Reducing the Stigma of Criminal Backgrounds in America

As we all know, genuine systematic change never happens overnight.

Progress only comes in steps, but it's those individual steps, however small they might be, that lay the path to broader change that is lasting, significant and meaningful.

At long last in the United States, we're finally beginning to see unprecedented bi-partisan support from Congress on a major issue that undermines the very definition of the freedoms enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

The massive effort to begin to depopulate American prisons of non-violent offenders and individuals jailed for relatively low-level drug offenses to address the crisis of mass incarceration.

Tackling the prison-industrial complex and the scope of the systematic unequal application and enforcement of local, state and federal laws that feed it is only one part of unraveling mass incarceration in America.

The reintegration of former prisoners back into society to enable them to become productive members of the community must be a priority as well, and slowly but surely those changes are starting to manifest around the nation.

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe

Just consider the state of Virginia, where last month Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe restored voting rights to some 200,000 former convicted felons, enabling them to cast votes in the presidential elections this fall.

Despite outrage from Republicans who've made putting up barriers to the right to vote for students, racial minorities, the poor and the elderly a priority in recent years, surely restoring former convicts's right to participate in the Democratic process is a positive step towards keeping them on the right track.

Across the nation juvenile sentencing laws are being reformed at the state level to ensure that teenagers under the age of 18 are not incarcerated in prisons with adults, denied access to bail or locked up for low-level drug charges.

Like Connecticut, where Democratic Governor Dan Malloy is pushing the state legislature to pass more juvenile justice reforms in a state where reforms in juvenile sentencing that raised the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18 and the decriminalization of small amounts of marijuana have helped push the crime rate to a 48-year low.

But those kinds of changes, long overdue, are going even deeper.

Last month, on April 4th (the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a memo entitled "Office of General Counsel Guidance on Application of Fair Housing Act Standards to the Use of Criminal Records By Providers of Housing and Real Estate-Related Transactions".

Now that's a mouthful, but it's pretty remarkable.

What it boils down to is that HUD has issued new government recommendations and guidelines to real estate companies, residential leasing / property management companies, and associated vendors (like companies that provide application screening services) on screening individuals with criminal backgrounds for residency applications.

For people like me who process leasing applications for apartments for a living, it means HUD now recommends that we now need to begin looking closer at applicants who may be flagged for having a criminal record and look deeper at the specifics of what that record means - specifically because a disproportionate percentage of those with criminal backgrounds are people of color.

People who have been statistically proven to have been disproportionately targeted by law enforcement, and convicted in state an local court systems, for a range of non-violent offenses based on race and ethnicity.



For example, someone who submits an application for an apartment (or a mortgage) may be flagged for having a criminal record and prevented from renting or buying housing.

But that record may be for a minor drug offense, or a low level misdemeanor related to something like cashing a bad check, or getting into an altercation in a bar - and believe me, those kinds of things affect people of all races.

A criminal background flag may stem from warrants issued for accumulated fines from unpaid parking violations, or the criminalization of procedural vehicular violations, as we saw in places like Ferguson, Missouri.

Unarmed motorist Sandra Bland

Or worse, in Texas where Sandra Bland ended up dying in jail under mysterious circumstances for an illegal lane change - and no one faced legal repercussions for it.

Routine things like that can prevent people from being approved for renting an apartment, even if it happened 5 to 7 years ago - even if those folks qualify with good credit and sufficient income requirements.



If you have the time, read through the HUD memo, it's pretty significant in that it's making a major government policy recommendation that companies now begin to revise policy to take into account the fact that as many as 100 million American adults  (fully one third of the U.S. population) have some kind of criminal record.

The memo also highlights the staggering fact that the approximately 2.2 million people currently incarcerated in American prisons represent 25% of the global prison population - even though the U.S. represents only 5% of the world's population.

Now as some of you reading this know all too well, judicial and human rights activist have been talking about those stats for years.

It's a significant step that HUD is now recommending that private real estate companies begin to take those statistics into account when screening people for residency.

That's a big step for addressing mass incarceration in America, one that reflects an acknowledgment of a troubling reality in this nation.

The stigmatization of a huge portion of the U.S. populace based on systematic bias built into a law enforcement and judicial system that treats people differently not based on the objective interpretation of the law, but on the perception of the race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status of the individual.

Change doesn't happen overnight, it happens in steps, and the HUD recommendations are an important step in dismantling the dehumanizing savagery of the American prison-industrial complex.

Who's Getting Jailed and Why?

The day after posting my previous blog on debtor's prisons, Fresh Air host Terry Gross conducted a really informative radio interview with Nancy Fishman, the project director of the Center on Sentencing and Corrections for the Vera Institute for Justice.

Vera is a progressive non-profit established in 1961 that works to ensure fairness in the justice system and address issues related to mass incarceration and injustices embedded within America's jails and prisons.

Fishman, the co-author of a report entitled 'Incarceration's Front Door: The Misuse of America's Jails',  shared some really troubling insight about U.S. jails.

Including the disturbing fact that for-profit companies that operate local jails for municipalities and counties across the nation actually charge people held there fees for their own room and board.


A fact made more absurd in light of statistics posted on the Vera Institute for Justice Website that show that local jails currently admit some 11.7 million Americans a year, most of whom are being held for low-level non-violent offenses or minor traffic violations based on their inability or failure to pay fees for tickets and fines.

62% of those people are actually innocent and haven't even been convicted of an actual offense or crime, and the vast majority of them are poor.

As Fishman told Terry Gross about the approximately 730,000 Americans currently in U.S. jails:

"They are legally innocent...one of the great travesties, frankly, of jail admissions right now is that we have innocent people sitting in jails for long periods simply because they can't afford to pay [bail]."

As a recent New York Times article reported, the problem of backlogged court cases for minor offenses has gotten so bad in the Bronx that Bronx Defenders (which provides legal services to the poor) and two law firms filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Manhattan last Tuesday alleging that excessive wait times and delays for people awaiting court appearances actually constitutes a violation of the right to fair trial guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Now obviously that doesn't mean that there aren't people who deserve to be in jail.

Speaking of which....

Michael Slager shooting Walter Scott in the back

Former North Charleston Police Officer Michael Slager was back in the news earlier this week after the Justice Department announced that he will face federal indictment on three counts for the 2015 shooting death of unarmed African-American veteran Walter Scott.

In fact it was just about this time last year that Slager made headlines after he stopped unarmed African-American veteran Walter Scott for driving with a broken tail light.

After a brief and fairly cordial verbal discussion, Scott abruptly got out of the car and took off running.

Following a brief foot chase, Slager caught up with Scott and there was a brief physical struggle before Scott got away; it was then that Slager opened fire with his handgun, killing Scott as he was running away.

Slager initially told investigators that he fired in self defense as Scott was coming towards him, but a bystander caught the incident on a cell phone camera and it showed that not only did Slager shoot the Navy veteran in the back, he actually picked up his taser weapopn which had fallen during the physical struggle, and brought it over and dropped it near Scott's body in an effort to try and plant false evidence that Scott had tried to attack the former officer,

As I said, some folks do belong in jail.

Conservatives Can't Change the Subject Anymore

Activist Ryan Toney in front of the Supreme Court in 2013

Every now and then in this country, if you're lucky, you might just be fortunate enough to bear witness to the kind of fundamental change that shifts foundations, alters perceptions, changes the course of our history and reminds us of the kind of nation America can be when it gets it's act together.

Today was just such a day thanks to a landmark Supreme Court decision resulting from years of legal challenges, social activism and lobbying for marriage equality and LGBT rights.

Today was a good day for all Americans.

Yesterday was such a day too, lest we forget that the Affordable Care Act withstood a second major legal challenge and is now one step further towards being firmly cemented as one of those bedrock Roosevelt-ian federal programs that "promote the general welfare" like Social Security or Medicare.

It's not simple to put a finger on it but something has clearly shifted in the collective American
consciousness.

A terrifying chain of events seared into the American mindset; a teenage girl in Texas being physically assaulted by an out of control police officer trying to break up a disturbance at a pool party.

A racist killer brainwashed by right-wing hate propaganda using a legally purchased handgun to murder nine innocent people in a church during a bible study in Charleston, South Carolina.

These events are directly linked to the high-profile police killings that took place in Baltimore, Ferguson, Staten Island, Brooklyn, Cleveland, South Carolina and elsewhere.

After the deaths of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and others, there was no more dismissing the killing of unarmed and innocent people of color as isolated incidents or accidents.

In this technology-driven age of social media, cell-phone video & photos, CCTV cameras and eyewitness accounts have made it clear for those who weren't aware of it before (or denied it) that the state-sponsored brutalization of people (many but not all people of color) by some members of law enforcement is not just systematic.

The scale and frequency of it (the federal government doesn't even keep comprehensive stats on police killings) has branded it as a large-scale human rights violation being committed by the very judicial system tasked with enforcing laws and protecting the public.

The scope of this issue is examined in the June 4th issue of Rolling Stone in Matt Taibbi's searing expose of systematic police violence against communities of color and the origins of "Broken Windows policing" entitled "Why Baltimore Blew Up".  You have to read it if you haven't already.

As Taibbi writes in the opening paragraphs, "Go to any predominantly minority neighborhood in any major American city and you'll hear the same stories: decades of being sworn at, thrown against walls, kicked, searched without cause, stripped naked on busy city streets, threatened with visits from child protective services, chased by dogs, and arrested and jailed not merely on false pretenses, but for reasons that often don't even rise to the level of being stupid."
 
The stark truth of these massive inequities in the justice system are coupled with the issue of the mass incarceration of African-American men, which is so absurd in scope that even in this highly politically-polarized atmosphere, it's now brought together people like Hillary Clinton, the Koch brothers, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and George Soros on the same side. Think about that.

It's creating a groundswell in America, a tidal wave of awareness that is now extending beyond the justice system; I think it's the momentum of that same groundswell that swayed the slim 5 - 4 majority on the Supreme Court to vote in favor of marriage equality.

Though I did study Constitutional law in college, and the SCOTUS majority did rule based in part on an expansive interpretation of the 14th Amendment in granting same-sex couples the right to marry, I think the court's opinion can be traced back to the simple fact those justices are just like us.

They saw what happened to Freddie Gray in Baltimore after he was taken into police custody for a reason that's still not clear.

They watched a South Carolina police officer shoot a black motorist in the back who fled a traffic stop then watched him die before picking up his taser and placing it near the man's body to try and justify his murdering an unarmed man who was running away.

They watched in horror as the reports unfolded of Dylann Roof shooting innocent churchgoers in cold blood based on his twisted interpretation of racist manifestos he'd read online.

We've all watched those things unfold, they may be members of the Supreme Court but in that they are no different than us.

I don't think there's any question that those things impacted their decision to both affirm the Affordable Care Act and to grant marriage equality; not because it's a health issue, or a gay issue, or a black issue, or a white issue, or a religious issue.

It's a human issue. It's a question of what kind of nation we want to be in the 21st century.

This groundswell I spoke of, this tide is going to affect even more change; it's already shifted the tone of the 2016 presidential race as GOP contenders have been forced to confront nationwide calls to remove the Confederate flag from license plates and from the grounds of statehouses in South Carolina, Alabama and elsewhere.

Walmart, Sears, even NASCAR have already called for the removal of the Confederate flag.

Students at the University of Texas are petitioning for the removal of a statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis from campus. 

That tide is affecting not just race, and sexual orientation but gender too.

As Eriq Gardner reported in the June 5th issue of The Hollywood Reporter, the ACLU targeted the film and television industry with a petition on May 21st calling on Hollywood to request the government (specifically the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) to begin an investigation into why female directors are still so underrepresented in television and film.

It's impacting the conversation on immigration as well.

In the wake of Donald Trump's abhorrent and offensive remarks about Mexicans during his recent presidential announcement, Univision, the nation's largest Spanish-language broadcaster has severed ties with the Miss Universe pageant because of Trump's involvement as a co-producer of the event.

These are all human issues and Americans are not just paying attention; they are calling for changes.

As Matt Taibbi wrote in the opening of his June 4th  Rolling Stone article on systematic police abuse: "When Baltimore exploded in protests a few weeks ago following the unexplained paddy-wagon death of a young African-American man named Freddie Gray, America responded the way it usually does in a race crisis: It changed the subject."

Conservatives in this nation have been changing the subject for decades.

They've tried to convince people the Civil War was about the abstract concept of "States Rights" rather than whether states should decide whether black Americans could be owned as property and held in perpetuity in a state of forced labor and human bondage.

They've tried to frame the right of same-sex American couples to marry in the context of a "States Rights" issue or a "Freedom of religion" issue.

They've tried to frame their desire to suppress the rights of blacks, Hispanics, the elderly, college students, legal immigrants and the poor to exercise their Constitutional right to vote as a "Voter Integrity Issue".

But unfortunately for conservatives in this country, especially the right-wing extremists who now control the Republican party, something has shifted in the collective American consciousness.

A new awareness has taken root and is now growing, and conservatives can't just change the subject anymore - they must now confront the human issue before us all.

Disparities in Justice in America - A Renewed Discussion

One nation, two justice systems? (Image courtesy - twitter@DerrickJaxn)

If anything positive can come about as result of the senseless death of Michael Brown at the hands of an overzealous police officer, it's a renewed national dialog on the disparities that exist within America's justice system.

The community outrage over the shooting and the subsequent street protests, riots and the accompanying police reaction that have captivated the nation didn't just materialize out of nowhere.

As a well-written article published in the New York Times yesterday  pointed out, the reaction in Ferguson stems from long-simmering tensions that result in large part from patterns in housing discrimination, sharp disparities in community policing and the unequal application of the law based on economics and race.

As officials from the Department of Justice prepare to undertake an independent Federal autopsy on the body of Michael Brown, egregious examples of excessive use of police force against unarmed people of color remind us that this is the 21st century and the color of your skin can often determine how a policeman will treat you.

Michael Brown was jaywalking, he was shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer.

Back on July 1st a homeless grandmother named Marlene Pinnock was walking along a highway in Los Angeles in broad daylight on her way to find a place to sleep when a California Highway Patrol officer confronted her, threw her to the ground and savagely beat her in the head with a closed, gloved fist.

Fifteen days later Eric Garner was standing on the street in Staten Island, New York where he lived selling loose cigarettes when members of the NYPD confronted him, a bystander videotaped one of the officers restricting Garner's airway with an illegal choke hold while other officers piled on top of him - Garner was pronounced dead a short time later.

These are just a few examples of violent police responses to very low-level infractions that happened in broad daylight. In each case there were witnesses who saw what happened. (How many incidents happen across America at night when there are no witnesses?)

The disparities in the application of the law impact all of us, regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality or religion. The statistics are startling. According to StopMassIncareration.net, the United States has 5% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prison population - 60% of those prisoners are black or Latino. (Give or take a few percentage points, blacks make up about 12.1% of the total US population).

A joint research project released in 2012 by the Pew Center on the States and Vera Institute's Center on Sentencing and Corrections and Cost-Benefit Analysis Unit calculated the annual cost to American taxpayers for running the US prison system was a staggering $39 billion. States on average spend 2.8 times more per prisoner than they do pupils; math that only leads to a perpetuation of the system of mass incarceration in this country - an industry unto itself that lobbies for more prison construction.

Remember it's not just a cost measured in tax dollars alone. We're talking about the creation of a massive underclass of convicted felons and ex-prisoners (many of who were imprisoned for low-level drug offenses) who re-enter society barred from voting and taking part in the civic process of electing people to represent them, face barriers and discrimination in the hiring process, lack of access to health care and are relegated to a permanent 2nd class status that leaves them on the fringes of society.

The issue of disparity stretches way beyond the prism of race; it's goes to the very heart of the US justice system and the definition of who we are as a nation. Remember the "Affluenza" case of wealthy Texas teenager Ethan Couch?

It was a big story last December when Texas District Judge Jean Boyd sentenced the then-sixteen year-old Couch to probation after he slammed into a disabled vehicle while legally drunk. He killed the driver of the parked vehicle and three people (a mother and daughter and a youth pastor) who'd stopped to help her; he also paralyzed one the passengers in his truck and seriously injured another.

Judge Boyd's bizarre reasoning was that Couch had grown up so insulated from personal responsibility as a result of being so spoiled by his parent's immense wealth - so he couldn't be held legally responsible for his actions. We all know where a poor sixteen-year-old in Couch's shoes would've ended up.    

Responsibility lies at the heart of the Michael Brown case in Ferguson. The details of the autopsy reports and the conclusion of the investigations into the shooting will tell us more about whether or not Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson will be insulated from personal responsibility for his actions.

Maybe it will also give us some insight into exactly what that blindfold covering the eyes of the symbol of justice in America (with her sword and scales) is blinding her to.