Earlier this year, while standing before a group of 100 men imprisoned at Polk Correctional Institution in Butner, N.C., I was struck by the remarkable full-circle opportunity ALM (the parent company and publisher of The Am Law Daily), through its support of Equal Justice Works, has provided me—the son of a man imprisoned at Polk three decades ago who now advocates on behalf of similarly situated men and the 1.6 million other North Carolinians with criminal records.

The young men gathered in front of me, all of them between the ages of 19 and 25, were participants in a transition seminar because each was due to be released within the next six months. Deprived of freedom but not the audacity of youth, a handful of them shared with me their plans to return to school, start businesses, and otherwise provide for the needs of their families. Understandably, they assumed they would leave behind the worst consequences of their criminal records as soon as they were free of Polk’s bars and barbed wire.

Unfortunately, the reality they face does not match their optimism. Upon being released from prison with their debts to society paid, most of those young men will not receive the restorative opportunities they deserve. Instead, after being denied the privileges, opportunities, and resources essential to productive citizenship, approximately half of them will eventually be reincarcerated. Many of those who remain free will live in destitution.

Few of the men—and few of those who occupy statehouses around the country—truly understand the degree to which criminal records serve as modern-day scarlet letters that trigger hundreds of state and federal civil disabilities. Indeed, these soon-to-be-free men, like approximately 65 million Americans, will be designated as second-class citizens, vulnerable to private discrimination and communal exclusion. Isolation from gainful employment, affordable housing, public assistance, and a host of other resources and opportunities are the far-reaching “collateral consequences” of criminal records that often do more harm than one’s criminal sentence.

Looking out into that crowd of youthful faces and recognizing the gulf between their optimism and the reality that awaits, I felt—perhaps more fully than at any other point in my project—the profound cruelty and urgency of this problem.

I thought about Luther, my first client, who was charged with a nonviolent felony at the age of 17. It was his first brush with the law, and he was advised that if he pled guilty to the charge he would serve just a few months in prison. Not once was Luther warned about the collateral consequences that would likely flow from that conviction. Thinking himself fortunate to have avoided a lengthier sentence, he accepted the deal and served his six months.

Almost 20 years since that lone criminal conviction, Luther describes his life since release—branded a felon and denied job after job—as “still serving time.”