Tag: Illinois

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 to retain only substantive and procedural requirements that are truly necessary from a policy perspective, and to shift burdens now placed on individual applicants to the government wherever practicable. At the same time, the revealed difficulty of accessing petition-based relief on an equitable basis would be a strong incentive to consider automation, and the costs and benefits of each process could more easily be compared.

As a preliminary step toward launching this project, we collaborated with Beth Johnson and her partners in the Rights and Restoration Law Group (RRLG) to develop a survey instrument that collects information about access barriers to felony expungement across four domains: (1) resource and knowledge; (2) eligibility; (3) process; and (4) effectiveness. We tested our survey instrument with practitioners from several states. Beth and her team took the survey for their home state of Illinois and analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of the state’s record-sealing system.iv

We are publishing the RRLG Illinois report that follows as a pilot for additional state-specific studies. It provides detailed descriptions of the Illinois system’s strengths and weaknesses in the four areas identified above, and makes recommendations for reform. RRLG’s survey responses are in the appendix.

The Illinois report is available as a PDF here, and included in this post below.

We hope to be able to broaden this project to work with practitioners from additional states to complete the survey and write up case studies, on the basis of which we could recommend state-specific reforms as well as more general best practices. In addition to this project, we have been collaborating with Jessica K. Steinberg, director of the Prisoner & Reentry Clinic at GW Law, on an initiative in which the clinic has created a survey tool and conducted data collection on pro se access barriers to felony expungement in 34 states, with a white paper planned for later this year.

In the meantime, here are links to the survey questions used for this report. We invite anyone interested to complete it, to help us gather data for this undertaking:

Part I. Resource & Knowledge Barriers: https://forms.gle/MxRYtcpvMahYybcM7

Part II. Eligibility Barriers: https://forms.gle/RHQo92DedtddqyrJ7

Part III. Process Barriers: https://forms.gle/nAjUHKwKjmbKzXMZ9

Part IV. Effectiveness Barriers: https://forms.gle/t2iNh1RPJDPLDkXm7

Read more

Collateral Consequences in Occupational Licensing Act

We’ve noted in recent posts the numerous states that, just in the past three or four months, have enacted broad occupational licensing reforms affecting people with a criminal record.  Many of these new laws have been influenced by a model developed by the Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian public interest law firm that has been litigating and lobbying to reduce barriers to work for more than two decades.  In turn, states like Indiana, Kansas, Tennessee and Wisconsin have built upon IJ’s model to enact even more progressive schemes intended to ensure that people with the requisite professional qualifications will not be unfairly excluded based on a record of arrest or conviction.

Now IJ has incorporated many of these progressive refinements into its original model licensing law, the Occupational Licensing Review Act (OLRA), and broken out the provisions relating to criminal records into a free-standing model act specifically directed at managing collateral consequences in the occupational licensing context, the new Collateral Consequences in Occupational Licensing Act (CCOLA).

Read more

New expungement legislation: Maryland and Oklahoma

The trend toward expanding expungement and sealing laws is continuing.  In the last week of April, the governors of Maryland and Oklahoma signed bills enlarging eligibility criteria and reducing waiting periods, joining Florida and Utah with new record-sealing enactments in 2018.  The provisions of these two newest laws are described below.  Similar legislation is well along in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Vermont.  Vermont S 173, enrolled and awaiting the governor’s signature, is of particular interest since it makes expungement automatic in some categories without the requirement of a petition or filing fee (“unless either party objects in the interest of justice”).   We are tracking these pending bills and will add them to the Restoration of Rights Project if and when they are enacted.

Read more

More states facilitating licensing for people with a criminal record

Last week we posted a description of a detailed new Indiana law regulating consideration of conviction in occupational and professional licensure throughout the state.  It now appears that this may represent a trend, as eight additional states have either recently enacted or are poised to enact similarly progressive occupational licensing schemes.  New general laws regulating licensure are in place in Arizona, Illinois, and Massachusetts.  Similar bills have been enrolled and are on the governor’s desk for signature in Kansas, Maryland, Nebraska, and Tennessee.  Arizona’s new 2018 licensing law follows on another law passed in that state in 2017 that authorized provisional licenses for individuals with a criminal record.  Massachusett’s new licensing law is part of a more general criminal justice reform bill.   Delaware and Connecticut have also recently loosened restrictions on licensing for cosmetology and related professions.

The licensing reforms in these states – and in several other states where licensing bills are less far along toward enactment — seem to have been influenced by a model law proposed by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm.  Key features of the Model Occupational Licensing Review Act as they affect individuals with criminal records are 1) to provide individuals with an opportunity to seek a preliminary determination from the licensing agency as to whether their criminal record will be disqualifying; 2) to require licensing agencies to disqualify only if an applicant has been convicted of a felony or violent misdemeanor, and if the agency determines that “the state has an important interest in protecting public safety that is superior to the individual’s right to pursue a lawful occupation”; and 3) to require each agency to publish a report annually on the number of applicants with a criminal record seeking a license, the number of approvals and denials, and the type of offenses for each type of action.  Disqualification is justified under this model law only if the conviction is “substantially related to the state’s interest in protecting public safety,” and the individual will be “more likely to reoffend by having the license than by not having the license.”

The federal government is also encouraging licensing reform: the U.S. Department of Labor is supporting a three-year project to assist states improve their general policies and practices related to occupational licensing, including those that affect persons with a criminal record. The project brings together 11 states to participate in the Occupational Licensing Learning Consortium. The 11 states are Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Nevada, Utah and Wisconsin.

We are monitoring this legislative trend and will revise the state profiles and other materials in the Restoration of Rights Project as new laws are enacted.

 

A closer look at Indiana’s expungement law

More than four years ago, Indiana’s then-Governor Mike Pence signed into law what was at the time perhaps the Nation’s most comprehensive and elaborate scheme for restoring rights and status after conviction.  In the fall of 2014, as one of CCRC’s very first posts, Margaret Love published her interview with the legislator primarily responsible for its enactment, in which he shared details of his successful legislative strategy.  Later posts on this site reported on judicial interpretation of the law.  Since that time, a number of other states have enacted broad record-closing laws, including Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, New York, and most recently Illinois.

We have been impressed by the evident enthusiasm for Indiana’s “expungement” law within the state, from the courts, the bar, the advocacy community, and even from prosecutors.  So we thought it might be both interesting and useful to take a closer look at how the Indiana law has been interpreted and administered, how many people have taken advantage of it, and how effective it has been in facilitating opportunities for individuals with a criminal record, particularly in the workforce.  We also wanted to see what light this might shed on what has brought to the forefront of reform so many politically-conservative states.  Spoiler alert: the Chamber of Commerce was one of the strongest proponents of the law.

We expect to be able to post our account of the Indiana expungement law shortly after Labor Day.  In the meantime, we thought it might be useful to reprint our 2014 interview with former Rep. Jud McMillan, which has been among our most viewed posts.

Read more

Illinois enacts boadest sealing law in Nation

On Fiday Illinois governor Bruce Rauner signed into law what appears to be the broadest sealing law in the United States, covering almost all felonies and requiring a relatively short eligibility waiting period of three years. We expect to provide a more in-depth discussion of the law next week from practitioners working on the ground in the state, and will soon update the Illinois Restoration of Rights Project profile to reflect these important changes.  In the meantime, we share the following from Cabrini Green Legal Aid, which was among the organizations that helped push the legislation through.

This afternoon, Governor Bruce Rauner signed into law six pieces of legislation that impact people with arrest and conviction records, including HB 2373 – the sealing expansion bill. This marks the LARGEST expansion of a sealing law in the United States and is a huge win in criminal justice reform. Effective immediately, this new law will provide thousands of people in Illinois the opportunity for criminal records relief by allowing them to petition the court to remove barriers in their lives as a result of their past criminal record. On behalf of our partners with the Restoring Rights and Opportunities Coalition of Illinois (RROCI),* Cabrini Green Legal Aid (CGLA) appreciates the support and involvement of so many of you who took action making phone calls, sending emails and traveling to Springfield.

Read more

New research report: Four Years of Second Chance Reforms, 2013-2016

Introduction

4 year report coverSince 2013, almost every state has taken at least some steps to chip away at the negative effects of a criminal record on an individual’s ability to earn a living, access housing, education and public benefits, and otherwise fully participate in civil society.  It has not been an easy task, in part because of the volume and complexity of state and federal laws imposing collateral consequences.  To encourage employers and other decision-makers to give convicted individuals a fair chance, some states have enacted or modified judicial restoration mechanisms like expungement, sealing, and certificates of relief.  Others have extended nondiscrimination laws, limited criminal record inquiries, and facilitated front-end opportunities to avoid conviction.

In partnership with the NACDL Restoration of Rights Project, the CCRC maintains a comprehensive and current state-by-state guide to mechanisms for restoration of rights and status after conviction.  As a part of keeping that resource up to date, we have inventoried measures enacted and policies adopted by states in the past four years to mitigate or avoid the disabling effects of a criminal record, and present it here as a snapshot of an encouraging national trend.

Read more

Illinois health care licenses elude those with records

2000px-Seal_of_Illinois.svgThe Illinois legislature has been generally progressive in enacting measures to help people with a criminal record avoid being stigmatized for life.  In 2003, as a state senator, President Obama sponsored one of the earliest of these measures, authorizing courts to grant certificates relieving collateral consequences. In 2011, however, Illinois took several steps backwards when it enacted legislation automatically barring some criminal record holders from ever working in a variety of licensed health care fields.  The law has since become the subject of litigation and further legislation that leaves many would-be medical licensees to face an uncertain future.

What follows is a description of the law’s enactment, subsequent court challenges, and potential legislative fixes.

Read more

New York Times editors question efficacy of expungement laws

In an editorial titled “Job Hunting With a Criminal Record,” the editors of the New York Times tackle the problem of employment discrimination against the estimated 70 million Americans who “carry the burden of a criminal record.”  They question the efficacy of expungement and other popular “forgetting” strategies for dealing with employer aversion to risk, preferring the “longer term” approach of “a change in attitudes about people with criminal records.”

The editorial points out that expungement laws typically apply only to “relatively minor transgressions,” require lengthy waiting periods, and include “significant exceptions” (e.g., they don’t apply to jobs and licenses requiring a background check, a large and growing segment of the labor market). In addition, “trying to keep anything secret in the 21st century is no sure thing.”  Finally, “record-sealing laws do not and cannot address the underlying problem of overcriminalization.”

Read more

Forgiving v. forgetting: A new redemption tool

Read more

1 2