The collateral consequences of maintaining public access to criminal records are far reaching and prevent individuals from rebuilding their lives after a conviction. These collateral consequences are discussed in the context of their effect on individual poverty and how such poverty could be reduced by the abolition of the use of criminal records generally and in key areas of societal life. This note argues that criminal records, while they are currently omnipresent in American society, are not necessary to the functioning of our society, and in fact, damage its functioning by forcefully othering certain groups of people and contributing to the cycle of poverty through that variety of collateral consequences.

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