Category: Housing

National maps on expungement, pardoning, and voting rights restoration

The Collateral Consequences Resource Center is pleased to unveil six new maps that visualize the Center’s research on national laws and policies for restoring rights and opportunities to people with a record. These maps are now available below and on the 50-state comparison pages (expungement, sealing & other record relief; civil rights; and pardoning). Each state can be clicked for a detailed summary of state law and policy. The Center will keep these maps updated, along with the rest of the Restoration of Rights Project, with future changes to the law.

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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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New fair chance employment and housing laws in 2021

In the first half of 2021, two states enacted major laws significantly expanding protections against discrimination based on criminal record: Illinois in the area of employment and New Jersey in housing decisions. Several other states also enacted new laws regulating consideration of criminal records in employment and housing, which are summarized below. Fair chance employment On March 23, 2021, Illinois Governor Pritzker signed into law HR1480, a major expansion of the Illinois Human Rights Act to add a new section prohibiting discrimination in employment based on criminal record. Unless otherwise authorized by law, it is a civil rights violation for any employer, employment agency or labor organization to use a conviction record as a basis to refuse to hire or to take any other adverse action unless: 1) there is a substantial relationship between one or more of the previous criminal offenses and the employment sought or held, or 2) the granting or continuation of the employment would involve a public safety risk. “Substantial relationship” means that the position offers the opportunity for the same or a similar offense to occur and “whether the circumstances leading to the conduct for which the person was convicted will recur in the employment […]

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New Jersey puts “fair chance housing” on the national agenda

People with a record frequently experience challenges in obtaining or maintaining housing. For those who have been incarcerated, on supervision, charged, and/or arrested, the background check for rental applications can be a persistent obstacle. Lack of stable housing is a major roadblock to successful reintegration into the community or the pursuit of social and economic opportunities. It is therefore encouraging that states have begun to enact laws limiting record-based disqualifications in housing decisions. On June 18, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed into law the Fair Chance in Housing Act, the most rigorous state legislation to date limiting consideration of criminal records in housing decisions. During a ceremony to commemorate Juneteenth, he described the new law as a step to “level what has been for too long an uneven playing field when it comes to access to housing,” explaining that it will bar landlords from asking about criminal history in most instances. The NAACP New Jersey State Conference, Latino Action Network, Fair Share Housing Center, and New Jersey Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism led organizational advocacy for the measure. Senator Troy Singleton, one of the bill’s primary sponsors, cited the “staggering amount of data on the national level that […]

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