Category: Juveniles

Legislative Report Card: “The Reintegration Agenda During Pandemic”

CCRC’s new report documents legislative efforts in 2020 to reduce the barriers faced by people with a criminal record in the workplace, at the ballot box, and in many other areas of daily life. In total, 32 states, D.C., and the federal government enacted 106 bills, approved 5 ballot initiatives, and issued 4 executive orders to restore rights and opportunities to people with a record.

Our Legislative Report Card recognizes the most (and least) productive state legislatures last year. Hands down, Michigan was the Reintegration Champion of 2020 with 26 new record reform laws, while Utah was runner-up, and seven other states were commended for their work.

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“The Reintegration Agenda During Pandemic: Criminal Record Reforms in 2020”

In each of the past five years, CCRC has issued an end-of-year report on legislative efforts to reduce the barriers faced by people with a criminal record in the workplace, at the ballot box, and in many other areas of daily life.[i] These reports document the progress of what has become a full-fledged law reform movement to restore individuals’ rights and status following their navigation of the criminal law system.

Our 2020 report, linked here, shows a continuation of this legislative trend. While fewer states enacted fewer laws in 2020 than in the preceding two years, evidently because of the disruptions caused by the pandemic, the fact that there was still considerable progress is testament to a genuine and enduring public commitment to a reintegration agenda.

In 2020, 32 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government enacted 106 legislative bills, approved 5 ballot initiatives, and issued 4 executive orders to restore rights and opportunities to people with a criminal record.

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“The Many Roads to Reintegration”: A 50-state report on laws restoring rights and opportunities

We are pleased to release a new report describing the present landscape of laws in the United States aimed at restoring rights and opportunities after an arrest or conviction. This report, titled The Many Roads to Reintegration, is an update and refresh of our previous national survey, last revised in 2018.

The report covers voting and firearms rights, an array of record relief remedies such as expungement and pardon, and consideration of criminal record in employment and occupational licensing.

In each section of the report we assign a grade to each state for each type of relief. We collate these grades to produce an overall ranking on the nine categories that we graded. That ranking is reproduced below.

We are encouraged by the amazing progress that has been made in the past few years toward neutralizing the effect of a criminal record since the present reform era got underway less than a decade ago. The last two years in particular have produced a bumper crop of new laws in almost every U.S. jurisdiction.

Some of our top performers have been long-time leaders in promoting reintegration, including Illinois, Utah, and Minnesota. But some of the most progressive lawmaking has come from states newer to the field, like Nevada, Colorado, and North Dakota. These and the other states in our Top Ten set an example that we hope will inspire other jurisdictions in the months and years to come.

The executive summary of the report is reprinted below. The full report is available in PDF and HTML formats.

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California becomes third state to adopt “clean slate” record relief

On October 8, Governor Newsom signed into law AB 1076, the so-called “Clean Slate Act,” authorizing automatic record relief in the form of set-aside or sealing for individuals with certain convictions and arrests under California law.  The new law supplements but does not supplant the existing system of petition-based relief, and applies to convictions and arrests occurring after the bill’s effective date of January 1, 2021.  Eligibility for automatic relief under the new law is similar to but not precisely coincident with eligibility under existing law.  The new law also for the first time prohibits courts and the state repository from disclosing information about conviction records that have been granted relief, except where specifically authorized, whether under the new automatic process or the older petition-based system.

California is now the third state to adopt general “clean slate” record relief, after Pennsylvania (2018) and Utah (2019).  While the automatic feature of the new law has prospective effect only, its limits on disclosure will, when effective, apply to all conviction records that have at any time been dismissed or set aside, whether automatically or by petition, as well as to all arrests and other non-conviction records that have been sealed.  The specific features of AB 1076 are described in detail in the following comment posted on October 3.

Governor Newsom also on October 8 signed two other bills that affect collateral consequences:  SB 310 amends Section 203 of California’s Code of Civil Procedure to make people convicted of a felony eligible to serve of a trial jury unless incarcerated or under supervision, or required to register as a sex offender based upon a felony conviction; and AB 1394 repeals a law requiring that juveniles pay a fee to have their records sealed.

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“Invisible Stripes: The Problem of Youth Criminal Records”

This is the title of a paper by Professor Judith McMullen of Marquette University Law School.  Professor McMullen points out that “the efforts of today’s young people to ‘go straight’ are hampered by nearly unlimited online access to records of even the briefest of encounters with law enforcement, even if those encounters did not result in conviction.”  She argues that “we need to restrict access to and use of information about contacts that offenders under the age of 21 have had with the criminal justice system.”

CCRC’s forthcoming study of how jurisdictions manage non-conviction records underscores the points made in this article.  It may come as a surprise to many that few jurisdictions automatically limit public access to and use of non-conviction records, and in fact many facilitate both through mass on-line posting of records – including arrests that never result in charges.  Even states that authorize courts to seal or expunge non-conviction records frequently impose daunting barriers to this relief, including financial barriers.  A decision of the Iowa Supreme Court last month, upholding a law conditioning expungement of dismissed charges on an indigent defendant’s payment of court-appointed attorney fees, vividly illustrates this access to justice problem that squarely frustrates efforts at reintegration.  There are a number of studies underway of the adverse effect of court debt on reentry, but none that we know of linking court debt to the operation of “clean slate” laws.

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