Category: Policy

NYT says NO to “the other f-word,” and YES to Gov. McAuliffe

The New York Times has two great Sunday editorials on issues relating to collateral consequences.  One deals with the issue of labeling people with a criminal record, of special concern when headline writers seem unable to resist using what Bill Keller at the Marshall Project recently called “the other F-word.”  The editorial points out that ugly demeaning labels like “convict” and “felon” are “an unfair life sentence.”  Let us hope the message reaches newsrooms across the country, and that journalists (especially headline writers) will find another way of describing people with a criminal record. The Times also has another very fine editorial on Virginia Governor McAuliffe’s restoration of the vote to more than 200,000 individuals, pointing out that his authority under the Virginia Constitution is indisputable. A very good day for the editorial staff of the Gray Lady, whose editorial page is setting an example of enlightened thinking about criminal law issues – notably including the collateral consequences of conviction. Read more

Justice Department (or part of it) will no longer use the “f-word”

The Washington Post has published an op ed by a top Justice Department official responsible for grants and contracts announcing that her agency* will no longer use labels like “felon” and “offender” to describe people who have a criminal record.  Assistant Attorney General Karol Mason, who heads the Office of Justice Programs, said that she had recently issued “an agency-wide policy directing our employees to consider how the language we use affects reentry success.” I have come to believe that we have a responsibility to reduce not only the physical but also the psychological barriers to reintegration.  The labels we affix to those who have served time can drain their sense of self-worth and perpetuate a cycle of crime, the very thing reentry programs are designed to prevent. This is terrific news, and comes on the heels of a thoughtful editorial by Bill Keller of The Marshall Project proposing that journalists ought to make an effort to avoid disparaging language: [W]ords that not long ago were used without qualms may come to be regarded as demeaning: “colored,” “illegals.”  “Felon,” which makes the person synonymous with the crime, is such a word. Likewise “convict.”  I’m less troubled by words that describe a temporary status without the suggestion of irredeemable wickedness — “inmate” and “prisoner” and “ex-offender” — but ask me again a year from now. Ms. Mason’s piece explained further: This new policy statement replaces unnecessarily disparaging labels with terms like “person who committed a crime” and “individual who was incarcerated,” decoupling past actions from the person being described and anticipating the contributions we expect them to make when they return.  We will be using the new terminology in speeches, solicitations, website content, and social media posts, and I am hopeful that other agencies and organizations will consider doing the same. Interestingly, the Post editor either didn’t read Ms. Mason’s piece or didn’t agree with it, since the paragraph introducing it used the word “convict” twice.  I guess it just takes time. __________________ *A note at the bottom of the op ed explains that Ms. Mason’s new policy applies only to OJP and not to the Justice Department as a whole. Read more

Will Prez Obama make federal contractors ban the box? [Update: Not now.]

  Updated April 29: According to comments late this week from senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, the President remains inclined to defer to Congress when it comes to making federal contractors ban the box: Asked whether there was consideration of whether to take action to require federal contractors to “ban the box,” Jarrett said, “The president has supported federal legislation that would ban the box for federal contractors. He thinks that’s the best approach.” The legislation in question appears to have stalled, as noted by its sponsor Rep. Elijah Cummings.  (In a tweet, Jarrett pointed advocates to a 2013 directive of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance reminding contractors of their obligation to comply with the EEOC guidance on criminal records.) On the other hand, on Friday the administration made good on its November promise to require federal agencies to ban the box, when OPM announced a proposed rule requiring federal agencies to postpone inquiry into an applicant’s criminal record until after a conditional offer of employment has been made. Also, marking the end of National Reentry Week, the President formally established the Federal Interagency Reentry Council, a Cabinet-level working group dedicated to “the rehabilitation and reintegration of individuals returning to their communities from prisons and jails.”  Originally convened by the Attorney General in 2011, the President’s action ensures that the Council will continue past the end of his Administration. Original post from April 26: As the White House inaugural National Reentry Week begins, advocacy organizations and Members of Congress are again calling on President Obama to use his executive authority to “ban the box” in federal contractor hiring, just as he announced he would do in federal agency hiring last November. The call comes on the heels of a number of steps the Obama Administration has taken to improve the employment prospects of those with criminal histories, including the creation of the Fair Chance Business Pledge earlier this month.  Last fall, the President announced a number of additional reentry initiatives, including establishment of a Clean Slate Clearinghouse.  The President’s overall record on second-chance issues has been commendable, but he will have to move quickly to maximize his administration’s impact before the end of his term. The 170,000 federal contractors employ a full 25% of the nation’s workforce, and all of them are subject to Executive regulation via the terms of their contracts.  As such, the President has significant authority to regulate private sector hiring policies.  He also has an efficient means of enforcing those regulations through termination of contracts with noncompliant employers.  To date, however, the President has deferred to Congress where regulation of contractors is concerned, urging it to pass the Fair Chance Act which would extend a ban-the-box policy to contractors by statute. But since that announcement, the Fair Chance Act has languished in committee, and it seems increasingly unlikely that a policy that applies to contractors will become a reality before the end of the President’s term unless the President implements it himself.  Last Wednesday, Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the Act’s sponsor, acknowledged its dim prospects in urging the President not to wait for Congress.  In an open letter, joined by 21 other Members, he wrote: On November 2, 2015, you also explained that “Congress should pass legislation that builds on today’s announcement. ”  We agree, and have been working diligently with our colleagues in Congress to advance the Fair Chance Act (H.R. 3470), which would extend ban the box policies to all three branches of the federal government and prime federal contractors. However, without a clear path forward for the legislation, we are respectfully calling upon you to drive these issues forward with executive action. Yesterday, a coalition of 136 advocacy organizations (including the CCRC) led by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) wrote to the President urging him to extend fair chance hiring policies to federal contractors. As the NELP letter points out, the additional burden on many large federal contractors would be slight since they are already subject to ban-the-box laws at the state level: [B]ecause most of the nation’s largest federal contractors operate across state lines, they are already subject to multiple state and local ban-the-box laws. Indeed, seven states (Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, and Rhode Island) and many of the nation’s largest cities (including Baltimore, Chicago, New York City, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.) have fair hiring mandates in place covering private sector employers.[2. Many other states ban-the-box in public hiring, but none of those policies extend to state contractors.] As a result, roughly 25 percent of the nation’s civilian workforce (or over 40 million workers) are employed in a state or locality where private sector employers are obligated to comply with a ban-the-box law. Thus, abundant precedent exists to help pave the way for a federal executive order regulating the nation’s private contractors.   Additionally, many large federal contractors have already chosen to adopt ban-the-box policies of their own accord, including Xerox, Google, and Koch Industries/Georgia Pacific. In his speech announcing the federal agency ban-the-box policy this past November, President Obama said, Now, a lot of time, [a] record disqualifies you from being a full participant in our society — even if you’ve already paid your debt to society.  It means millions of Americans have difficulty even getting their foot in the door to try to get a job much less actually hang on to that job.  That’s bad for not only those individuals, it’s bad for our economy.  It’s bad for the communities that desperately need more role models who are gainfully employed.  So we’ve got to make sure Americans who’ve paid their debt to society can earn their second chance. Banning the box in federal contractor hiring would go a long way toward achieving this goal, by giving countless American workers the opportunity to demonstrate their employment qualifications before employers become aware of their criminal histories. But the clock is counting down on the President’s chance to make that important change a part of his legacy. You can read entirety of the Congressional letter here, and the letter from the NELP-led coalition here.   Read more

A wide-ranging look at sex offender registration in PA and beyond

The Cumberland County (Pennsylvania) Sentinel recently published a series of articles by Joshua Vaughn that examine the operation and effect of sex offender registration laws from a variety of perspectives. We summarize the articles with links to the Sentinel’s website. Finding statistics to fit a narrative Original article Vaughn traces the “frightening and high risk of recidivism” for untreated sex offenders that Justice Kennedy used to support the Supreme Court’s holdings in McKune v. Lile (2002) and Smith v. Doe (2003) to an unsourced “anecdotal quip” in a 1986 article from Psychology Today suggesting sex offender recidivism rates as high as 80%.  That figure found its way into a Justice Department practitioner’s guide for treating incarcerated sex offenders, which in turn was cited by the Solicitor General’s amicus brief in McKune. Vaughn, asking how such a questionable statistic could turn out to be a “linchpin fact” in two extremely influential Supreme Court cases, proposes that the Court relied on the Solicitor General, who in turn relied on the practice guide without doing his own research. Vaughn reports that the Justice Department “now states on its website that the rate at which released sexual offenders are rearrested for new sexual offenses is as low as 3 to 10 percent,” evidently referring to a report of the Bureau of Justice Statistics.   When facts aren’t facts: A look at the effectiveness of sexual offender registries Original article The second article in the series looks at the comparative costs and benefits of registries in light of the claimed high recidivism rates that are used to justify them. It notes the 2014 decision of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court holding unconstitutional a state law requiring long term registration of juveniles based on evidence showing juvenile recidivism rates between 2 and 7 percent.  The article also considers how registries might be reformed in light of what we now know about actual recidivism rates.   Registered man details a lifetime debt to society Original article The third article in the series offers a glimpse into one Pennsylvania man’s life on the registry.  After serving fifteen years in prison and losing his family, he has accepted the burdens of registration as a fact of life.  His days are now “spent trying to fly under the radar, not out of the oversight of police or for any nefarious purposes, but to try to regain some normalcy and a chance to build relationships in his life outside of prison.”   Family members speak out against sex offender registries Original article Vicki Henry, the founder of Women Against Registry, warns of the danger that public registration poses to registrants and their families.  In light of her own experience — her registrant son was the subject of unproven child pornography allegations — and reported incidents of violence against registrants, Henry says that “public registries have become a public hit list and do not provide the public with actual safety.”   A closer look at Pennsylvania’s sex offender registry Original article This article looks at the makeup of the Pennsylvania sex offender registry and the specific requirements to which registrants are subject.   There are currently over 19,000 people on the registry in Pennsylvania, 1,500 whom are classified as sexually violent predators.  Of those 1,500, two-thirds are currently incarcerated.  All registrants are subject to continual scrutiny from law enforcement, to public stigma, and to burdensome and intrusive notification requirements that can last from 15 years to a lifetime. Read more

Reentry efforts undermined by collateral consequences

Author: Art Beeler Editor’s note: Earlier this week Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced that The Justice Department has christened the week of April 24-30 “National Reentry Week.”  In the announcement, the Attorney General highlighted  “the major steps [taken by the Obama administration] to make our criminal justice system more fair, more efficient, and more effective at reducing recidivism and helping formerly incarcerated individuals contribute to their communities.”  The announcement prompted Art Beeler, a former warden in the federal correctional system and current member of the North Carolina Sentencing Commission, to consider the place that collateral consequences ought to have in our national dialog about reentry, recidivism, and public safety. As a warden with the Federal Bureau of Prisons for more than twenty years, I know that successful evidence-based reentry programs are essential if we are going to reduce recidivism and increase public safety.  So it was with great interest that I read U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s letter celebrating reentry week.  I applaud the growing focus on reentry programming, which is essential, but I believe that we must acknowledge that we will never achieve the goal of reintegrating those convicted of crimes back into society without fully addressing the problem posed by collateral consequences.  The federal government has already taken some steps a to reevaluate collateral consequences imposed by federal regulations, as the AG notes in her letter, but successful reentry efforts demand a full reevaluation of the intent and effect of collateral consequences at both the federal and state level. Though I have spent much of my career attempting to help those convicted of crimes transition back into society, I did not fully understand the impact of collateral consequences until late in my career.  Their significance hit home when I was giving a tour of the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina to participants of a reentry conference at Duke’s School of Law.  Joining us on the tour was a former inmate who had been invited by the Chief Judge for the Western District of North Carolina.  The man had been barbering for almost twenty years since his release and had no subsequent criminal involvement.  But his twenty-plus year-old federal drug conviction rendered him ineligible for the Small Business Administration he needed to open his own barber shop.  Hearing this, I suddenly became aware that collateral consequences were far more commonplace and restrictive than I had previously assumed. According to the National Inventory of the Collateral Consequences of Conviction (NICCC), there are over 47,000 collateral consequences imposed by state and federal law, many of which make it unnecessarily difficult for prisoners to succeed on the outside.  Most of these laws and rules were enacted with the well-intentioned goal of protecting public safety, but, by posing obstacles to successful reentry, many of these laws have the opposite effect.  I say this based on forty-two years of experience in correctional management, during which I have seen multitudes of prisoners enter, leave, and, all too-often, return to prison. Reducing recidivism requires expanding opportunities to those with criminal records, not reducing them.  My correction colleagues and I would often say, anecdotally, that if the sixty percent in the middle of the normal distribution curve of those released had not found a decent job with a living wage in 90-120 days, then they would likely return to criminal behavior and, inevitably, to prison. The reality underlying that assumption has been borne out in numerous of studies.  Most notably, a RAND study empirically demonstrated that inmate education and vocational training reduces recidivism.  The Second Chance Pell Pilot program (which is experimenting with reversing the 1994 policy barring prisoners from receiving Pell grants to fund college tuition) shows that the Administration recognizes this reality.  Critics of such programs wonder why prisoners should get a free ride while law-abiding citizens pay for their own educational costs.  The answer is simple: Because 95% of prisoners will be returning to the community, and we know that those who are better equipped to succeed pose less risk.  Everyone benefits when we remove the unreasonable barriers limiting opportunities for current and former inmates. But we cannot begin to address the problem posed by collateral consequences until we understand it.  Too many lawyers, legislators, and others involved in the system are unaware of the impact that these civil penalties have on reentry and recidivism, just as I was until fairly recently.   Studies and inventories of collateral consequences, like the NICCC and C-CAT maintained by the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Government here in North Carolina, are working to change that.  But reform requires policy-makers to pay attention.  In the past few years I have written several letters to legislators and policy-makers on the subject of collateral consequences.  Rarely have I received more than a generic response thanking me for my comments.  Hopefully, other interested parties are having better luck raising awareness. Focusing on sentencing reform and reentry programming is important, but they are only two pieces of the puzzle.  By failing to fully review the role of collateral consequences at all levels we are cutting a leg off of a three-legged stool and undercutting our efforts to encourage the success of returning citizens and the safety of our communities. About the Author: Art Beeler is a Clinical Assistant Professor at North Carolina Central University, and a Commissioner with the North Carolina Sentencing Commission. He retired as the Complex Warden at the federal correctional facility in Butner, North Carolina in 2009, after over three decades of service in the federal prison system.]   Read more