Being convicted of a crime can certainly have lifelong ramifications that don’t necessarily involve life behind bars without parole. It can mean a lifetime of unemployment.
Minneapolis-raised Kissy Mason witnessed this firsthand in her own family. “People in my family were being locked up, and then they were locked out of a right to live, a right to employment,” she told Nur Lalji of Yes! Magazine.
Seventy percent of people released from prison commit another crime within three years, and part of this recidivism rate is due in part to how difficult it is for them to find a job.
Mason was determined to make better choices for herself than those being made by her family members. But in 2006, she was involved in a domestic argument that escalated, leading to a felony conviction. Although she never went to jail — she served probation instead — whenever she filled out an application for employment, she had to check the ubiquitous box indicating that she was a convicted felon. This status also disqualified her for low-income Section 8 housing.
Instead of lamenting the situation, Mason worked to change it. She joined the campaign to “ban the box,” which was started by All of Us or None (a group founded by formerly incarcerated people that had difficulty finding work) in 2003. Since then, 12 states have removed this question from job applications. Employers can still conduct criminal background checks, but by the time they get that far in the hiring process, they’ve usually had a chance to study the applicant’s other qualifications.
Mason’s home state, Minnesota, enacted legislation banning the box in January 2014. Because of the initiative, one of the state’s major corporations, Target, has stopped using the check-off box on job applications not just in its Minnesota stores— but throughout the country.
“Sometimes people bar you from jobs forever because of one incident, and I don’t think that’s fair,” Mason told Lalji. “People should be given another chance. It shouldn’t be one time and you’re out.”
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Tag: Law Enforcement & Prisons
Meet a Former Big-City Police Chief Who Wants to Turn American Law Enforcement on Its Head
Past behavior doesn’t always predict future behavior. Norm Stamper is a case in point. Stamper was the Seattle Police Chief in 1999, when hundreds of people protested the World Trade Organization meeting. Under Stamper’s direction the police opted to disperse the protesters with tear gas. The tactics resulted in Stamper’s resignation and prompted him to begin a period of “very painful learning,” he told Sarah Stuteville of Seattle Globalist. He told her that using chemical agents to disperse the protesters was “the worst decision” of his career. Ever since, Stamper has been studying law enforcement in other countries to find techniques and ideas that could be effective for the American justice system.
In his book Breaking Rank, Stamper advocates some controversial law-enforcement ideas, including legalizing drugs, abolishing the death penalty, and relying more on citizens for enforcement than police. He told Stuteville that the drug war has incarcerated far too many people, especially minority men. “We’ve got the drug war raging since 1971 and pitting police against low-level, nonviolent drug offenders, creating natural animosity and tension between police and the community—in particular young people, poor people and people of color,” he says, pointing to Portugal, which decriminalized drugs in 2001, resulting in a decrease in drug use and overdose deaths.
Stamper says we can learn from communities in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where women gather to bang pots and pans outside the homes of men who abuse women, creating a ruckus to publicly shame the men and raise awareness of the problem. “I think we should return to the earliest days of primitive law enforcement,” he told Stuteville, believing that America can “have citizens that are attuned to, and actually carrying out, a public safety role.”
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This Florida Jail Is Giving Vets a Second Chance
The rough return to civilian life after military service too often puts faltering veterans on the wrong side of the law. But many believe those who have served their country should have another chance to turn their lives around. That’s why the Pasco County Jail in Land O’ Lakes, Fla., has created a separate pod to house 32 veteran inmates together and offer them therapy, substance abuse help, job training, and housing assistance so that when they get out, they can land on their feet.
Sheriff Chris Nocco told Eddie Daniels of the Tampa Tribune, “They served their country; they have proven to us as a nation that they can do the right thing. This is about an opportunity for them to lift themselves up, back on their feet again, and be productive members of society.”
Several other communities are trying to help veterans who’ve landed in trouble with the law. Law enforcement officials have established special courts just for military veterans in Philadelphia, Buffalo, N.Y., San Diego and elsewhere.
Brian Anderson of Pasco County Veterans Services told Daniels, “They actually sacrificed part of themselves for the better cause of America. … Some of the issues they’re facing that lands them in predicaments like this are probably attributed to the service they gave.”
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This Judge Figured Out How to Keep People Out of Prison by Treating Them Like His Own Children
Steven Alm, a felony trial judge in Honolulu, was fed up with the number of probationers who flouted the rules. If the people Alm saw in his courtroom continued to ignore their probation requirements, the only punishment was to send them back to jail, but only after many months and many incidents, so there were no immediate consequences to most of their violations. Alm told Megan Thompson of the PBS NewsHour, “I thought of the way I was raised, the way my wife and I would– were trying to raise our son. You tell him what the family rules are, and then, if there’s misbehavior, you do something immediately. Swift and certain is what’s gonna get people’s attention and help them tie together bad behavior with a consequence and learn from it.”
Judge Alm launched a new program, called HOPE, for Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement, that targets people at the highest risk for probation violations. Instead of taking drug tests at scheduled appointments, the participants can be tested at any time, with only a few hours notice. For each violation, the courts impose an immediate punishment, such as a few days in jail. This works better for deterrence than threats of larger punishments in the future. Judges also have the option to be lenient with punishments if the probationer is genuinely trying to change his or her ways.
The Department of Justice studied HOPE and learned that participants were 55% less likely to be arrested for new crimes as were people in regular probation programs. They ended up spending half as much time in jail, and were 72% less likely to use drugs. Keeping a probationer on HOPE for a year costs tax payers $1500, while a year in prison costs $46,000 in Hawaii. The results aren’t perfect—some note that this approach makes a lot of work for police officers and other criminal justice employees, and there have been a few participants in HOPE who have committed serious crimes. But Hawaii has decided HOPE is better than the alternative, and seventeen other states now implement probation programs like it.
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This Inmate Has Become a Diving Expert in Prison. Here’s Why That’s Good for America
On a hot September day in Southern California, a convicted felon clad in a heavy helmet and scuba gear dives to the bottom of a deep-water tank. He spends several minutes down there, removing bolts from large metal pipes, and communicating his progress through a radio to a dive tender and fellow inmates of the California Institution for Men, a state prison in Chino.
Fifteen minutes elapse before the man, William Jones, emerges from the tank. This is a much different scenario from a decade ago, when Jones made his living through armed robbery. Jones wasn’t caught until he intercepted a small-business owner about to make a bank deposit, and was charged with a felony. “I wanted to conquer the world one robbery at a time,” says Jones, 30, who is from Los Angeles’ Crenshaw District. “My priorities were all mixed up. I had no plan for myself, for my family, and didn’t care about anything.”
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Now, Jones is a student at the Marine Technology Training Center, a state-run program that has turned felons into divers, welders, riggers, construction supervisors and mechanics. The program has succeeded in doing something the state’s department of rehabilitation as a whole has failed at quite miserably: consistently rehabilitating criminals. The state’s recidivism rate — the percentage of individuals released from prison who are incarcerated again within three years — is an alarming 63.7 percent (PDF). The dive program’s rate, by contrast, is less than 15 percent.
The diving center achieves its low recidivism rate by offering felons a skill set that leads to a more lucrative career path than many were capable of before they were convicted. Inmates usually have little knowledge of diving or the program itself when they apply, but they’re attracted to the school because they want a way to build a better life once they’re released. Average pay in the industry is around $15 an hour at entry level, and annual salaries can climb to $100,000 within four years. That drastically reduces temptations to return to a criminal life. Perhaps more important, the program’s physical training and camaraderie give criminals a platform to build character, discipline and a sense of self-worth that turns them away from their former, illegal pursuits.
Of course, employers can be uneasy about hiring ex-felons. They carefully vet divers from the prison, and are particularly dubious of inmates-turned-divers who have a history of drug addiction. Still, the Chino graduates are known throughout the commercial diving industry for producing quality work. “The individual that I have working for me is hands down one of the best, most highly motivated guys I have on board,” says Bryan Nicholls, president of U.S. Underwater Services, a commercial diving company in Mansfield, Texas.
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Richard Barta, the owner of Muldoon Marine Services in Long Beach, Calif., agrees. “If a person comes to you and he’s turned his life around and he really wants to make something of himself, you have to look at all the positives,” Barta says.
The dive school is open to any convicted felon in a Level 1 prison facility, a low-security area where less dangerous offenders are housed. If an inmate in a higher-security facility wants to apply, he can demonstrate good behavior over time and earn his way to Level 1. Inmates who apply must have at least 18 months of their term remaining and no more than three years left.
The benefits of such a program to society are numerous. First, it saves the state money. The average prison inmate costs around $47,000 a year to incarcerate, and that’s an expense the state can avoid by investing in true rehabilitation that keeps people out of prisons. The dive program costs $9,100 per year per inmate, which is more than offset by the reduction in recidivism. Second, it boosts the economy by churning out more skilled workers who produce value. Increased oil production in the Gulf of Mexico is spurring more demand for divers who can access platforms and pipelines, says Nicholls, whose company services offshore wells in the Gulf.
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Finally, there’s the enormous social advantage of having fewer criminals on the streets. “It helps you with your morals. You have a certain pride in what you do and respect for yourself,” Jones says. “I’m a different person now. There’s no reason for me to go out there and start doing the things I was doing.”
Those benefits in Chino are even more pronounced given the pervasiveness of prison overcrowding throughout the nation. In a bid to help federal prisons that are operating at nearly 40 percent above capacity, Attorney General Eric Holder has stepped in to call for the easing of harsh sentences for low-level drug offenses. In California, overcrowding is so bad that federal judges have ordered the state to remove 9,600 inmates from its prisons. To comply, Gov. Jerry Brown authorized spending $315 million to move the inmates to private jail cells and county jails. His preferred solution, though, is a three-year extension he requested to implement mental health and drug treatment programs aimed at lowering recidivism. The judges responded by granting only a one-month extension pushing the deadline to late January 2014; if they don’t agree to a longer delay, the inmates will have to be moved. While that plan might be a stopgap, it doesn’t solve California’s chronic problem of producing too many criminals.
But the state has rehabilitation programs that do. In addition to the diving school, some 7,000 inmates work in factories on prison grounds to produce clothing, office furniture, license plates, juice, shoes, signs, gloves, eyewear and other goods sold predominately to state entities. Participants in these programs are 26 percent less likely to reoffend and go back to prison than the average prison inmate in California. A September 2013 report released by the California Rehabilitation Oversight Board said all these programs had “proven to be effective at reducing recidivism” and recommended that the correctional department work to make them more accessible. The dive center is even more effective than these programs because it helps inmates build a valuable career.
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Yet, such efforts haven’t been very accessible. Historically, the Career Technical Education program, which operates the dive school, has received no funding from Sacramento; it was financed solely by the profits of the goods that other inmates produce in factories. Some programs have been under threat of closing because of the lack of funding—including an apprenticeship in construction for inmates at the California Institution for Women— while other programs are running at a reduced level. “We’re on a dicey edge all the time on our funding,” says Fred Johnson, the marine center’s instructor. In October 2013, state officials reached a tentative agreement for the corrections department to provide $2.6 million to the CTE. Still, funding for future years remains uncertain.
That’s a shame because Johnson and his team have figured out how to address the cause of California’s correctional problem. True, inmates have to want to change in order to be rehabilitated. The physical training is so intense that 80 percent of those who sign up for the dive school drop out in the first week. Of the 200 inmates who sign up per year, only around 20 graduate. Participants are commonly sent on 10-mile runs; workouts include a seemingly implausible number of squats, pull-ups, push-ups and dips; and the training culminates in a dreaded five-mile swim. But instructors say all inmates who pass the first week’s physical tests go on to graduate, and in so doing achieve something they thought was impossible. “The secret is we change the inmate’s way of thinking,” Johnson says. “We teach them they’re not losers; that they can be winners.”
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Hungry Families in Vermont Are Getting Help From the Last Place You’d Expect
At first glance, the 1,800 square-foot Salvation Farms facility in Vermont seems like any other produce-packing site. But it’s part of a prison, and the nine men who cleaned and packed nearly 70,000 pounds of potatoes there last year are inmates. The food was all would-be waste, but thanks to Salvation Farms, it went to 270 food banks around the state. The program is proving valuable for the corrections department, too, providing service to the hungry while giving prisoners a productive outlet. The program has drawn support from state government officials and private donors alike.
Can a Crime-Reduction Method Also Prevent Traffic Accidents?
The broken windows approach to fighting street crime involves seriously enforcing the small things, like broken windows and other instances of vandalism, in order to maintain an orderly environment and discourage bigger crimes. According to the NYPD, the theory has worked to reduce New York City’s homicide rate, and could also work on reducing the number of traffic accidents caused by reckless driving. Cracking down on drivers who run red lights or who drive just over the speed limit could create more orderly roads, creating a safer environment for pedestrians.