Research & Publications

Back to Business: How Hiring Formerly Incarcerated Job Seekers Benefits Your Company is a new report from the Trone Center for Justice & Equality. The report details the ways companies can combat the ills of decades of mass incarceration, while at the same tapping into the potential energy of a workforce of millions. Today, 70 million Americans—one in three adults—have a criminal record. These are people who have or will reenter their communities and need gainful employment to build stability and find success after incarceration. The report lays out how by reducing barriers to employment and implementing fair hiring practices, companies can better provide employment opportunities to formerly incarcerated people to the benefit of all. When companies break down these barriers to employment and provide second chances, they can have a positive impact on the lives of individuals, the trajectory of families, on the health of their businesses, and on the growth of the American economy. The bottom line: doing good is good for business.

This report highlights actions that state agencies and advocates can take to ensure that LIHTC properties comply with VAWA.

Selling Off Our Freedom: How Insurance Corporations Have Taken Over Our Bail System is a joint report by Color of Change and the American Civil Liberties Union’s Campaign for Smart Justice that documents how the for-profit bail industry fuels mass incarceration and perpetuates racial inequalities.

Every year in the United States, millions of people are forced to pay cash bail after their arrest or face incarceration before trial. This is despite the fact that they are presumed innocent and have not been convicted of a crime. To avoid being locked up while their cases go through the courts—which can sometimes take months or even years—people who cannot afford bail must pay a non-refundable fee to a for-profit bail bonds company to front the required bail amount. The financial burden of this fee harms individuals, it harms families, and it disproportionately affects Black and low-income communities. The only winner is the bottom line of big for-profit businesses. These harms are perpetuated by the large insurance corporations that control the two-billion dollar for-profit bail bonds industry, which is both unaccountable to the justice system and unnecessary to justice itself. Large companies whose only goal is profit should not be the gatekeepers of pretrial detention and release. The for-profit bail system in the United States fuels mass incarceration and contributes to racial and economic inequalities. It is a destructive force that undermines the rights of people who come into contact with the criminal justice system, and it must be abolished.

This new ACLU white paper, “Bullies in Blue: Origins and Consequences of School Policing,” explores the beginnings of school policing in the United States and sheds light on the negative consequences of the increasing role of police and links it to both the drivers of punitive criminal justice policies and mass incarceration nationwide. The report traces a line back to the struggle to end Jim Crow segregation during the civil rights movement, and challenges assumptions that the function of police in schools is to protect children. It posits that police are police, and in schools they will act as police, and in those actions bring the criminal justice system into our schools and criminalizing our kids.

This report sets out key legal arguments and strategies for defense attorneys to challenge evidence seized by government-installed computer malware as a violation of the Fourth Amendment and federal law.

Over the past several years, the government has increasingly turned to hacking and malware as an investigative technique. The FBI has begun deploying software designed to infiltrate and control, disable, or surveil a computer’s use and activity. This kind of widespread and secretive hacking by the government is controversial and of questionable constitutionality.

The report assesses recent court decisions evaluating the government’s use of the controversial hacking technique and makes recommendations for the most promising avenues to have unconstitutionally obtained evidence suppressed.