Types of courts

Reauthorized in 2018, the Second Chance Act (SCA) aims to reduce recidivism and improve outcomes for people returning from state and federal prisons, local jails, and juvenile facilities through the provision of federal grants. During this panel, National Institute of Justice-funded researchers will detail two ongoing evaluations of the SCA grant program:

1. An evaluation of the effectiveness of the SCA grant program per Title V of the First Step Act.
2. A longitudinal examination of the long-term impacts of the SCA program.

NIJ hosted a webinar to discuss under-researched aspects of reentry: expungement of criminal records and the impact of those records. This webinar includes a presentation of ongoing research projects examining the impact of legal aid for expungement and past research projects studying the accuracy and permanency of criminal records and the prevalence of collateral consequences of conviction. A Q&A session will conclude this webinar.

This webinar features a discussion of previously published research on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2005 Booker decision - which effectively transformed the United States Sentencing Guidelines from a mandatory, to an advisory, system. The presentation will address selected research findings from the last 15 years. Individual participants will briefly review their previous research findings with particular attention paid to the analytic methods used.