Category: Reports

“From Reentry to Reintegration: Criminal Record Reforms in 2021”

At the beginning of each year since 2017, CCRC has issued a report on legislation enacted in the past year that is aimed at reducing the barriers faced by people with a criminal record in the workplace, at the ballot box, and in many other areas of daily life. These reports have documented the steady progress of what last year’s report characterized as “a full-fledged law reform movement” aimed at restoring rights and status to individuals who have successfully navigated the criminal law system. The legislative momentum, which slowed a bit during the first year of the pandemic, picked up…

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A radical new approach to measuring recidivism risk

NOTE: This post has been updated as of 4/2 to incorporate additional research. Researchers at the RAND Corporation have proposed a radical new approach to measuring recidivism risk that raises questions about decades of received truth about the prevalence of reoffending after people leave prison.  At least since the 1990s, the Bureau of Justice Statistics has measured risk of recidivism at the time of a person’s last interaction with the justice system, when the statistical cohort includes many who are frequent participants in the criminal system as well as those for whom it is a one-time affair.  As a result,…

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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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Reintegration reform returns to pre-pandemic levels in first half of 2021

This year is proving to be a landmark one for legislation restoring rights and opportunities to people with a criminal record, extending the remarkable era of “reintegration reform” that began around 2013. Just in the past six months, 30 states and the District of Columbia have enacted an extraordinary 101 new laws to mitigate collateral consequences. Six more bills await a governor’s signature.  It appears that legislative momentum in support of facilitating reintegration has returned to the pre-pandemic pace of 2019. Overall, the past 30 months have produced an astonishing total of 361 laws aimed at neutralizing the adverse effect…

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Study reveals potential for racial bias in presidential pardon process

Last week the RAND Corporation published its long-awaited Statistical Analysis of Presidential Pardons, commissioned in 2012 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics to determine whether the Justice Department process for deciding who to recommend for a presidential pardon is tainted with “systematic” racial bias. The RAND study appears to have been a direct response to an investigative report published jointly in December 2011 by ProPublica and the Washington Post, which concluded based on an examination of pardon cases granted and denied during the administration of George W. Bush, that race was “one of the strongest predictors of a pardon.” Specifically,…

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