Senate Farm Bill Amendment Sentences Former Felons and Their Families to Lifetime Hunger Risk

When my re-entry conference participant Cathy told me that she would live with her felony conviction for the rest of her life, she was referring mainly to her difficulties in overcoming employer biases.

Last week, the Senate tentatively decided that certain former prisoners and their families would also have to live hungry — or at least, at risk of hunger — for the rest of their lives.

It approved, by unanimous consent, an amendment to the Farm Bill that would deny food stamp benefits to convicted murderers, rapists and pedophiles.

Thus, no debate and no vote for the record on this extraordinarily harsh, ill-considered and, some say, potentially racist exclusion from one of our most important safety net protections.

Politically convenient for Senators who might have shared this view, assuming they knew what the amendment said. Infuriated columnist David Dayen says most probably didn’t.

Those who did may have stayed silent in fear that they could later be attacked as “coddling violent criminals.” The well-worn Willie Horton meme.

Bob Greenstein, President of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, reminds us that some of the ex-offenders are blacks who were convicted decades ago by all-white Southern juries.

Others may have been convicted because they were represented by an overburdened public defender who advised them to cop a plea — or because prosecutors withheld evidence that indicated they weren’t guilty.

But assume, for the sake of argument, that most were convicted for crimes they did commit.

The issue here is whether we, through our government, should create a new punishment beyond the sentence they’ve already served.

This would seem, as Greenstein says, to dismiss the very concept of rehabilitation. Or, to put it another way, to say to certain former prisoners, “You will never wholly re-enter our community.”

This, unfortunately is something our laws already do, though not so sweepingly as the Farm Bill amendment would.

Eleven states deny at least some former criminals the right to vote for the rest of their lives, unless they can get a pardon or another official action that restores the right.

Federal law mandates a lifetime ban against public housing occupancy and receipt of Housing Choice (formerly Section 8) vouchers by people who’ve been convicted of manufacturing methamphetamine in public housing.

The same ban applies to those required to permanently register as sex offenders — a broader category than we commonly think.

And, as the Farm Bill amendment’s sponsor, Senator David Vitter (R-LA) notes, there’s also a lifetime ban on food stamp eligibility for people convicted of drug felonies.

In this case, however, most states and the District of Columbia have opted out of or modified the ban, as the law allows. This is also true of a similar ban on cash assistance from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

No opt out possible in the new ban, however.

Yet the banned former felons’ income would be counted if eligible families applied for food stamps, thus reducing the benefits they could get — or the benefits they’re getting now, since the whole amendment applies to everyone ever convicted of any of the specified crimes.

So we’d be punishing people who had nothing to do with the crime — and, as another angry blogger says, creating an incentive for families to break up.

Some of the Senator’s Twitter followers unkindly noted* that he had gotten a second chance after the news broke that he’d used an “escort service” — more likely than not, a criminal offense, though not prosecuted.

And it may seem just snarky of me to mention it. But it points to opportunities for rehabilitation — forgiveness even — that I think most of us support.

The Vitter amendment will actually make staying on the straight and narrow more difficult. Surely it would be tempting for someone who’s struggled unsuccessfully to find a steady, good-paying job to commit a crime in order to put food on the table.

When the Senator introduced his amendment, he offered no justification for it, except to suggest that it responds to a “misconception that the ban is already in the law.”

And, as I said, no one spoke up to challenge it. Greg Kaufmann at The Nation suggests that we advise Senate Democrats to check Lost and Found for their spines.

If they find them, they could still modify the amendment — perhaps with an opt-out — or even better, take it out of the Farm Bill altogether.

I would hope that some of their Republican colleagues would join them.

The proposed lifetime ban flies in the face of a core principle of our criminal justice system, our multifarious interests in promoting rehabilitation and basic human values like fairness, compassion and forgiveness.

These aren’t — or shouldn’t be — partisan issues.

* The Senator has apparently purged the tweets I originally saw. So you may not find any if you click the link, though one had been tweeted again when I last looked.

Release From Prison Doesn’t End the Punishment

I spent most of a recent Friday at a conference on returning citizens. The Washington National Cathedral organized it to develop an agenda for actions that would help them re-enter the community after their release from prison — and perhaps keep so many from having to make the journey back.

I’ve been trying to digest the insights and impressions I gained. There was a lot coming at us from a lot of different angles.

And all the while, I keep thinking about what my tablemate Cathy, a recently returned citizen, said to me before the conference began. “I will live with this for the rest of my life.”

The “this,” I think, was partly the reason she was incarcerated to begin with — a nonviolent offense that involved no personal gain. She feels the charge was unfair.

She’ll live her whole life with a sense of injustice — and payments to the government for restitution in excess of $1 million.

The bigger part of the “this” are other consequences. Her family disowned her. And the case manager at the halfway house she was transferred to did nothing to prepare for the time she’d be released, though she’d have no home to go to.

“I would have been on the streets,” she said, if an acquaintance hadn’t found her a space in a shelter — a fortunate, if temporary solution to a common form of neglect that often leaves returning citizens stranded.

Top of the “this” list, however, is the red flag employers see.

Cathy has substantial work experience and in-demand skills. She got hired, criminal record notwithstanding, shortly after her release. But the company let her go, without notice or explanation. She assumes because some higher-up learned of her record.

She’s had a number of interviews since. But they’ve netted nothing — and in some cases, ended as soon as she’s disclosed her criminal conviction. The human resources person just “shuts down,” she said.

Well, Cathy is very capable and very determined. And there are people looking out for her interests, including some of the leaders at the conference.

So I believe she’ll find work. But her experience in our criminal justice system has inalterably changed her life — and in some ways, her very self, I gather.

Some would say, well, this is justice. An impartial judge decided she’d done something wrong. She was punished for it. And if the punishment lasts beyond her time in prison, so does the wrong. She can’t go back in time and undo it.

Set aside the particularities of Cathy’s case, where the question of wrong seems at least debatable.

I can’t help feeling that the justice our system purportedly metes out is enormously wasteful, both in dollars and in human lives. And the judgments commonly made about people with criminal records make the waste worse.

We incarcerate far more people than any other country in the world — nearly 1.6 million in 2011. We pay, on average, $34,135 a year for every one of them we’ve got locked up.

More than one in four released from state prisons are back within three years, draining funds that could be used for other purposes, including services that could keep them from going back through the revolving door.

“If any other institutions in America were as unsuccessful in achieving their ostensible purpose …, we would shut them down tomorrow,” says Professor James Gilligan.

The indirect costs of our propensity to imprison are greater than what we pay to lock up people who pose no risk of harm to anyone — and then to marginalize both them and formerly dangerous returning citizens who’d like nothing better than to lead ordinary, law-abiding lives.

A data analysis by two of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ projects found, among other things, that:

• Former male inmates earned 40% less than they would have if not incarcerated — a loss of nearly $179,000 by the time they reached age 49.
• Those whose earnings put them in the bottom fifth were twice as likely to be there 20 years later as low-earners who hadn’t done time.
• They were thus earning less than $7,600 in 2006 — about 46% of the federal poverty line for a family of three.

We must also consider the collateral damage to those who’ve done nothing wrong at all. More than half the people behind bars in 2008 were parents of minor-age children — most of them fathers.

Two-thirds of them were in prison for non-violent crimes. More than half had been the primary breadwinners for their families.

So families become poorer and more unstable — not only while the parent is behind bars, but afterwards.

For these as well as other reasons, children whose parents have been incarcerated get into more trouble in school. One study found that 23% whose fathers had served time were suspended or expelled, as compared to only 4% whose fathers hadn’t.

Their “prospects for economic mobility become significantly dimmer,” the Pew authors say — a fine understatement. They may, in fact, as the American Civil Liberties Union says, be in the pipeline to prison.

These are all quantifiable costs — not only to the returned citizens and their families, but to our economy as a whole.

How do we measure the psychological damages to children whose parents are taken away — not only those that result in the kinds of behaviors that get them suspended, but anxiety, depression and the like?

The psychological damage to the parents themselves? “People are coming out traumatized because of what goes on inside,” said one of the returning citizens at the conference.

How do we measure the contributions people like Cathy might make if their job opportunities weren’t constrained by their records?

Or the loss to her godchild, whose parents have severed connections?

No Help for Homeless DC Family, But Mayor Shortchanges Shelter Funding

I met a homeless family the other day. The mother was, to all appearances, six months pregnant. The father was tending to their toddler.

They had no place to stay and no money for food. And the Family Resources Center — the District’s central intake for homeless families — couldn’t help them.

The mother told me that they’d been advised to find some place to stay — as if they’d have asked for shelter if they had one.

They’d returned to the Center in hopes of a gift card so they could buy some food, but it had run out of cards. I was told the cards were donated by corporations like Safeway and Giant, and the chains hadn’t come through of late.

The family could, however, get a Metro fare card. I asked the father what they’d do with it. He said he guessed they’d go back to their former neighborhood and see if someone would take them in. Not likely, he seemed to think.

So here’s a family that’s destitute. A little kid and an unborn child at high risk of long-term health and developmental damages due to hunger.

Perhaps for the toddler also psychological damage if he understands what it means that they’re spending nights in bus stations or hospital waiting rooms — even, as seems likely, if he picks up on the fear and stress his parents are feeling.

Who knows how many more stories like this there are — and how many more there’ll be in months to come?

All because the District government couldn’t find enough money to fund its homeless program in light of projected needs.

A 46% increase in family homelessness since 2008. A report indicating extraordinary vulnerability to increased homelessness.

And a budget for this fiscal year that provides not a penny more for homeless services — actually $3 million less than what the Department of Human Services was spending.

So DHS has again stopped providing shelter for newly homeless families. Official end of the winter season means they’ll be on their own — perhaps till the next freezing-cold day.

And now Mayor Gray has proposed a budget that would effectively cut homeless services by $7 million. These are “lost,” i.e., spent, federal funds that he could have replaced with local dollars.

No doubt the budget must address many priorities. But I fail to see how letting homeless families fend for themselves squares with budget development principles that include “protect the District’s most vulnerable residents.”

Also fail to see why all tax and fee increases must be off the table if the alternative is cuts that undermine other principles.

The Mayor tells us that to “seize our future,” we must “improve the quality of life for all.”

My quality of life wouldn’t be impaired by paying, say, a sales tax on services that aren’t covered now — or for that matter, income taxes at a higher rate.

It is impaired by helpless worrying about the literally help-less family I met. Their quality of life goes without saying.

What’s Needed to Unlock Job Opportunities for Ex-Prisoners in DC?

An estimated 60,000 District of Columbia residents have a criminal record. That’s about a tenth of the entire local population, babes in arms included.

The source of this eye-popping figure is a recent report by the Council for Court Excellence. It’s about one of the “collateral consequences” of a criminal record — lack of employment opportunities for “previously incarcerated persons” in D.C.

The report summarizes the results of a survey of 550 such persons and a separate survey of 20 local employers. It includes some modest recommendations for action by the DC Council and criminal justice agencies, both local and federal.

A worthy effort, but I don’t think the recommendations get to the core problems. These seem to me to fall into three big buckets.

Criminal Justice Policy

Surely we’re incarcerating far too many people. The Council indicates as much when it cites national figures, but it’s silent on the egregiously high percent of District resident who’ve spent time behind bars.

According to recent estimates, it says, between 12.3 million and 13.8 million people in the U.S. have a felony conviction. On the high end, that’s about 5.9% of the adult population.

The rate for District adults is nearly 12%, assuming that the Council’s criminal record figure is comparable to what it reports for the nation as a whole.

No matter how good re-entry programs are, ex-prisoners will have a hard time overcoming “collateral consequences” like unemployment. What if we didn’t imprison so many people to begin with?

Education and Training

The Council begins with what seems an altogether reasonable premise. Ex-felons are less likely to commit further crimes if they’re on a path toward economic security.

About 46% of the survey respondents surely weren’t, since they had no jobs at all. But about the same percent were unemployed before they were incarcerated.

So it seems reasonable to think that the high unemployment rate among ex-prisoners — and perhaps the incarceration rate itself — reflect problems in our education system.

How many of the survey respondents, I wonder, dropped out of school because they couldn’t master the skills they needed to get promoted to the next grade — or found the education they were getting profoundly irrelevant?

This isn’t to say that people without a decent education inevitably turn to crime. Nor, for that matter, that most of the survey respondents were dropouts, though we can guess a fair number were (see below).

Many could have found, as many high school graduates do, that living wage jobs in our local labor market demand more advanced skills and/or formal education.

The Council recommends, among other things, more training to prepare prisoners for in-demand jobs — specifically, as office clerks, customer service representatives and food preparation workers.

It indirectly indicates that most prisoners don’t have the education that higher-paying in-demand jobs require. But the low-skill jobs don’t pay enough to cover the costs of living in the District — housing in particular.

Seems then that solutions would have to lie beyond prison walls and involve a much wider range of actors and players than the Council’s proposals address.

Employer Bias

The Council’s report makes one wonder how much training would matter anyway.

About 65% of the ex-prisoners surveyed received a job training certificate, GED or higher education credential while behind bars. Only 2% more of them were employed than those who hadn’t gotten any of these.

The point spread was exactly the same for those who’d gotten and not gotten training after their release.

The key here are other survey results.

A full 80% of the ex-prisoners surveyed said that when looking for work, they were asked about their criminal records “all the time.”

Reported results from the employer survey don’t tell us how many screen out applicants with a criminal record. We do know, however, that only a third had hired or would hire an ex-prisoner “should the opportunity arise.”

Half the employers agreed that certain policy and program changes would make them more predisposed to hire ex-prisoners — not necessarily to hire them, mind you, but influenced in that direction.

Among them is protection from legal liability, i.e.,  immunity from lawsuits claiming “negligent hiring” if an ex-prisoner on their payroll committed another crime in the course of his/her duties.

The Council recommends this. Yet it notes that it could find only five such lawsuits against District employers in the last several decades.

Says to me that we’ve got an irrational bias here — either an unfounded fear or a cover for other prejudicial assumptions.

DC Councilmember Marion Barry has introduced a bill that would make “past arrests and convictions” a prohibited basis for discrimination under the D.C. Human Rights Act.

Lots of reservations about this — and not all coming from the Chamber of Commerce and the businesses it represents.

Enough so I think we can be pretty confident that local employers will be able to go on discriminating against job applicants with criminal records for the indefinite future.

What would get them to do otherwise?