s young people to ‘go straight’ are hampered by nearly unlimited online access to records of even the briefest of encounters with law enforcement, even if those encounters did not result in conviction.” She argues that “we need [...]
Should potentially severe collateral consequences trigger enhanced procedural protections? (5/24/2019) - In two recent law review articles, Professor Paul T. Crane of the University of Richmond School of Law proposes that courts and legislators—when deciding whether a criminal defendant is entitled to a particular procedural right—should take into account potential exposure to severe collateral consequences. The two articles together mark a major contribution to the literature. Much attention has focused on [...]
“Third-Class Citizenship” for people with a “violent” record (4/11/2019) - Professor Michael M. O’Hear of Marquette University Law School has an important new article titled “Third-Class Citizenship: The Escalating Legal Consequences of Committing a ‘Violent’ Crime.” This marks the first effort to systematically study the full legal consequences of a “violent” criminal charge or conviction, including the collateral consequences that uniquely apply to violent crimes. O’Hear documents the growing network of [...]
Symposium on felony disenfranchisement set for Friday in Missouri (4/10/2019) - On Friday, April 12, a day-long symposium on felony disenfranchisement will be held at the University of Missouri in Columbia, MO. The event, hosted by the Missouri Law Review and Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, is open to the public. Three panels of scholars will address: (1) the historical origins of conviction-based disenfranchisement and its consequences for democracy—featuring CCRC board member Gabriel “Jack” Chin, [...]
New book argues collateral consequences can’t be justified (4/8/2019) - University of Nottingham philosophy professor Zachary Hoskins has written an important new book about “collateral legal consequences” (CLCs), just published by Oxford University Press. Beyond Punishment? A Normative Account of the Collateral Legal Consequences of Conviction engages cases and statutes from the United States and other countries, but it is primarily a philosophical interrogation of the legitimacy of CLCs, not an [...]
“High Time for Marijuana Expungement” (3/27/2019) - Any state that legalizes or decriminalizes marijuana should automatically include an expungement provision that clears the criminal record of individuals who engaged in activities deemed lawful under the new legalization or decriminalization laws. This is the thesis of my new article, “High Time for Criminal Justice Reform: Marijuana Expungement Statutes in States with Legalized or Decriminalized Laws.” At the federal [...]
Starr and Prescott publish groundbreaking empirical study of expungement (3/19/2019) - Professors Sonja B. Starr and J.J. Prescott of Michigan Law School have released the first-ever broad-based empirical study of the effects of a state law limiting public access to criminal records. CCRC’s reports have noted the lack of empirical research to inform policies aimed at promoting reentry and reintegration for people with a criminal record—something this study of Michigan’s set-aside law begins to [...]
“Executive Clemency in the United States” (2/5/2019) - This is the title of CCRC Executive Director Margaret Love’s new article for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia. The article describes the historic role played by the executive pardon power in reducing punishments (including collateral ones) and explains clemency’s diminished vitality and reliability in modern times in most states and in the federal system. Love concludes that “[i]t appears unlikely that an [...]