Melissa Burch's research and community work focuses on the experiences of former prisoners and the intersections of race, criminalization and employment. Her writing has been featured in popular journals and magazines and in the anthologies Abolition Now!: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle against the Prison Industrial Complex and Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States. Melissa is a longtime member and former staffer of Critical Resistance and worked for a number of years with A New Way of Life Reentry Project in Los Angeles. She is currently writing her first book on the rise of criminal background screening in the job market, tentatively titled The Criminal Records Complex: Hiring and Job Seeking in the Age of Mass Conviction.