unemployment rate for people with records was in the double digits, while the overall unemployment rate was 3 to 4 percent. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the prepandemic U.S.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic downturn, workers with criminal records were already facing a permanent recession of their own. The legacy of incarceration is also distributed unevenly among white, Black, and Latino children: Approximately 1 in 9 Black children and 1 in 28 Latino children have an incarcerated parent, compared with roughly 1 in 57 white children. 5 The economic barriers associated with a parent’s record function as what child development experts call an “adverse childhood experience,” jeopardizing children’s cognitive development, school performance, educational attainment, and even their earnings and employment in adulthood. children now have at least one parent with a record.

A prior analysis by the Center for American Progress found that nearly half of U.S.

The consequences ripple forward generationally, with a host of far-reaching negative impacts on families and children. Black, Indigenous, and Latino people are disproportionately criminalized and more likely to have a record and be treated unfairly across society because of it. 4 As Michelle Alexander argued in her watershed tome The New Jim Crow, mass incarceration and its often lifelong collateral consequences serve as core underpinnings of the fabric of structural racism that defines much of 21st century American society. A recent study by the Brennan Center found that people who have been incarcerated see their subsequent earnings reduced by an average of 52 percent, with an average lifetime earnings loss of nearly half a million dollars in the aggregate, people with criminal convictions face lost wages in excess of $372 billion every year.

Decades of biased policing and charging have resulted in people of color disproportionately bearing the brunt of mass incarceration and overcriminalization in the United States, and likewise, the criminal records crisis has also exacerbated stark levels of racial inequality. Black, Indigenous, and Latino communities have been particularly harmed by the dramatic increase in the number of people with records.

Clean slate act