Reforms of Policy Barriers to Positive & Productive Community Engagement of Individuals with Felony Histories

Over the past four decades, civil disability policies have proliferated throughout the United States in tandem with the rising use of criminal sanction as social policy. There are currently more than 45,000 different state and federal statutes that impose a type of civil disability on individuals with a felony conviction. This preliminary report provides a brief overview of the reform efforts that have thus far been enacted, but not introduced, to either eliminate or ameliorate existing civil disability policies at the state level between 2010 and 2017. The first section of the report includes a state-level analysis of the reforms. Next, the second section takes an aggregate view of the reform efforts organized by United States Census regions and divisions. Lastly, an overall review of reform types is presented to identify those reforms with either high or low momentum.