Category: Criminal Records

“Future Interrupted”: The collateral damage of juvenile adjudications

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1.5 million children are arrested each year. At some point in each of these children’s lives, the record of their arrest or court involvement will impose barriers to education and employment.  At least two-thirds of post-secondary institutions conduct background checks of prospective students. More than 90% of employers conduct background checks. And, many licensed occupations and professions require FBI background checks. Yet, the reality is, these background checks are often incomplete or inaccurate and they are always stigmatizing.

The justice system has long recognized that children are different from adults, and historically the public had little or no access to the records of juvenile adjudications. That is no longer the case.  The effect of juvenile records now punish kids well into adulthood.

Juvenile Law Center’s recent policy paper, Future Interrupted, urges that children must be free to grow up unfettered by their childhood mistakes—to have their court involvement remain in the past so they can move forward with their lives. This paper explores how various background check systems disseminate juvenile record information, using real-life stories from youth to illustrate the devastating effects of record retention and dissemination.

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New federal screening requirements for child care workers

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Child care workers in every state are subject to rigorous criminal background checks that may result in mandatory bars to employment. Until now, each state has been generally free to define its own standards regarding screening for criminal history. That is about to change.

By September of next year, states receiving funds under the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Act of 2014 (which appropriates over $ 2.5 billion each year to fund state child care and child welfare programs) must adopt minimum federally-defined screening standards for child care workers or risk loss of funding. The revised statutory standards subject current and prospective child care workers to a multi-level criminal background check and disqualify from employment anyone convicted of crimes against children, specified violent crimes, and drug crimes within the past 5 years.  States may opt to waive the disqualification for drug crimes on a case-by-case basis, but they are also free to adopt conviction-based disqualifications that are more restrictive than the law requires.

If the new CCDBG standards were not bad enough, the Department of Health and Human Services has issued proposed rules that would make them worse.  On Monday, the CCRC joined a coalition of organizations led by the National Employment Law Project in calling on HHS to rethink proposed rules that would implement the new screening requirements. A formal comment filed by the coalition details the ways in which the proposed rules fail to adequately address the disparate impact that the requirements could have on women, African Americans, and Latinos, and takes issue with requirements in the rules that are more exclusionary than the Act requires. Read more

50-state guide to expungement and sealing laws

The 50-state chart of judicial relief mechanisms from the NACDL Restoration of Rights Resource, which is also posted on this site, is a comprehensive survey of all authorities for judicial relief in the states and federal system. We wanted to bring it to our readers’ attention in light of the new federal interest in helping individuals with a criminal record overcome barriers to employment and licensing through clearing their records.

The National Clean Slate Clearinghouse, recently announced as part of President Obama’s reentry initiative, will “provide technical assistance to local legal aid programs, public defender offices, and reentry service providers to build capacity for legal services needed to help with record-cleaning, expungement, and related civil legal services.” This joint project of the Labor and Justice Departments will doubtless make it a first priority to survey the laws providing judicial and other relief in different states, to determine what sort of assistance lawyers will need to neutralize the adverse employment consequences of conviction, though the courts or otherwise.  We hope these resources will prove useful in that effort.

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How a parent’s criminal record limits children

reportcover“The barriers associated with having a criminal record do not just result in lifelong punishment for the parent with the record; they also can significantly limit a child’s life chances.” This is according to a new report by the Center for American Progress that examines the multi-generational effects of collateral consequences and the cycle of poverty and lost opportunity that those consequences perpetuate.

A parent’s criminal record can affect everything from a child’s emotional and physical well-being to future economic and educational outcomes.  This is true even if the record was for a minor conviction that did not result in incarceration or, in some cases, an arrest that did not result in conviction at all.

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Medicare Employment Exclusions and Criminal Records: Good and Bad News

Yvelisse Pelotte, a staff attorney at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, has drafted a survey and analysis of the barriers to employment in Medicare-funded programs and facilities for people with a criminal record, which is posted below.  While some of these exclusions are short-term and others can be waived by the Secretary of HHS, the statute gives HHS a great deal of latitude in extending exclusions for a lengthy period of time.

The applicable federal statute also contains a very broad definition of disqualifying conviction, specifically extending to expunged convictions and guilty pleas not resulting in conviction.  This means that federal law effectively puts off limits a very large segment of health care jobs, at least temporarily, for people with criminal records the state no longer regards as serious, if it ever did.

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Employment bars in long-term health care facilities declared unconstitutional

A few days ago we received the following communique from Sharon Dietrich of Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, announcing a major litigation victory that will be welcome news across the country.  On December 30 a unanimous 7-judge appeals court struck down the provisions of the Pennsylvania Older Americans Protective Services Act barring employment of people with criminal records in long-term health care facilities such as nursing homes and home health care agencies.  The provisions declared unconstitutional on due process grounds law include lifetime employment bans for offenses as minor as misdemeanor theft, which Sharon notes “prevented many Pennsylvanians with criminal records from working in that entire burgeoning field.”  The decision in Peake v. Commonwealth is here, and NPR’s report on the decision is here.

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Criminal records and immigration in Europe and the U.S.

What are the emerging trends in Europe and the United States in considering a person’s past criminal record for purposes of travel, work and residency?  Professor James Jacobs of NYU Law School and three co-authors have just posted on SSRN a fascinating article titled Criminal Records and Immigration:  Comparing the United States and the European Union.   Research for the article, which will be published in the Fordham International Law Journal, shows that EU countries tend to focus primarily on public safety concerns in deciding the relevance of a criminal record for immigration purposes, including travel to and within the EU.  In contrast, the United States treats criminal record as “an indelible mark of bad character” that has become “the most important determinant of who is admitted to the country, who is removed, and who is offered the privileges of citizenship.”

While many U.S. practitioners and scholars are familiar with the ways a criminal record can affect a non-citizen’s right to enter and remain in this country, they will be interested to learn more about the complex and nuanced way that a criminal record can affect immigration to as well as travel and work within the European Union and its constituent countries. The authors ask the question whether increasing efficiency in access to criminal records in the EU will bring its laws and policies closer to those of the U.S.

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President issues order announcing reentry initiatives

On November 2, the President issued an executive order announcing a series of steps to encourage reentry and rehabilitation of individuals who have recently been released from prison.  Among other things, the order establishes a National Clean Slate Clearinghouse, and authorizes technical assistance to legal aid programs and public defender offices “to build capacity for legal services needed to help with record-cleaning, expungement, and related civil legal services.”

According to an article in the New York Times, the measures

are all relatively modest in scale, important to the president less for their individual effect than for the direction they keep the country moving. Collectively, they reflect a belief that former inmates should have greater leeway to apply for jobs and housing without disclosing criminal records that would hinder their chances.

The order also calls on Congress to establish a ban-the-box program for federal employers and contractors.  In the interim, it asks the Office of Personnel Management to “take action where it can by modifying its rules to delay inquiries into criminal history until later in the hiring process.”  Presumably this means at a minimum that OPM should eliminate the criminal history question on its “Declaration for Federal Employment” form.  However, the order stops well short of recommending the more progressive steps proposed in a National Employment law Project report issued last January, including the revision of the federal “suitability” regulations to comply fully with the protections of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

We will shortly take a closer look at this new federal initiative to blunt the impact of collateral consequences.  For now, we post the text of the entire order.  Read more

Another federal expungement case from Brooklyn – is this the beginning of a trend?

On October 8, a former chief judge of the Eastern District of New York held that he was “constrained by controlling precedent” to deny the expungement petition of a woman who feared that her 23-year-old fraud conviction would prevent her from obtaining a nurse’s license.  See Stephenson v. United States, No. 10-MC-712.  Judge Raymond Dearie declined to find the “extreme circumstances” warranting expungement under Second Circuit precedent, noting that the petitioner before him was fully employed and that her aspiration to become a nurse was realistic, in light of the protection afforded her by New York’s nondiscrimination laws.  He proposed that his own willingness to certify her rehabilitation could help satisfy the “good moral character” standard for a nursing license. (Could this be the sort of “certificate of rehabilitation” contemplated by Judge John Gleeson in his second Jane Doe expungement case?  If so, it would seem to require no specific statutory authority for him to issue it to an individual he sentenced, no matter how long ago.)

Judge Dearie contrasted the case before him with the one in which Judge Gleeson ordered expungement in May, where the petitioner’s criminal record was having “a dramatic adverse impact on her ability to work,” citing Jane Doe I at *5.   The government has appealed Judge Gleeson’s expungement order.

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“Old Writ Could Give Ex-Offenders a New Start”

Joe Palazzolo has posted at the Wall Street Journal Blog an article describing an amicus brief filed yesterday in United States v. Jane Doe (Jane Doe II), one of two federal expungement cases before Judge John Gleeson that we’ve been following.  Argument in Jane Doe II is now scheduled for October 26.  (The government has appealed Judge Gleeson’s May 21 expungement order in Jane Doe I to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.)  The brief begins like this:

This Court invited the views of Amica on the Court’s authority to issue “a certificate of rehabilitation in lieu of expungement” and the appropriateness of issuing such a certificate in this case. While there is no federal statute that authorizes a court to issue relief styled as a “certificate of rehabilitation,” Amica wishes to bring to the Court’s attention two mechanisms, each perhaps underappreciated but with deep historical roots, by which the Court may recognize an individual’s rehabilitation and otherwise address issues such as those raised by petitioner’s case. The first is by exercising its statutory authority to issue a writ of audita querela, which is available in extraordinary circumstances under the All Writs Act, 28 U.S.C. §1651, to grant a measure of relief from the collateral consequences of conviction. The second is by recommending to the President that he grant clemency.

The blog post describing the brief is reprinted in full after the jump.

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