SNAP benefit restrictions and bans harm people and families in need vulnerable to food insecurity.

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Many policymakers, researchers, practitioners, politicians, and advocates support bipartisan criminal legal system reform efforts, such as alternatives to incarceration, drug policy reform, and decarceration, alongside addressing mass incarceration's collateral consequences, such as food insecurity (Johnson & Beletsky, 2020; USCCR, 2019). The flexibility of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act to provide emergency SNAP supplements and ease program administration during the pandemic combined with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights calls for Congress to eliminate SNAP benefit restrictions based on criminal convictions provide critical, timely guidance. Remaining SNAP bans and restrictions, which do not enhance public safety or rationally relate to original offenses, impede people with criminal convictions from safely and successfully reentering society. The COVID‐19 pandemic has opened the Overton Window in framing social safety net reforms as acceptable policy positions across the criminal legal system. Policy improvements, nondiscrimination, and cross‐sector collaboration are critical to ensure expedient access to SNAP benefits and to best support healthier, safer transitions from jail or prison to the community upon release.

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