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 again in 2021. The title of this post introduces our annual report on new laws enacted during the past year, and emphasizes the continuum from reentry (for those who go to jail or prison) to the full restoration of rights and status represented by reintegration. Recent research indicates that most people with a conviction never have a second one, and that the likelihood of another conviction declines rapidly as more time passes. The goal of full reintegration is thus both an economic and moral imperative. In the past year the bipartisan commitment to a reintegration agenda has seemed more than […]

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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, employers and others tend to interpret background checks as overstating the risk posed by someone who in fact may have been living in the community for years without criminal incident, and is unlikely to become criminally involved again. In Providing Another Chance: Resetting Recidivism Risk in Criminal Background Checks, Shawn Bushway and his RAND colleagues argue that risk should instead be measured at the time a background check is conducted, after an individual has had an opportunity to demonstrate their ability to reintegrate lawfully as well as their propensity to reoffend.  They label this the “reset principle,” and argue that this […]

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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 of a criminal record, plus more than a dozen additional executive actions and ballot initiatives.

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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, the ProPublica study concluded that “White criminals seeking presidential pardons over the past decade have been nearly four times as likely to succeed as minorities” while “Blacks have had the poorest chance” of receiving a pardon. In a 224-page statistical analysis of how pardon petitions were evaluated by the Office of the Pardon Attorney (OPA) between 2001 and 2012, the RAND researchers “[did] not find statistically significant evidence that there are racial differences in the rates at which black and white petitioners receive [favorable] pardon recommendations.” (Note that sentence commutations were not a part of the RAND study.)  At the […]

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