U.S. criminal justice policies too often respond to people who are “sick, poor, homeless or unable to care for themselves or their families with the hammer of the criminal justice system,” according to a study released late last year by the Vera Institute of Justice. “Then we continue to hammer them long after they have satisfied our need for retribution.”
The study describes the post-sentence civil penalties, disqualifications or disabilities that occur from state or federal convictions as “collateral consequences of criminal convictions” or “collateral consequences.”
The report says that the legal and life-restricting consequences of having a criminal conviction are “varied, and often bewildering,” in addition to impacting employment, housing, education and immigration consequences.
However, the study doesn’t account for restrictions imposed by the private sector, i.e., landlords, employers or university admissions officers, “which stem not from the express operation of the law, but from the social stigma suffered by individuals with a criminal record,” Vera reports.
Nationwide, Vera finds that there are approximately 45,000 laws and rules that restrict the opportunities and benefits available to individuals with criminal histories. However from 2009 through 2014, 41 states and the District of Columbia enacted 155 pieces of legislation to reduce the burden of collateral consequences for people with certain criminal convictions.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder called on states to ease or abolish “unwise collateral consequences” that stop ex-offenders from fully reintegrating into their communities, in a February 2014 speech at the National Association of Attorneys General Winter meeting.
Holder said felon disenfranchisement laws are “unnecessary,” “unjust” and “counterproductive,” and “perpetuate the stigma and isolation imposed on formerly incarcerated individuals, [and] increase the likelihood they will commit future crimes.”
Vera says one of the collateral consequences of having a criminal conviction is its destabilizing effect on families. More than half of state inmates and nearly two-thirds of federal inmates are parents of children under age 18. As of 2007, 2.3 percent of individuals under age 18 had at least one incarcerated parent, an increase of 80 percent since 1991.
Fathers in particular lose contact with their children, Vera finds. Only 40 percent of fathers behind bars have weekly contact of any kind with their child, and contact decreases as the sentence continues. More than half of these fathers never have an in-person visit with their children.
Wall Street Journal cites a 2011 study by the FBI that found one in three adults has been arrested by age 23, and law enforcement has made more than one-quarter billion arrests in the past 20 years, according to a Federal Bureau of Investigation report. In 2012 about 70.3 million U.S. adults had criminal records.
The report found that follow-up support for mental illness, substance abuse or obtaining vocational skills or education was absent for the more than 637,000 men and women released from state and federal prisons, the nearly 2.6 million released from community supervision and the more than 11 million released from jail in 2012. “These issues, when left unaddressed, increase the risk of recidivism, and many of these people are returning to communities lacking the resources or services necessary to cope with these pressing needs,” Vera reported.