For vast numbers of Americans who have been convicted of a felony, the punishment has no end point.
This essay in the New York Times by Carnegie Mellon professor, Alfred Blumstein, and University of Maryland criminologist, Kiminori Nakamura, gets to the heart of this issue that we as a nation can simply no longer afford to ignore.
Here’s a clip from their story:
IN 2010, the Chicago Public Schools declined to hire Darrell Langdon for a job as a boiler-room engineer, because he had been convicted of possessing a half-gram of cocaine in 1985, a felony for which he received probation. It didn’t matter that Mr. Langdon, a single parent of two sons, had been clean since 1988 and hadn’t run into further trouble with the law. Only after The Chicago Tribune wrote about his case did the school system reverse its decision and offer him the job.
A stunning number of young people are arrested for crimes in this country, and those crimes can haunt them for the rest of their lives. In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Crime Commission found that about half of American males could expect to be arrested for a nontraffic offense some time in their lives, mostly in their late teens and early 20s. An article just published in the journal Pediatrics shows how the arrest rate has grown — by age 23, 30 percent of Americans have been arrested, compared with 22 percent in 1967. The increase reflects in part the considerable growth in arrests for drug offenses and domestic violence.
The impact of these arrests is felt for years. The ubiquity of criminal-background checks and the efficiency of information technology in maintaining those records and making them widely available, have meant that millions of Americans — even those who served probation or parole but were never incarcerated — continue to pay a price long after the crime. In November the American Bar Association released a database identifying more than 38,000 punitive provisions that apply to people convicted of crimes, pertaining to everything from public housing to welfare assistance to occupational licenses. More than two-thirds of the states allow hiring and professional-licensing decisions to be made on the basis of an arrest alone.
Employers understandably want to protect their employees and customers from risk. Yet at the same time, there is a growing public interest in facilitating job opportunities for those who have stayed crime-free for a reasonable period of time. The weak economy and a rethinking of the logic of mass incarceration — driven in large part by budget pressures — have also brought attention to the situations of ex-offenders like Mr. Langdon, who face the collateral consequences of conviction long after their involvement with the criminal justice system has ended. Federal authorities are beginning to pay attention. Last April, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. urged state attorneys general to review laws and policies “to determine whether those that impose burdens on individuals convicted of crimes without increasing public safety should be eliminated.”
Read the rest. to find out what Blumstein and Nakamura suggest as solutions.
PS: A former California prison warden friend of mine who originally drew my attention to this story, pointed out that the one aspect of this issue that the authors don’t mention is voting rights. “The United States is the only country that permits permanent disenfranchisement of felons even after completion of their sentences,” he wrote in an email.
This causes around two million Americans to be forever disenfranchised. However, each state has different rules. In California, thankfully, while voting rights are not restored upon release from prison, once someone is off parole or probation, they may register to vote again.
Thanks for posting this interesting op-ed. Look forward to reading the whole thing.
I did want to note that the vast majority of states don’t have permanent felony disenfranchisement. It’s much more common that voting is allowed once released or after finishing parole.
According to this map, Iowa, Kentucky, Florida, and Virginia are the only one’s that extreme.
http://www.brennancenter.org/page/-/d/download_file_48642.pdf
Thanks, David, for clarifying the issue of voting rights. And, yes, it’s worth it to read the whole thing.
PS: After I read your comment I added an explanatory addendum to the end of the post re: voting rights.
Common sense and experience tells me that convicted felons who achieve freedom are much more likely to vote for Democrats…something about exchanging professional courtesies. That’s reason enough to not let them vote.
@Woody. Interesting research from Weaver and Lerman finds that incarceration makes people less likely to participate in political and civic engagements and to have less trust in government. That might be a good reason for even you to care about incarceration.
Paper here: http://www.princeton.edu/~alerman/LermanPolCons
They don’t find, and I haven’t seen any evidence, to suggest that incarceration has a causal effect on one’s choice once in the voting booth. There may be a correlation between incarceration and voting, but that is most likely because people who are more likely to be incarcerated are also more likely to vote in a particular way, whether or not incarcerated.
I know that you are just being a wise-ass or perhaps an attempt at humor, but incarceration is too important of an issue to degrade the discussion to that level. In addition, suggesting that a desire to vote for a particular candidate or party warrants restriction on suffrage is a shameful violation of the rule of law.
Lighten up, David. Life doesn’t have to be all causes and offenses.
I know a lot of ex convicts who tend to lean conservative (woody, insert joke about me knowing convicts…). It’s ironic, but a lot of them rehabilitate by accepting the system as is, and recognizing that they have more freedom if they play by the system’s rules. They tend to reject any kind of assistance from liberals, and view it as condescending. It’s not like they’re foxnews, fire breathing Republicans who shill the party’s talking points day in and day out as if they have nothing better to do (like Woody), but they do tend to lean right of center. It’s a trip. You’d expect them to lean left. Another case of Americans voting against their best interests, because of course every conservative vote is a vote for more prison time and more crimes punishable by prison.
Following up on felony disenfranchisement, it appears that there are real effects in political outcomes. Research by Ugge and Manza finds that it is likely the 2000 election would have gone the other way, and they also find evidence for a similar effect in seven U.S. Senate races. Fascinating stuff.
Here’s their book:
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Sociology/Political/?pr=10&pf=0&ss=title.asc&sf=recommended&sd=asc&view=usa&ci=0195149327