California
Restoration of Rights Project – California Profile
Guide to restoration of rights, pardon, sealing & expungement following a California criminal conviction
California Compilation of Collateral Consequences
On-line inventory of California Collateral Consequences (CCRC, 2017)
Jobs for All: The Movement to Restore Employment Rights for Formerly Incarcerated People
2017 report by the Rosenberg Foundation
2015 report by the Renewing Communities Initiative of the The Stanford Criminal Justice Center and the Warren Institute at the UC Berkeley School of Law
2015 report by the National Employment Law Project.
Helping Immigrant Clients with Proposition 47 and Other Post-Conviction Legal Options
2015 guide by Californians for Safety and Justice.
A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Criminal Record Expungement in Santa Clara County
2014 report by the San Jose State University Record Clearance Project
2011 report by the Pacific Juvenile Defender Center
* Be sure to check for changes in the relevant laws since this resource is fairly dated.
Related blog posts:
- Oklahoma and California win Reintegration Champion awards for 2022 laws (1/17/2023) - On January 10 we posted our annual report on new laws enacted in 2022 to restore rights and opportunities to people with a record of arrest or conviction. Like our earlier reports, it documents the steady progress of what we characterized two years ago as “a full-fledged law reform movement” aimed at restoring rights and dignity to individuals who have [...]
- Marijuana legalization and record clearing in 2022 (12/20/2022) - CCRC is pleased to announce a new report on recent cannabis-specific record sealing and expungement reforms in the past 18 months. The report, extending CCRC’s fruitful collaboration with the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at The Ohio State University, is available here. An accompanying infographic (reproduced at the end of this postr) summarizes the report’s findings, and includes a color-coded [...]
- A closer look at racial disparities in California’s automatic record clearing (9/19/2022) - Numerous studies have demonstrated how Black Americans are treated more harshly at every stage of the criminal legal system—from over-policing to overcharging to more punitive sentencing. New research from California shows how eligibility limitations on criminal record relief perpetuate racial disparities in the criminal justice system, and have a disproportionately adverse effect on Black Americans. The study, by Alyssa Mooney, [...]
- Racial disparity in clean slate record clearing? California responds (8/25/2022) - Reproduced below is a press release describing new research by three California scholars published in the Law & Society Review, based on California sentencing data, showing how eligibility criteria for automatic record clearing “can inadvertently perpetuate racial inequity within the criminal justice system.” This conclusion seems to us unsurprising, and likely has broader national application for two interrelated reasons: Prosecution [...]
- Waiting for Relief: A National Survey of Waiting Periods for Record Clearing (2/23/2022) - Our new report is the first-ever comprehensive national survey of the period of time a person, who is otherwise eligible to expunge or seal a misdemeanor or felony conviction record, must wait before obtaining this relief. Waiting periods are usually established by statute and can range from 0 to 20 years. Typically, during a waiting period the person must be [...]
- Illinois set to become fifth state to cover criminal record discrimination in its fair employment law (2/13/2021) - NOTE: Governor Pritzker signed S1480 into law on March 23. In our recent report on criminal record reforms enacted in 2020, we noted that there were only four states that had fully incorporated criminal record into their fair employment law as a prohibited basis of discrimination. These states (New York, Wisconsin, Hawaii, and California) provide that employers can only disqualify [...]
- Momentum grows to restore voting rights to people with a felony (2/3/2021) - Our new report on 2020 legislative reforms shows continued progress in state efforts to expand voting rights for people with a felony conviction. Despite a courtroom setback at the Eleventh Circuit, where a federal appeals court ruled that Florida’s landmark 2018 felony re-enfranchisement initiative does not restore the vote to people who owe court debt, two additional states and D.C. [...]
- Legislative update: third quarter 2019 sees more new licensing and expungement laws (10/11/2019) - In July we reported on the extraordinary number of new laws enacted in the first half of 2019 aimed at restoring rights and status after arrest and conviction. A total of 97 separate pieces of legislation, some covering multiple topics, were enacted by 38 states and many broke new ground in their jurisdictions. Moreover, clear trends begun in 2018 accelerated in [...]
- California becomes third state to adopt “clean slate” record relief (10/10/2019) - On October 8, Governor Newsom signed into law AB 1076, the so-called “Clean Slate Act,” authorizing automatic record relief in the form of set-aside or sealing for individuals with certain convictions and arrests under California law. The new law supplements but does not supplant the existing system of petition-based relief, and applies to convictions and arrests occurring after the bill’s [...]
- California poised to become third state to adopt “clean slate” record relief (10/3/2019) - On September 23, the California legislature sent AB 1076 to California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has until October 13 to sign or veto this potentially transformative legislation. If enacted, AB 1076 would make California the third state (after Pennsylvania (2018) and Utah (2019)) to authorize “clean slate” record relief, a direction to authorities to seal certain arrest and conviction records automatically. (Illinois, [...]