Category: News

CCRC seeking a Deputy Director

The Collateral Consequences Resource Center is seeking an enterprising and committed individual with strong technical skills to serve as its Deputy Director. The incumbent will work with the Executive Director in all aspects of CCRC’s program, and will have primary responsibility for maintaining the Restoration of Rights Project (RRP), including its various derivative reports for which CCRC is best known. The RRP is a unique national inventory of laws and practices relating to restoration of rights and criminal record relief in each U.S. jurisdiction, which attracts thousands of visits to the CCRC website each day. Keeping the RRP current in real time requires strong research skills, patience and attention to detail in analyzing complex statutes, and a passion for issues relating to restoration of rights after arrest or conviction. In producing the annual reports on new legislation and issue-specific analyses of current trends, the Deputy Director will have an incomparable opportunity to guide the development of public policy in this important emerging area of the law.  The incumbent will participate in other aspects of CCRC’s work, including the development of policy on federal programs that support entrepreneurs with a criminal history, and will have opportunities to publish scholarly articles and participate in academic […]

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CCRC’s First Newsletter

Dear Subscribers, We write with an update on our continued work to promote public discussion of restoration of rights and opportunities for people with a record. Highlights from this year’s work are summarized below, including roundups of new legislation, case studies on barriers to expungement, policy recommendations, and a new “fair chance lending” project to reduce criminal history barriers to government-supported loans to small businesses. We thank you for your interest and invite your comments as our work progresses.

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Second Chance Month: A Federal Reintegration Agenda

In 2017, Prison Fellowship declared April Second Chance Month for the first time. The designation has since gained support from Congress, the White House, state and local bodies, and nongovernmental organizations, as an opportunity to raise awareness about the collateral consequences of arrest or conviction along with the importance of providing second-chance opportunities for people with a record to reintegrate into society. CCRC’s flagship resource, the Restoration of Rights Project provides 50-state resources detailing current law and practice for four types of second-chance remedies: (1) restoration of civil and firearms rights; (2) pardoning; (3) expungement, sealing, and other record relief; and (4) limits on consideration of criminal records in employment and occupational licensing. Our annual reports on new legislation document the astonishing pace of state reform action on these issue since 2013. We are proud to see these resources utilized by impacted individuals, attorneys, advocates, journalists, scholars, lawmakers, courts, and others to understand second-chance remedies, pursue relief, and bring about reforms. President Biden’s Proclamation on Second Chance Month declares that the criminal justice system must offer “meaningful opportunities for redemption and rehabilitation”: Every person leaving incarceration should have housing, the opportunity at a decent job, and health care. A person’s […]

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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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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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