Archives for January 2015

San Francisco Board of Supervisors approves a resolution initiated by All of Us or None calling for San Francisco to eliminate hiring discrimination against people with criminal records
Numerous cities and counties have improved the chances for persons with criminal histories to get jobs, the National Employment Law Project reports.
Known as “Ban the Box,” the reform prohibits asking about criminal records in the initial job application.
The project report estimated that 65 million Americans – or one in four adults – had a criminal history as of 2011.
The report also shows that the background check industry has grown with access to the Internet at the same time that the numbers of workers with criminal records has risen.
“Implementing this new policy won’t be easy, but it’s the right thing to do…We cannot ask private employers to consider hiring former prisoners unless the city practices what it preaches,” said then-Mayor Richard Daley when he announced Chicago’s policy banning the box.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued a revised guidance in April 2012 on the use of arrest and conviction records in employment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The commission recommended as a “best practice…that employers not ask about convictions on job applications and that, if and when they make such inquiries, the inquiries be limited to convictions for which exclusion would be job-related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity.”
Some 66 jurisdictions, including Chicago, Jacksonville, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Memphis and Baltimore, were highlighted in the report as locations that have adopted Ban the Box.
“Just in the first three months of 2014, 11 cities and counties across the nation have adopted these policies emphasizing an applicant’s qualifications rather than his or her past mistakes,” the report said.
The momentum in support of Ban the Box hiring reforms continues to grow. In the report, the campaign to Ban the Box on San Francisco’s application for public employment was led by “All of Us or None,” a national organizing initiative of formerly incarcerated people.

“We cannot ask private employers to consider hiring former prisoners unless the city practices what it preaches”

“In 2005, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a resolution initiated by All of Us or None calling for San Francisco to eliminate hiring discrimination against people with criminal records by removing the request for criminal history information on the initial job application for public employment,” the report said.
“An individual’s past convictions can only be considered after an applicant has been identified as a finalist for a position. The exception is for those jobs where state or local laws expressly bar people with convictions from employment, in which case the city conducts its background review at an earlier stage of the hiring process.”
Similar policies have been adopted in other Northern California cities such as East Palo Alto, Berkeley, Richmond and Oakland.
Oakland, working with All of Us or None, adopted the policy in 2010, per the NELP report.
The report stated, “The city conducts background checks on applicants after a conditional offer, but only for those positions required by law or the city has made a ‘good faith determination’ that the position warrants it. The city also notifies the applicant of the potential adverse employment action, provides a copy of the background report and provides the applicant an opportunity to rebut the accuracy or relevancy of the background report.”
Richmond’s new ordinance, according to the report, prohibits inquiry into an applicant’s criminal history at any time unless state or federal law requires a background investigation or the position has been defined as “sensitive.”
San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim wants to make this question, “Have you been convicted of a crime?” virtually obsolete on job applications in the city, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Dec. 10, 2013.
A Sacramento Bee headline on June 27, 2012 read: “A Job is Best Crime Prevention Program.” The Bee article said, “The job hunt is tough for everybody these days. But imagine having a criminal record. Many employers, including cities and counties, won’t consider hiring someone with a criminal past, no matter how long ago the crime was committed, how minor the offense might have been or how thoroughly the applicant has turned his life around.”

Women’s rights and civil liberties organizations are calling for the U.S. Department of Justice to renounce the practice of enhancing the sentences of women convicted of felonies while pregnant, particularly those with drug convictions.
Jessica Pieklo, senior legal analyst for the news blog RH Reality Check, reported on the criminalization of pregnancy. Pieklo highlighted a case involving Lucy Weld of Dandridge, Tenn., who received a sentence of 151 months in prison for conspiracy to manufacture methamphetamine.
Presiding Judge Thomas Varlan announced at sentencing that Weld would receive an additional six years because her crime was committed while she was pregnant.
Following Weld’s sentencing, U.S. Attorney William Killian issued a statement supporting the judge’s decision. “Through this prosecution, the U.S. Attorney’s Office sends a message that, should a child, born or unborn, be exposed to a substantial risk of harm through the manufacture of methamphetamine, we will pursue any available enhancements at sentencing.”
A coalition of organizations seeking drug reform policies, women’s rights and civil liberties said in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder that changes to the current sentencing structure should be made to renounce enhancement penalties.
Seventeen states and the District of Columbia were represented by organizations concerned with the change of the current practice. These organizations argue that sentences that are enhanced due to pregnancy are contrary to science and evidence-based research, which shows the punishing of pregnant drug offenders harms public health, Pieklo reported.
“Opening the door to enhanced penalties for pregnant women will unquestionably make women of color — a group already subject to extraordinary disproportionality in criminal punishment and sentencing — even more vulnerable to state and federal control and punishment,” said Cherisse Scott, founder and CEO of the Tennessee-based organization SisterReach.
In April, the Tennessee Legislature passed Senate Bill 1391, an amendment to the state’s fetal homicide law. This law allows the judicial system to prosecute women for the illegal use of narcotics during pregnancy, if her child is born addicted to or harmed by the narcotic drug. The bill was an amendment to the previous law that favored the decriminalization policies concerning pregnant women and drug convictions.
Legislators passed the Safe Harbor Act in 2013, giving women that are pregnant the opportunity to seek treatment for their addiction. The incentive for joining the program was retaining custody of their children. However, the passing of SB 1391 allows state district attorneys the leverage they need to bring criminal charges against these women under the current law.
Coalition members wrote a letter to the Department of Justice, asking that it publicly acknowledge and denounce enhanced penalties for women who are pregnant during the commission of a crime.
“The action supported by the federal prosecutor in Tennessee is based on the profoundly discriminatory principle that pregnant women may be subject to separate, unequal and harsher penalties than others,” wrote Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women. If charged under the law, a woman could face a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.
“Becoming pregnant and either continuing or terminating a pregnancy is a fundamental right for which no person should be subject to punishment directly or through enhanced penalties,” Paltrow concluded.

 
‘The Proposition 47 victory is a repudiation of four
decades of tough-on-crime policies, and marks the end of the era of politics of fear’
California voters clearly want an end to excessive prison sentences and the “politics of fear,” the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California concludes with the overwhelming approval of Proposition 47.
“The Proposition 47 victory is a repudiation of four decades of tough-on-crime policies, and marks the end of the era of politics of fear,” the ACLU’s Allen Hopper said in a Nov. 7 news release.
Nearly 60 percent voted in favor of the change, sending “a loud message” to Sacramento, Hopper commented. “The question is whether our political leaders in Sacramento are listening.”
“Voters want smart criminal justice strategies and recognize that longer sentences, especially for low-level, nonviolent crimes, have not made our communities safer,” wrote Hopper, director of criminal justice and drug policy for the ACLU of California.
“California’s recidivism rate, one of the highest in the country, is perhaps the best indicator of the degree to which the state’s harsh sentencing laws have utterly failed to keep any of us safe over the past 40 years of prison and jail expansion, constantly ratcheted-up punishment and the abandonment of even a pretense of rehabilitation as a component of criminal justice,” he wrote.
Hopper noted the Legislature failed to act and “for far too long, the politics of fear and the power of the law enforcement lobby have dominated Sacramento.”
“Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) tried twice…to pass bills similar to, though much more moderate than, Proposition 47. (He) was unable to get a bill reducing the penalty for simple possession of drugs from a felony to a misdemeanor out of his own chamber, due to the opposition of the statewide associations of sheriffs, police chiefs and district attorneys”, Hopper wrote.
Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a compromise bill that would have made similar changes. Proposition 47 was an initiative designed to do the same thing — reclassify many minor crimes from felonies to misdemeanors.
“Lawmakers must abide by the will of the people…The Legislature and the governor should work together to ensure Proposition 47 is implemented in an honest, timely manner, and should rebuff any law enforcement attempts to divert the money earmarked for rehabilitation and treatment to still more jail construction,” said Hopper.
The state’s sentencing scheme needs re-evaluation, the ACLU report said. “It’s time for a comprehensive review of our penal code and sentencing laws, starting with the intricate web of sentencing enhancements that the Little Hoover Commission investigated in 2007 and declared ‘complex and confusing,’ with over 100 enhancements strewn throughout more than 20 separate statutes,” cited Hopper.
“Perhaps it’s time for a sentencing commission…not controlled by the same law enforcement interests that have stymied reform for decades,” Hopper commented.
“It’s time for a serious look at sentencing laws in California with an eye toward real reform and the same investment in innovation that drives our technology sector. And it is time to end, once and for all, the era of the politics of fear,” he added.

Several well-meaning laws lack common sense, resulting in inflexible, harsh penalties.
That is the conclusion reached by Jonathan Blanks in the Post Everything website of The Washington Post newspaper.
Some broad statutes have created “a system that can’t distinguish grown men from schoolchildren, serial rapists from amorous teens or drug mules from kingpins. Such a system is dysfunctional —stupid even,” wrote Blanks in his June 25 article titled America’s Stupidest Criminal Laws.
For example, some Drug-Free School Zone laws punish selling, manufacturing and sometimes just possessing illicit drugs within a specified distance of a school, park or daycare center with a higher punishment for the underlying drug offense.
Many black and Hispanic neighborhoods with high populations have overlapping zones, negating any deterrent effect and slanting enforcement against minority communities, Blanks noted. Heavy penalties are applied whether or not kids are involved and even if school is out for the summer.
Sex offender registries can include someone convicted of public urination or a 17- or 18-year-old who had consensual sex with a 15- or 16-year-old girlfriend or boyfriend. Thereby, hard line laws against child predators could bar the wrong people from certain areas, he pointed out.
The war on drugs was supposedly meant to give harsher mandatory minimum sentences to kingpins. However, the writer says they were used mostly on low-level dealers and “mules.”
“Until the 1800s, juries not only determined facts of laws — that is, whether the law was broken — but whether the law in question was just in the first place,” wrote Blanks. The Fourth Amendments of the Bill of Rights provide rights during criminal investigations.
Those protections have eroded over time, Blanks wrote. However, change is starting to come. State and federal lawmakers are recognizing that such policies can get awfully expensive.
Many states have amended their Drug-Free School Zone laws. Some reduced the penalty; others require the offense to be “at least tangentially tied to exposing children to the drug trade.” Still others have lowered the law’s geographical reach, according to the Sentencing Project, wrote Blanks.
The Smarter Sentencing Act would reduce some mandatory minimum penalties for non-violent drug offenders, if passed into law. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Richard Durbin, D-Ill., proposed the act in the U.S. Senate.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission is also considering if recent sentence reductions for all non-violent drug offenses should apply retroactively to all applicable federal inmates. More than 50,000 may be eligible, which could save hundreds of millions of dollars.
“Throwing the book at offenders with well-meant but misguided lawmaking has wreaked havoc on correctional budgets while breaking up families and damaging local economies in the process,” wrote Blanks.
He urges policymakers let judges decide who is punished and how severely, instead of blind punishment. Such a system could lead to fewer mistakes than subjecting everyone to the inflexible categorical judgment of legislators and prosecutors, concluded Blanks.