More than 600,000 people return to their communities each year after serving time in state and federal prisons, as do nearly nine million people from the nation’s jails. Another more than 2.5 million people complete parole or probation. A conviction history carries negative consequences for people reentering their communities and reuniting with their families, often in the form of barriers to pivotal aspects of establishing successful lives, including getting jobs, securing stable housing, and going to school.
Due in part to the difficulty of overcoming these barriers, five out of six people who have spent time in a state prison will be arrested for a new crime within nine years of their release. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle supported policies this year that were designed to improve reentry outcomes, such as the federal FIRST STEP Act, which incentivizes education and recidivism-reduction programs for people in federal prisons. Access to postsecondary education, both during and after incarceration, expanded; more than a million people who had been disenfranchised because of felony convictions regained the right to vote in Florida; and 14 states enacted laws easing occupational licensing restrictions on people with criminal records.
In fact, a report by the Collateral Consequence Resource Center called 2018 “the high point of recent state efforts to restore rights and status to people with a criminal record.” Nineteen states enacted laws making it easier for people to seal and expunge their criminal records—including a first-of-its-kind law in Pennsylvania that automatically seals some records after 10 years. And, with the labor pool shrinking as unemployment drops, more companies recognized the benefits of hiring formerly incarcerated people. Several California counties reduced, eliminated, or even refunded fees for justice system involvement—and the state began reviewing old marijuana convictions for possible expungement.