The Afterlives of Conviction project is a research-education-action initiative that seeks to support efforts to challenge the discriminatory use of criminal records. It takes direction from community-based organizations in order to make scholarly data and concepts available to organizers, educators and policy makers in engaging and useful ways. By documenting the human impact of a criminal conviction in the United States through ethnographic analysis, the project aims to deepen understanding of the lived experience of criminalization and challenge common sense about the meaning and use of criminal records.
Afterlives of Conviction Website
The Afterlives of Conviction project website aims to deepen understanding of the experience of living with a criminal record in the United States. In collaboration with organizations working to end criminal records exclusion, it identifies pivot points between academia and on-the-ground work and strives to make scholarly data and concepts available to organizers, educators, and policymakers in engaging and useful ways. The website hosts many different kinds of publications and resources, such as a 3-part ethnographic book series, a comic about the rise of criminal background screening, and a research digest annotating more than 100 scholarly sources in plain language for organizers. To learn more, please visit the project website.
Research Brief: The Best Firefighting Jobs Require the EMT License
For many people with criminal records, including those who work to fight fires while imprisoned, the best firefighting jobs are out of reach. This research brief demonstrates how a California regulation prohibiting access to the Emergency Medical Technician license limits access to the best paid, most sought after firefighting positions, in the most desirable locations in California. View the full report here.
Fact Sheet: Do Licensing Restrictions Make Sense?
This Fact Sheet is designed as a tool for challenging the legal barriers facing people with criminal records who seek to obtain an occupational license. Using scholarly research, we expose the lack of evidence-based reasoning justifying these restrictions, calling into question the very idea that people with criminal records pose a greater risk. Please download and distribute freely.(Click here for full pdf).
Project Team
Melissa Burch
Assistant Prof. of Anthropology, Director Afterlives of Conviction Team. Melissa Burch’s research and community work focuses on the experiences of former prisoners and the intersections of race, criminalization and employment. Her writing has been featured in popular journals and magazines and in the anthologies Abolition Now!: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle against the Prison Industrial Complex and Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States. Melissa is a longtime member and former staffer of Critical Resistance and worked for a number of years with A New Way of Life Reentry Project in Los Angeles. She is currently writing her first book on the rise of criminal background screening in the job market, tentatively titled The Criminal Records Complex: Hiring and Job Seeking in the Age of Mass Conviction.
Holly Honig
Undergraduate Researcher, Vice-President of Humanity for Prisoners. Holly Honig is using the BGS undergraduate degree to customize an academic program focused on the histories and theories of punishment, criminalization, human rights, and incarceration. She plans to keep advocating for people incarcerated in Michigan who deserve to be treated with humanity, kindness, and dignity without exception. Her research with the Captive Afterlives Team has focused on the rationale of statutes and regulations that limit a person’s access to employment as well as the origins and explanations of how pre-employment criminal background checks became so ubiquitous.
Sophie Ordway
M.A. Student, School of Social Work. Sophie Ordway’s graduate studies focus on macro-level social work practice in social policy and evaluation. As part of the Afterlives of Conviction team, Sophie has been researching the rise of occupational licensing and the barriers it poses to formerly incarcerated folx. She plans to utilize her MSW to analyze and evaluate public policy and social service programs in an effort to work towards decarceration.
Charlotte Smith
Ph.D. Student, Political Science. Charlotte Smith is a doctoral student in political science (Law, Courts, and Politics) whose work focuses on state sanctioned and fostered structural and physical violence. She is particularly interested in policing tactics in urban areas and how this interaction of state power and space serves to differently shape the lives of the city’s inhabitants. As part of the Afterlives of Convictions Team, she has been researching the logics of occupational licensing restrictions for formerly incarcerated people and the effects these have on their employment possibilities.
Megan Freund
Megan Freund is an Oakland, California-based designer and graduate of the Master of Integrative Design (MDes) program at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan. Megan dedicates her design practice to projects sharing her commitment to advance racial and social justice and expand access to opportunities through applied creativity. She brings to creative partnerships a collaborative mindset and a bias for participatory design methods that make visible the inherent problem-solving capabilities of communities. Her most recent project explored the use of play to sustain participation in efforts to confront systemic racism in American public education.
Carolina Jones
Carolina Jones is an illustrator & comic artist from the Rio Grande Valley, Texas. Currently studying Art & Design at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, she wishes to paint accurate representations of marginalized and stigmatized communities. In collaboration with the Carceral State Project, she has illustrated research-based images on immigration & the criminal system and on the discriminatory use of criminal records. You can find her work at: https://carolinajones-portfolio.squarespace.com