A criminal sentence is announced in open court and lasts a stated number of months. The consequences that follow are imposed by statutes nobody reads aloud, attach automatically, and frequently last forever. This article maps that second sentence: the thousands of federal and state provisions that restrict employment, licensing, housing, benefits, immigration status, firearm rights, education, and the franchise on the basis of a conviction, and increasingly on the basis of an arrest that never produced one. It explains why collateral consequences grew as they did, how they interact with a background-check industry that neither the courts nor the legislatures designed, and why the same conviction can end one person's career and leave another's untouched. The second half covers the remedies that exist — expungement, sealing, set-aside, certificates of relief, pardons, and the automatic Clean Slate statutes now enacted in more than a dozen states — and is candid about which of them actually work. It closes with what the empirical evidence does and does not establish about employment, recidivism, and record clearance, and with the practical point that eligibility for later relief is usually determined by a plea decision made years earlier.