Published: April 6, 2004

As the Bush administration focuses attention on ex-offenders with its modest program to help them return to the community, an eye-opening new study shows that the effort will require a lot more than re-entry programs. Not only do all 50 states continue to punish and marginalize convicts after they leave jail, but most also have laws that punish millions of people for crimes for which they were never convicted.

The new study, from the Legal Action Center, a criminal justice policy group, identifies laws in all 50 states that hamper former offenders' ability to re-enter society. These excessively punitive laws, which must be modified or repealed before ex-convicts have a real chance at jobs, homes and mainstream lives, bar them from scores of professions that require state licenses but are unrelated to their crimes.

The study, which will soon be available on the Web, ranks the states based on the stringency of laws that bar former offenders from whole professions, or strip them of driver's licenses, parental rights and the right to vote.

Colorado, South Carolina, Georgia and Virginia are rated worst, which means that ex-offenders in those states have the least chance of becoming productive citizens. In some states, a person who commits a vehicle-related crime as a teenager can go to college and grow into adulthood, only to be barred from, say, the real estate business, which requires a state license.

A similar brand of punishment is being used against people who have been arrested on suspicion of crimes for which they were never convicted. Thirty-seven states permit prospective employers and all state licensing agencies to ask about and weigh arrests that never led to conviction. In addition, employers in most states can simply fire anyone who is discovered to have a criminal record, regardless of the circumstance.

Congress worsened matters during the 1990's with a series of new laws that use federal aid to punish former offenders and arrestees. One of the most damaging laws withholds highway funds from states that do not punish drug offenders by suspending their driver's licenses — whether or not the original offense had anything to do with a car.

Many states were smart enough to opt out of this law. But 27 actually revoke or suspend driver's licenses of some or all drug offenders. Those who leave prison in desperate need of jobs cannot legally drive to work, to school or to drug treatment programs. In states where public transportation is nonexistent, ex-convicts have no choice but to risk returning to prison by driving illegally.

This country only harms itself when it traps ex-offenders at the margins of society and forces them back into prison.

NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/06/opinion/06TUE2.html?ex=1082253657&ei=1&en=ad)

Nemesis, that was a good little report. Restitution fees also make it difficult for ex-cons to get back on their feet. Where the hell is this justice we keep hearing so much about?

Ditto...there are way too many obstacles for our men and women to face when coming home...not enough resources or even constructive advice..

I agree. Its terrible. My son is really struggling with this and he can't find a job anywhere. He is one of those wrongly accused, which really doesn't matter at this point. I wish us all well! God Bless

Here it is, 2007 and not much has changed.

Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?
Race and the transformation of criminal justice

Glenn C. Loury

[Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the department of economics at Brown University.]

Full: http://bostonreview.net/BR32.4/loury.html


The early 1990s were the age of drive-by shootings, drug deals gone bad,
crack cocaine, and gangsta rap. Between 1960 and 1990, the annual number
of murders in New Haven rose from six to 31, the number of rapes from
four to 168, the number of robberies from 16 to 1,784—all this while the
city’s population declined by 14 percent. Crime was concentrated in
central cities: in 1990, two fifths of Pennsylvania’s violent crimes
were committed in Philadelphia, home to one seventh of the state’s
population. The subject of crime dominated American domestic-policy debates.

Most observers at the time expected things to get worse. Consulting
demographic tables and extrapolating trends, scholars and pundits warned
the public to prepare for an onslaught, and for a new kind of
criminal—the anomic, vicious, irreligious, amoral juvenile
“super-predator.” In 1996, one academic commentator predicted a
“bloodbath” of juvenile homicides in 2005.

And so we prepared. Stoked by fear and political opportunism, but also
by the need to address a very real social problem, we threw lots of
people in jail, and when the old prisons were filled we built new ones.

But the onslaught never came. Crime rates peaked in 1992 and have
dropped sharply since. Even as crime rates fell, however, imprisonment
rates remained high and continued their upward march. The result, the
current American prison system, is a leviathan unmatched in human history.

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison
Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s
population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration
rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those
of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other
industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of
their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times
that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan.
We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the
combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three
largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some
$200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels
of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past
quarter century.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so
many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were
being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered
across America’s urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in
state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or
robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug
offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most
disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer
than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately
black and brown.

How did it come to this? One argument is that the massive increase in
incarceration reflects the success of a rational public policy: faced
with a compelling social problem, we responded by imprisoning people and
succeeded in lowering crime rates. This argument is not entirely
misguided. Increased incarceration does appear to have reduced crime
somewhat. But by how much? Estimates of the share of the 1990s reduction
in violent crime that can be attributed to the prison boom range from
five percent to 25 percent. Whatever the number, analysts of all
political stripes now agree that we have long ago entered the zone of
diminishing returns. The conservative scholar John DiIulio, who coined
the term “super-predator” in the early 1990s, was by the end of that
decade declaring in The Wall Street Journal that “Two Million Prisoners
Are Enough.” But there was no political movement for getting America out
of the mass-incarceration business. The throttle was stuck.

A more convincing argument is that imprisonment rates have continued to
rise while crime rates have fallen because we have become progressively
more punitive: not because crime has continued to explode (it hasn’t),
not because we made a smart policy choice, but because we have made a
collective decision to increase the rate of punishment.

One simple measure of punitiveness is the likelihood that a person who
is arrested will be subsequently incarcerated. Between 1980 and 2001,
there was no real change in the chances of being arrested in response to
a complaint: the rate was just under 50 percent. But the likelihood that
an arrest would result in imprisonment more than doubled, from 13 to 28
percent. And because the amount of time served and the rate of prison
admission both increased, the incarceration rate for violent crime
almost tripled, despite the decline in the level of violence. The
incarceration rate for nonviolent and drug offenses increased at an even
faster pace: between 1980 and 1997 the number of people incarcerated for
nonviolent offenses tripled, and the number of people incarcerated for
drug offenses increased by a factor of 11. Indeed, the criminal-justice
researcher Alfred Blumstein has argued that none of the growth in
incarceration between 1980 and 1996 can be attributed to more crime:

The growth was entirely attributable to a growth in punitiveness,
about equally to growth in prison commitments per arrest (an indication
of tougher prosecution or judicial sentencing) and to longer time served
(an indication of longer sentences, elimination of parole or later
parole release, or greater readiness to recommit parolees to prison for
either technical violations or new crimes).

This growth in punitiveness was accompanied by a shift in thinking about
the basic purpose of criminal justice. In the 1970s, the sociologist
David Garland argues, the corrections system was commonly seen as a way
to prepare offenders to rejoin society. Since then, the focus has
shifted from rehabilitation to punishment and stayed there. Felons are
no longer persons to be supported, but risks to be dealt with. And the
way to deal with the risks is to keep them locked up. As of 2000, 33
states had abolished limited parole (up from 17 in 1980); 24 states had
introduced three-strikes laws (up from zero); and 40 states had
introduced truth-in-sentencing laws (up from three). The vast majority
of these changes occurred in the 1990s, as crime rates fell.

full: http://bostonreview.net/BR32.4/loury.html