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.