By Margaret Love & David Schlussel

This Report Card supplements our recently published 50-state report, “The Many Roads to Reintegration,” a survey of U.S. laws aimed at restoring rights and opportunities after arrest or conviction. That report includes topical essays covering voting and firearms rights, an array of record relief remedies, and consideration of criminal record in employment and occupational licensing. The “Many Roads” report assigned to each state, D.C., and the federal system a grade for nine different types of restoration laws: (1) loss and restoration of voting rights (2) pardon (3) felony expungement, sealing & set-aside (“felony relief”) (4) misdemeanor expungement, sealing & set-aside (“misdemeanor relief”) (5) non-conviction relief (6) deferred adjudication (7) judicial certificates of relief (8) employment (9) occupational licensing. Using these grades, we produced an overall ranking of the states and D.C.* In this Report Card we provide the grades and rankings in an easily digestible form. We also provide a brief narrative summary of how each state’s law stacks up in the different categories. Our hope is that these summaries will suggest ways in which a state might improve its laws and hence its ranking. An appendix collects all the grades and rankings. Finally, we emphasize once again that our grades are based solely on the text of each state’s law, leaving more nuanced judgments about their actual operation to practitioners, researchers, and the law’s intended beneficiaries. We expect to look more closely at the operation of some of the record relief laws in the near future, and

Washington, DC: Collateral Consequences Resource Center (CCRC), 2020. 61p.

By Margaret Love & Rob Poggenklass

At the beginning of each year since 2017, CCRC has issued a report on legislative enactments in the year just ended, new laws 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 annual reports document the steady progress of what our 2020 report characterized as “a full-fledged law reform movement” aimed at restoring rights and dignity to individuals who have successfully navigated the criminal law system. In the three years between 2019 and 2021, more than 400 new record reforms were enacted. Many states enacted new laws every year, and all but two states enacted at least one significant new law during this period. A full appreciation of the scope of this movement can be gained by reviewing the detailed 50-state charts and state-by-state profiles in our Restoration of Rights Project. The modern law reform movement reflected in our annual reports is bipartisan, grounded in and inspired by the circumstance that almost a third of adults in the United States now have a criminal record, entangling them in a web of legal restrictions and discrimination that permanently excludes them from full participation in the community. It reflects a public recognition that the “internal exile” of such a significant portion of society is not only unsafe and unfair, but it is also profoundly inefficient. We are pleased to present our report on new laws enacted in 2022, titled The Frontiers of Dignity: Clean Slate and Other Criminal Record Reforms in 2022. While this report shows that the legislative momentum gathering since 2018 slowed somewhat in the past year, there has still been progress, with more new laws enacted this year than in 2018 when the current reform movement took off in earnest.

Washington, DC: Collateral Consequences Resource Center, 2023. 43p.