Page 14 - Delaware Lawyer - Summer 2019

FEATURE
Karen Lantz
and Lisa Minutola
Why
The injustice of collateral consequences
A job, a safe place to live, a chance at a college degree or entry into a skilled trade. These are pieces of the “American Dream” that we like to believe are available to anyone who works for them, but they remain forever out of reach for many people who have come into contact with the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems.
12 DELAWARE LAWYER SPRING 2019
Even a brief, isolated encounter with these systems brings a lifetime of bar- riers and exclusions — or “collateral
consequences” — that persist no matter how committed a person is to staying on the right side of the law and no matter how much time has passed since they served their formal sentence.
Over 500 explicit legal consequences can flow from a criminal conviction in Delaware. This jarring statistic was de- veloped as part of a 2014 project by the Criminal Justice Section of the Ameri- can Bar Association, which collected the statutory and regulatory consequences of criminal convictions, and catalogued them in a searchable database called the National Inventory of Collateral Conse- quences of Conviction. The database in- ventories federal and state laws and regu- lations that create barriers to education,
employment, housing, credit and other
opportunities for those individuals who
1
have a conviction on their record. When
federal statutes are included, the barriers number 1,507.2 And that is only a tally of explicit barriers – it does not attempt to catalog the continuing stigma around a criminal record that makes the applicant with a record less likely to be successful than one without.
Records of arrests can be as devas- tating as conviction. A criminal-history background check in Delaware will in- clude records of arrests, even if the charg- es were dropped, the person was acquit- ted, or the case otherwise resolved in the defendant’s favor. Further, Delaware is among the states that allow employers to ask applicants to disclose their criminal records on job applications. Delaware en- acted “ban the box” legislation on May
the American Dream Is Out of Reach