Collateral Consequences of Felony Conviction and Imprisonment

Abstract

The so-called collateral consequences of imprisonment encompass a host of legal restrictions and deleterious outcomes for former inmates, their families, and their communities. These may result from formal legal barriers associated with a felony conviction to extralegal effects resulting from periods of imprisonment. The universe of collateral consequences, a phrase some scholars decline to use because it diminishes their importance, affects all domains of social life and results from a patchwork of legal restrictions, conditions imposed by the criminal justice system upon release, and the indirect effects of imprisonment on inmates’ families, neighborhoods, and employment prospects. These “collateral consequences,” “punishments beyond the offender,” “invisible punishments,” and “extralegal sentences” form the basis for a growing field in criminology, sociology, and law focused on the contemporary prison boom in the United States. Imprisonment has always influenced the lives of former inmates well after they leave the institution behind, but the rise in imprisonment since 1970 in the United States has exacerbated these effects as well as concentrated them among some segments of the population. Thus, while former felons have always been barred from voting in some states, for example, it is only as a result of mass incarceration that these laws have influenced the outcomes of elections. Finally, though some of the work on collateral consequences described here examines imprisonment in other contexts (e.g., in the United Kingdom), most work in the area is centered on the United States because of its exceptionality with respect to high rates of imprisonment.