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:
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- 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, 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 effective date of January 1, [...]
- 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, [...]
- Michigan set-asides found to increase wages and reduce recidivism (2/27/2018) - Preliminary results of an empirical study by two University of Michigan law professors show that setting aside an individual’s record of conviction is associated with “a significant increase in employment and average wages,” and with a low recidivism rate. We know of only one other similar study, conducted by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, and it came [...]
- CCRC publishes California Compilation of Collateral Consequences (10/20/2017) - The CCRC is pleased to announce the publication of the California Compilation of Collateral Consequences (CCCC), a searchable online database of the restrictions and disqualifications imposed by California statutes and regulations because of an individual’s criminal record. Federal collateral consequences can also be searched through the CCCC database. This new resource follows on the heels of similar compilations of collateral consequences that CCRC [...]
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- California follows federal lead in limiting employment screening (7/10/2017) - A new California regulation took effect last week that puts employers on notice that adverse action based on criminal history may violate state law prohibitions on racial discrimination. The regulation closely tracks a 2012 guidance issued by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which asserts that consideration of criminal history by employers violates Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act when [...]
- California set-aside enhances employment prospects (4/3/2017) - Second-chance mechanisms in California are working to increase the employment prospects and earning potential of Californians with criminal records according to a soon-to-be-published study by a team of researchers from U.C. Berkeley School of Law. The study, by Jeffrey Selbin, Justin McCrary & Joshua Epstein, tracked over an eleven-year period the employment status and annual income of 235 Californians who [...]