The Effect of Collateral Consequence Laws on State Rates of Returns to Prison

"In this dissertation I [Sohoni] examine the effect of states’ collateral consequence laws in the categories of voting, access to public records, employment, public housing, public assistance, and driver’s licenses. I examine the impact of these laws on state rates of returns to prison, as measured by percent of prison admissions that were people on conditional release when they entered prison, the percent of exits from parole that were considered unsuccessful due returning to incarceration; the percent of exits from parole that were returned to incarceration for a new sentence, and the percent of exits from parole that were returned to incarceration for a technical violation. I also run an additional fixed effects analysis on the effect of restrictions on Temporary Assistance for Needy Children (TANF) over a seven year period." This study is the first one done to address what is known empirically about how certain collateral consequence laws negatively influence the ability of ex-offenders to reenter their communities. This dissertation is comprised of five chapters: introduction to reentry and the era of mass incarceration, goals and realities of collateral consequence laws, and the current study; collateral consequence laws in the United States-overview, legal challenges and concerns, effects, and collateral consequences and recidivism; data and methods; findings regarding voting, access to records, employment, public housing, public assistance, driver's licenses, the cumulative effect, fixed effects analysis of TANF restrictions, and discussion of results; and conclusions.