“Cook County is home to an estimated 1.3 million people with criminal records — those records can sometimes limit people from certain jobs, housing or even educational opportunities. The Paper Prisons Initiative estimates more than 500,000 of them are eligible to have those records cleared, but advocates say that’s not happening for many of them.” […]

Erica Gunderson ” Economic sanctions. Collateral consequences. Permanent punishments. There are 44,000 restrictive federal laws, rules, and policies that continue to penalize people long after they have served their sentence in prison. Permanent Punishment, a four-part series, examines this stark reality faced by nearly 3.3 million men and women in Illinois.  Cook County is home to