Category: Policy

Justice Department will enforce limits on landlord background checks

Earlier this year the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued new guidance asserting that housing policies that exclude people with criminal records may violate the non-discrimination provisions of the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA) if they fail to consider the nature, severity, and recency of criminal conduct and if they are not narrowly tailored to protect residents or property.  The Justice Department has taken the first step toward judicial enforcement of this guidance. On October 18 the Department’s Civil Rights Division filed a Statement of Interest in Fortune Society v. Sandcastle Towers Housing Development, a federal civil rights suit brought in the Eastern District of…

Read more

Illinois health care licenses elude those with records

The 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…

Read more

Judge Gleeson to speak about collateral consequences

Capitalizing on the growing interest in the employment discrimination faced by people with a criminal record, Cornell University’s ILR School will host a program next month featuring Judge John Gleeson on “The Role of Courts in Managing Collateral Consequences.”  Details of the program, which will take place in Manhattan on September 29, are here.  Last year, Judge Gleeson expunged the conviction of a woman he had sentenced 13 years before, and later issued a “federal certificate of rehabilitation” to one of the woman’s codefendants. While the 2nd Circuit recently reversed Judge Gleeson’s expungement order, the government did not appeal his certificate order….

Read more

“Racial profiling in hiring: A critique of new ban-the-box studies”

In June we covered two recent studies that concluded ban-the-box policies tend to decrease minority hiring because some employers use race as a proxy for criminal history.  In other words, in the absence of information about applicants’ criminal history, some employers assume that minority applicants have a record and exclude them on this assumption.  The result is that ban-the-box policies increase opportunities for whites with a criminal record but decrease them overall for minorities, and thus encourage unlawful discrimination.  Some observers, including one of the study authors, advocated for the repeal of ban-the-box policies based on those conclusions.  Last week, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) published…

Read more

New reports document federal progress on collateral consequences

The Presidential Memorandum that formally established the Reentry Council in April 2016 mandated a report documenting the Council’s accomplishments to date and plans moving forward.  The resulting report, The Federal Interagency Reentry Council: A Record of Progress and a Roadmap for the Future, was issued today. Also today the White House issued a fact sheet with new commitments to the Fair Chance Business Pledge. Finally, the Justice Department released a National Reentry Week After Action Report.  We will be taking a close look at these reports on the federal government’s recent efforts to address collateral consequences, and expect to post…

Read more