How Bar Applicants with Criminal Records Experience the Moral Character Determination

My paper “Moral Character: Making Sense of the Experiences of Bar Applicants with Criminal Records” is out from the Manitoba Law Journal. It is an interview-based study of bar applicants, bar officials, and ethics attorneys, and the way they experience and process their pasts and presents via the California Bar’s moral character determination. The journal is open source, so you’re all welcome to read the full thing (which mostly speaks through my interviewees’ voices) but for those pressed for time, here are just a few of my findings:

  1. The most dominant emotion that arose in the interviews was shame, stemming from the juxtaposition of my interviewee’s pasts and their elite professional futures. My interviewees, most of whom had managed to
    morph their self-identity to conform to their new status as candidates for the legal profession, were reduced by the process into their former shoes as convicts and/or prisoners.
  2. The bar process exacerbated the shame. The stringent requirements of accuracy in disclosure are obtuse to the difficulties of recreating unsettled adolescent pasts, and the choreography of the hearings (no support for the applicants, cross examination styles, etc.) was described by six of my interviewees, without any prompting from me, as “the worst experience of my life.” This, mind you, included people who had done time in jail and/or juvie.
  3. There was a striking contrast between the Bar’s framing of remorse as monolithic and absolute and the much more complex ways in which people described their feelings about their past crimes. The certainty that bar officials can detect insincerity is not borne by empirical science, which casts very serious doubt on anyone’s ability to tell true from false remorse. Moreover, the mediocre community theater aspect of the hearings does not leave room for people to discuss their experiences with true insight and nuance, and they know this, and it frustrates them. Moreover, cultural performance/presentation stands in the way of communicating remorse in a way that will be properly “read” by officers of a largely white, elite, male profession.
  4. The demographic effects of professional exclusion from the bar are largely unknown because, until recently, the bar didn’t even collect data on the race/class of people and how they fared in the moral character process (we do have evidence that black male lawyers are significantly discriminated against in disciplinary proceedings.) White applicants felt that their deviance and alienation was unseen because it wasn’t part of the usual demographics boxes; applicants of color felt that they were doubly deviant and “otherized.”
  5. There is a lot of hubris, which echoes the hubris I found when I studied parole hearing, in the assumption that the key to rehabilitation is the performance of psychic excavation in front of a panel of strangers. This is nonsense from a research standpoint. We know that rehabilitation is what rehabilitation does: people who are holding down jobs and going through law school in good standing are great prospects for professional success–and they don’t necessarily overlap with people who give a convincingly weepy performance in front of 4-7 people in suits. Specifically, the bar ignores established, robust findings from life-course criminology according to which just going through and finishing law school is in itself a strong indicator of desistance.
  6. The bar frequently diagnoses substance abuse issues and forces people through substance abuse programs. The interviewees themselves report that they found some value in the programs even though they didn’t actually have a substance abuse problem. I don’t know whether this reflects people in denial about their problems, overcautiousness on the part of the bar, or both.
  7. Even as people experience joy and relief at their eventual admission to the bar, the experience continues to haunt them and adds stress to their professional and personal lives. The extent to which people are open about their backgrounds after their successful admission to the bar varies widely, with public interest lawyers much more open and corporate lawyers much more circumspect.
  8. What the bar views as uniformly negative baggage is actually a rich and important asset to the profession. My interviewees talked about their experiences as a catalyst for their decision to pursue justice for clients and about their deep understandings of injustice and oppression. But treating criminal records as liabilities, rather than resources, we are missing on an important opportunity to make the bar more receptive and service-oriented to clients who would greatly benefit from their lawyers’ empathy and compassion, through professional diversification beyond the usual census boxes and through education of the profession as a whole.
  9. Even though my interviewees regarded their law schools–and especially their faculty–as sources of empowerment and good advice, there’s more law schools can do. We can alert people, in law school application forms, that accuracy in describing their backgrounds is key to being regarded as honest and forthright later, in the bar admission process. We can give people access to their admissions package when they prep for the moral character. And we can devote a smidgeon of the immense energy we’ve devoted to lowering the bar passage rate to advocating for our students with criminal records.





Help Floridians Regain the Right to Vote

Florida is one of only four states in which people with felony convictions permanently lose their right to vote. In November 2018, Floridians sought to change this by passing Amendment 4 by a majority of %64.55. Amendment 4 would automatically restore the right to vote for people with prior felony convictions, except those convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense, upon completion of their sentences, including prison, parole, and probation.

Since the passage of Amendment 4, politicians have piled challenge upon challenge in the way of people seeking the right to vote. The latest hurdle came today, when the 11th Circuit ruled en banc that Florida may require people with a past felony conviction to pay off all fines and fees before they can get their right to vote back–even if they cannot afford to do so.

The only explanation I can find for this is an entitlement effect. I grew up in a country in which everyone, even people doing time in prison at the time of the election, can vote, and it would never occur to me that it’s possible or fair to do otherwise. But I suspect that what is at work here is an insidious version of the entitlement effect: They feel comfortable doing this because their point of departure is lifetime disenfranchisement. To them, it’s not about giving people what every citizen has and should have–it’s about gifting people a privilege they haven’t had in a long time.

We can do something about this. Hop on this website and plonk a few shekels to help your fellow Americans – Floridians who want to participate in our democracy and are being thwarted by politicians and courts – vote in the upcoming election. It’s good for Florida, it’s good for racial and economic justice, and it’s good for all of us, because you know that winning Florida is crucial in this election. According to Jeff Manza and Chris Uggen, at least one presidential election (now two, likely) and eight congressional ones would have gone the other way if people with felony convictions could vote. Prove them right by changing history and expanding democracy.

Release Party for Yesterday’s Monsters

Hi, Dear Readers! My new book Yesterday’s Monsters: The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole is out from UC Press and I am inviting you to celebrate!

When: Wednesday, March 11

Where: Manny’s, Valencia & 16th

What:

In 1969, the world was shocked by a series of murders committed by Charles Manson and his “family” of followers. Although the defendants were sentenced to death in 1971, their sentences were commuted to life with parole in 1972; since 1978, they have been regularly attending parole hearings. Today all of the living defendants remain behind bars.

Relying on nearly fifty years of parole hearing transcripts, as well as interviews and archival materials, Hadar Aviram invites readers into the opaque world of the California parole process—a realm of almost unfettered administrative discretion, prison programming inadequacies, high-pitched emotions, and political pressures. Yesterday’s Monsters offers a fresh longitudinal perspective on extreme punishment.

Book reading, signing, parole reform, food, drink!

RSVP HERE!

Nonexistent Reentry in CA: When People Are Duped Into Thinking It’s All Their Fault

The opening chapter of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish compares two penal scenes: the drawing and quartering of a regicide and a drab scene from a discipline-heavy juvenile facility, 80 years later. These scenes are emblematic of the change Foucault sees in punishment: from centralized to decentralized, from a “festival of punishment” to drab things behind closed doors, and most importantly–from body to soul. I read this stuff for the first time about twenty years ago, and its enchantment has worn off; I’m pretty clear on the fact that the move from corporal punishment to incarceration was overall a good one. But there are some days when the “soul” element of punishment is especially hard to stomach, especially when it consists of selling justice-involved people the lie that the only cause for their miseries lies in their own action.

I was outraged, albeit not surprised, to read this distressing exposé on Mother Jones. The gist of it is that our enthusiasm for early releases has not been matched by an enthusiasm to actually help people get on their feet after they are released. It opens with a typical–and horrendous–story:

After 15 long years behind bars, Terah Lawyer needed to show the parole board she had somewhere lined up to live. She landed a spot in a facility on Treasure Island and was so grateful to be out that at first she didn’t mind being forced to spend dozens of hours a week in treatment classes for a substance abuse problem she didn’t have, and in fact, as a drug and alcohol counselor, was certified to teach about. But quickly, the program’s strict schedule and tough restrictions, like lockdowns on holidays and limited free time, got in the way of adjusting to real life. Before she left prison, she’d worked hard to secure a job with the California Coalition of Women Prisoners, but her facility’s rules forced her to delay her start date three months, and she lost the opportunity. Most painfully, the program’s structure made it hard to visit with her parents, who lived a couple hours north in Sacramento.  

Once she was finally able to start working, she’d leave the house at 7 a.m., work a full day, and get back in time for the hour-and-a-half class at night. “I was required to still bring in 21 hours of treatment classes in order for me to get my weekend passes to go home, to go shopping, to go out with family or friends, to do things that are considered freedom,” she explains. “It was really difficult being able to hold down a full-time job, which is thankfully now giving me an income, and also meet the program’s requirements of classes that I didn’t even need in the first place.”

Lawyer’s experience reminded me of participant observations I did at the Peer Reentry Navigation Network (PRNN), a group of former lifers now making a life for themselves on the outside that meets monthly in San Francisco, run jointly by an activist who is formerly incarcerated and by a parole officer. The day I was there, everyone talked about housing. In Yesterday’s Monsters I described the conversation:

After a round of advice and information about housing and smartphone tutorials, Cara, a young woman, steps to the front of the room to facilitate an activity. She distributes blank pages and invites attendees to draw a picture frame on the page. She then asks us to write or draw a picture of what success means to us. We work in silence, occasionally sneaking a peek at our neighbors’ work and smiling at them. Cara then invites the audience to share. “Being able to provide for my family.” “Having a job, a stable place to live.” “Finding someone to love and someone who loves me.” One woman shares, “I want two dogs and a Mercedes.” Cara laughs. The woman jokingly adds, “What? You wanted us to define success. Well, that’s what success means to me.”

Then Cara gives us the “bad news”: If you are not actively working to direct your life toward those goals, then perhaps you don’t really want them. For example, she says, if you want to save enough money for a down payment on a house but you end up buying shoes and flashy outfits, then maybe you are not really that driven to be a homeowner. You must pursue your goals with real ferocity, she says.

For many of the people in the room, homeownership in aggressively gentrified San Francisco is a pipe dream. Since the rise of the tech industry, housing in the city has become prohibitively expensive, both for owners and for renters. Even so-called low-income housing requires a considerable income, as well as jumping through multiple bureaucratic hoops. Joe acknowledges these difficulties but encourages attendees to overcome them. “If you want to apply,” he says, “I will help you. We’ll work on your applications together.” It might take sixty applications, he says, but eventually one will succeed. 

My ambivalence grows. On one hand, I admire the spirit of enterprise, mutual aid, and community strength in the room. I recognize the importance of self-focused success and of belief in free agency. On the other, I’m sure that my fellow attendees have learned all too well in the course of their lives that, despite their best efforts, the reentry deck is heavily stacked against them. I recall Alessandro de Giorgi’s recently released subjects who attributed their immense difficulties and abject poverty to their own failings rather than to the systemic difficulties that stood in their way.

There is something maddening about people being led to be convinced that their own flaws are the only thing standing between them and their dreams, but that very message is what the so-called prison rehabilitation apparatus, and particularly the parole hearing process, tries to sell people on a regular basis. When my colleague Alessandro de Giorgi interviewed formerly incarcerated people who faced acute misery at the very bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (no home; no job; no food), he was struck by how much they attributed their poverty, squalor, and dire need to their own flaws. He explains:

Today, whatever minimal services are available to former prisoners are provided mostly through the non-profit, faith-based, semi-private sector, what Jennifer Wolch (1990, 201) has aptly defined as an emergent shadow state: a “para-state apparatus with collective service responsibilities previously shouldered by the public sector, administered outside traditional democratic politics, but yet controlled in both formal and informal ways by the state.” In this framework, highly individualistic and market-friendly solutions are systematically proposed as the only answers to a broad range of structural obstacles faced by formerly incarcerated people: At every turn in their trajectories through the carceral state, from arrest to reentry, criminalized people are taught that success or failure is entirely dependent upon their own efforts.

But here’s the really depressing bit:

Despite the weight of the structural circumstances they face, the participants to this research appear to have internalized the neoliberal narrative of personal responsibility that is constantly inculcated in prisons, rehabilitation centers, and reentry programs (see also Gowan & Whetstone 2012; Miller 2014; Werth 2012, 2016). They wholeheartedly embrace the dominant rhetoric of free choice, as well as hegemonic definitions of social deservingness and undeservingness. 

In other words, de Giorgi’s subjects themselves believe that the ills that they face when they reenter are their own fault, because they don’t deserve better, and do not seem to see any institutional problem here (when he presented this piece at our Carceral Studies Workgroup, he astutely observed that people do have racial critiques a-la-Michelle Alexander, but not an understanding of class.)

In Yesterday’s Monsters I saw this propaganda apparatus at work: people who see their crimes in a broader social context are chastised for “minimizing.” Here’s an example from the book, in which Patricia Krenwinkel, in the 1980s, tries to frame her crime in the context of the sixties:

It came up about ’65. It was the beginning of the marches. It was the beginning of the civil rights movement. It was the beginning of all the movements of the late sixties, which eventually involved entering the war. . . . I found that I couldn’t seem to find my bearings in this world at that time. . . . I couldn’t seem to find where there was any, on my own—seem to find any reinforcement for doing anything other than kind of letting myself go with the time of what at that time was tune-in and drop-out, as Timothy Leary so put it. I mean, it’s hard to say. There were so many components. I was a child of the sixties. And there definitely is something to be said about the sixties. It was an incredible time in the period of our history. It’s something that I look back on and I see, because there’s thousands of people out there that were not much different than myself.

The prosecutor, Stephen Kay, responds with an astounding lack of empathy and contextual comprehension:

I feel that it’s kind of hard for me to accept Miss Krenwinkel’s statement that she was a child of the sixties, and there were thousands of others like her out there in the sixties. I myself went to law school at Berkeley during the time of Mario Savio and could observe some of these children of the sixties. And they characterized themselves as flower children. Their slogan was “make love, not war.” They weren’t into murdering people.

Pretty much any reasonable criminologist you’ll meet will tell you that crime is a combination of personal and environmental factors (including what gets defined as crime.) How much of each gets poured into the mix varies across crimes; this is why talking about both drug use and violent assaults as “crime” can be confusing. But you’d have to be extremely naive to assume that crime doesn’t have an ontological existence (some abolitionists in the 1970s advanced this view), just as you’d have to be pretty obtuse and cruel to assume that crime is entirely a function of personal pathology. If it were, why are poor people overrepresented in the criminal justice apparatus?

A lot of the highfalutin’ critical criminology from the last few years uses the term “neoliberalism” to mean a hypercapitalist, highly privatized environment in which people are expected to take responsibility for themselves, with no welfarist contribution from the state. Kicking people out of prison to fend for themselves without any veritable programming designed to put them on their feet–and with an astonishing paucity of solid vocational training behind bars in preparation for life outside–is a manifestation of this neoliberal ideology, and what’s more–this mentality is successful and pervasive because it dupes not only the professionals who administer it, but also the people who are subjected to it. 

From “Nothing Works” to “Something Works”

This morning, the Guardian is covering a great vocational program in Southern California called Manifest Works, “an immersive workforce development and job placement organization; we turn real-world experience into learning opportunities for those impacted by foster care, homelessness, and incarceration.” From the Guardian story:

One of the most common entry points into the entertainment industry is as a production assistant, or PA. The PA might get coffee, run electrical cords, or break down the set; the job’s chameleonic nature makes it a behind-the-scenes linchpin. Manifest Works, a not-for-profit based in Los Angeles, ties the hustle of a PA job to its training program for people affected by incarceration, homelessness and foster care. Some participants had been out of prison as little as three months.

Williams spoke softly and deliberately, rocking back and forth in his crisp white sneakers. He applied to the program after an alum recommended him. He was doing security before that. “Not what I wanted to do with my life,” he said. “This is giving me an opportunity to pursue something closer to what I wanted for myself.”

He still wasn’t sure what on-set role he’d like most. “Everybody wants to be the director,” he said, knowingly.

California, as the country’s most populous state, has one of its highest prison populations, and the highest population of people on probation or parole. It is also home to the multibillion-dollar entertainment industry.

A 2017 study in the Economic Journal evaluated the career trajectories of 1.7 million people released from California prisons between 1993 and 2008, and concluded that, while employment curbs recidivism among the released, the quality of opportunities may be more important than the quantity available.

Sixty-three people have completed the Manifest Works program since it began in fall 2014. Many have established steady freelance careers doing production work. No alum has gone back to prison.

What do they mean by “quality of opportunities?” The study referred to in the Guardian story is by Kevin Schnepel, an economist from the University of Sydney and you can find it here. The abstract reads:

I estimate the impact of employment opportunities on recidivism among 1.7 million offenders released from a California prison between 1993 and 2008. The institutional structure of the California criminal justice system as well as location, skill, and industry-specific job accession data provide a unique framework for identifying a causal effect of job availability on criminal behaviour. I find that increases in construction and manufacturing opportunities at the time of release are associated with significant reductions in recidivism. Other types of opportunities, including those characterised by lower wages that are typically accessible to individuals with criminal records, do not influence recidivism.

This kind of careful study is exactly what we need to counter the despair of the “nothing works” legacy. Because of the dramatic cuts to rehabilitation and vocational programs, which I discuss in Cheap on Crime, opportunities in California prisons really vary. San Quentin benefits from its proximity to the Bay Area, which guarantees an influx of volunteers–but are they programs they offer really effective? More importantly, why are opportunities in construction and manufacturing more important in curbing recidivism than opportunities in other fields, such as service?

A few things come to mind: construction and manufacturing are opportunities that structure one’s day in addition to providing an income. It’s easier to stay the course when you have to be somewhere and perform a job that shows tangible improvement (i.e., putting together a kitchen or producing X gadgets.) They are also jobs that, in the right setting, can provide camaraderie, and have fairly strong unions. But who knows if this is true? To understand why some job opportunities are more effective, we’d need to interview formerly incarcerated folks who are employed in these jobs and ask them about their day and their thoughts about this.

In any case, it’s important for prisons to follow up on studies such as Schnepel’s and on the success of programs such as Manifest Works. Resources are limited, and they need to be invested where they’d yield real results.

Film Review: Ant-Man

Future posts will definitely feature some of these interesting things, but today I want to talk about the movie I saw on the flight to DC: Marvel Comics’ Ant-Man. This is not an indie documentary for bleeding-heart progressives who can wax poetic about the prison industrial complex. It’s a mainstream movie, featuring CGI animation, superpowers, gloom, doom, and beautiful people, and as such it is remarkable, because it represents what the filmmakers think the mainstream is open to seeing and accepting onscreen. And what it shows them is a skewed and flawed, and yet refreshing, slice of incarceration and reentry in the Bay Area.
Set in San Francisco, the film’s hero, Scott Lang, starts his journey in prison—notably, not a generic, imagined institution, but an imagined version of the very real San Quentin. And it’s a very different cinematic San Quentin than the one in which Oscar Grant spends an important scene in Fruitvale Station; one that resembles Justice Scalia’s dark fantasies more than it resembles the actual prison we know. Scott’s first scene in Ant-Man sees him engage in a violent fight with another inmate. The many spectators, as well as Scott’s adversary, are large, black, muscular men. But then, the tension breaks, and it becomes obvious that Scott is on friendly terms with his adversary; we are told that this is some sort of rite of passage in honor of Scott’s impending release. Smiling, Scott says to his fellow inmates, “you have strange rituals.”
“You”, not “us”; because early on it is fairly clear that Scott is a special sort of inmate, one for which filmgoers will feel sympathy: he is a conventionally good-looking white man, armed with graduate education (a master’s degree in electric engineering), and his criminal history is that of a high-level hack for the morally allowable purpose of redistributing wealth. In short, Scott is a non-non-non if there ever was one, and we all root for him as he is released—be it because he terms out or because of Realignment.
But even with this relatively privileged starting point, Scott finds it difficult to cope outside. We see him shack up with friends, all of whom are formally incarcerated, and expressing hope of finding a suitable job soon. But his hopes are shattered: he manages to obtain an entry-level job at Baskin Robbins, where he is summarily fired by an unfeeling boss. Not for smart-mouthing a client (which he does, and which would be unthinkable to, say, an uneducated man of color competing for unskilled labor positions); for having a criminal history. Ban the Box, apparently, only gets one through the door; it doesn’t keep him there. And this is a crisis for Scott, who has to provide for, and win back the right to visit, his young daughter. His ex-wife is engaged to a cop, and both of them think of Scott as the deadbeat dad he is. We, however, know better; we’re rooting for Scott, and that’s partly because we haven’t been exposed to his ex-wife’s travails through his trial and incarceration. But we also learn a lesson: when someone is saddled with a criminal record and a history of incarceration, all the whiteness and the education in the world won’t help. It almost goes without saying that this message is deeply flawed. Race, class, and education make a big difference in reentry—as does another thing Scott has going for him, a supportive family. But it drives home the heavy penalty of incarceration and a criminal history with regard to someone with whom some middle-class moviegoers might identify.
It is this economic desperation, rather than a personality flaw, that leads Scott back into crime with his housemates—all of whom, except for him, are either men of color or immigrants with heavy accents. The film plays fast and loose with stereotypes, which is par for the course for sidekicks in a comic book. They are capable men, but they are capable in limited ways, and only as assistants to Scott, whose competence and ability are played up in the sophisticated heist they plan. The film occasionally takes pleasure in breaking these stereotypes; Luis’s unfocused chatter and confused narratives include references to his visits to a museum and enjoyment of Mark Rothko oils. But even when doing so, the Bay Area scenes that fly before our eyes as Luis describes the potential heist place him squarely within the imagined East Bay working class colorful subculture of dive bars, bikers, chicks and shady contacts. Luis has the info and the contacts, but he is not the brain of the operation.
The scenes depicting the heist planning elevate Scott and his accomplices to the coveted status of garage startup techies, and it is this subtle analogy that portrays them at their most competent and heroic. This nod to Silicon Valley reminded me of The Last Mile and other programs encouraging the involvement of folks of low income and education in the tech world upon their release. The film makes it clear, though, that reentry is not kind to any of our heroes, and if they are to make their way in the world, they must do so themselves. And so, their entrepreneurship is modeled after the “innovate first, ask questions later” model of South Bay, and sold as admirable and competent.
As viewers of the film know, the heist goes awry, and a chain of events is set in motion that sets Scott up to becoming “ant man”: a superhero capable of shrinking to the size of an ant. The adventure, villains, goals, and betrayals, are fairly predictable for the genre. What is less predictable, and surprisingly touching, is the ant metaphor, and how it connects to the incarceration and reentry theme from the movie.
Ants are eusocial insects. They are indistinguishable from each other. The inventor who employs Scott refers to them by numbers, not by names. When Scott complains, the inventor explains, “they are just numbers; do you have any idea how many ants they are?” We treat ants, apparently, the way we treat people in total institutions; we see them as a population, not as individuals deserving of life, health, and happiness. But Scott, reduced to the size of an ant, sees them as individuals, and names one of them Anthony. He learns from the inventor’s daughter how to control the ants with his mind by becoming part of the eusocial structure. Thus, the ants’ impersonality and collective organization is their great advantage. When one is struck down, ten rise in its stead (in fact, Anthony is struck in one of the final raids; Scott regrets it, but hops over and rides another ant in its stead). And together, because of their commitment to the collective wellbeing of the community, they are invincible.
It is notable that the penultimate scene in the movie marshals some of the laughable stereotypes for the beginning to marshal the ant metaphor of community and apply it to the formerly incarcerated. Luis tells a convoluted story yet again; but the bottom line of the story is that an indirect contact wants Scott to join the Avengers: “We need a guy that shrinks”. It is through this informal Bay Area network that an opportunity awaits our superhero. Because, like ants, the people who exit our prisons may look to policymakers, jailers, and employers all the same, and it might be easy to discount them—but when they look out for each other and act collectively, that is the source of their strength.

Elaine Brown Starts Farm Reentry Project in Oakland

For some optimistic news, look no farther than Oakland, where former Black Panther activist Elaine Brown has put together a beautiful reentry project. Civil Eats reports: 

Brown’s project, announced last October, is ambitious. The first step has been establishing a for-profit West Oakland Farms, whose 40 raised beds are already overflowing with tomatoes, peppers, kale, squash, corn, and other produce. Down the road, Brown wants to add a juice bar, fitness center, grocery store, and tech design space, along with affordable housing on the city-owned property under the umbrella of the nonprofit organization she founded last year, Oakland & the World Enterprises.

“I’m not in the farm business,” she told Civil Eats recently. “I’m in the business of creating opportunities for Black men and women who are poor and lack the education, skills, and resources to return to a community that is rapidly gentrifying without economic avenues for them in mind.”

Think of it as part prisoner re-entry program, part small business startup incubator, and part community hub. Brown chaired the Black Panthers from 1974 to 1977 and, after more than a 30-year absence, moved back to Oakland in 2010. The project marks her return to activism in the city. Since 2013, Brown has been working closely with Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson on youth and employment re-entry projects in West Oakland.

This strikes me as a very exciting program for so many reasons, not the least of which is connecting disenfranchised populations with fresh produce and high-quality food often unavailable in the “food deserts” of poor neighborhoods. I hope it succeeds and flourishes.

Residence Requirements for Sex Offenders Struck Down

This morning, in re William Taylor et al., the California Supreme Court struck down the provisions of Jessica’s Law that restricted registered sex offenders from residing within 2000 feet of a school or park.

The bottom line is as follows:

[W]e agree that section 3003.5(b)‟s residency restrictions are unconstitutional as applied across the board to petitioners and similarly situated registered sex offenders on parole in San Diego County. Blanket enforcement of the residency restrictions against these parolees has severely restricted their ability to find housing in compliance with the statute, greatly increased the incidence of homelessness
among them, and hindered their access to medical treatment, drug and alcohol dependency services, psychological counseling and other rehabilitative social services available to all parolees, while further hampering the efforts of parole authorities and law enforcement officials to monitor, supervise, and rehabilitate them in the interests of public safety. It thus has infringed their liberty and privacy interests, however limited, while bearing no rational relationship to advancing the state‟s legitimate goal of protecting children from sexual predators, and has violated their basic constitutional right to be free of unreasonable, arbitrary, and oppressive official action.

Nonetheless, as the lower courts made clear, CDCR retains the statutory authority, under provisions in the Penal Code separate from those found in section 3003.5(b), to impose special restrictions on registered sex offenders in the form of discretionary parole conditions, including residency restrictions that may be more or less restrictive than those found in section 3003.5(b), as long as they are based on, and supported by, the particularized circumstances of each individual parolee.

While the Orange County Register believes that it is unclear whether the ruling has effect outside San Diego County, it seems that a legal provision that is unconstitutional in one area of California is just as unconstitutional in another. Of particular interest is the impact of San Francisco, which, because of the layout of schools and parks in it, is essentially inhabitable to sex offenders under Jessica’s Law. This meant a large proportion of homeless and transient sex offenders, which, as one of them said to ABC news, “are actually walking time bombs out here because we are suffering from sleep deprivation”. 

Reentry to Nothing

My terrific colleague Alessandro de Giorgi has an excellent series of posts on the Social Justice blog, titled Reentry to Nothing. They are based on ethnographic work he is doing and expose the difficulties of making life work on the outside.

#1 – Get a Job, Any Job

At 1:30 p.m. I get a message from Melisha, who tells me that her job application at the Walmart in East Oakland had been turned down after they performed a background check on her: 

Hi bra happy Memorial day. It all bad for me sad … about the Walmart job … that Walmart did a nationwide check everthing came back from fines old address criminal record from Arkansas. Cant nobody say I didn’t try … sad … my life is fuck up. Is there any kind of away you can get that removed for me … don’t u study criminal justice. I need u on this bra I’m stress now I try to tell Ray 

#2 – The Working Poor

Ray tells me they are desperate for money. He has only been able to work for a few hours a week at KFC since being released from jail last month. He still works on call for $8.00 an hour and makes less than $200 each week. Meanwhile, Melisha has been unable to find any job—despite filling out applications at McDonald’s, Pack n’Save, Ghirardelli, and several other places—and her SSI payments were suspended while she was in jail.
Alex: Right now … The two of you, how much cash do you have?
Ray: Nothin’.
Alex: Nothing?
Ray: Zero. Pennies. Oh, here you go [searches into his pockets, then opens his hand to show me a few dimes]. That’s our savings right here. Oh yeah … And our free cookie [hands me a greasy paper bag from KFC with a half-melted chocolate chip cookie inside].Alex: A free cookie?
Ray: Yeah! Free cookie, from KFC. Free cookie, that’s all we got right here.
I follow Rico to the last room on the left, which is occupied by one of his old friends. Peering through the open doors, I see only decrepit rooms with littered floors. In some, people are sitting on their beds eating, smoking, watching TV, and arguing loudly. All residents of the premises share two bathrooms and showers.  Like the rest of the building, they are filthy. Hip-hop music blasts from the surrounding rooms, including the one we enter. There, two middle-aged white men, whose teeth are mostly missing, are smoking crystal meth. They become nervous at the sight of me, but when Rico reassures them that I’m not a cop, they intently inhale the vaporizing crystals again. After a few minutes of silence, Rico explains that the building was formerly the site of a transitional housing program for recovering drug addicts. Now it is just a ghetto building with cheap rooms for rent. Since Rico is no longer on parole, he cannot go back to the halfway house; moving here may be his only option, because the landlord does not require a deposit or credit report. 

More Voting Controversies

“Those swept up in this system too often had their rights rescinded, their dignity diminished, and the full measure of their citizenship revoked for the rest of their lives,” Mr. Holder said. “They could not vote.”A couple of years after the failure of the effort to interpret voting regulation in CA so that folks doing time in jails as a result of realignment can vote, civil rights organizations are trying again. This time, the petition focuses on folks who are under mandatory supervision, who are told by the Secretary of State they can’t vote.

The petitioners might have just felt some wind in their sales, blown by the federal government. Recently, Attorney General Eric Holder urged states to repeal felon disenfranchisement laws.

“Those swept up in this system too often had their rights rescinded, their dignity diminished, and the full measure of their citizenship revoked for the rest of their lives,” Mr. Holder said. “They could not vote.”

Holder was addressing life-long bans in Southern states, a holdover from the nadir of race relations in the 1920s, which render, for example, 10% of Florida citizens ineligible to vote. By contrast, California offers more opportunity for redemption (and has done so since 1974.) But this governmental animus toward enfranchisement is important to notice.