In this third post about the Final Stage Reentry Project, we focus on the impact expungement has on housing and on identity and overall life satisfaction. Despite our hypothesis that a clear record would clear the way for housing and happiness, expungement once again had no impact. We dig into these results and the potential reasons for the findings.
Would-be criminal justice system reformers have long believed that a criminal record inhibits the search for secure employment, housing, and life happiness, and those problems in turn lead to increased recidivism. For reformers, the answer to these challenges has been some kind of criminal justice record clearing. But that theory has only some evidence to support it. In this first of three posts, the A2J Lab dives into its long-running randomized controlled trial in Kansas studying expungement’s impact on reentry outcomes.
Rogers hearings, the Massachusetts ruling designed to protect patient autonomy in involuntary psychiatric treatment, often cause harmful delays in treatment. Two reforms that propose shifting responsibility to Administrative Law Judges and to mental health professionals respectively, however, could help bring timely treatment and better advocacy.
The Access to Justice Lab published a newly released study of Washington, D.C. mothers involved in Child Protective Services demonstrating that government-funded child welfare programs are effective in reducing child neglect cases by prioritizing economic support to overcome conditions caused by poverty.
Conducting randomized control trials in the law can be a decade-long (or longer) process. Our “Child Welfare” project evaluates whether families with children who face poverty-related legal and social challenges can avoid unnecessary entries into the child welfare system with the assistance of holistic legal services – a combination of social worker services and a traditional attorney-client relationship. The study is five years in the making and still just half-way through completion, but we’re sharing its origin and process anyway.
