Transcript
CFPB FinEx Webinar:  "Focusing on Reentry:  Justice-Involved Individuals and Their Families"
Presenters:  Shaina Vanek, Office of Community Affairs, CFPB; and Collin O'Rourke, Office of Community Affairs, CFPB
Facilitators:  Joshua Shapiro and Ken McDonnell, CFPB

 
>>Joshua Shapiro:  Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining. My name is Josh Shapiro. I'm from the Bureau Events Management Team. Before we begin, just going to go over some quick logistics.
 
If you need closed captioning, please go ahead and click on the CC button on the bottom left of the Webex window. If you have any technical issues, please chat the host into the chat box, and we'll go ahead and give you some private time and hopefully solve your issues. If you have any questions, please do enter them into the chat box. We will be getting to them towards the end of the presentation. 
 
And now I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Ken McDonnell, who is with the Department of Financial Education, to kick off today's events. Ken.
 
>>Ken McDonnell:  Thank you, Josh. Thank you all for attending. This is part of our Financial Educators Exchange or FinEx program. I hope you all are members, and if not, please feel free to reach out to me at Kenneth.McDonnell@CFPB.gov, and I'm more than happy to sign you up.
 
We'd like to start out here with a standard disclaimer that this presentation is being made by CFPB representatives on behalf of the Bureau. It does not constitute legal interpretation, guidance, or advice by the Bureau, and any opinions or views stated by the presenter are the presenter's own and may not represent the views of the Bureau.
 
This document includes links or references to third-party resources. The inclusion of links or references to third-party sites does not necessarily reflect the Bureau's endorsements of the third party, the views expressed on the third-party site, or products or services offered on the third-party site. The Bureau has not vetted these third parties, their content, or any products or services they may offer. There may be other possible entities or resources that are available, not listed, that may also serve your needs. 
 
So I'd like to do now is introduce our two speakers. We will have Shaina Vanek. Shaina serves as the Senior Policy Analyst within the Office of Community Affairs in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, providing advice to the leadership on CFPB policies and programs that affect justice-involved individuals and ensuring alignment with the agency's statutory authorities in protecting consumers in the financial marketplace. She brings over 25 years of criminal justice experience and leadership to the CFPB, having served in a variety of progressively responsible positions throughout the field of corrections in both the private and public sectors. Before joining the Bureau a little over a year ago, she served as the Acting Director of the National Institute of Corrections in the Department of Justice. She has also worked in higher education and in two national consulting firms focused on related issues. Shaina is committed to identifying and addressing the barriers faced by justice-impacted individuals and to providing frontline staff with resources that protect consumers in the marketplace before, during, and after incarceration.  
 
Also joining Shaina will be Collin O'Rourke, who is a Program Specialist in the Office of Community Affairs. Collin has been involved with the office's work on justice-involved individuals for several years. He was one of the authors of the Bureau's 2022 report, Justice-Involved Individuals and the Consumer Financial Marketplace. Recently, he's looked in depth at complaints that justice-impacted individuals have submitted to the CFPB and will be sharing some of those findings today. Collin came to the Bureau from the University of Wisconsin Center for Financial Security, where he managed projects looking at the effectiveness of financial coaching, counseling, and education programs. 
 
And now I'd like to turn this on over to Shaina. Shaina, take it away.
 
>>Shaina Vanek:  Thank you so much, Ken. I'm really glad to be here with everyone today. I know we still have folks joining us, but we'll go over a little bit about what today's agenda is, and as you got a sense, we have a lot to cover.  
 
But first today, we'll go over the introduction to CFPB more broadly, specifically the Office of Community Affairs, where both Collin and I work. We'll speak to the January 2022 report, Justice-Involved Individuals and the Consumer Financial Marketplace, why we're focusing on justice-involved individuals and reentry, the importance of our work in that space, and then what we can learn from consumer complaints. And then we'll go over some tools and resources that I think will be really helpful to those of you who are in the financial education space, working in corrections, working in reentry. So that will cover things like our Your Money, Your Goals Toolkit; our Focus on Reentry companion guide; how to submit a complaint and then also Ask CFPB, great resources; and then also, lastly, but not least, ordering and downloading materials and submitting questions. 
 
Next slide. Okay. So before we get started today, we really wanted to know who we have with us today. So we have a bit of a poll. So we have questions in terms of are you somebody who works in a prison or jail, you've been directly impacted by the criminal justice system, criminal legal system, or you have somebody in your family who's been impacted, whether you work in community corrections, probation/parole, a community-based service provider, and/or in the legal field, either pro bono attorney, prosecutor, defense attorney, et cetera. And you can pick more than one. So if you identify with more than one of those items, then by all means, click more.
 
And, Josh, I think we have a poll to make that magic happen, correct?  And there it is, like magic. So please, if you take a moment, just go in and click the answers that most apply to you and hit submit, and that will give us a sense of who we have with us today. We'll give you just a couple minutes to do thatÑabout 30 seconds. So please do it quickly. We'll just give that another few seconds.
 
[Pause.]
  
 >>Ms. Vanek:  We will close the poll inÑfive, four, three, two, one.  And then we can see where the answers are and continue on with our presentation. Okay. So it looks like we have folks from having been directly impacted or have loved ones, a couple, a handful that have worked in prisons or jails or do now, community-based, and then lots of folks who were working with people directly in the community and/or the legal field and lots of others. So if you happen to a selected other and you feel comfortable and want to share, please put down your other in the chat, just so we can get a sense of where folks are from. But thank you so much, all of you, for joining and expressing interest in this topic. We're excited to be able to talk with you today.
 
Okay, next slide. All righty. And here's the part where I get to talk a little bit about CFPB and our Office of Community Affairs. 
 
Next slide. Okay. So first of all, with the role of CFPB, we are committed to serving and supporting consumers. We are a relatively new agency, so not a lot of people necessarily always familiar with us. I know a lot of people in the FinEx space are definitely very interested and familiar with us, but wanted to share a little bit about what our role is. We work to ensure that markets for the consumer financial products that are out in the world around us every day are fair, transparent, and competitive. We implement and enforce federal consumer financial law, and we provide consumers with up-to-date information and resources to protect and manage their finances.  
 
And I think one of the things that was really helpful is if you have the opportunity to check CFPB website frequently as a practitioner, as somebody who's a frontline staff member, who's working with justice-impacted folks, really having the utmost up-to-date information, our website is almost always being updated with new information and new tools and issues that help to protect consumers. And it's also a great place to help us understand what you have going on, too, as well. 
 
Next slide. Okay. So in terms of the Office of Community AffairsÑthat's where Collin and I workÑthe CFPB Office of Community Affairs serves the variety of populations who may lack full, affordable access to financial services, including people with low to moderate incomes, low wealth, and people who are in other ways financially excluded or vulnerable. By any measure, the numbers of consumers whose income level contributes to the financial fragility constitutes a significant portion of the U.S. population. According to 2022 data from the Census Bureau, some 37.9 million people, including children, live in households that have incomes below the federal poverty level, and oftentimes, justice-involved, justice-impacted people and their families are often part of these groups. Justice-involved individuals and their families experience unique financial challenges that often come with very long-term negative consequences. For those of you who work directly with impacted folks, that is something you probably see daily in your work.  
 
So our Office of Community Affairs, we do three major things that help support CFPB's mission. One is to regularly gather and basically get insights into the market intelligence through direct stakeholder engagement, interviews, and focus groups. That helps us better inform our policy as an agency and identify potential risk to consumers. 
 
We also advance competition, really driving and promoting competition in the financial marketplace by expanding research and reports that highlight the barriers and policies harmful to consumers. Collin will talk to you a little bit about that report in a moment. That's really relevant to this conversation. 
 
And then last, we build capacity. We support public and nonprofit partners in providing financial empowerment programming with resources and technical guidance.  
 
Next slide. Okay. Collin, I'm going to hand things over to you because you were integral in developing this report, and I know you'll have a lot to share with our participants today.  
 
>>Collin O'Rourke:  Thanks, Shaina, and thanks everyone for joining us today. Shaina is going to rejoin and take back control of the presentation in a little bit, and she's going to talk a lot about the resources that the Bureau has developed for justice-involved individuals and people who work with them. But I just wanted to take this, a few moments here up front, to talk about some of the projects that we've worked on in this area in the past few years.  
 
For us in Community Affairs, we've been working on this reentry and the justice space for many years. In 2022, just over two years ago, we released a report, the Bureau's first in this area, called Justice-Involved Individuals in the Consumer Financial Marketplace. And it looks at the financial products and services that consumers must use at each stage in the justice system and the challenges that often arise from those products, from dynamics like a lack of competition, contracting practices, and other industry dynamics. The report identified numerous market failures, like a lack of consumer choice, and then also explored the consequences of these financial products for individuals, families, and their communities. 
  
I think the one major contribution of the report was that it really tied together a lot of different areas.  The report spanned essentially the entirety of the criminal justice system, beginning with the pre-trial phase and going through reentry. Oftentimes different pieces of the system are covered, but we tried to bring it all together in a report that was both comprehensive and as concise as possible.  So that report, we'll make sure to get the link in the chat if we haven't already, and the link is here on the slide. And I encourage you to check out that report.
 
Next slide please. Again, Shaina's going to talk a lot more about Bureau resources, but I just wanted to give a flavor up front of the types of activities that the CFPB engages in in this space. We have a variety of resources for people who are directly impacted by the justice system and for those working with people who are impacted. Here, we just have one of the examples, a guide that we've developed called Focus on Reentry:  Criminal Justice, which is part of our I program, and we'll learn more about that later in this presentation. 
 
Then over on the right here alsoÑso Shaina and I aren't directly engaged in this space, but the Bureau also has supervisory and regulatory authority over many of the financial products and services that exist in the criminal justice arena, and I just took some of the headlines off the CFPB website of some of the major actions that we've taken. We have penalized certain companies for behavior in this area. These posts are allÑmore details available on the website but just wanted to highlight that piece here.
 
Next slide. We can go on to the next slide. Okay. We're bouncing around a little bit here, but I also just want to take a step back and talk about why we at the CFPB were interested in this area. One key thing is that the criminal justice system affects so many people. More than 70 million individuals have a criminal record, and that equates to about one in four adults, and of course, we know that the consequences of justice involvement are often severe and long-lasting. A criminal record can limit people's access to employment, to housing, and other basic needs and opportunities and, as we'll see, can have implications on their access to financial products and services. 
 
Among those challenges are issues with background screening reports and reports that are used for both housing and employment, high fees for basic products and servicesÑfor basic financial products and services. We know that the criminal justice system is intertwined with a variety of costs, could be fines and fees or other costs that then have implications for debt and managing debt. And then justice involvement also has an impact on families, again, from debt and other dynamics like missed wages.
 
Next slide. Here, we just highlighted some additional figures. The numbers have changed a little bit due to the COVID pandemic, but in the past few yearsÑin 2019, there were over 6 million people who were incarcerated. Nearly 9 million people were booked into jail. More than 600,000 people are released from prison each year. The number who are released from jail is even higher. Again, more than 70 million people have a criminal record, and even that number is kind of a low estimate of the number of people who are impacted when we think about the impact spilling over to people's family members, their friends, and their communities. And throughout the system, the impacts of the system fall disproportionately on people of color. So that's kind of the big picture of why we wanted to delve deeper in this space and really the motivation for us taking on the activities that we're going to continue to discuss today.

Next slide. I think I've covered most of this. Financial insecurity is a cause and consequence of justice involvement. Often financial insecurity could be one of the reasons how people end up getting involved in the system, and also upon reentry, the kind of collateral consequences on people's finances can be long-lasting. As we discussed in our 2022 report, private companies are often involved through contracts and other means in providing financial products and services throughout the criminal justice system. So there's both a public and a private element to many of these issues. Consumers often have no choice over which products or services to use. So, for example, someone who's interested in sending money to a loved one who's incarcerated, depending on the state, but they will often have no choice over which money transfer service they have to use. And with that lack of choice, they essentially have to accept what are often high fees in order to get their money to their loved one.

The justice system can leave people vulnerable to aggressive practices. We've seen instances where entities have used the threat of arrest, prosecution, detention, reincarceration, use those as a threat and kind of coerceÑuse those as a way to coerce certain behavior, just given the high stakes that are involved forÑthat can be involved in nonpayment. And people who have been involved in the justice system may be targeted by high-cost financial providers, and as we've mentioned, justice involvement can have a lasting impact on people's access to financial products and services. 
 
Next slide. Okay. So this next section, I'm going to talk about consumer complaints from a few different angles. But to start out, I just wanted to talk about submitting a complaint. So a consumer who is having an issue with a financial product or service can submit a complaint to the CFPB. It's also possible to submit a complaint on behalf of a consumer. So somebody like a caseworker may work with a consumer to submit the complaint. I'll mention a little bit more about that in a sec. But once theseÑso if the consumer has a problem with a financial product or service, they can submit a complaint online, by phone, or by mail. And we know that there are heightened barriers to making these submissions for people whoÑespecially for people who are incarcerated. But once the Bureau receives a complaint, we review it for completeness, and if the complaint is complete, forward it on to the company involved. And then the company has a certain number of days to send a response back to the consumer. So this process essentially can help consumers kind of formalize the issue that you're having with a financial product or service and obtain a response from the company involved. 
 
For those of you who may work with people who are involved in the justice system, one thing that we just wanted to note is that there is this system for submitting complaints on behalf of other individuals, so say a caseworker may help multiple clients submit complaints. But one critical thing is that when you're submitting complaints online on behalf of others, that each person needs to have a uniqueÑeach person you're submitting a complaint on behalf of needs to have a unique email address associated with that.  So the caseworker would to use their own email to submit complaints on behalf of multiple peoples.  So hopefully, that's clear. It's just that when we have the online submission system, if you're submitting complaints on behalf of others, each person, each consumer needs to be associated with a unique email address. And that issue does not exist with mail, complaints that are submitted by phone or mail. But we know that there are people who do use the system to help to submit complaints on behalf of others.  
 
Next slide. So the primary purpose of this complaint system is to help consumers get a response to the issue that they're having, but one thing we wanted to just let everyone know about is that consumer complaints also feed into a public complaint database that's pretty easy to use.  You can search the complaints by keyword, filter it by a variety of variables like date, product, issue, company, company name, and so forth. These can provide some rich information. Consumers often have written narratives about their experiences and you can kind of slice and dice the data in a variety of different ways. So just wanted to point out this piece that the complaints are not only helpful to consumers but also can provide meaningful information in this public database.
 
Next slide. Here now, with that said, we have spent an extensive amount of time looking at the complaints submitted by justice-involved individuals. We've created a new process from the ground up for identifying these complaints. There's not a checkbox that says this person is justice-involved. So we've kind of created keyword searches and so forth to identify relevant complaints, and we have also been working on just raising awareness around the complaint portal and the relevance to this population. We've seen that there's a lack of awareness around consumer protection rights. People may not become have the comfort level or trust in using the system, and then as I mentioned, there are greater challenges submitting complaints by phone or by mail versus online. I think there's kind of a typo there. 
 
Next slide, please.  I'm going to just talk a little bit about what we found in the complaints. So essentially,  we've spent time reading through the complaints, kind of finding themes, organizing them, and seeing what we can glean from the information that consumers have provided.
 
So in our most recent analysis, we identified four primary themes. One is just people highlighting the high fees that they encounter for basic financial products and services. Another common theme was identity theft or fraud and unauthorized activity during incarceration, debt challenges across a range of debts, and kind of associated with many of these issues is difficulty disputing incorrect information or fraudulent activity.
 
Next slide. So I'm just going to walk through those themes a little bit, ad so again, one of the themes was the high fees. Two examples are money transfers. So one consumer in the complaint database described fees as exorbitant and just plain greedy exploitation, and the consumer in that case reported paying $9 for a money transfer by credit card. So we can see, especially when people are transferring fairly low amounts, say $20, $30, the percentage of that amount that's eaten up by fees can quickly become quite high.  
 
Another area for which we've seen information and complaints about high fees are release cards. Often prisons and jails will issue funds left on someone's commissary account or maybe money that they've earned through work while incarcerated on a prepaid release card, and one consumer reported being forced to use this card. So they really had no choice but to accept this card, which they described as having high fees.  
 
Next slide. One theme thatÑanother theme that came out is identity fraud and unauthorized activity, and so where we really see this is many complaints where someone who is incarcerated clearly has challenges due to that incarceration and monitoring their accounts or their credit reports, and then they are released from prison or jail only to find out that unauthorized activity or identity theft occurred. This often relates toÑin the complaints, we often see this related to credit records, but there can alsoÑthis can also arise from bank, banking and prepaid debit card activity. 
 
So in the example, in the quote I have here, "I recently came home from prison after doing four years and checked my credit report. I have accounts that were created while I was incarcerated. I did not have the ability to apply for anything while incarcerated because I did not have access to anything to do so." So again, this dynamic of people reentering, re-entering their communities following prisoner or jail, only to find out that they have these unauthorized activity that occurred. 
 
Next slide. Another common challenge in this set of complaints is around debt collection, spanning a wide range of debt. So I won't read this whole complaint, just the part in bold:  "I was incarcerated for almost two decades, which started in [sixteen years before the debt was incurred]. They said debt had started in [date] and I didn't get released until [three years after the debt was incurred]," so just challenges managing debt around periods of incarceration.
 
Next slide. The final theme is just challenges disputing and correcting these errors, account activity that was unauthorized or fraudulent, et cetera. "The company denied my claim saying that because my PIN was used for some transactions, they were not unauthorized and I was responsible for them in full. I fully complied with all requests for the information. They accused me of making the transaction myself and lying about it, even though I was clearly in jail the whole time this was going on." So we see many complaints along these lines where someone is reporting that they were clearly incarcerated during the time in question or the activity in question. They may struggle to kind of prove, prove their case to the financial product, the company offering the financial product or service in question. It's almost like in certain cases, it sounds like the mere fact that someone's involved in the justice system is kind of a strike against them in terms of their credibility and how they'reÑtheir perceived credibility and how they're treated by others. 
 
And then again, just the, the bottom complaint here is reporting something similar. "I did not and could not have authorized or initiated the fraudulent activity that occurred."
 
Next slide. Now I'm going to turn it back over to Shaina, who's going to go through more of the Bureau tools and resources. 
 
>>Ms. Vanek:  Thank you so much, Collin. And boy, has time flown right by. It's back to me already. 
 
We do have one question that came into the chat, and I'm going to look to the side so I can make sure I read it. Are there any state governments that are also investigating the financial issues facing people in prison? If so, do we have a list ofÑthat includes the links to those sites?
 
So a lot of states' attorneys general have a complaint submission portal as well. So it kind of mirrors what CFPB does as well at the state level. So we don't have a link to that, but each state does typically have a means by which they can get consumer complaints.
 
If they're looking at justice-impacted individuals and families specifically, that is a state-by-state thing. There are a handful of private organizations, foundations, advocacy groups, et cetera, that are all looking at these issues as well. It's one of the things that I think if we talked 20 years ago, nobody was looking. And now here is a time and space where we recognize that the economically vulnerable and injustice-impacted people's consumer experience is very unique and very, very harmful to them and their families. So I would encourage looking around a little bit on the internet. Again, CFPB not endorsing any one particular spot or place, but definitely think it is being looked at by a number of both federal, state, and local governments, as well as private industry and private organizations.
 
Okay. So I get to talk about resources, and one of the things I wanted to mention before I get back into the resources available through CFPB is just how many folks are on the webinar today that are from housing, from employment agencies. I saw a number of corrections folks, correctional librarians. You all hold a strong place in my heart, having worked with correctional librarians before, as well as those who are in the financial coaching space, whether you're from a financial institution working in financial coaching or in the community working in the coaching space. There are so many people here today who want to help and hopefully can really benefit from being exposed to some of these resources, if you haven't seen them before, or if they are familiar to you, maybe getting a new take on them. So I want to make sure that I jump in here, and then we'll see how far we can get before we get to the end of the session and answer some more questions.
 
So as we've mentioned a little bit earlier, CFPB has created a suite of resources calledÑunder the umbrella ofÑYour Money, Your Goals, and so first is a financial empowerment toolkit, which is the Your Money, Your Goals. And it's really a set of materials for organizations, people who are helping people who are incarcerated or reentering as returning citizens after a period of incarcermentÑ"incarcerment," that's a new wordÑincarceration, and really helping people to increase their knowledge, skills, and resources. So whether you're helping somebody to get a job, find a place to live, or deal with a legal problem, money always comes up.
 
As Americans, we don't often talk about money when we're growing up. So oftentimes we don't have the financial expertise or knowledge that we probably could really benefit from in order to be savvy consumers. So really, the tools that are in the financial empowerment toolkit are a great place to start the conversation.
 
These were designed through a collaborative process with partners on the ground. It's included rigorous field testing by practitioners, so people that are in the same roles as many of you. We field-tested things. Is it written at a level that makes sense? Is it something that can create the conversation and really open up that dialogue? And for those of you who are in the financial counseling space, you know that having a way to start that money conversation is really, really important. 
 
And so these materials were really designed to be used by frontline practitioners, such as social workers, legal aid attorneys, housing counselors, and many other volunteers that work with underserved communities. This resource and information can really help to, like I said, have that money conversation with the people you serve.

And the materials are not designed for financial, you know, experts. They're designed for everyday people. And really, they're used in a place in a way that can help further the conversation and who are already trusted partners in their communities.

So those of you who work in this space all the time, like, people trust you. And so when you're able to, you know, partner your trusted relationship with these tools, it really does, you know, further that conversation and the clients you serve can rely on this information. So I mentioned the toolkit.

We also have four companion guides, as you can see. And the four companion guides really help to address the unique needs of four different communities, one being Native communities, one being today's focus, which is focused on reentry. People with disabilities and folks who are involved in the military community, which all four groups have some unique issues that are specific to them.

And we think these companion guides are really, really great resources. They're shorter than the toolkit too, which may be another level of appeal for you. And then we also have four colorful booklets that can help you address things like being behind on bills, debt, credit, and savings.

There are also a few of them, behind on bills and credit, are also available in Spanish. Next slide. Okay.

You were just testing me, see if we're going in the right direction. One more slide forward. There we go.

One back. Okay. So the focus on reentry guide, as I mentioned, is key to the groups you're all working with today.

So it's designed to help, like I said, frontline staff and volunteers working with individuals with criminal records address some of the specific challenges that they may face. The tools are designed to address the unique needs of people who do have criminal records, and that can be anywhere from arrest through incarceration, sentencing incarceration, through reentry. So think of criminal records as a very, very broad reaching set of topics because they definitely impact consumers if it's something as simple as an arrest all the way through incarceration release.

And what I really like best about these materials is that you can meet people where they're at, and you can work with topics that are of the greatest interest to the people that you're serving. So if you're a correctional librarian and somebody has an issue with identity theft, you can go to the identity theft section and start that conversation and say, here's how we can help address that with you today. So it's again, you're not doing it to somebody, you're doing it with them.

You're helping them to empower themselves and gain the expertise and knowledge they need to make these choices and decisions about their financial futures. Next slide. Okay.

So this looks daunting. There are 10 modules. Trust me when I say it is not as daunting as it may look.

So each of these modules, they're not meant necessarily to be gone in order. Like I said, you can meet people where they're at. If they're having an issue with debt or understanding what their credit report even says, because it's really complicated, you can go right to those sections.

So they don't have to be done in sequential order. You can pick the module that makes the most sense. There are multiple tools under almost every single one of the 10 modules.

And really get the help that somebody needs for that particular issue at that particular time. So next slide. Okay.

So let me go to my next slide so I can make sure I use the right things. Okay. So as I mentioned before, you can use the information and the tools to help people with criminal records.

Everything from identifying the financial challenges related to successful transition and reentry into the community. Obtaining the documents related to their identification to help ease that transition process. Developing a cash flow budget by tracking income and spending.

And identifying and prioritizing debt. Both debt arising from involvement in the criminal justice system. So, you know, fines and fees, justice and legal-related debt, or consumer debt.

And then access and review of credit reports. And then understanding the background screening process and individual rights when applying for jobs and for housing. So you can use these guides in one-on-one settings, small group settings.

Each person's needs are often unique and often complex. So we've seen it work in both environments where there's group discussions and people are supporting each other in their challenges and navigating those barriers. And then also sometimes one-on-one in correctional, you know, case workers working with somebody in a facility or when somebody's releasing and going through the reentry process, community-based organizations having one-on-one conversations as well.

And even when there are multiple issues or concerns to address, trust me when I say you really shouldn't try to cover everything at once. It can feel really overwhelming. But one thing at a time tends to be the most effective way of utilizing those tools.

And really, I think, you know, you can pick the tool within the module that works best for that person. They may try the first tool and they're like, eh, this just isn't really fitting for me. But the second one will.

So I think the flexibility that's kind of integrated into the reentry guide and the Year in Money, Year in Goals broader toolkit, both of those resources really help, like I said, help to connect with people with the issue they're having and the tool that was most comfortable to use. Next slide. Okay.

So I do have a couple of tools I wanted to highlight for you. The first being, this is, I've said this to many groups I've worked with over the years and particularly since coming to the Bureau, you know, thinking about your money situation before incarceration, really, really hard. People are normally navigating a whole bunch of change and stress and anxiety related to either being in pretrial status or after they've been sentenced, but then they're going to be reporting.

The last thing they're thinking about is probably, hmm, how do I prepare my money situation? You know, so this is, I think, one of the critical tools that if you happen to be working as a frontline staff member with somebody who is going into prison or jail, even in pretrial status, it may make sense to do some of these, go through some of these items with the clients you're working with. So really kind of looking at and knowing that, you know, child support, how does that get handled during incarceration? Student loan debts, you know, how do I put my student loans on hold and defer? And now in particular, with so many things changing in the student loan space, really important to stay on top of that as well. How to protect one's identity from theft.

As you heard from Collin, so many people, whether they're involved in the juvenile justice system or the adult legal system, people really often struggle with identity theft and they find out after they've been incarcerated. And then also how to deal with, you know, your bank accounts, your credit accounts, all of those places and spaces that we often are all managing our money every day. All of those continue when somebody is incarcerated, but have they set up a power of attorney? Have they frozen their credit? Things that can really help prepare somebody as they're going in to have peace of mind, but then also to, you know, make sure they're protecting their financial lives for when they get back out.

So I think I went in more detail than I expected to there, but I think that was an important one to cover. So next slide. And we all think, okay, I'm going to pause for a second.

Think about your New Year's resolutions and how vague they often are. Like, hey, I want to lose weight. Hey, I want to get more sleep.

One of the things that when we're talking about money, we really want to be cognizant of, and when we're working with clients, is setting SMART goals. So this tool is one of those tools that is really easy to follow. It's a structure for creating goals that are SMART.

They're specific, they're measurable, they're achievable, they're relevant to the circumstances the person's in, and they're time-bound. So oftentimes when we use this tool with folks, we really think about, you know, first, what are people's values? You know, the person we're working with, we want them to think about what's most important to them and their family. And if they are the most important things in their lives, they're more likely to prioritize them.

So if an individual isn't sure about what their goals are, they can think about, you know, what they want to change in their life. And again, whether this is going into a facility or on the way out, you know, what's going to be different? What can I do to help somebody make different choices when it comes to their financial landscape? And it's likely people have lots of different things they want to achieve, but this can really not just start the money conversation, but really bring it into concrete actions that the person can take to make those changes. And again, this can be used at any point during their trajectory through the criminal justice system, most relevant, most helpful, probably, as they're getting ready to release and are going through the last six months to a year of a sentence.

Okay, next slide. I am trying to be cognizant of time, so I leave time for questions. Let's see.

This is a really important one, one that often comes up when I'm working with groups that are focused on helping those who have criminal records. Obtaining and understanding one's criminal records is really, really hard and also really, really critical. So background screening reports, as you might guess, if you think about your financial reports, your background screening reports that are out there in the world, it includes so much information.

And you really want to get a sense for those who you're working with so they can know what's in their record, and they may have to, and most likely will have to, get those records from multiple places. It's not the same as ordering your credit report from any of the three credit reporting agencies. Criminal records are often at the local level.

They are also at the state level. They are also at the federal level. So you've got so many different places that may have records on an individual.

And this is where it's kind of outside our area of financial coaching and counseling, but it is highly recommended to work with groups that specialize in this. So whether that be legal aid experts, expungement clinics, or other organizations at the state level that provide assistance. And one of the entities that's out there that is helpful is something that I came across recently, which is there is a national clearinghouse for helping individuals with criminal records re-enter through employment.

It's a network out of the Legal Action Center, and it's called HIRE. And I will put that in the chat probably after I stop talking so I don't try to do two things at once because it's normally dangerous when I do that. But this is a kind of a clearinghouse of sorts that helps to connect people with their local state criminal records resource centers.

So like I said, whether that's a court, whether that's law enforcement locally, whether it's the state or also broadly to the federal government. Next slide. And then this is a tool which I will just make sure that we refer you to later, but kind of what the difference is between a security freeze, an initial alert, and an extended alert related to credit protection and requirements.

So this, I think you can kind of dive in deeper if this is an area of interest, but in the interest of time, I'm going to scoop through this and go to the next slide. Okay. So this is incredibly helpful.

It is a fabulous resource for those of you who haven't had the opportunity to see it before. So Ask CFPB is available in both English and Spanish, and it offers clear and partial answers to hundreds, and I do mean hundreds, of financial questions. If you have just a few keywords that somebody asked you about and you're like, geez, as your financial counselor or as your correctional counselor or librarian or HUD counselor, I don't know the answer, go right to Ask CFPB, and it will pop up and be populated by a number of answers and topics that you can trust.

It'll have links that go directly to other federal and state resources, and again, like I said, is something you can always rely on for the most accurate and up-to-date information. And then next slide. And you probably want to know at this point, where do I get my hands on the reentry guide or the broader Your Money, Your Goals materials? And so on the Your Money, Your Goals materials page, you can download the PDFs directly or you can order printed copies.

The order printed copy link will take you to an organization called Pueblo, which is basically the government printing office's entity that ships these things out, and you can order any of the free materials to your cart and checkout. The one caveat is you'll need to provide a street address and not a P.O. box for your order, and it does take a while. So four to six weeks.

If you need materials faster, you can always send an email to Your Money, Your Goals at cfpb.gov, and we'll put that link into the chat as well, and that we can expedite them for you. Other caveat that I would mention is our printed resources supply stock is a little bit limited. So I would also encourage, if you have the ability to download and print yourself, one of the great things about doing it that way is to co-brand.

So if you work in, you know, a state or local agency or, you know, you're in a community-based provider organization or others, you can co-brand by putting your logo on right next to ours, and as long as you don't change the content of that information, we are happy to share the billing of that with you in the sense of, you know, your logo and ours is both there. So I would say that's another great resource if you want to look it up that way. And next slide.

I am heading home stretch. I know we have a few minutes for questions. And this is our prepaid products agreement database.

So Collin had mentioned in his section about, you know, the cost of the reentry. They're called reentry or gate money, money that's driven out of somebody who's incarcerated's commissary accounts or their money from the state or the local jurisdiction when they're leaving incarceration. As part of this, we did have a requirement that states put in their prepaid account agreements.

So basically disclosures and the actual contracts are entered into this database. So if you work in a local jurisdiction or you serve folks who are coming out of a prison or jail, you can check to see if it's there. And that can help you better serve your clients you work with in the sense that you will know what those requirements are for those release cards and help people to make good decisions when it comes to, you know, how long they keep the money on the card, how they use the card, because there are often fees associated with every touch point that somebody uses that card or doesn't use the card.

So we wanted to see if this was of interest to you. And so we'll make sure we put that in the chat as well, which is great because it's already there. And check that if you get a chance as well.

Next slide. Okay. And I know we have lots of questions.

I had little bells going off that keep telling me that there's lots of questions coming in. I know we probably won't get to all of them today. So if we don't get to your question, I would ask that you email us at YourMoneyYourGoals, all one word, YourMoneyYourGoals@cfpb.gov. And that way, if we don't get to your question today, we can certainly do that in the days ahead.

Particularly if it's a hard question, we may have to do a little bit of research, but we definitely will do that for you and loop back with a response. So with that being said, for my colleagues who have been managing and monitoring all of the questions, are there any that you'd like to tackle? Yes, there are. There are some interesting questions here for you.

So let me start with this one. Is there any progress happening to change the regs to allow financial institutions to be able to use a prison ID as a form of identification to open a bank account if they've just been released? That is a fabulous question with lots of, lots of nuanced answers. So yes, so there is currently a bill in Congress that's specific when anything happens at the federal level.

It applies only to the Bureau of Prisons because that's the federal correctional agency that is overseen by Congress. So there is a bill that's been proposed to that end to make sure that the correctional ID, if it's not a state, you know, driver's license, because oftentimes people's driver's license expire while they're incarcerated and can't be reinstated without going back to the DMV. And that's a whole other process.

But for the federal system, there is legislation that's trying to move that forward. And I know the Bureau of Prisons has been working with a number of states. Basically, they have to go on a state-by-state agreement in order to have alternative smart IDs accepted by local banks and credit unions, because there are a lot of requirements in terms of being sure that the bank can verify somebody's identity.

So that's, I think that's where it's a little challenging, because each state does things a little differently. But that is definitely happening. And there are some other kind of private entities that are out there trying to promote this as well.

So I think that's the hard part, because we're obviously trying to regulate, you know, the safety and security of people's money and make sure people are who they say they are. But then also understanding that, you know, folks who've been involved with the justice system often do not have, you know, state, normal state ID that would be, you know, your driver's license or a state-issued ID that qualifies as a smart ID, because everything has computer chips in it now. So it's ongoing.

We've got another one here. Is CFPB reviewing how criminal justice history is reflected in access to credit, including its use in credit scores and other predictive models? You all are asking me very hard questions, but good ones. And I noticed that Collin has not raised his hand and come off camera to answer these either.

But yes. So as you probably have seen, or if you haven't, go to our website and take a look. There's a lot of work being done around data brokers, people who, and entities that manage data about us.

There is data about us in every possible way. Again, like I said, 20 years ago, we probably never would have experienced the same degree, but the rise of the internet has made information very, very available. So to that end, there is work being done.

We did a collaborative request for information related to background screening with the FTC to better understand how criminal records were being utilized and reviewed as part of background screening for housing and also touched on employment as well. So there is work being done in this space. The challenge is that technology keeps going faster than the humans that are trying to catch up with it, but we are doing our best to be in front of that curve and make sure that we are working in interagency collaborations to better understand how that information is being collected and sold and used.

So we have another one here. Are you aware of any other countries that have exemplary approaches to the financial needs of currently and formerly incarcerated? And if so, do you know which ones they are? So this is one of those international questions. You're basically making me take my CFPB hat off a little bit and go back to some of my previous agencies' work in the space, but, you know, each country has very different approaches, as you might imagine.

And one that probably gets a lot of the most of the press is Norway, given their very human-centered model of corrections. And I know that there's a number of stateside jurisdictions that have gone to Norway. They've done exchanges with Norway corrections staff and really, you know, look for ways to bring those learnings back to the states.

So without an endorsement from CFPB, but certainly a, hey, check out Norway, kind of comment, that might be a good place to look to see what they do. But we have one here from Collin. Are there any resources to assist justice-involved individuals in obtaining employment history and or record of arrest at little or no cost? Okay.

I put a link in the chat that is a, so the CFPB maintains a list of consumer reporting agencies. So this, there's, of course, the three big credit reporting agencies, but this is a more extensive list of consumer reporting companies, and it includes companies that compile background screening reports. And in that file, if you open the PDF in the link that I put, there's a PDF kind of report, and it includes information about how consumers can request a free copy of those reports.

So there's, I haven't, I haven't added them up recently, but there's several dozen companies, you know, in a variety of different areas, many of which in this background screening space. So you could really spend a lot of time requesting these free reports and checking out what's in there. And that's all we have for now.

So thank you, again, Shaina and Collin, for such a wonderful presentation and for some really helpful information on helping individuals who really need some assistance. So thank you so much.
Good afternoon, everybody, thank you for joining. My name is Josh Shapiro. I'm from the Bureau events management team before we again, just going to go over some quick logistics.

Uh, if you need, if you need closed captioning, please go ahead and click on the CC button on the bottom left of the Webex window. If you have any technical issues, please chat the host into the chat box and we'll go ahead and give you some private time and hopefully solve your issues. If you have any questions, please do enter them into the chat box.

We will be getting to them towards the end of the presentation. And now I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Ken McDonald, who is the department who is with the Department of financial education to kick off today's events. Ken.

Thank you, Josh. Thank you all for attending. This is part of our financial educate financial educators exchange or FinEx program.

I hope you all are members and if not, please feel free to reach out to me at Kenneth McDonald at CFPB.gov and I'm more than happy to sign you up. We'd like to start out here with a standard disclaimer that this presentation is being made by CFPB representatives on behalf of the Bureau. It does not constitute legal interpretation, guidance, or advice by the Bureau, and any opinions or views stated by the presenter are the presenter's own and may not represent the views of the Bureau.

This document includes links or references to third-party resources. The inclusion of links or references to third-party sites does not necessarily reflect the Bureau's endorsements of the third party, the views expressed on the third-party site, or products or services offered on the third-party site. The Bureau has not vetted these third parties, their content, or any products or services they may offer.

There may be other possible entities or resources that are available, not listed, that may also serve your needs. So I'd like to do now is introduce our two speakers. We will have Shaina Vanek.

Shaina serves as the Senior Policy Analyst within the Office of Community Affairs in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, providing advice to the leadership on CFPB policies and programs that affect justice-involved and justice-involved individuals and ensuring alignment with the agency's statutory authorities in protecting consumers in the financial marketplace. She brings over 25 years of criminal justice experience and leadership to the CFPB, having served in a variety of progressively responsible positions throughout the field of corrections in both the private and public sectors. Before joining the Bureau a little over a year ago, she served as the Acting Director of the National Institute of Corrections in the Department of Justice.

She has also worked in higher education and in two national consulting firms focused on related issues. Shaina is committed to identifying and addressing the barriers faced by justice-impacted individuals and to providing frontline staff with resources that protect consumers in the marketplace before, during, and after incarceration. Also joining Shaina will be Collin O'Rourke, who is a Program Specialist in the Office of Community Affairs.

Collin has been involved with the Office's work on justice-involved individuals for several years. He was one of the authors of the Bureau's 2022 report, Justice-Involved Individuals and the Consumer Financial Marketplace. Recently, he's looked in depth at complaints that justice-impacted individuals have submitted to the CFPB and will be sharing some of those findings today.

Collin came to the Bureau from the University of Wisconsin Center for Financial Security, where he managed projects looking at the effectiveness of financial coaching, counseling, and education programs. And now I'd like to turn this on over to Shaina. Shaina, take it away.

Thank you so much, Ken. I'm really glad to be here with everyone today. I know we still have folks joining us, but we'll go over a little bit about what today's agenda is.

And as you got a sense, we have a lot to cover. But first today, we'll go over the introduction to CFPB more broadly, specifically the Office of Community Affairs, where both Collin and I work. We'll speak to the January 2022 report, Justice-Involved Individuals and the Consumer Financial Marketplace.

Why we're focusing on justice-involved individuals and reentry, the importance of our work in that space. And then what we can learn from consumer complaints. And then we'll go over some tools and resources that I think will be really helpful to those of you who are in the financial education space, working in corrections, working in reentry.

So that will cover things like our Your Money, Your Goals Toolkit, our Focus on Reentry Companion Guide, How to Submit a Complaint, and then also Ask CFPB, great resources. And then also, lastly, but not least, ordering and downloading materials and submitting questions. Next slide.

Okay, so before we get started today, we really wanted to know who we have with us today. So we have a bit of a poll. So we have questions in terms of, are you somebody who works in a prison or jail? You've been directly impacted by the criminal justice system, criminal legal system, or you have somebody in your family who's been impacted.

Whether you work in community corrections, probation, parole, a community-based service provider, and or in the legal field, either pro bono attorney, prosecutor, defense attorney, et cetera. And you can pick more than one. So if you identify with more than one of those items, then by all means, click more.

And Josh, I think we have a poll to make that magic happen, correct? And there it is, like magic. So please, if you take a moment, just go in and click the answers that most apply to you and hit submit. And that will give us a sense of who we have with us today.

We'll give you just a couple minutes to do that, or a couple minutes, about 30 seconds. So please do it quickly. We'll just give that another few seconds.

We will close the poll in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And then we can see where the answers are and continue on with our presentation. Okay, so it looks like we have folks from having been directly impacted or have loved ones, a couple, a handful that have worked in prisons or jails or do now, community-based, and then lots of folks who were working with people directly in the community and or the legal field, and lots of others. So if you happen to a selected other and you feel comfortable and want to share, please put down your other in the chat just so we can get a sense of where folks are from.

But thank you so much, all of you, for joining and expressing interest in this topic. We're excited to be able to talk with you today. Okay, next slide.

All righty, and here's the part where I get to talk a little bit about CFPB and our Office of Community Affairs. Next slide. Okay, so first of all, with the role of CFPB, we are committed to serving and supporting consumers.

We are a relatively new agency, so not a lot of people necessarily always familiar with us. I know a lot of people in the FinEx space are definitely very interested and familiar with us, but wanted to share a little bit about what our role is. We work to ensure that markets for the consumer financial products that are out in the world around us every day are fair, transparent, and competitive.

We implement and enforce federal consumer financial law, and we provide consumers with up-to-date information and resources to protect and manage their finances. And I think one of the things that was really helpful is if you have the opportunity to check CFPB website frequently as a practitioner, as somebody who's a frontline staff member, who's, you know, working with justice-impacted folks, really having the utmost up-to-date information. Our website is almost always being updated with new information and new tools and issues that help to protect consumers.

And it's also a great place to help us understand what you have going on, too, as well. So, next slide. Okay, so in terms of the Office of Community Affairs, that's where Collin and I work, the CFPB Office of Community Affairs serves the variety of populations who may lack full, affordable access to financial services, including people with low to moderate incomes, low wealth, and people who are in other ways financially excluded or vulnerable.

By any measure, the numbers of consumers whose income level contributes to the financial fragility constitutes a significant portion of the U.S. population. According to 2022 data from the Census Bureau, some 37.9 million people, including children, live in households that have incomes below the federal poverty level. And oftentimes, justice-involved, justice-impact people and their families are often part of these groups.

Justice-involved individuals and their families experience unique financial challenges that often come with very long-term negative consequences. For those of you who work directly with impacted folks, that is something you probably see daily in your work. So, our Office of Community Affairs, we do three major things that help support CFPB's mission.

What is to regularly gather and basically get insights into the market intelligence through direct stakeholder engagement, interviews, and focus groups. That helps us better inform our policy as an agency and identify potential risk to consumers. We also advance competition, really driving and promoting competition in the financial marketplace by expanding research and reports that highlight the barriers and policies harmful to consumers.

Collin will talk to you a little bit about that report in a moment. That's really relevant to this conversation. And then last, we build capacity.

We support public and nonprofit partners in providing financial empowerment programming with resources and technical guidance. So, next slide. Okay.

And Collin, I'm going to hand things over to you because you were integral in developing this report, and I know you'll have a lot to share with our participants today. Thanks, Shaina, and thanks everyone for joining us today. So, Shaina is going to rejoin and take back control of the presentation in a little bit, and she's going to talk a lot about the resources that the Bureau has developed for justice-involved individuals and people who work with them.

But I just wanted to take this a few moments here up front to talk about some of the projects that we've worked on in this area in the past few years. So, for us in Community Affairs, we've been working on this reentry and the justice space for many years. In 2022, just over 2 years ago, we released a report, the Bureau's first in this area, called Justice-Involved Individuals in the Consumer Financial Marketplace.

And it looks at the financial products and services that consumers must use at each stage in the justice system and the challenges that often arise from those products, from dynamics like a lack of competition, contracting practices, and other industry dynamics. The report identified numerous market failures, like a lack of consumer choice, and then also explored the consequences of these financial products for individuals, families, and their communities. I think the one major contribution of the report was that it really tied together a lot of different areas.

So the report spanned essentially the entirety of the criminal justice system, beginning with the pre-trial phase and going through reentry. And so, oftentimes, different pieces of the system are covered, but we tried to bring it all together in a report that was both comprehensive and as concise as possible. So that report, we'll make sure to get the link in the chat if we haven't already, and the link is here on the slide.

And I encourage you to check out that report. Next slide please. Again, Shaina's going to talk a lot more about Bureau resources, but I just wanted to give a flavor up front of the types of activities that the CFPB engages in in this space.

So, we have a variety of resources for people who are directly impacted by the justice system and for those working with people who are impacted. Here, we just have one of the examples, a guide that we've developed called Focus on Reentry Criminal Justice, which is part of our Your Money, Your Goals program, and we'll learn more about that later in this presentation. Then over on the right here also, so Shaina and I aren't directly engaged in this space, but the Bureau also has supervisory and regulatory authority over many of the financial products and services that exist in the criminal justice arena.

And I just took some of the headlines off the CFPB website of some of the major actions that we've taken. So, we have penalized certain companies for behavior in this area. These posts are all more details available on the website, but just wanted to highlight that piece here.

Next slide. We can go on to the next slide. Okay.

So, we're bouncing around a little bit here, but I also just want to take a step back and talk about why we at the CFPB were interested in this area. One key thing is that the criminal justice system affects so many people. So, more than 70 million individuals have a criminal record, and that equates to about one in four adults.

And of course, we know that the consequences of justice involvement are often severe and long-lasting. A criminal record can limit people's access to employment, to housing, and other basic needs and opportunities, and as we'll see, can have implications on their access to financial products and services. Among those challenges are issues with background screening reports and reports that are used for both housing and employment, high fees for basic products and services, for basic financial products and services.

We know that the criminal justice system is intertwined with a variety of costs. Could be fines and fees or other costs that then have implications for debt and managing debt. And then justice involvement also has an impact on families, again, from debt and other dynamics like missed wages.

Next slide. Here, we just highlighted some additional figures. There are the numbers have changed a little bit due to the COVID pandemic, but in the past few years, in 2019, there were over 6 million people who were incarcerated.

Nearly 9 million people were booked into jail. More than 600,000 people are released from prison each year. The number who are released from jail is even higher.

Again, more than 70 million people have a criminal record, and even that number is kind of a low estimate of the number of people who are impacted when we think about the impact spilling over to people's family members, their friends, and their communities. And throughout the system, the impacts of the system fall disproportionately on people of color. So that's kind of the big picture of why we wanted to delve deeper in this space and really the motivation for us taking on the activities that we're going to continue to discuss today.

Next slide. I think I've covered most of this. Financial insecurity is a cause and consequence of justice involvement.

Often, financial insecurity could be one of the reasons how people end up getting involved in the system, and also upon reentry, the kind of collateral consequences on people's finances can be long-lasting. As we discussed in our 2022 report, private companies are often involved through contracts and other means in providing financial products and services throughout the criminal justice system. So there's both a public and a private element to many of these issues.

Consumers often have no choice over which products or services to use. So, for example, someone who's interested in sending money to a loved one who's incarcerated, depending on the state, but they will often have no choice over which money transfer service they have to use. And with that lack of choice, they essentially have to accept what are often high fees in order to get their money to their loved one.

The justice system can leave people vulnerable to aggressive practices. We've seen instances where entities have used the threat of arrest, prosecution, detention, reincarceration, use those as a threat and kind of coerce, use those as a way to coerce certain behavior, just given the high stakes that are involved for, that can be involved in nonpayment. And people who have been involved in the justice system may be targeted by high-cost financial providers.

And as we've mentioned, justice involvement can have a lasting impact on people's access to financial products and services. Next slide. Okay.

So this next section, I'm going to talk about consumer complaints from a few different angles. But to start out, I just wanted to talk about submitting a complaint. So a consumer who is having an issue with a financial product or service can submit a complaint to the CFPB.

Someone who, it's also possible to submit a complaint on behalf of a consumer. So somebody like a caseworker may work with a consumer to submit the complaint. I'll mention a little bit more about that in a sec.

But once these, so if the consumer has a problem with a financial product or service, they can submit a complaint online, by phone or by mail. And we know that there are heightened barriers to making these submissions for people who, especially for people who are incarcerated. But once the Bureau receives a complaint, we review it for completeness.

And if the complaint is complete, forward it on to the company involved. And then the company has a number, a certain number of days to send a response back to the consumer. So this process essentially can help consumers kind of formalize the issue that you're having with a financial product or service and obtain a response from the company involved.

For those of you who may work with people who are involved in the justice system, one thing that we just wanted to note is that there is this system for submitting complaints on behalf of other individuals. So say a caseworker may help multiple clients submit complaints. But one critical thing is that when you're submitting complaints online on behalf of others, that each person needs to have a unique, each person you're submitting a complaint on behalf of needs to have a unique email address associated with that.

So like say the caseworker would not want to use their person, their own email to submit complaints on behalf of multiple peoples. So hopefully that's clear. It's just that when we have the online submission system, if you're submitting complaints on behalf of others, each person, each consumer needs to be associated with a unique email address.

And that issue does not exist with mail complaints that are submitted by phone or mail. But we know that there are people who do use the system to help to submit complaints on behalf of others. Next slide.

So the primary purpose of this complaint system is to help consumers get a response to the issue that they're having. But one thing we wanted to just let everyone know about is that consumer complaints also feed into a public complaint database that's pretty easy to use. You can search the complaints by keyword, filter it by a variety of variables like date, product, issue, company, company name, and so forth.

These can provide some rich information. Consumers often have written narratives about their experiences and you can kind of slice and dice the data in a variety of different ways. So just wanted to point out this piece that the complaints are not only helpful to consumers but also can provide meaningful information in this public database.

Next slide. Here now, so with that said, we have spent an extensive amount of time looking at the complaints submitted by justice-involved individuals. We've created a new process from the ground up for identifying these complaints.

There's not a checkbox that says, you know, this person is this person is justice-involved. So we've kind of created keyword searches and so forth to identify relevant complaints. And we have also been working on just raising awareness around the complaint portal and the relevance to this population.

We've seen that there's a lack of awareness around consumer protection rights. People, you know, may not become have the comfort level or trust in using the system. And then as I mentioned, there are greater challenges submitting complaints by phone or by mail versus online.

I think there's kind of a typo there. And so now I'm going to, next slide please, I'm going to just talk a little bit about what we found in the complaints. So essentially we've spent time reading through the complaints, kind of finding themes, organizing them, and seeing what we can glean from the information that consumers have provided.

So in our most recent analysis, we identified four primary themes. One is just people highlighting the high fees that they encounter for basic financial products and services. Another common theme was identity theft or fraud and unauthorized activity during incarceration, debt challenges across a range of debts, and kind of associated with many of these issues is difficulty disputing incorrect information or fraudulent activity.

Next slide. So I'm just going to walk through those themes a little bit. And so again, one of the themes was the high fees.

Two examples are money transfers. So one consumer in the complaint database described fees as exorbitant and just plain greedy exploitation. And the consumer in that case reported paying $9 for a money transfer by credit card.

So we can see, especially when people are transferring, you know, fairly low amounts, say $20, $30, the percentage of that amount that's eaten up by fees can quickly become quite high. Another area for which we've seen information and complaints about high fees are release cards. So often prisons and jails will issue funds left on someone's commissary account or maybe money that they've earned through work while incarcerated on a release, a prepaid release card.

And one consumer reported being forced to use this card. So they really had no choice but to accept this card, which they described as having high fees. Next slide.

So one theme that, another theme that came out is identity fraud and unauthorized activity. And so where we really see this is many complaints where someone who is incarcerated, you know, clearly has challenges due to that incarceration and monitoring their accounts or their credit reports. And then they they are released from prison or jail only to find out that unauthorized activity or identity theft occurred.

And this, this often relates to, in the complaints, we often see this related to credit records, but there can also, this can also arise from bank, banking and prepaid debit card activity. So in the example, in the quote I have here, I recently came home from prison after doing four years and checked my credit report. I have accounts that were created while I was incarcerated.

I did not have the ability to apply for anything while incarcerated because I did not have access to anything to do so. So again, this dynamic of people re-entering, following prisoner jail, re-entering their communities, following prisoner jail, only to find out that they have these unauthorized activity that occurred. Next slide.

Another, another common challenge in the, in this batch of, in this set of complaints is around debt collection, spanning a wide range of debt. So I won't read this whole complaint, just the, the part in bold. I was incarcerated for almost two decades, which started in 16 years before the debt was incurred.

They said that that had started in X date and I didn't get released until three years after the debt was incurred. So just challenges managing, managing debt around periods of incarceration. Next slide.

And the, the final theme is just challenges disputing and correcting these, these errors, account activity that was unauthorized or fraudulent, et cetera. The company denied my claim saying that because my PIN was used for some transactions, they were not unauthorized and I was responsible for them in full. I fully complied with all requests for the information.

They accused me of making the transaction myself and lying about it, even though I was clearly in jail the whole time this was going on. So we see many complaints along these lines where someone is reporting that they were clearly incarcerated during the time in question or the activity in question. And they're, they're, they may struggle to, to kind of prove, prove their case to the financial product that serve, the company offering the financial product or service in question.

It's almost like in some certain cases, it sounds like the mere fact that someone's involved in the justice system is kind of a strike against them in terms of their credibility and how they're, their perceived credibility and how they're treated by others. And then again, just the, the bottom complaint here is reporting something similar. I did not, could not have authorized or initiated the fraudulent activity that occurred.

Next slide. Now I'm going to turn it back over to Shaina, who's going to go through more of the Bureau tools and resources. Thank you so much, Collin.

And boy, has time flown right by. It's back to me already. We do have one question that came into the chat and I'm going to look to the side so I can make sure I read it.

Are there any state governments that are also investigating the financial issues facing people in prison? If so, do we have a list of, that includes the links to those sites? So a lot of states' attorneys general have a complaint submission portal as well. So it's kind of mirrors what CFPB does as well at the state level. So we don't have a link to that, but each state does typically have a means by which they can get consumer complaints.

If they're looking at justice-impacted individuals and families specifically, that is a state-by-state thing. There are a handful of private organizations, foundations, advocacy groups, et cetera, that are all looking at these issues as well. It's one of the things that I think if we talked 20 years ago, nobody was looking.

And now here is a time and space where we recognize that the economically vulnerable and injustice-impacted people's consumer experience is very unique and very, very harmful to them and their families. So I would encourage looking around a little bit on the internet. Again, CFPB not endorsing any one particular spot or place, but definitely think it is being looked at by a number of both federal, state, and local governments, as well as private industry and private organizations.

Okay, so I get to talk about resources. And one of the things I wanted to mention before I get back into the resources available through CFPB is just how many folks are on the webinar today that are from housing, from employment agencies, from I saw a number of corrections folks, correctional librarians. You all hold a strong place in my heart, having worked with correctional librarians before, as well as those who are in the financial coaching space, whether you're from a financial institution working in financial coaching, or in the community working in the coaching space.

There are so many people here today who want to help and hopefully can really benefit from being exposed to some of these resources if you haven't seen them before, or if they are familiar to you, maybe getting a new take on them. So I want to make sure that I jump in here, and then we'll see how far we can get before we get to the end of the session and answer some more questions. So as we've mentioned a little bit earlier, CFPB has created a suite of resources called under the umbrella of Your Money, Your Goals.

And so first is a financial empowerment toolkit, which is the Your Money, Your Goals. And it's really a set of materials for organizations, people who are helping people who are incarcerated or reentering as returning citizens after a period of incarceration, and really helping people to increase their knowledge, skills, and resources. So whether you're helping somebody to get a job, find a place to live, or deal with a legal problem, money always comes up.

As Americans, we don't often talk about money when we're growing up. So oftentimes, we don't have the financial expertise or knowledge that we probably could really benefit from in order to be savvy consumers. So really, the tools that are in the financial empowerment toolkit are a great place to start the conversation.

These were designed through a collaborative process with partners on the ground. It's included rigorous field testing by practitioners, so people that are in the same roles as many of you. We field tested things.

Is it written at a level that makes sense? Is it something that can create the conversation and really open up that dialogue? And for those of you who are in the financial counseling space, you know that having a way to start that money conversation is really, really important. And so these materials were really designed to be used by frontline practitioners, such as social workers, legal aid attorneys, housing counselors, and many other volunteers that work with underserved communities. This resource and information can really help to, like I said, have that money conversation with the people you serve.

And the materials are not designed for financial experts. They're designed for everyday people, and really, they're used in a place in a way that can help further the conversation and who are already trusted partners in their communities. So those of you who work in this space all the time, people trust you, and so when you're able to partner your trusted relationship with these tools, it really does further that conversation, and the clients you serve can rely on this information.  
 
So I mentioned the toolkit. We also have four companion guides, as you can see, and the four companion guides really help to address the unique needs of four different communities, one being Native communities, one being today's focus which is focused on reentry, people with disabilities, and folks who are involved in the military community, which all four groups have some unique issues that are specific to them. And we think these companion guides are really, really great resources. They're shorter than the toolkit too, which may be another level of appeal for you. 
 
And then we also have four colorful booklets that can help you address things like being behind on bills, debt, credit, and savings. There are also a few of them, behind on bills and credit, are also available in Spanish.
 
Next slide. Okay. You were just testing me, see if we're going in the right direction. One more slide forward. There we go. One back. Okay. So the focus on reentry guide, as I mentioned, is key to the groups you're all working with today. So it's designed to help, like I said, frontline staff and volunteers working with individuals with criminal records address some of the specific challenges that they may face. The tools are designed to address the unique needs of people who do have criminal records, and that can be anywhere from arrest through incarceration, sentencing and incarceration, through reentry. So think of criminal records as a very, very broad-reaching set of topics because they definitely impact consumers if it's something as simple as an arrest all the way through incarceration release.
 
And what I really like best about these materials is that you can meet people where they're at, and you can work with topics that are of the greatest interest to the people that you're serving. So if you're a correctional librarian and somebody has an issue with identity theft, you can go to the identity theft section and start that conversation and say here's how we can help address that with you today. So it's again, you're not doing it to somebody; you're doing it with them. You're helping them to empower themselves and gain the expertise and knowledge they need to make these choices and decisions about their financial futures. 
 
Next slide. Okay. So this looks daunting. There are 10 modules. Trust me when I say it is not as daunting as it may look. So each of these modules, they're not meant necessarily to be gone in order. Like I said, you can meet people where they're at. If they're having an issue with debt or understanding what their credit report even says, because it's really complicated, you can go right to those sections. So they don't have to be done in sequential order. You can pick the module that makes the most sense. There are multiple tools under almost every single one of the 10 modules and really get the help that somebody needs for that particular issue at that particular time.  
 
Next slide. Okay. So let me go to my next slide so I can make sure I use the right things. Okay. As I mentioned before, you can use the information and the tools to help people with criminal records, everything from identifying the financial challenges related to successful transition and reentry into the community, obtaining the documents related to their identification to help ease that transition process, developing a cash flow budget by tracking income and spending, and identifying and prioritizing debtÑboth debt arising from involvement in the criminal justice system, so, you know, fines and fees, justice and legal-related debt, or consumer debtÑand then access and review of credit reports and then understanding the background screening process and individual rights when applying for jobs and for housing.  
 
So you can use these guides in one-on-one settings, small group settings. Each person's needs are often unique and often complex. So we've seen it work in both environments where there's group discussions and people are supporting each other in their challenges and navigating those barriers, and then also sometimes one-on-one in correctionalÑcase workers working with somebody in a facility or when somebody's releasing and going through the reentry process, community-based organizations having one-on-one conversations as well.
 
And even when there are multiple issues or concerns to address, trust me when I say you really shouldn't try to cover everything at once. It can feel really overwhelming, but one thing at a time tends to be the most effective way of utilizing those tools. And really, I think, you can pick the tool within the module that works best for that person. They may try the first tool and they're like, eh, this just isn't really fitting for me, but the second one will. So I think the flexibility that's kind of integrated into the reentry guide and the Your Money, Your Goals broader toolkit, both of those resources really help, like I said, help to connect with people with the issue they're having and the tool that was most comfortable to use.  
 
Next slide. Okay. So I do have a couple of tools I wanted to highlight for you, the first beingÑI've said this to many groups I've worked with over the years and particularly since coming to the BureauÑthinking about your money situation before incarceration really, really hard. People are normally navigating a whole bunch of change and stress and anxiety related to either being in pretrial status or after they've been sentenced, but then they're going to be reporting. The last thing they're thinking about is probably, "Hmm, how do I prepare my money situation?" So this is, I think, one of the critical tools that if you happen to be working as a frontline staff member with somebody who is going into prison or jail, even in pretrial status, it may make sense to do some of these, go through some of these items with the clients you're working with. So really kind of looking at and knowing thatÑchild support. How does that get handled during incarceration? Student loan debts. How do I put my student loans on hold and defer? And now, in particular, with so many things changing in the student loan space, really important to stay on top of that as well. How to protect one's identity from theft. As you heard from Collin, so many people, whether they're involved in the juvenile justice system or the adult legal system, people really often struggle with identity theft, and they find out after they've been incarcerated. And then also how to deal with your bank accounts, your credit accounts, all of those places and spaces that we often are all managing our money every day, all of those continue when somebody is incarcerated, but have they set up a power of attorney? Have they frozen their credit? Things that can really help prepare somebody as they're going in, to have peace of mind, but then also to make sure they're protecting their financial lives for when they get back out. So I think I went in more detail than I expected to there, but I think that was an important one to cover.
 
Next slide. And we all thinkÑokay. I'm going to pause for a second. Think about your New Year's resolutions and how vague they often are. Like, hey, I want to lose weight. Hey, I want to get more sleep. One of the things that when we're talking about money, we really want to be cognizant of and when we're working with clients is setting SMART goals. So this tool is one of those tools that is really easy to follow. It's a structure for creating goals that are SMART. They're specific, they're measurable, they're achievable, they're relevant to the circumstances the person's in, and they're time-bound.  
 
So oftentimes when we use this tool with folks, we really think about, first, what are people's values? The person we're working with, we want them to think about what's most important to them and their family, and if they are the most important things in their lives, they're more likely to prioritize them. So if an individual isn't sure about what their goals are, they can think about what they want to change in their life. And again, whether this is going into a facility or on the way out, what's going to be different? What can I do to help somebody make different choices when it comes to their financial landscape? It's likely people have lots of different things they want to achieve, but this can really not just start the money conversation but really bring it into concrete actions that the person can take to make those changes. And again, this can be used at any point during their trajectory through the criminal justice system, most relevant, most helpful, probably, as they're getting ready to release and are going through the last six months to a year of a sentence.

Okay. Next slide. I am trying to be cognizant of time, so I leave time for questions. Let's see. This is a really important one, one that often comes up when I'm working with groups that are focused on helping those who have criminal records. Obtaining and understanding one's criminal records is really, really hard and also really, really critical. So background screening reports, as you might guess, if you think about your financial reports, your background screening reports that are out there in the world, it includes so much information. And you really want to get a sense for those who you're working with so they can know what's in their record, and they may have to and most likely will have to, get those records from multiple places. It's not the same as ordering your credit report from any of the three credit reporting agencies. Criminal records are often at the local level. They are also at the state level. They are also at the federal level. So you've got so many different places that may have records on an individual, and this is where it's kind of outside our area of financial coaching and counseling, but it is highly recommended to work with groups that specialize in this so whether that be legal aid experts, expungement clinics, or other organizations at the state level that provide assistance. 
 
And one of the entities that's out there that is helpful is something that I came across recently, which is there is a national clearinghouse for helping individuals with criminal records reenter through employment. It's a network out of the Legal Action Center, and it's called HIRE. And I will put that in the chat probably after I stop talking so I don't try to do two things at once because it's normally dangerous when I do that. But this is a kind of a clearinghouse of sorts that helps to connect people with their local state criminal records resource centers. So like I said, whether that's a court, whether that's law enforcement locally, whether it's the state or also broadly to the federal government.  
 
Next slide. And then this is a tool which I will just make sure that we refer you to later, but kind of what the difference is between a security freeze, an initial alert, and an extended alert related to credit protection and requirements. So this, I think you can kind of dive in deeper if this is an area of interest, but in the interest of time, I'm going to scoop through this and go to the next slide. 
 
Okay. So this is incredibly helpful. It is a fabulous resource for those of you who haven't had the opportunity to see it before. So Ask CFPB is available in both English and Spanish, and it offers clear and partial answers to hundredsÑand I do mean hundredsÑof financial questions. If you have just a few keywords that somebody asked you about and you're like, geez, as your financial counselor or as your correctional counselor or librarian or HUD counselor, I don't know the answer, go right to Ask CFPB. And it will pop up and be populated by a number of answers and topics that you can trust. It will have links that go directly to other federal and state resources, and again, like I said, is something you can always rely on for the most accurate and up-to-date information.  
 
And then next slide. You probably want to know, at this point, where do I get my hands on the reentry guide or the broader Your Money, Your Goals materials? And so on the Your Money, Your Goals materials page, you can download the PDFs directly or you can order printed copies. The Order a Printed Copy link will take you to an organization called Pueblo, which is basically the government printing office's entity that ships these things out, and you can order any of the free materials to your cart and checkout. The one caveat is you'll need to provide a street address and not a P.O. box for your order, and it does take a while, so four to six weeks. If you need materials faster, you can always send an email to Your Money, Your Goals at cfpb.gov, and we'll put that link into the chat as well, and that we can expedite them for you. 
 
One other caveat that I would mention is our printed resources supply stock is a little bit limited. So I would also encourage, if you have the ability to download and print yourself, one of the great things about doing it that way is to co-brand. So if you work in a state or local agency or you're in a community-based provider organization or others, you can co-brand by putting your logo on right next to ours, and as long as you don't change the content of that information, we are happy to share the billing of that with you in the sense of your logo and ours is both there. So I would say that's another great resource if you want to look it up that way. 
 
And next slide. I am heading to the home stretch. I know we have a few minutes for questions. This is our Prepaid Products Agreement Database. So Collin had mentioned in his section about the cost of the reentry. They're called reentry or gate money, money that's driven out of somebody who's incarcerated's commissary accounts or their money from the state or the local jurisdiction when they're leaving incarceration. As part of this JPay settlement, we did have a requirement that states put in their prepaid account agreements.  So basically, disclosures and the actual contracts are entered into this database. So if you work in a local jurisdiction or you serve folks who are coming out of a prison or jail, you can check to see if it's there, and that can help you better serve your clients you work with in the sense that you will know what those requirements are for those release cards and help people to make good decisions when it comes to how long they keep the money on the card, how they use the card, because there are often fees associated with every touch point that somebody uses that card or doesn't use the card. So we wanted to see if this was of interest to you. And so we'll make sure we put that in the chat as well, which is great because it's already there, and check that if you get a chance as well.
 
Next slide. Okay. And I know we have lots of questions. I had little bells going off that keep telling me that there's lots of questions coming in. I know we probably won't get to all of them today. So if we don't get to your question, I would ask that you email us at YourMoneyYourGoalsÑall one wordÑYourMoneyYourGoals@cfpb.gov, and that way, if we don't get to your question today, we can certainly do that in the days ahead. Particularly if it's a hard question, we may have to do a little bit of research, but we definitely will do that for you and loop back with a response.  
 
>>Mr. McDonnell:  We've got another one here. Is CFPB reviewing how criminal justice history is reflected in access to credit, including its use in credit scores and other predictive models?
 
>>Ms. Vanek:  You all are asking me very hard questions but good ones, and I noticed that Collin has not raised his hand and come on camera to answer these either. But yes. So as you probably have seen, or if you haven't, go to our website and take a look. There's a lot of work being done around data brokers, people whoÑand entities that manage data about us. There is data about us in every possible way.  
 
Again, like I said, 20 years ago, we probably never would have experienced the same degree, but the rise of the internet has made information very, very available. So to that end, there is work being done.
 
We did a collaborative request for information related to background screening with the FTC to better understand how criminal records were being utilized and reviewed as part of background screening for housing and also touched on employment as well. So there is work being done in this space.  
 
The challenge is that technology keeps going faster than the humans that are trying to catch up with it, but we are doing our best to be in front of that curve and make sure that we are working in interagency collaborations to better understand how that information is being collected and sold and used.
 
>>Mr. McDonnell:  We have one here for Collin. Are there any resources to assist justice-involved individuals in obtaining employment history and/or record of arrest at little or no cost? 
 
>>Mr. O'Rourke:  Okay. I put a link in the chat that is aÑso the CFPB maintains a list of consumer reporting agencies. So thisÑthere's, of course, the three big credit reporting agencies, but this is a more extensive list of consumer reporting companies, and it includes companies that compile background screening reports. And in that file, if you open the PDF in the link that I put, there's a PDF kind of report, and it includes information about how consumers can request a free copy of those reports.  So there'sÑI haven't added them up recently, but there's several dozen companies in a variety of different areas, many of which in this background screening space. So you could really spend a lot of time requesting these free reports and checking out what's in there.
 
>>Mr. McDonnell:  And that's all we have for now. So thank you, again, Shaina and Collin, for such a wonderful presentation and for some really helpful information on helping individuals who really need some assistance. So thank you so much.
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