My job was to keep people out of jail, but I couldn’t control what kept bringing my clients back into the courtroom.

A common example was a young mother, caught with pills and charged with a felony for possession with intent to sell; loses her job because she couldn’t afford the bail set at $1,500; pleads guilty to the felony in return for probation so she can get out of jail; fails the drug tests on probation and ends up with the felony on her record; loses her driver’s license because of unpaid court costs and fines; and then her children because she cannot afford to provide them with food, clothing, and shelter.

I saw that every week: Someone who entered the courtroom an addict and exited a criminal. According to the North Carolina Second Chance Alliance, more than 2 million people in the state have criminal records, 90 percent of large employers ask about that history, and more than 1,000 different laws in the state deny rights and privileges due to convictions.

And like in many states, it’s difficult to expunge those convictions because of long waiting periods and narrow rules of eligibility, which makes it hard for a person to find a decent job or stable housing, or obtain the education they want. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in 2014 the United States went without an estimated $78 to $87 billion in gross domestic product because of people who were unable to reenter society and participate in the workforce due to their criminal background. And that’s devastating for communities that were hardest hit by the opioid epidemic.

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My hometown in the foothills of North Carolina was once the home of some of the largest manufacturing businesses, including the American Furniture Company. But slowly those jobs left town and went to China, or were lost to automation. From the year 2000, when that company finally closed, to 2014, my county experienced the second worst decline of median income in the United States: from $47,992 to $33,398.

And that’s when the pills came in. Doctors overprescribed Oxycontin, Vicodin, and Percocet to people who were in pain and out of work. Many got hooked and some sold the painkillers on a black market out of their medicine cabinet. In 2007, the county experienced the third highest overdose rate in the country.

Because of a lack of funding at the state level, there’s no public defender’s office. So when I came home to work as a lawyer, I took appointed cases to supplement what I brought into our firm as a young criminal defense attorney. That meant representing as many as 15 clients a day and sometimes as many as 50 in a week. We’d be lucky to meet for more than a few minutes at a time to go over the facts before trial or to run through a plea offer while standing next to a bailiff in one of the holding cells behind the courtroom.

For every case disposed, I’d get appointed to another. Drugs were an underlying factor in almost every fact pattern.

My county wasn’t unique. The same forces of globalization and automation were devastating towns all across the country. But we didn’t discuss what was happening in those terms, and we didn’t learn about these deaths of despair by reading about them in The Atlantic. The stories were personal. It wasn’t uncommon to walk into the courtroom and see the faces of childhood friends, a young man from church, or even a next-door neighbor.

There’s a stereotype that the opioid crisis affects only middle-aged white men, but addiction doesn’t discriminate by age, race, or education level. Where there is discrimination, though, is in access to treatment. If you were from a rich household, or had a strong support system, your family could afford to send you to rehabilitation for as long as it took, up to a couple of years if need be. For everyone else, recovery options were limited and usually led back to the courtroom. (In North Carolina, programs like the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant spend more than $44 million per year on recovery services, but without Medicaid expansion, many in recovery are still on their own and unable to afford inpatient treatment.)

What happened in my town happened before, in the 1970s and the 1980s, when cities hollowed out and the response to a crack epidemic was mass incarceration. Now, because of organizers and advocates in those communities, the urban incarceration rate has declined in recent years. But because of the opioid crisis, since 2013, the incarceration rate in rural America has risen by 26 percent.

Today there is legislation in North Carolina called the Second Chance Act that would expand eligibility for record expungement. Hopefully, lawmakers will get that bill passed soon. What I saw in an Appalachian courtroom wasn’t because my hometown was full of bad people. It was because the factories closed and we treated poverty and addiction by locking up the victims.

Like any curious 14-year-old, I asked, “Why they let you go?” She responded with an undertone of cynicism: “They said they need to downsize, so they let me go.”

“Mommy, what does downsize mean?”

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Since my overly expensive degree in Organizational Behavior from NYU, I’ve learned that not all downsizing is as bad as what happened to my mother.

According to the Harvard Business Review, proponents of downsizing argue that it is an effective strategy, with benefits such as increased performance and sales. Stepping out of Business 101 is decarceration, the downsizing of incarceration to reduce the scale and reach of the criminal justice system. It’s time to start now, especially as violent crime is down in most cities and lawmakers weigh the decriminalization of many offenses, such as drug possession/use and sex work.

Downsizing means police should not be mental health first responders. They need mental health treatment. They need help. Police officer suicides in 2018 were the highest ever, with 228 officers dying by suicide. Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, believes the 228 number “is undoubtedly underreported.” Probation and parole officers are not substance abuse counselors or employment specialists.

And all of this is okay because we don’t need them to be. They just need to get themselves healthy, and rightsizing should be an option. We already have proficient social workers, mental health professionals, substance abuse counselors, and employment specialists who are not utilized enough or funded appropriately.

The criminal justice system is a discordant machine of more than 55,000 criminal justice-related agencies nationwide inclusive of police, courts, district attorney offices, jails, prisons, parole and probation boards, and ecarceration. I’m sure I’ve missed a few here, but the point is that America’s criminal justice reform intoxication should include more than reducing the number of people in prisons or the amount of lockups closed: It should mean fewer institutions of incarceration, too.

Downsizing in this context means relieving some institutions of their duties and giving them a severance package that will allow them to take care of their own house.

Our tax dollars pay the bill of more than $270 billion to keep the criminal justice system intact. If the criminal justice system were a country, it would be 41st on the GDP tally of 186 countries. We — and I mean “we,” because “We, the People” allow for this profane, ineffective, and inefficient use of resources — currently have open-air incarceration, where about 4.5 million people live under some form of community supervision, alongside the 2.3 million people in prisons. We spend $29 billion on the federal law enforcement budget (#99 on the GDP tally). We have 70 million people in the U.S., not incarcerated, but living freeish with a criminal conviction.

Amid this display of laissez-faire governance, there is progress to soberly consider. Bail reform in several states is decreasing the debtor’s prison construct. Restorative justice models are sprouting up across the country, effectively decreasing exposure to all points of the criminal punishment system. Progressive judges like Victoria Pratt “sentenced” people who came before her court to write essays, instead of lockup. Law enforcement administrators from across the country have been meeting as Executives Transforming Parole & Probation (EXiT) to operationalize the downsizing of their reach and their caseloads. In their “Statement on the Future of Probation & Parole in the United States,” they assert: “As people who run or have run community supervision throughout the country and others concerned with mass supervision, we call for probation and parole to be substantially downsized, less punitive, and more hopeful, equitable and restorative.”

Several years ago, when I was a violence interrupter for the Cure Violence program in Brooklyn, New York, I spoke at an intimate convening of community residents, police, and elected officials. During my comments, I said my job is to figure out ways to put myself out of work. My work was to reduce shootings in the area of Brooklyn where the violence interrupter program operated. Even then, I understood that any person or institution engaged in intervention work should hope that their interventions are no longer needed. The criminal justice system is an operation of interventions ostensibly created to deal with violations of the societal contract. Because of the disproportionate use of these interventions on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian Pacific Islander populations, we understand that we have a racialized system of control.

White supremacy aside for a moment (as if it is ever possible to put the ideology of white supremacy in timeout), the 55,000 agencies of the criminal punishment system, e.g., the courts, law enforcement, and community supervision, should keep a humbling view of themselves.  They should be working to put themselves out of business. They need to see downsizing as a means to community efficacy.

Since my mother’s untimely dismissal from her job, our family figured it out, like most working-class families. We pooled our resources together. My mother still has a few choice four-letter words in her Trinidadian accent to describe the process of being laid off. I assume the 55,000 criminal justice agencies will also have a vulgar reaction to real downsizing. But I am sure those of us in communities that are involuntarily cuffed to the criminal punishment system will also find a way to pool our resources together to create safe neighborhoods we all deserve.

“I was homeless, looking for a place to live, and trying to get into a drug treatment program,” Gomez told TalkPoverty. “I couldn’t afford to enroll at a volunteer center and do my hours.” Her struggle to fulfill the terms led her down a rabbit hole of unsympathetic judges, sexual harassment, and dangerous working conditions.

Several recent high-profile cases have put court-ordered community service like that Lopez experienced into the headlines. So has a University of California, Los Angeles study that took a close look at how community service is used in LA County, and the wildly disparate outcomes within the county’s court-ordered community service framework. Limited research on this subject is in circulation, but the information from Los Angeles suggests tracking and quantifying data around community service nationwide might yield important insights into a little-researched aspect of the legal system. As with other elements of the criminal legal system, class and race heavily mediate the kind of service people engage in and how many hours they are ordered to complete.

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The researchers found significant racial disparities, with Latinx and Black people being more likely to serve community service as a result of disparities in citations, arrests, and charging decisions. For example, in traffic cases that resulted in community service, which involve infractions like speeding and failing to stop, 81 percent of workers were Latinx, out of proportion with LA’s roughly 49 percent Latinx population, and 8 percent were Black.

They also found a high percentage of people who could not afford attorneys (78 percent) amongst those who performed community service, while 16 percent had limited English proficiency and needed translators in court. This paints a profile of a predominantly low-income population — 89 percent of those serving community service in the cohort they studied were low-income — of color, with substantial numbers of immigrants.

Around 100,000 people are sentenced to community service in LA County every year, serving the equivalent of 4,900 full-time, paid civilian jobs and 1,800 government jobs. The number of hours of labor this represents, and the significant cost savings for community service sites, is tremendous. Noah Zatz, a UCLA law professor and lead author, told TalkPoverty, “We were startled to see just how high the hours were for many people, people getting hundreds or even thousands of hours.”

The report argues this is a form of extractive labor that stacks on to existing “poverty penalties” in the criminal legal system, in addition to driving inequalities on work sites, where people completing community service work side-by-side with paid parties in everything from municipal animal shelters to for-profit nursing homes, but without the same benefits, protections, and wages.

Lopez recalled that at one placement, she was ordered to engage in unsafe activities like cleaning bathrooms with a mixture of bleach and ammonia. At another, she said she was forced to mop on her hands and knees in a kitchen surrounded by men who stared at her, but she had to “swallow that pill and push through” after the supervisor threatened to “throw out all my hours.”

“In addition to the direct displacement dynamic,” noted Zatz, referring to paid workers who might lose out on roles filled by community service, “the other dynamic at play is that these assignments function as a form of subsidy to nonprofits.” Government agencies also experience big savings through community service; over half of the cases the researchers looked at involved CalTrans, the state’s highway construction and maintenance agency.

Community service is sometimes represented to members of the public as a compassionate alternative to jail time and a way to “work off” court-imposed debts. In fact, it can create significant hardships. People may struggle to complete high numbers of hours on top of their paid jobs and other obligations, such as school and child care. When Lopez struggled to complete her service and asked for help, judges were unsympathetic; it ultimately took the help of an attorney with A New Way of Life, an advocacy organization that works with women leaving prison, to get the court to work with her. The court agreed to accept volunteer hours she served at organizations not on its officially sanctioned list, acknowledging her work with community advocacy organizations.

The researchers noted that disability can also be a factor; the study cites one disabled person who was sentenced to 60 hours of work they were unable to perform and ended up with 180 hours of “light” service. Zatz notes that people receive more credit for physically demanding work, which creates inherent inequalities for disabled people.

And some still owe court-imposed fines and fees that can’t be worked off by laboring on construction crews or organizing files at the sheriff’s office, with 86 percent of those involved in criminal cases making payments that averaged $323 on top of their service. That’s, of course, after they’ve paid the fee for placement at a community service work site recognized by the court.

Many members of the public may not be aware of the close ties between court-ordered community service and the mounting crisis of court fines and fees. Nearly every state has seen steep increases, many of which are established in rigid fee schedules that judges can’t change. In many cases, courts are offering community service as a way to “pay off” the very fines the court has imposed, though they could conduct ability-to-pay assessments to determine whether those fines are realistic. For some, the only way to resolve these debts is to work, providing free labor to participating sites.

The reliance upon free labor is troubling for the researchers. Whether people are engaged in community labor, which includes a physically demanding element like working on a road crew, or community service, like volunteering at a thrift store, they are treated as a cheap and disposable resource. Not only are they not paid for their time, they’re not provided with meaningful skills and a path to advancement, with very few people hired on by the agencies and organizations they work for. These organizations can also be choosy, indicating that they won’t work with people convicted of certain kinds of crimes, which makes it harder for them to complete court-ordered community service.

At a time when labor organizing is in resurgence, community service represents a largely unexplored aspect of the labor movement. Some participants in community service programs are working alongside union members who have fought for robust contracts that include fair pay and benefits as well as protected working conditions. Community service workers don’t benefit from those contracts and are in fact sometimes forced to sign waivers explicitly identifying them as volunteers and giving up certain workplace rights and protections.

Reforming court fines and fees to address the modern-day debtor’s prisons and coercive labor conditions across the United States is critical, as is coming up with alternatives to incarceration that do not involve exploitation. Community service as it exists now could also be reformed; people could be provided with job training, meaningful pay, and other supports to turn a court-ordered job into economic opportunity, something people like Lopez, who’s been sober three years and is currently pursuing a college education, could have benefited from.

Until then, members of the public may want to look twice at community service’s role in their neighborhoods.

One year later, in 2017, de Blasio had a change of heart, and decided that he would propose a plan to close Rikers within 10 years and build four new jails across the city in its place. Members of the #CloseRikers campaign, many of whom are formerly incarcerated, have supported the building of four new jails to replace Rikers, too.

Close one jail to build four new ones was the limit of their imagination. But it should not be the limit of imagination for people of color and especially people who spent as much as one day in jail.

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The move towards opening more humane jails and state of the art “jail centers” is happening all around the country, from Sioux City, Iowa, to Spokane, Washington, to Oahu, Hawai’i. But that’s just the latest euphemism in the history of prison reform. From plantations to convict lease gangs to penitentiaries to correctional facilities, we have a collective conditioning to center confinement, even when the numbers provide a different narrative.

Reductions in the New York City jail population because of bail reform and other policy changes has made the once unrealistic idea of closing Rikers one of political pragmatism. According to statistics provided by the New York Police Department, New York City’s overall crime rate is continuing a downward trend. In fact, the homicide rate is at the lowest since the 1950s.

There is no Batman with a neverending utility-belt of crime-fighting tools intimidating the city’s underworld. Community-based programs aimed at prevention and intervention are the Caped Crusader. Crime in New York City declined at the same time that policy shifts forced the NYPD to stop using stop and frisk as its main policing tool.

The imaginations of activists, most of whom spent time on Rikers, is now being actualized.

This next step should not include the construction of another cage. If you build it, you will fill it, and according to scholar, Angela Davis, “jails and prisons always become overcrowded.” America’s prisons are already running at 103.9 percent capacity. The ACLU has been suing the state of Hawai’i since 1984 for its prison overcrowding; prisons there are now at an average of 167 percent capacity.

Prisons and jails, especially in America, are direct descendants of slave plantations. Laureates such as Ava DuVernay and Michelle Alexander have plainly made the case for this nexus.  Convict-leasing gangs were created after formerly enslaved Africans fought for their freedom in the Civil War, which were the precursors to the modern-day penitentiaries and jails.

Speaking at the Smart on Crime Conference at John Jay College earlier this month, Darren Mack, a formerly incarcerated leader and member of #CloseRikers, said that a part of the plan to close Rikers and open four new jails is to have social service providers run the new facilities instead of the Department of Corrections. But replacing correctional staff with any other kind of a professional is a jail with lipstick. Los Angeles residents fought against similar cosmetic changes by winning the battle to halt the construction of $2.2 billion jail-like mental facility.

If advocates, especially those who have lived in jails, don’t use this moment to close jails, 20 or 30 years from now prison reformers will be thinking of ways to improve these same jail centers.  In 1979, the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, wrote on the subject of prison reform: “One should recall that the movement for reforming the prisons, for controlling their functioning is not a recent phenomenon. It does not even seem to have originated in a recognition of failure. Prison ‘reform’ is virtually contemporary with the prison itself: it constitutes, as it were, its program.”

Now, I appreciate that the voices of formerly incarcerated are loud and numerous on both sides of this debate. Homogeneity in any movement is a myth at worse and unrealistic at best.

So here we are. We are at a moment when we can push, prod, and perform the dreams of the abolitionists of old: freedom. The upcoming biopic of Harriet Tubman, already getting Oscar buzz, will hopefully remind us that her first goal and hurdle was to convince caged human-beings that they were not free; that a plantation with better amenities was still a plantation committed to the peculiar institution of trampling Black souls to build a greater America. Dr. Tubman, as I like to call her, left us a vital lesson to remember.

Better conditions of confinement, though a necessary touchpoint of our humanity, is not freedom. Building new jails in a moment when it is becoming vogue to reduce the prison population is a cognitive dissonance that will likely result in creative ways to suggest Black and Brown people belong in them. America always finds a way to imagine confinement for people of color. Look at how kids are caged at the Mexican-American border.

We, especially those of us committed to implementing solutions that eradicate the need for jails and prisons, should not limit our expertise and our imaginations to soluble solutions that create more cages to be filled.

We can Harriet this moment.

While searching us, one of the officers said, cynically, “It ain’t legal yet,” though the “it” was not found on us.

It was around 10 p.m. and I was too tired to assert my rights or to say that I was in a meeting with their commissioner earlier that week about NYPD’s plans to build community-police relations. We accepted the harassment, survived the interaction, and went to our respective homes to smoke our blunts in peace, like most white people who now claim Crown Heights as their home.

Police murders of unarmed people in America sprout from seemingly benign harassment like that which happened to me and my friend, a military veteran — like what happened to Eric Garner, who was strangled to death for bootlegging cigarettes.

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In August, California passed a law making it less legal for law enforcement to kill Black and Brown people such as Eric Garner. California’s recently passed Assembly Bill No. 392, described by some as one of the toughest standards in the nation for when law enforcement officers can kill, is progress. Known as the “Act to Save Lives,” the law removes barriers to prosecuting officers who unlawfully use lethal force. The new law also redefines when a peace officer’s use of deadly force is deemed justifiable, based on the totality of the circumstance.

The LAPD alone killed 172 people in 2017. This new law would presumably decrease that number because police will be able to use deadly force only when, based on the perspective of the officer, it is necessary in defense of human life.

Advocates such as Cat Brooks at the Anti Police-Terror Project are the architects of this new law, potentially setting a legal precedent to be replicated across the country.

Acknowledging the success of the efforts of these advocates can occur while we also question whether substantive progress has been made. Five years ago, more than 500 journalists, lawyers, medics, organizers, pastors, students, tech experts and videographers participated in what would be called the “freedom rides,” which were response to the murder of unarmed Mike Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.

The group of freedom riders, along with the local residents of Ferguson, had a list of demands, including: “a decrease in law-enforcement spending at the local, state and federal levels and a reinvestment of that budgeted money into the black communities most devastated by poverty in order to create jobs, housing, and schools. This money should be redirected to those … departments charged with providing employment, housing, and educational services.”

California’s new law doesn’t address that concern.

Rightfully, the Act to Save Lives regulates policing with impunity. Police will no longer easily get away with the “I feared for my life” script; they will have to prove after the murder or assault that a “reasonable officer in the same situation would believe that a person has the ability…and intent to immediately cause death or serious bodily injury to the peace officer or another person.” All of this substantiation would be done after the hashtag for this person is created and goes viral.

What is still to be tackled is the oversaturated deployment of police into communities of color.

Which brings me back to Brooklyn. This fall in the East New York section of Brooklyn, less than a mile from where I was harassed, the NYPD is opening its first stand-alone community center — a $10 million investment by the City of New York.

Now, positive police-community relations are a plus for any community, but it is not where we need to invest $10 million dollars in a community where in 2015, the rate of preterm births, a key driver of infant death, is the fourth highest in the city; the teen birth rate is higher than the city average; and the rate of elementary school absenteeism is eighth-highest in the city.

Social welfare is not a function of police training, nor is it a part of their corporate culture. More importantly, policing as a practice has a foundationally biased perspective of poor Black and Brown communities, and that is a truth we all should be honest enough to sit with.

The step after this acknowledgement is changed behavior. Listening followed by action.

Over the past year or so, I have been in roundtable conversations with a diverse array of actors in the criminal legal system. Organizers, directly impacted people, loved ones of the impacted, along with academics, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, elected officials, social workers, historians, cops, prison guards, and wardens — basically all the cogs in an irreformable and irreparable old steam engine.

The convenings are a part of a project that Bruce Western of the Columbia University Justice Lab called the “Square One Project.” The home page provokes the following scenarios:

Imagine neighborhoods soaring in education instead of arrests.

Imagine community groups leading the effort to end violence in our towns and cities.

Imagine a response to crime that brings communities together instead of breaking them apart.

The next Square One roundtable convening will take place in Detroit in October, and I also wonder, “can police imagine a community that does not rely on them as a dominant resource?”

In communities such as East New York and Ferguson, police-community relations are one problem of many: High unemployment, negative prenatal outcomes, bad water, dilapidated and unaffordable housing, and the list can go on. More of a police presence is not a solution to any of the above.

Emory University Sociologist Abigail Sewell asserts that “part of the solution may be to reduce police contact in the first place.” With that reduction can come abundant and sustainable investments in community-based organizations and individuals of expertise who reside in the projects and hang on the street corners — the community writ large.

Regulating the justifications for police use of deadly force is a commendable step in the right direction. The leap that communities like East New York need, however, is an investment in reducing the social determinants that give law enforcement the excuse to have a suffocating presence there.

Black and Brown neighborhoods do not need more overseers, or more state of the art smaller jails. We are capable of thriving without emphasis on our perceived criminality, and we are capable of taking care of ourselves, just like those in places like Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, or Carrol Gardens, once we are provided with the tools to deal with the tentacles of American racism, such as poverty, the distribution of money, and overpolicing. The “Seven Neighborhoods Study” produced by formerly incarcerated people in the 1990s found that there was a “direct connection between low income, racially isolated, underserved communities…and encounters with law enforcement that result in prison or death.”

Only time will tell whether the Act to Save Lives will have a measurable positive impact on police interactions with Black and Brown people. That new NYPD community center will come as a win for those focused on building a new paradigm for police-community relations.

But the academic and practitioner in me still thinks about Malcolm X, who famously said, “If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. They won’t even admit the knife is there.” I know that police harassment is an underlying and extralegal blade that can be wielded at any time in the name of progress.

Yes, it is less legal to be killed by police, but I still feel the knife.

Data on incarcerated Black Muslim women is slim, but reported cases of de-veiling date back at least 14 years. In 2005, Jameelah Medina was accused of being a terrorist by a Los Angeles County Sheriff and forced to remove her hijab. In 2017, Kirsty Powell settled a lawsuit with Long Beach for the “humiliation and distress” she suffered when her hijab was forcibly removed by police. Last year, the Council of American Islamic Relations in Michigan filed a civil rights complaint on behalf of Siwatu Salama-Ra, whose religious rights (including access to a hijab, Quran, and pork-free food) were violated while incarcerated.

These are only a scattering of cases, and more surely linger in the shadows. Unfortunately, not every case is reported, because doing so can lead to retaliation or long legal battles. Multiple groups have taken up fights to introduce changes across the country to address these problems, but the issue of violating Black Muslim women’s religious rights is deeper than policy.

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There is a legal precedent for allowing Muslim women to wear hijab while incarcerated. Along with the First Amendment guaranteeing religious freedom, Congress passed the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) in 2000, which included protecting the religious rights of incarcerated people. However, that precedent has been difficult to apply to incarcerated Muslims due to Islamophobia embedded within the carceral system. As noted by CAIR Michigan staff attorney Amy Doukoure, there is no uniform policy across facilities regarding the right to wear hijab. Instead, Doukoure said, “When it comes to county facilities and state facilities, every county and every city has their own policy. Or a lot of them still have a lack of policy.”

This lack of policy leaves a lot up to discretion, which poses unique issues for Black Muslim women. Although Black Muslims make up a fifth of all Muslims in the United States, we occupy a tumultuous space. Black Muslims experience an anti-Black extension of Islamophobia rooted within the “afterlife of slavery”. Theorized by African-American literature professor Saidiya Hartman, it refers to the continued devaluation and dehumanization of Black lives, accomplished through a “racial calculus and political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.”

In some cases, the removal of Black Muslim women’s hijab is also linked to public shaming tactics. Educator and activist Angela Davis noted in “Are Prisons Obsolete?” that Black women are subject to regimes of punishment that differ greatly from those experienced by white women. Part of that includes publicly shaming or humiliating Black women, which is seen time and time again throughout the criminal justice system. The very existence of online mugshots and media usage of them is a great example and, for Black Muslim women, poses a unique concern.

In Maine, the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office opened an internal investigation in 2016, after at least one Black Muslim woman — who was arrested at a protest — had a mugshot without hijab released to the media. In the opinion of other protesters, the decision to release the mugshots online was intentional.

When working on developing a policy in LA county, Margari Hill, co-founder and executive director of the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, noted that law enforcement tried to slip in vague wording to leave things up to their discretion, and advocated for having dual mugshots: one with hijab and one without.

That “dual mugshot” policy also exists in Michigan, where Doukoure said women are often told they can’t wear headscarves for identification purposes, adding, “You’re allowed to wear them in your driver’s licenses and you’re allowed to wear them in your passport photos, so why does the Michigan Department of Corrections need a higher standard than every other state and federal government agency?” Despite the Michigan Department of Corrections having a policy around hijabs in general, there is no rule preventing those photos from going online. If they do, it’s essentially impossible to remove them due to the difficulty of communicating with online search engines and convincing them to take the photos down, and the department itself.

The issue of having a mugshot without hijab going online is one I’m familiar with. According to a Ramsey County Public Information Officer, the county’s official policy since March 2014 has been, “We exchange [their hijab] for one of ours (to avoid any contraband issues). We take two pictures, one with and one without. The one without is confidential and never released.”

But similar to the Black Muslim women in Maine, I was arrested while protesting the police. While I was detained, I was told by a male officer that I needed to remove my hijab for my mugshot. I complied, because the process of getting booked and released takes hours. I was too tired to argue. Despite Ramsey County’s own policy, it was the only picture taken. That mugshot was later released online.

Groups have attempted to address the lack of policy within their own regions, which illuminated other factors at play. For instance, cultural ways of wearing hijab that are dominant in Black communities are not considered markers of one’s Muslim faith in the same way that they are for other communities.

In the 1960s, the repeal of the National Origins Act and Asiatic Barred Zone led to an influx of Muslim immigrants, which led to the American public beginning to explicitly code Muslims as Arab. As a result, Hill shared that she would often have to demonstrate to law enforcement different ways to wear hijab and the various materials it could come in. She noted that if a Black Muslim did not have the proper “markers” to be considered “legitimately” Muslim — such as an Arabic name or a particular phenotype — then the reaction was accusations that “Oh, you’re wearing [a scarf] for fashion” and “You’re not a real Muslim, you’re a Moos-lim.”

This process of facilities taking it upon themselves to determine who is a legitimate Muslim — and excluding Black women from that — was also noted by Doukoure. In 2018, at the same time CAIR Michigan filed a civil complaint against the Michigan Department of Corrections on the behalf of Ra, the organization filed a second on the behalf of Marna A. Muhammad, who was illegally denied clergy status.

“We believe that because she was an African-American woman serving an African American community, they didn’t find her to be what they consider to be a stereotypical Muslim,” Doukoure shared. Muhammad was with Masjid Wali Muhammad, the oldest masjid in Michigan. “And therefore, they refused to recognize that someone like her could be a religious, spiritual leader that could have clergy status.”

Through the dehumanization of Black people — and our subsequent removal from the religious, as outlined by Delice Mugabo — Black Muslims are rendered invisible within mainstream discussions around Islamophobia, but still perceived as an inherent threat. This anxiety is transferred from colonial times, such as Charles V of Spain’s attempts to exclude “slaves suspected of Islamic learnings” after a revolt. Black Muslims as a threat to social order are well documented within the criminal justice system, where Black militant became synonymous with “problem” and then interchangeable with Muslims. The de-veiling — and general maltreatment — of incarcerated or detained Black Muslim women is a symptom of wider issues relating to anti-Black Islamophobia. Black Muslim women are regarded as inherent threats due to both their Blackness and their Islam.

The issue of de-veiling Black Muslim women within detention facilities cannot be read as simply an issue with policy implementation. Even when the right policy exists in writing, experiences like mine reveal that it is not actually implemented as a standard practice. Instead, people must reckon with the deeper, systemic issues leading to the simultaneous delegitimization and criminalization of Black Muslim women.

Numerous law enforcement officials, prosecutors, lawmakers and local media outlets have been strong opponents of the elimination of cash bail, which is the payment required from a defendant in return for being released from jail as they await trial. The fiercest resistance to change has come from the powerful for-profit bail bond industry.

This $2 billion industry, which makes most of its earnings by exploiting low-income defendants stuck in desperate situations by shaking them down for steep and sometimes illegal fees in return for a loan that can be used to pay bail, has been using misinformation and fear tactics to combat cash bail reforms. One industry group even posted on Facebook that reforming the cash bail system means “every night is purge night,” an allusion to the popular horror films in which crime is legalized.

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However, the results are in from the long-awaited criminal justice report by New Jersey’s Administrative Office of the Courts, and it’s clear that the Garden State did not devolve into lawless chaos because of bail reform. Instead, crime rates in New Jersey have been plummeting ever since the reforms were implemented in 2017, with violent offences such as homicide and robbery down by more than 30 percent.

The report proves that concerns about large numbers of defendants committing crimes while released and failing to show up for trial were unwarranted. State court officials say that the differences before and after the state’s bail reform are statistically insignificant — there was a 3.3 percentage point increase in the number of defendants who failed to appear in court, and a 1 percentage point increase in the number of defendants who were charged with a new crime while released and awaiting trial. The report states that that “because of certain challenges in compiling data from 2014, small changes in outcome measures should be interpreted with caution and likely do not represent meaningful differences.”

The positive impacts are much more noteworthy. According to a statement by Superior Court Judge Glenn A. Grant, acting administrative director of the New Jersey courts, “New Jersey’s jail population looks very different today than it did when the idea of reforming the state’s criminal justice system first took hold.” The state’s overall pretrial population, which consists of detainees who have not been charged with a crime, has declined by 44 percent. That amounts to 6,000 fewer people incarcerated in 2018 compared to 2012.

This means that thousands of defendants who have not been convicted of a crime and are presumed innocent under the law will be free to remain with their families and their community while they await their day in court. Under the previous system, low-income defendants would see their lives fall apart as they lost their job, housing, or even their children simply because they could not afford to pay bail.

On the other side of the spectrum, violent yet wealthy defendants will no longer be able to use their resources to walk free when facing serious charges such as sexual assault or armed robbery, while low-income defendants facing minor charges such as possession of marijuana remain locked up. According to a statement by the Drug Policy Alliance’s New Jersey State Director Roseanne Scotti, all this proves “that New Jersey’s historic bail reform law has been a resounding success.”

It is important to note that these reforms are not a panacea. The report reveals that although the state’s jail population is dropping, “the overrepresentation of black males in the pretrial jail populations remains an area in need of further examination.” In a press release, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey mostly praised the reforms but added that “a system that reduces the number of incarcerated people but does not improve racial disparities is simply not good enough. We intend to continue our advocacy efforts to reduce racial disparities in the criminal justice system.”

Although more work needs to be done to address these racial disparities, New Jersey’s reforms have been successful enough to inspire other states, including California, New York, Texas, Illinois, and Alaska. The bail bond industry has also declared war on those efforts.

The report’s findings are “an absolute refutation of the bail industry’s scare tactics” said Alexander Shalom, senior supervising attorney at the New Jersey chapter of the ACLU, in an email. “They had warned that a virtual elimination of money bail would result in no one appearing in court and massive crime increases. That we’ve seen 6,000 fewer people jailed and virtually no increase in court nonappearance or re-arrest rates debunks that myth.”

In New Jersey, concerns about a crime explosion turned out to be nothing but fearmongering. It is now up to the rest of the nation to follow suit by looking at the facts, ignoring the bail industry’s scare tactics and taking steps to create a just, safe, and nondiscriminatory bail system.

Despite public statements to the contrary, there is mounting evidence that the administration is continuing to separate asylum-seeking families like Brayan and Julio’s. President Donald Trump holds fast to the belief that family separation effectively deters families from Mexico and Central America from seeking refuge in the United States, despite evidence to the contrary, and immigration attorneys are reporting that the administration is taking advantage of a loophole in the federal court’s injunction against separations. According to Neha Desai at the National Center for Youth Law, border patrol officers are using the pretext that children’s safety is at risk to separate families: “If the authorities have even the most specious evidence that a parent was a gang member… anything they can come up with to say that the separation is for the health and welfare of the child, then they’ll separate them.”

The Trump administration’s decision to systematically separate children from their parents, is, in its specifics, unprecedented. But family separation was enabled in the first place, and it continues today, because our immigration system, like other public systems, has been built to separate families — particularly families of color.

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The immigration system is one of three systems that routinely separate families in the United States. The criminal justice and child welfare systems are the other two. In the immigration and criminal justice systems, separation is most commonly an unconsidered, if not quite unintended, consequence of policy, as parents are incarcerated and sometimes deported without their children. In child welfare, separation is the deliberate result of policy, as children are removed from their parents’ custody over concerns for their immediate safety. In each system, however, children are harmed by family separation. And in each system, children of color are more likely to be separated from their parents.

The very first federal restriction on immigration resulted in family separations. In 1875, Congress barred Chinese involuntary laborers and suspected prostitutes from entering the United States. In practice, the law made it almost impossible for Chinese women to immigrate, including those who wished to join their husbands, as government officials “demonstrated a consistent unwillingness, or inability, to recognize women who were not prostitutes among all but the wealthy applicants for immigration.” In the years that followed, an increasing number of laws excluded more Asians from the United States. Separations continued as part of this: At Angel Island, the notorious immigration station in San Francisco Bay, many Asian-American families were separated for weeks at a time so that they could not coordinate their answers before they faced interrogation.

By the mid-20th century, Latinx immigrants had become the subject of nativist ire, and many Latinx families were separated as a result. During the Great Depression, local and state governments colluded with social welfare agencies to encourage and sometimes coerce Mexicans—and in many cases Mexican Americans — to “repatriate” to Mexico. Two decades later, concern about rising undocumented immigration in the Southwest led to “Operation Wetback,” a federal deportation drive that was once again focused almost exclusively on Mexicans. The legacy of this targeting of Latinx communities by immigration enforcement is visible today. Though immigrants from Latin America make up an estimated 77 percent of the unauthorized population in the United States, they have constituted well over 90 percent of immigrants removed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in recent years. 27,080 immigrants with U.S. born children were deported in 2017.

Like immigration enforcement, our system of mass incarceration mechanically separates families. Incarceration creates financial and emotional hardship for families by default, but there are additional ripple effects that can last long after release. According to an analysis of 3 million child welfare cases, parents who have a child placed in foster care because they are incarcerated are more likely to have their parental rights terminated than those who physically or sexually assaulted their kids. Again, this falls disproportionately on children of color: Approximately 11.4 percent of African-American children have a parent in prison, compared to 3.5 percent of Hispanic children and 1.8 percent of white children. This disparate impact has been true for the history of the criminal justice system in the United States, and it has grown with the rise of mass incarceration since the 1970s.

Families of color are also disproportionately separated by the child welfare system, which from the beginning saw its role as removing children from their families for their own protection. Originally, the child welfare system focused on removing poor children from their families, whether or not there were signs of abuse. As William Pryor Letchworth, a famous advocate of children’s causes, declared in 1874, “If you want to break up pauperism, you must transplant [the child].” Charities in New York, Boston, and other East Coast cities sent thousands of poor children on “orphan trains” to towns in the Midwest, where they were assigned foster families.

As the child welfare system developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, children of color were for the most part excluded from services, but other public institutions separated them from their families at high rates. A Children’s Bureau report observed that from 1750 to 1960, “the black child’s chance of ‘receiving care’ [a polite euphemism for being incarcerated] from a correctional facility was still much greater than that of receiving any other type of care.” Meanwhile, the United States undertook a concerted campaign to remove American-Indian children from their families in order to facilitate their “assimilation.” Starting in 1879 and continuing well through the 20th century, children as young as five years old were packed off to boarding schools, where they were prohibited from speaking their native languages and, often, from visiting home.

When the formal child welfare system began to integrate following World War II, it continued to identify symptoms of poverty as grounds for removing children, and separated American-Indian and African-American families at startlingly high rates. Starting in 1959, the Indian Adoption Project, part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ (BIA) larger effort to undermine tribal sovereignty and erase American Indian cultures, purposefully placed American Indians in white homes. Surveys in 1969 and 1974 documented that between 25 and 35 percent of all American-Indian children were placed in foster or adoptive homes or institutions. During this period, child welfare scholars also began to document the high rates of removal of African-American children, a legacy that lives on despite attempts to address racial inequities. A 2014 study found that 4.9 percent of white children will experience foster care placement before their 18th birthday, compared to 15.4 percent of Native American children and 11 percent of black children.

This history reveals that Julio and Barayan are not alone, even under less openly racist administrations. Thousands of families are separated every year by public systems, and families of color are much more likely to suffer this fate. In order to ensure that families like Julio and Barayan can remain together, we need to transform these systems. In the criminal justice and immigration systems, this means severely limiting incarceration and deportation, particularly of parents. In the child welfare system, this means increasing the services and supports available to families so that they can thrive together, as well as significantly raising the threshold to remove children from their homes. Children need their families in order to develop and flourish. As a nation, we cannot continue to tear children from their parent’s arms.

Finally, a recent major court decision opened the door to possible freedom for Wedlow and other Missourians who were sentenced to life without parole before they were old enough to vote. It also shined a light on how — despite a Supreme Court ruling that mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles are cruel and unusual — authorities have been slow in granting those prisoners their chance at freedom.

Wedlow, now 46, was sent away at a time when prison sentences — and prison populations — were skyrocketing. In 1992, there were about 12,500 people serving life without parole in the United States. By 2017, there were 53,000, including 2,200 who were convicted as children. These lengthy sentences for violent offenses are a major driver of mass incarceration.

Then a series of groundbreaking Supreme Court rulings rolled back the sentences that can be given to children. In 2012, Miller v Alabama banned mandatory sentencing schemes that give children life without parole. In 2016, Montgomery v Louisiana ruled that people already serving such sentences — such as Wedlow — must be given a “meaningful opportunity to obtain release.”

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“Mandatory life without parole for a juvenile precludes consideration of his chronological age and its hallmark features — among them, immaturity, impetuosity, and failure to appreciate risks and consequences,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the 2012 ruling. “It prevents taking into account the family and home environment that surrounds him — and from which he cannot usually extricate himself — no matter how brutal or dysfunctional.”

To comply with the ruling, the Missouri legislature passed a law allowing Wedlow and about 90 others to petition for parole after 25 years. It instructed the parole board to consider specific factors at hearings for this group, including growth and rehabilitation, age and maturity at the time of the crime, and “the defendant’s background, including his or her family, home, and community environment.”

Wedlow watched the news about the decision on his cell mate’s television. “I was like, ‘Wow. God is good,’” he recalled. “That ruling gave all of us hope.”

But as Missouri’s juvenile lifers began going before the parole board in 2016, they were almost uniformly denied. At Wedlow’s February 2017 hearing, he was asked about the details of his 1989 crime for about 10 minutes over video conference. Afterwards, he received a one-page, boilerplate denial form stating his release “would depreciate the seriousness of the present offense.” His next hearing was set for February 2022 — five years in the future.

In May 2017, four Missourians serving juvenile life without parole who were similarly denied filed a federal class action lawsuit, alleging that this treatment was not what the Supreme Court had in mind when it ruled that those imprisoned as children deserve a chance at release. This October, U.S. District Judge Nanette Laughrey agreed, giving the Missouri Department of Corrections until Dec. 11 to come up with a plan that “should include revised policies, procedures, and customs designed to ensure that all Class members are provided a meaningful and realistic opportunity for release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation.”

“Obviously, we’re really excited,” said Amy Breihan, Director of the St. Louis office of the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center, which represented the incarcerated plaintiffs. “This has been a long battle in Missouri to get some semblance of justice for these folks.”

However, Breihan noted that in Missouri, “It’s far from the end of the case.” She and her clients are waiting to see what remedy the Department of Corrections proposes by the deadline. “My hope is what that means is the board can no longer deny parole to these individuals based solely on the circumstances of the offense,” she said. “That’s something our clients have been saying all along doesn’t make sense in light of the spirit and language of Miller, and it doesn’t make sense to us either.” Earlier this month, Laughrey granted Breihan and her clients permission to create and file their own, competing plan for getting Missouri into compliance with the Supreme Court rulings.

“Compliance with Montgomery has varied significantly around the country,” the Campaign for Fair Sentencing of Youth reported in January. “Whether an individual serving [juvenile life without parole] has a meaningful opportunity for release depends foremost on the state in which he or she was sentenced.” In New York, a similar ongoing federal suit alleges that the parole board routinely denies release to people sentenced as children, in defiance of the Supreme Court rulings.

Wedlow hopes that at his next hearing, the parole board will be required to consider his successful prison record, the classes he has taken, and mitigating factors of his crime, including his age and family life. Wedlow entered foster care when he was seven, after a child care worker responding to a domestic violence report found food-bare cabinets filled with cockroaches, urine-soaked mattresses, and piles of reeking dirty clothes. At 16, after he refused to live with his mother at a family friend’s house, a juvenile court determined that his behavior was “injurious to his welfare” and he was sent to juvenile detention school, despite not being charged with any crime.

People whose early life looks like Wedlow’s are disproportionately likely to wind up incarcerated. Last March, the Brookings Institution linked incarceration records and IRS records, finding that boys born into households earning in the bottom 10 percent of income earners are 20 times more likely to be in prison in their early 30s than boys born into the top 10 percent. And these economic disparities have knock-on effects: According to an Equal Justice Initiative report from before the Supreme Court rulings, “kids who cannot afford competent counsel face a dramatically escalated risk of being sentenced to die in prison.”

If released, Wedlow plans to live in a halfway house and work for a family friend until he can save enough money to move into a one-bedroom apartment in a low-crime area outside Kansas City. He also wants to take night classes to get a trade job. And he looks forward to meeting his four nieces and nephews in person for the first time. His sister — who was just six when he went away — has never been able to bring them, since he is allowed just three visitors at a time.

Wedlow believes that if the parole board considers his background and circumstances, they will let him go: “Once they look at that and see that I was never in juvenile for no crime, that I was physically and verbally neglected and abused as a child, and in and out of foster care — not for juvenile delinquency but for my own safety and welfare — they’ve got to give me a date.”

I am 54 years old, but this is a new feeling. Going to the laundromat and the grocery store in the same week, living without roommates, and sorting through this pile of junk mail all feel like proof that I’m a whole person now. It’s all evidence that I might finally be allowed to move on from mistakes I made last century.

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I have a criminal record. I was convicted of two nonviolent misdemeanors decades ago, and they have haunted me, and my daughter, ever since. For her entire life, I struggled to make ends meet. That’s not the kind of thing you can explain to a child: she hated skipping school field trips and wearing homemade Halloween costumes. And even though I tried to explain, again and again, why I had to leave during dinner to make the late shift at the bar, I could never find the right words to make her understand why things had to be this hard for us. I didn’t know the answer myself.

I’ve worked jobs wherever I could — minimum wage at the supermarket, part-time at a clothing store, cleaning gigs that only paid under the table. At the same time, I went back to school and got a degree that taught me how to do the clerical work that keeps a doctor’s office running. I always wanted to help people, and even though I graduated on the honor roll, I couldn’t find a person who’d give me the chance. When they looked at me, all they saw was my record.

So I tried to get that record cleared. I went to expungement clinics, and I applied for a pardon. Nothing worked. I didn’t know what to do. All I could do was what I had been doing for years already: piecing together part-time jobs, raising a child on an income meant for a teenager, and searching for a way to change our lives.

Eventually, I found a lawyer. She taught me my rights, and gave me the confidence I needed to apply for jobs and insist that I be given a fair chance. After thirty years of struggling, my life has finally started to get better. Still, this is only a partial solution — it depends on me sticking up for myself.

New legislation in my home state of Pennsylvania, passed by the Republican-controlled legislature and signed into law by the Democratic Governor Tom Wolf, would help people like me rebuild our lives. The Clean Slate law automatically seals certain misdemeanor convictions after the individual is crime-free for 10 years. No jumping through hoops, no trying to work the system, no hoping you get lucky enough to find a good lawyer. It would have reset my life more than a decade ago.

In the past year that I have learned to advocate for myself, I’ve finally been able to  put my education to work. I work as a home health aide, cleaning and feeding folks who need support, and  caring for them with a gentle touch.

I’m the first to take an extra shift at work, and because I do, I can afford to help my daughter for the first time in her life. I can’t buy her a house, but I can help pay her rent when she needs it. We don’t have to stay on the couch at a friend’s place, or making a temporary home in a basement. I get to be a mother I always wanted to be, and a Nanna to my grandkids.

This is the only version of me that they know. When I open the door to their home, they shout  “Nanna, do you have something for me?”

For the first time in my life, I get to say “yes.” I always do. Isn’t that what Nannas are for?

Editor’s Note: The Center for American Progress, where TalkPoverty is housed, is a partner in the Clean Slate campaign. Find out more at CleanSlateCampaign.org.

As a child, I couldn’t wait to turn 18 so I could register to vote and go inside the voting booth. And that’s just what I did. It made me feel like an adult, like an American citizen doing my civic duty. I voted in every election that I could.

But because I was convicted of a felony, I can no longer participate in our democracy. Florida is one of three states – along with Kentucky and Iowa – in which everyone convicted of a felony is permanently barred from voting. Amendment 4, which is on the ballot this Election Day, would restore voting rights to some 1.5 million people just like me.

I grew up in a broken home filled with all types of abuse and despair. I had no mentors, only the golden rule to keep our family business inside the home. I went from a little girl filled with hope who got good grades to a young adult who no longer cared.

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I became a product of my environment, and ended up being the getaway driver in a robbery gone wrong.

Afterward, I could only think of the victim and his family and the pain they were going through. In those moments, I asked: If it was me and my family, what would I want? I would want the people involved to pay for what they did, I decided.

So I had my attorney take me to the Orange County jail and surrendered to the unknown. I did the right thing when it mattered the most, even when it was scary and the outcome uncertain.

The judge sentenced me to 15 years. I spent a third of my life paying my debt to society for my crime.

I fortunately survived. When I was given my end of sentence paperwork, I was presented with a form that I was told to sign. It advised me that I couldn’t vote anymore.

At first, I refused, because the judge had not sentenced me to the removal of my civil rights. But when I was told that I would be kept for the additional two years that were cut off my sentence due to good behavior if I didn’t sign the form, I quickly put my name on it. I wouldn’t understand the weight of that paper until after my release.

I came home with a plan to be the best person that I could. But I couldn’t get a job because of identifiers of my conviction on applications. I couldn’t go back to the college I attended pre-incarceration as an in-state student, because I didn’t have an I.D. that was a year old. My prison identification wasn’t acceptable, according to the board of governors.

When I finally thought I had broken through the invisible ceiling by obtaining my real estate license and selling a home to a cash buyer three months later, the significance of that the paper I signed in prison became clear. I took my commissioned earnings to get an apartment, but was refused; in many places, those with a felony conviction are not protected against this form of discrimination. As a professional in a business where it is our goal to make sales for profit, that was just mind-blowing.

I understood then that these things were allowed to happen to those of us with felony convictions because we could not vote. We had no ability to challenge policies designed to lock us out, and lock us back up again.

This is why the passage of Amendment 4 is so important, not just to those of us in Florida who would be affected, but to those in other states who have been denied their right to vote. It sends a message that we are American citizens, and that even though we made some mistakes along the way, we are forgiven and afforded a clean slate to become someone who contributes to society.

For my birthday this year, I am asking for the most important gift anyone can give me, and that’s to go out and vote yes on Amendment 4.

Google credited an odd arrangement of organizations for helping them with the decision, including the Essie Justice Group, a collective of women seeking to end mass incarceration, and Koch Industries, a multinational conglomerate run by the richest oil tycoons in the country.

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Facebook announced later that day that it would also ban bail bond ads, but that the details were “still being worked out.”

Aside from predictable backlash from bail bond providers, the joint decision has been relatively uncontroversial. The bail bond industry is, truthfully, about as scummy as it gets. Bail bondsmen require clients who can’t afford bail to pay a non-refundable portion of the bail they owe (usually about 10 percent), and even after they meet all their court appearances and the money is returned, the clients get nothing back—and they’re often charged loan fees that accrue after their case is resolved, pushing them further into debt. The practice is so despised that the United States and the Philippines are the only two countries in the world that even allow for-profit bail businesses to exist.

It’s not yet clear how effective blocking these ads will be. However, Google and Facebook’s decision is significant not for the effect it’ll have, but for what it represents: The movement to end cash bail has built enough momentum to get two of the largest companies in the world on its side. Behind the tech giants’ decision is an army of grassroots groups leading local movements to end bail—and their weird, cutting-edge, creative methods of gaining popular support.

*           *           *

One of the most persistent myths about America’s justice system is that defendants are innocent until proven guilty. In practice, the opposite is true: Defendants are assumed guilty, jailed, and only released before trial if they can afford to pay their bail.

Around 70 percent of the more than 700,000 prisoners in America’s jails have not been convicted of a crime. Most are in jail because they can’t afford to pay for their freedom, and they weren’t lucky enough to be released on “recognizance,” or without bail. In New York, only 1 in 10 defendants can afford to pay bail at arraignment. The rest are forced to await their trial behind bars, which can sometimes last years.

Even just one or two days in jail can have life-altering consequences. Ezra Ritchin, director of operations at The Bail Project and the former director of the Bronx Freedom Fund, an organization that pays bail for New Yorkers who can’t afford it, says, “A lot of the things you see in our justice system happen in those first few days.” If people don’t show up for work the next day, they could lose their job. If they’re homeless and don’t sign in for a shelter, they could lose their housing—and if just one family member doesn’t sign in because they’re in jail, their whole family could be living on the street. The first few days are also when people are most likely to die in jail, including by suicide, and it’s when inmates are most likely to be the victim of physical and sexual abuse.

Prosecutors use the threat of jail to force people into accepting plea deals, even if they’re innocent. More than 90 percent of New Yorkers who can’t afford bail will end up pleading guilty, even if they didn’t commit a crime, simply because they want to go home.

“You’re sitting in jail, and you’re told that if you maintain your innocence, then you have to stay in jail and wait it out,” explains Ritchin. “But if you plead guilty, you get to go home to your family and your community.”

Like all instruments of mass incarceration, bail takes the heaviest toll on black and brown communities. Black people are already much more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts for the same crime—up to 15 times more likely for certain low-level offenses like marijuana possession. They’re also less likely to be able to afford to pay for their freedom. The median bail for felony convictions is around $10,000, which is more than what most black women who can’t pay their bail made in the entire year before they were incarcerated. But even smaller bonds for misdemeanors are out of reach for most defendants: A 2012 report found that even when bail was set below $500, a majority of New York City defendants—almost 90 percent of whom are black or Hispanic—couldn’t afford it.

The Bronx Freedom Fund started out of the Bronx Defender’s Office in 2007, where public defenders witnessed firsthand the devastating effects of a system that incarcerates people for not having enough money. The Freedom Fund pays bail for people accused of misdemeanors so they can stay in their communities while they stand trial. In 2017, the fund bailed out almost 1,000 people, and more than 50 percent of them had their cases dismissed entirely.

Now, a growing number of people are recognizing the power of bail funds to directly fight against systemic racism. Ritchin says that a large part of the Freedom Fund’s donations come from people who “read some articles, see the website, and are looking to make a direct contribution to the fight against mass incarceration.”

“One really beautiful thing about a bail fund,” says Ritchin, “is that you get to say, ‘I’m interested in pushing back against mass incarceration, and now there’s one less person who’s sitting in jail.’” And bail fund money is revolving, so once someone meets all their court dates—as 96 percent of the Freedom Fund’s clients do—the money is returned and can be used to bail out someone else.

*           *           *

Aside from Koch Industries and the Essie Justice Group, Google also credited another organization for influencing its decision to block bail bond ads: Color of Change. Color of Change is the country’s largest online racial justice organization, and a major partner of National Bail Out, a collective of black organizers working to end pretrial detention and mass incarceration. Last year, Color of Change worked with National Bail Out to raise money for Black Mama’s Bail Out Day, a campaign to bail out incarcerated mothers on Mother’s Day.

“Our ultimate goal is to end money bail,” said Clarice McCants, Color of Change’s criminal justice campaign director.

Last year, National Bail Out bailed out more than 120 mothers for Mother’s Day. This year, they bailed out mothers in 16 cities, saying “We will bail out mama’s in all of our varieties. Queer, trans, young, elder, and immigrant.”

National Bail Out has paid more than $600,000 in bail to a network of dozens of community bail funds that includes the Bronx Freedom Fund. As this network has grown in recent years, so, too has its methods of collecting donations. One of National Bail Out’s largest sources of funding is Appolition, an app that allows people to donate spare change from credit card purchases to help end mass incarceration. In its first five months, Appolition raised $130,000.

Another funding source that has sprung out of this movement is Bail Bloc, an app that runs in the background of your computer, mines cryptocurrency, sells it, and donates the funds to Bronx Freedom Fund.

“Bail is a form of currency mining,” explains Maya Binyam, editor at The New Inquiry and one of Bail Bloc’s co-leaders. She says that cryptocurrency mining bears a “rhetorical relation” to bail. “The state incarcerates people before they’ve been convicted of anything and then forces them to pay for their own release. Bail Bloc allows you to offer your computer as the target for that mining in their stead.”

The app uses about as much energy as running a YouTube video. If you have it open during business hours from Monday to Friday, it’ll up your electricity bill a few dollars per month, and generate roughly an equivalent amount of the cryptocurrency Monero—essentially shifting the burden of the donation from you to whoever pays for the electricity that you’re using.

On Christmas day, after three months of mining from roughly 1,000 daily users, Bail Bloc donated $3,333.77 to the Freedom Fund.

“We want this technology to be available to people who don’t have $100 to donate to a bail fund, but nevertheless use electricity at the institutions they move through—schools or gentrifying coffee shops,” explains Binyam. This is one of her favorite parts of the project. “I worked at a day job where I was one of the only people of color, and there were a bunch of racist people in the office. And I just downloaded it on a bunch of work computers, and it felt kind of like a good ‘fuck you.’”

The most common critique they’ve heard is that there are more efficient ways to donate toward ending mass incarceration than mining Monero—which Binyam sees as positive.  “Instead of saying, ‘Why are we donating money toward bail?’ people are saying, ‘There’s way more efficient ways to donate money toward bail,’” she says. “Which is kind of amazing.”

Binyam says that Bail Bloc was designed to court public opinion and lift up the work of activists leading the fight against cash bail, like National Bail Out and the Bronx Freedom Fund. Grayson Earl, one of the creators of Bail Bloc, says he was also inspired by Black Mama’s Bail Out—a common refrain in these types of movements. One campaign will inspire another, which inspires would-be organizers to start their own community group, then artists and techno-utopians add their own ironic twist, and pretty soon the movement has become so massive and culturally relevant that Google, Facebook, and Koch Industries are trying to get a piece of it.

“The system is unjust enough that it requires organizations to be attacking it from every angle,” says Ritchin. There may be plenty of groups that have joined the fight against mass incarceration, he says, “but there’s even more groups jailing people.”

That’s why a bipartisan coalition in Pennsylvania has worked for more than two years to pass first-in-the-nation “clean slate” legislation that would allow minor nonviolent records to be automatically sealed once an individual remains crime-free for a set period of time. A bill was unanimously approved in the Pennsylvania Senate, 50-0, earlier this year, and it is expected to clear the House soon. Gov. Tom Wolf (D) has said he will sign the legislation into law. Even the Philadelphia Eagles are vocally supporting the bill.

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And now there is movement to bring clean slate to the halls of Congress. At the recent #UnlockingOpportunity conference in Washington, I spoke with Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D)—Delaware’s first woman and first person of color elected to Congress—about her run for office and the prospect of clean legislation at the federal level.

Rebecca Vallas: I’d love to hear from you about your background and why you’ve decided to take on criminal justice reform and re-entry.

Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester: First, I never ran for office in my life. But in 2014, my husband ruptured his Achilles tendon on a business trip and blood clots went to his heart and lungs and he passed away. It changed everything for me.

I’m typically a very joyful person. Every job I’ve ever had I brought joy to it—from working as a summer youth employment coordinator, to working in the office of then-Congressman Tom Carper as an intern, to being a case worker and working on Social Security Disability and housing and other issues, to being Delaware’s secretary of labor. But when Charles passed, it made me question why am I here. What’s my purpose? And that election year I saw so many people who looked either sad or mad, who had a feeling of loss. Whether they lost their job or home during the housing crisis, or a child to gun violence, it just felt heavy. And the people who were running for office … I was like, “I’m already sad, and y’all are bringing me down.”

So, I decided to run. And I was debating Ivy League lawyers. People would comment on blogs that I looked like a deer in the headlights—because I was a deer in the headlights, I was scared to death. But the more stories I heard from people in my state, the more compelled I felt. And I remember one day at a campaign event in the park a guy was talking about the fact that he had gotten out of prison, and no matter how hard he tried he could not find a job. It reminded me of my own family history—my uncles and cousins in Philadelphia who went in and out of the prison system. And so this whole concept of clean slate rang true because your one or two encounters with the law should not stop you from supporting yourself or your family. This issue touches people’s ability to buy a home, to rent an apartment, to just live.

When I heard about Pennsylvania’s legislation, it was a no-brainer for me that this is an issue that cuts across parties. And so we can announce here that I will be introducing federal clean slate legislation.

RV: Thank you. And I’d love to hear from you how a federal clean slate law could remove barriers not just for people with records but for their children and for their families.

LBR: We all know the impact that a parent going through a criminal justice system has on families. An article in The Atlantic magazine is a perfect example. It’s about a woman who was 57 years old, who was a grandmother. This charge had been following her for 38 years and stopping her from getting a job. But this legislation is saying it shouldn’t be hard for you to clean your record when you’ve served your time, some time has gone by, and it was a nonviolent offense. Anything that gets rid of the barriers for people to live, go to school, have a job, rent or own a home, that’s the goal of this legislation is to clean the slate so that you can live your life.

RV: What are the chances of seeing something actually move through Congress?

LBR: We can at least try to find common ground. I already have in mind a [Congressperson] who’s got a criminal justice background, who will probably seem way to the other political extreme of me, but who can also provide credibility. I believe that we can get this done—and it doesn’t even cost money. The fact that it could possibly save money and help the economy and help people’s lives I think makes it a win-win-win.

I also want to leave everyone with a message of encouragement. That no matter what you see swirling around you, stay focused. I was a dancer as a kid, and we’d do pirouettes. And people would say, “How can you spin and not fall?” It’s because you would focus on one spot, even though everything is spinning around you. We’re gonna make it through all of this swirl.

This interview also aired on Off-Kilter as part of a complete episode on October 27. It was edited for length and clarity.

But the media missed a key piece of context in its outcry: Programs like this aren’t actually unusual. The United States has a long history of forcibly sterilizing people, and it never really stopped.

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Starting in 1907, state governments sanctioned sterilization as a form of eugenics, to prevent anyone with undesirable traits—disabilities, poverty, a criminal record, specific racial backgrounds—from procreating. This type of legislation justified the sterilization of approximately 60,000 Americans until the laws were phased out in the late 1970s. But that doesn’t mean the practice actually ended: In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting found that at least 148 female inmates in California received tubal ligations without their consent between 2006 and 2010. Just one year later, the Associated Press reported on at least four instances of prosecutors in Nashville including birth control requirements in plea deals.

Other recent examples of court-required sterilization throughout the country include a 21-year-old West Virginia mother who had her tubes tied as part of her probation for marijuana possession (2009), and a man in Virginia who traded a vasectomy for a lighter child endangerment sentence (2014). “We’re starting to reach a point where the courts are responsible for anyone,” explained one prosecutor involved in a Florida plea deal. “It’s one final step to have to supervise teenagers in sexual relationships they aren’t ready to handle.”

The prosecutors in each of the recent cases lean on a classic conservative talking point to justify this paternalism: the need for “personal responsibility.” Judge Sam Benningfield, who is behind the recent sterilization program in Tennessee, used those exact words in his justification: “I hope to encourage them to take personal responsibility … This gives them a chance to get on their feet and make something of themselves.”

It is strange to think that these prosecutors and judges do not connect “responsibility” to “autonomy,” and stranger still that they see no connection between the personal and the systemic. At the core of each of these stories is an individual whose body was violated. But these plea deals tap into a historical pattern of abuse against people of color, LGBTQ people, people with physical and mental illness, and those living in poverty. Instead of acknowledging the systemic failure and offering basic supports to the communities most likely to bear the brunt of these policies, they are punished in one of the most dehumanizing ways imaginable.

This disconnect is threaded through the conservative platform on reproductive justice. Campaign promises to defund Planned Parenthood, an organization providing affordable family planning services, have become canon for the GOP. Eighty-five percent of Planned Parenthood patients have an income at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty level. Defunding these clinics would have a profound and disparate impact on those living in poverty, communities of color, rural communities, and the LGBTQ community. Many of these patients often do not have access to alternative providers for reproductive health care—including cancer screenings like pap smears and breast exams, sexual health education, sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment, and contraception. These clinics empower patients to make their own reproductive decisions, but conservatives are on a crusade to take away their agency while simultaneously spouting rhetoric about individual responsibility. The contradiction appears to escape their notice.

Marginalized communities do not suffer from a lack of personal responsibility. They suffer from a lack of resources and support. Instead of dismantling organizations that serve these communities and leaving it to the criminal justice system to serve as the arbiter of family planning, let’s support the institutions and policies that empower and build capacity for self-determination.

The Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results (NEAR) Act of 2016, sponsored by Democratic Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, represents a dramatic and desperately needed shift in how the nation’s capital will approach violent crime. In 2015, D.C. led the country in two categories: murders and police presence. With 119 homicides, it had a higher murder rate than every state in the country; and with six officers for every 1,000 citizens, it was the most heavily policed district in America.

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In his office on Pennsylvania Ave, Councilmember McDuffie sports a pink polo beneath a gray tweed jacket. He speaks in perfect prose, with none of the ums and ahs and broken sentences that plague most of us. He believes in the NEAR Act because it addresses the “root causes” of violence.

“You cannot arrest your way out of this problem,” he says.

McDuffie was raised in D.C. in the 1980’s and 90’s, when it was known as the murder capital of the United States. He grew up around the open drug markets; he had friends who were killed in their neighborhoods.

“I’ve seen a person shot, bleeding out in my arms. I’ve seen these things firsthand,” he says. “That is the context I brought to this work.”

McDuffie has also seen the perils of overpolicing. He’s watched police officers “converge on communities of color, stopping people in neighborhoods like mine without probable cause.”

The NEAR Act draws from model programs in Chicago and Richmond by establishing an Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (ONSE) in D.C. The ONSE will hire people from within the community—“people who have credibility in these neighborhoods,” McDuffie says. They will identify community members who are at risk of committing violence or becoming a victim of violence, and then offer them trauma-informed therapy, life planning, and mentorship. The bill also provides funds to train police officers on “cultural competency” and how to recognize bias, and it calls for increased data collection on police stops and the use of force.

While he was drafting the bill, McDuffie consulted with local activists who had long called for criminal justice and police reform in the district—including Eugene Puryear, an author and organizer who helped found the Stop Police Terror Project.

Puryear’s energy is contagious; he peppers his caffeinated speech with phrases like “punctuated equilibrium” and “tectonic shifts.” He lauded McDuffie for doing a “deep dive on the issue,” but he also wants to credit the organizers who he thinks helped create the political space for the NEAR Act. He believes that the national Movement for Black Lives—and its local manifestations, such as the Stop Police Terror Project—convinced the council members to care about overpolicing and mass incarceration because their constituents were fired up about these issues.

During the early phases of the Stop Police Terror Project, the group interrupted a speech by Mayor Muriel Bowser, who was pushing a crime bill that would have boosted police presence in the city. The group faced harsh criticism for the action—Puryear says that “everyone said we were band of radicals interrupting stuff with no positive program and no support in the community.”

But when the city council held a public hearing two months later to compare Bowser’s bill to the NEAR Act, nearly everyone who testified did so in favor of the latter. With overwhelming support from the community, the council passed the NEAR Act unanimously in March 2016. But neither the council nor the mayor fully funded the act in the 2017 budget, essentially putting it in limbo.

Over the next several months, the Movement for Black Lives kept growing. Thousands of protestors demonstrated in 88 cities across the country in the weeks after Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were killed by police officers. When Puryear and the Stop Police Terror Project started knocking on doors to gather signatures to fully fund the NEAR Act, they saw how badly residents wanted action.

“Once you would say you had any connection to Black Lives Matter, doors were swinging wide open,” Puryear said. He knocked on at least 500 doors, and he says that “every person who came to the door signed our petition, bar none.”

The council and the mayor agreed to fully fund the NEAR Act in the 2018 budget, which will go into effect on October 1. And the NEAR Act isn’t alone: Puryear says it’s part of a “cascading series” of local initiatives that came around in this “Black Lives Matter moment.” This includes a body-worn camera program for D.C. police officers and a juvenile justice bill, also sponsored by Councilmember McDuffie, that bans solitary confinement and court shackling for underage defendants.

Puryear believes that social change in the United States comes in spurts—long periods of very little change followed by rapid periods of huge changes. He hopes that we’re in one of those periods now, but he recognizes that progress isn’t inevitable. “What we do really matters,” he says. “The opportunities that are presented can just as easily be lost.” He thinks the next major battle surrounding the NEAR Act is its implementation: “There’s a lot of different ways this can be rolled out within the letter of the law.”

McDuffie agrees, and he says he’s working to make sure the bill gets implemented with the spirit and intent of how it was drafted.

The two models that the NEAR Act is based on have shown promise: Richmond has seen a 76 percent drop in homicides, and the Cure Violence model has curbed violence in pilot programs around the world. It remains to be seen whether the nation’s capital will have similar success—whether the old way of approaching violent crime, with militarized policing and mass incarceration, is finally on its way out.

Nearly a decade later, fast food workers and the Fight for $15 are a central focus of the mainstream labor movement. And, given IWW’s ability to unionize workers who once seemed out of reach, many labor organizers now look to them as an incubator of new organizing strategies.

Now IWW faces one of the biggest challenges in its history: convincing the broader labor movement to embrace the approximately 400,000 Americans employed as prison labor across the U.S.

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This spring, the IWW and allied community groups organized prison labor strikes of thousands of incarcerated workers in Alabama, Wisconsin, Texas, Mississippi, and Ohio—all demanding the right to form a union. The IWW Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee has called for a nationwide prison strike on September 9th to mark the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising and claims it has the support of thousands of prisoners throughout the U.S.

“It could really shake things up,” IWW organizer Jimi Del Duca told me. “A lot of working class people are afraid to organize because they have a few crumbs to lose. [Many] prisoners have nothing to lose and that gives them courage. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain.”

However, the barriers to organizing prisoners are high. Communication between prisons is difficult, as most prisoners are not allowed access to email. Even within prisons, inmates are limited in their ability to meet face-to-face.  While they are allowed to assemble routinely for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or religious activities, the 1977 Supreme Court case Jones v. North Carolina Labor Prisoners’ Union denied them their first amendment right to assemble if a warden feels a gathering is a threat to prison security. As a result, wardens block most prisoners’ union meetings.

However, Elon University Labor Law Professor Eric Fink says that prisoners may have another option. The right of prisoners to form a union has never been challenged in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union certification case, and Fink believes that prisoners could use the NLRB process to push for the right to meet regularly and form collective bargaining units. He argues that prison workers—employed by private contractors in 37 states—should have the same right to form a union as other workers employed by those contractors. According to Fink, if the IWW were to bring a case before the NLRB, then the Board could declare that prisoners are employees who are eligible to join a union.

“I think the Board is capable of saying there are issues that [incarcerated people] have the right to bargain for—such as hours and wages—as any other worker would have the right to do,” said Fink.

As for prison workers who are employed directly by the state, Fink feels they could organize more easily. Under federal labor law, each individual state has a Public Employee Relations Board (PERB) which governs how labor law is applied in the jurisdiction. Often, the leadership of the PERB is heavily influenced by local labor leadership. So, if a public sector union such as AFSCME were to endorse the right of prisoners to form unions, state-level PERBs might be inclined to extend that right.

However, there is a catch: many public sector unions also represent guards, who may be lukewarm to the idea of prisoners forming unions.

“The problem is that insofar as a number of public sector unions have prison guards as members—and sometimes in large numbers—it has an impact on the ability to have that discussion,” said Bill Fletcher, the former education director of the AFL-CIO.

Heather Ann Thompson, Professor of History in the African American Studies at the University of Michigan, believes that guards should see prisoners’ unions as a win for them, too.

“These are workplaces that are deeply unsafe and barbaric,” said Thompson. She believes that giving workers a collective voice may reduce gang violence, because it will give prisoners a structure through which they can advocate for themselves. Unions would also provide guards and prisoners with the means to push together for a safer prison environment.

Thompson also argues that it is in organized labor’s best interest to help prison workers. Some Republican governors—such as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker—have used prison labor to replace unionized public employees.

“Prisoners have no power to resist being employed as scab labor,” said Thompson. “Rather than resent the prisoners, the idea would be to support prison labor workers’ right to resist work.”

It remains unclear if the mainstream labor movement will support the prison labor strike movement. Both AFSCME and the AFL-CIO declined to be interviewed, but they have indicated that they view mass incarceration as an employment issue. In April, while touring an apprenticeship program at a prison in Washington State, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said, “Mass incarceration has become a big business whose product is low wages and blighted lives, and the time has come for us to do something about it.”

IWW organizer Del Deluca is hopeful that the broader labor movement will support this effort. With more than two million people in prison, he sees potential in this new path of organizing.

“We could change the direction of history,” he said. “We could change the way our world works.”

In some ways, the state’s indigent defense emergency is unique and extreme. Louisiana has never had a robust public defender system—in fact, it is the only state that attempts to fund this core government function largely through traffic tickets. And, as the state struggles to recover from Bobby Jindal’s disastrous tenure as governor, this already rickety framework is now collapsing. But difficult conditions for public defenders are neither new nor limited to Louisiana. Throughout the United States, public defenders have used the word “crisis” for decades as shorthand for the combination of volatile funding, understaffing, and excessive per-lawyer caseloads that has persistently plagued many defender offices.

In my recent article in the Columbia Law Review, “What Gideon Did,” I examined the grassroots effects of Gideon v. Wainwright, the landmark 1963 Supreme Court decision that established a constitutional right to state-provided counsel in criminal cases. For a number of structural reasons, state-level funding for Gideon’s implementation has proven unpredictable in the best of times, and susceptible to collapse in the worst of times, as defendants in Louisiana can attest. Given this history, Congress should step in to secure the Gideon guarantee with federal funding, so that defenders like Natasha George—and the poor people they serve—are not so vulnerable to the politics of state budgets.

A Chronic Crisis

Almost as soon as Gideon was decided, lawyers began to describe their working conditions as a “crisis.” While a few states, like California, had longstanding public defender offices established decades before Gideon, lawyers in most states set out to establish and expand defender offices. However, the available funding never kept pace with the growing demand. These funding realities contrasted with defenders’ interpretation that Gideon required them to serve as many clients as possible—a noble aim, but one that quickly produced dissatisfaction in lawyers and clients alike, as defenders’ caseloads spiraled upwards. I found, for instance, that in Massachusetts, the state public defender agency went from handling about 18,000 cases a year in 1968 to about 42,000 cases a year in 1972—a figure that would only continue to climb thereafter.

And, although state budgets for indigent defense rose in the 1970s, the number of cases that public defenders were asked to handle rose faster. As legal scholar William Stuntz observed, “Notwithstanding nominal budget increases, spending on indigent defendants in constant dollars per case appears to have declined significantly between the late 1970s and the early 1990s.” In 1983, the American Bar Association (ABA) lamented a nationwide “crisis in indigent defense funding.” In 1994, the ABA published a follow-up report whose title remains apt today: The Indigent Defense Crisis Is Chronic.

The persistence of crisis conditions in indigent defense suggests that the causes are deeply entrenched, and not a temporary reflection of shifting political views or economic vicissitudes. One long-term historical factor helping to explain America’s weak commitment to indigent defense is the legal profession’s own prestige hierarchy, which has long valorized advising corporations more than helping ordinary people. A second factor undermining indigent defense is simply the structure of American federalism. The New Orleans judge who recently ordered the release of defendants awaiting counsel wrote, by way of explanation, that “constitutional rights are not contingent on budget demands.” But in practice, constitutional rights are often hamstrung by state-level budgets.

Attitudes within the Legal Profession

For much of the twentieth century, elite lawyers in many parts of the United States did not consider defending poor people to constitute a respectable professional niche—it was neither lucrative nor, in elite jurists’ view, particularly intellectually challenging. Rather, indigent defense was often described as a suitable training exercise for young lawyers—a way to gain courtroom experience and maybe do some good for the community before they moved on to their “real” careers. In order to quantify this phenomenon, I looked through Harvard Law School alumni directories for the class of 1958. Among those who had volunteered as law students with Boston’s local public defender equivalent, none were working as public defenders ten years later, and only one was working in government service. There were geographic exceptions to this pattern, but in the many regions that had no strong tradition of career public defenders when Gideon was decided, Gideon’s implementation had to start from scratch.

Fortunately, lawyers’ own attitudes about indigent defense have changed in recent decades. Over time, lawyers have reimagined indigent defense as a respected practice specialty—not just training for a future career, but a career in its own right. Jane Kelly, the Iowa federal judge whom Obama recently floated as a possible Supreme Court nominee, embodies this shift. Kelly spent many years working as a public defender in the federal system. After her name appeared on Obama’s rumored short-list, conservative media outlets subjected Kelly to despicable personal attacks, maligning her for representing “infamous criminals.” Nevertheless, Kelly’s very presence on court-watchers’ radar suggests that most of the American legal community now considers public defense a respectable background for a judicial nominee. To be sure, indigent defense is not the typical legal vocation, but law schools do provide support for students interested in this work, and hiring for some defender offices is extremely competitive. In particular, the organization Gideon’s Promise has an excellent record of partnering with law schools to place graduates in public defender offices in the Deep South, where the need is especially acute.

Federalism and Funding

Funding, however, remains a constant headache for defender offices around the country, which symptomizes a larger issue—the mismatch between the requirements of American constitutional law and the federalist structure of American government. It is easy, and often quite justifiable, to blame state legislators for stingy appropriations for public defenders. But state legislators work within a system that permits them to get away with underfunding indigent defense. The Supreme Court has never specified how exactly Gideon is supposed to be implemented. And although states can be punished after the fact if they fail to provide individual defendants with effective counsel, in the form of reversed convictions or habeas relief (although in practice even those remedies are hard to win), the Court has never translated Gideon into forward-looking standards for how states are supposed to structure and fund their indigent defense systems.

It is not surprising that the Court has failed to set clearer standards. The right to counsel is unique in American law—it’s one of the few federal rights to positive government assistance, as opposed to a negative right against government interference—and there is no clear blueprint for how such a right is supposed to be judicially enforced. Moreover, the justices are typically reluctant to micromanage state criminal justice systems. Nevertheless, the result is that public defenders have been left in the wake of Gideon to cobble together funding from an ever-fluctuating mix of sources.

Possible Solutions?

In New Orleans, the ACLU has filed a civil rights lawsuit challenging the public defender shortage as a systematic violation of defendants’ rights to counsel, due process, and equal protection. This litigation builds on efforts nationwide, since the 1980s, to use class-action litigation to spur indigent defense reform. For example, two years ago, Governor Andrew Cuomo reached a settlement agreement with plaintiffs challenging New York’s indigent defense system. On the whole, however, such lawsuits have met with mixed success.

As a more promising nationwide solution, Congress could establish a dedicated source of federal funding for local and state public defender offices. In 1979, Senator Ted Kennedy introduced legislation, based on an ABA proposal, to establish a permanent Center for Defense Services to administer federal grants and enforce minimum quality standards for indigent defense. At the time, the bill made no progress, but given the current political momentum for criminal justice reform, Congress should revive the idea. John Pfaff, a law professor at Fordham University who studies criminal justice from an economic perspective, recently estimated that a congressional appropriation of just $4 billion—a minuscule sliver of federal discretionary spending—would have the effect of instantly tripling indigent defense resources nationwide.

An infusion of federal funds into local defender offices could have ripple effects beyond alleviating emergencies in states like Louisiana. Every issue on criminal justice activists’ agenda—from excessive bail to draconian sentencing—is one where public defenders could make headway through their advocacy in individual cases, if they had the necessary resources. But more fundamentally, the rights of poor people, wherever they happen to live, should not be abandoned to the whims of state legislators. All Americans should be able to depend on federal support for what is, after all, a federal constitutional guarantee.

One of my clients, Mr. Smith, is trying to expunge his conviction for petty theft. He owes over $2,000 in restitution, probation costs, and court fees. He cannot pay this hefty sum because he is unemployed—in part because of his criminal history. In reviewing his expungement petition, the judge notes the outstanding restitution and costs, and denies the petition. Mr. Smith has no way out of the debt trap—with his criminal conviction, he won’t be able to secure the job he needs to make sufficient income to pay off his debts.

Criminal justice debts are a growing national trend, but the problem is especially acute in Los Angeles. Due to a strained economy, Los Angeles courts are relying on court fees to revitalize their coffers. These fees go towards state funds for court construction and court operations, as well as locally, to salaries, benefits, and public agency retirement contributions for judges. In the last five years, Los Angeles trial courts collected over $1 billion in late fees (called “civil assessment fees”) charged to defendants when they did not pay their traffic or criminal court debt on time.

Though the fees are small in isolation, the accumulated criminal justice debt can total hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a single person, an overwhelming amount for most people reentering society, 90 percent of whom are poor and a disproportionate percentage of whom are people of color.

These debts are part and parcel of a system that creates permanent debtors out of people with conviction histories. In California, various clean slate remedies allow for expungement of criminal records, providing individuals a better chance to secure jobs, housing, and benefits. However, many financially disadvantaged people are unable to take advantage of these remedies because full payment of fines and fees is a prerequisite. This debt therefore has a damaging effect on housing and employment prospects. Employers and private landlords routinely conduct background checks, which reveal criminal records that cannot be expunged due to financial obstacles. On top of that, wage and tax garnishments are increasingly used to collect criminal debt, which can eat away at one’s income from earnings. As such, criminal justice debt acts as a bar to gainful employment, increases the risk of recidivism, and creates barriers to reentry long after court-ordered sentences are completed.

One such barrier is a suspended driver’s license. In California, a driver’s license can be suspended when a traffic ticket goes unpaid. While some maintain that driving is a privilege, for many people driving is a lifeline. Recently incarcerated people are especially vulnerable to the consequences of driver’s license suspensions because of their persistent financial hardship. They often need to drive to satisfy their parole or post-release supervision conditions. Many reentering parents are also required to drive to visitations and parental classes in order to regain custody of their children post-incarceration. Still, others who have conviction histories find jobs like truck driving, courier services, and home care workers, easier to obtain. These jobs all require a valid driver’s license.

What’s worse, re-incarceration is a serious threat. A recent report by prominent civil rights and legal services groups in California concluded that Blacks and Latinos were systematically stopped, fined, and arrested for driving with a suspended license. This misdemeanor offense carries with it a criminal conviction, a basis for violation of probation or parole, years of probation, and more fines and fees.

What is particularly insidious is that individuals who are unable to pay their debts are given an “option” to convert their fees to jail time or to perform “community service” for a fee. Their labor is then extracted at no cost to the state, but at tremendous cost to the person’s time and job opportunity. Unsurprisingly, this style of debt peonage has reverberating effects across all labor markets. Researchers at UCLA have theorized that it leads to the depression of labor standards and to the displacement of other workers.

In an era when policymakers are, at best, attempting to undo the effects of mass incarceration by decreasing jail populations and promoting out-of-custody rehabilitative programs, re-incarcerating people to “collect” on court debt is extraordinarily punitive. It does unsurprisingly little to deter serious and violent crime. “Repeat” offenders are created out of nothing but shaky finances, despite a person’s genuine attempts to be law-abiding members of society. Moreover, it is a drain on public resources without much gain. California, to date, boasts over $11 billion in uncollected court debt, and over 4 million driver’s licenses suspended for inability to pay court-debt.

Jurisdictions across the country, and especially in California, should reverse this trend by adopting laws that do not punish poverty. Expungements should not depend on the petitioner’s ability to pay outstanding criminal justice debt. Laws like SB 881, which ends driver’s license suspensions for outstanding traffic debt, should be passed to promote the financial independence of those who are seeking a meaningful second chance at life. There must be a dramatic retooling of the way that court debt is imposed, or else the current system is doomed to create permanent barriers to economic security long after incarceration.

Tragically, stories like his are far too common in America, and they are the reason I have introduced the No Money Bail Act of 2016 to reform our system of pretrial detention.

Last July, Sandra Bland was pulled over for failing to signal while driving in Texas. She was put in jail and bail was set at $5,000, an amount she could not afford to pay. Three days later she was found hanged in her cell.  And Qiana Williams, who shared her story at the White House last December and on Capitol Hill this past February, spent weeks in a St. Louis jail because she couldn’t afford to pay court and traffic fees.

Across the country, it comes down to this: People of means are able to pay their way out of jail, while the poor remain behind bars awaiting their day in court.

Even for those who can muster the funds, the money bail system is unfair.

In San Francisco, 29-year-old Crystal Patterson, who gets by on a $12.50-an-hour job, paid a bail bondsman $1,500 plus interest to post her $150,000 bail so she could return home to care for her grandmother.  She also signed an agreement to pay back the $15,000 bond posted by the bail bondsman. Afterwards, the District Attorney dropped the charges, but, though the bail bondsman would have been returned the $150,000 bail, Patterson is unlikely to ever see the money she paid to the bail bond company.

At any given moment, more than 450,000 Americans are locked up without ever having been convicted of a crime.  In my home state of California, more than two-thirds of those in jail haven’t been convicted, a total of more than 42,000 people.

Moreover, even a few days in jail can be devastating for families—especially those that are already fighting to make ends meet.  Perversely, money bail gives inmates a strong incentive to plead guilty, even when innocent, because they cannot afford bail and need to get back to their families, jobs, or education. Being locked up can also increase an individual’s risk of suicide and depression.

Finally, unnecessary pretrial detention of low-risk defendants is expensive. State and local governments in the U.S. spend an estimated $14 billion annually to incarcerate people who haven’t been convicted of a crime. In contrast, pretrial systems based on risk, rather than wealth, cost on average $7 per day.

For these reasons, most nations consider money bail an obstruction of justice. In fact, the only other country that maintains a large commercial bail bond industry is the Philippines. In the case of our disgraceful bail system, American exceptionalism is decidedly not a good thing.

Any serious effort at criminal justice reform must address our feudal-like bail system, which amounts to modern-day debtors’ prisons.  The “No Money Bail Act of 2016,” which I introduced earlier this year, would eliminate the payment of money as a condition of pretrial release at the federal level, and also would give states three years to switch to alternative systems or else forfeit law enforcement grants.

Justice in America should not be bought and paid for.  For the sake of Jeffrey Pendleton, Sandra Bland, Qiana Williams, and the countless other Americans who have suffered at the hands of our unjust money bail system, it is long past time that the United States join the rest of the civilized world when it comes to pretrial incarceration.

Nearly three decades later, we now know that 1 in 3 Americans have some type of criminal record, which translates into nearly three million residents in Pennsylvania, where I practice. And it is well documented that having even a minor record—such as a misdemeanor, or even an arrest that never led to conviction—can serve as an intractable barrier to employment.

Meanwhile, the number of people with criminal records seeking help from the legal aid program where I work, Community Legal Services of Philadelphia (CLS), has grown exponentially.  Today roughly 1,000 people with criminal records request CLS representation every year, comprising roughly two-thirds of our employment caseload.

As the White House commemorates National Reentry Week, civil legal services must be front and center as a vital tool to help people with criminal records get a fair shot at employment.

Helping people earn a clean slate

Record-clearing is at the heart of what CLS does to help people with criminal records, as it is the single most helpful tool to address the barriers associated with having a record. In addition to helping hundreds of clients get their records expunged each year, we conduct expungement clinics in the community to reach people who don’t—or can’t—make it into our offices. And one of my colleagues created “expungement generator” software that assembles expungement petitions from case information available online, allowing us to help many more individuals at once than if we had to enter the information one-by-one.

But no amount of clinics or special software could make it possible for us to help all the Philadelphians held back by criminal records, and we are forced to turn away far more people than we have the capacity to help. Some 82,000 petitions for expungement were filed in Pennsylvania last year alone.  But that is the tip of the iceberg—so many more people qualify for, and need, expungements.

That’s why CLS is working with the Center for American Progress and the transpartisan U.S. Justice Action Network to pass first-in-the-nation legislation that would enable Pennsylvanians to earn a clean slate once they have remained crime-free for a set period of time. The Clean Slate Act, which was introduced by bipartisan legislators in the Pennsylvania legislature earlier this month, has the potential to transform record-clearing for untold numbers of Pennsylvanians who have no access to the legal process.

Protection from employment discrimination

While a clean slate is the surest pathway for people with criminal records to move on with their lives, protections against employment discrimination are critical for those who cannot clear their records. Although people with criminal records are not a protected class, employment discrimination on the basis of a criminal record has for years been held a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That’s because communities of color are disproportionately impacted by the criminal justice system. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) plays an important role in enforcing Title VII. But without lawyers to file complaints on behalf of people whose rights have been violated, Title VII protections are theoretical at best. Thus, filing race discrimination claims with the EEOC and challenging employers who have turned down our clients for jobs due to criminal records is another key part of CLS’ work.

We’ve also seen—and worked to rectify—gaps in existing laws and policies around hiring discrimination. After many years of advocacy by CLS and others, the EEOC issued a new criminal records policy four years ago, making clear that blanket policies excluding people with records are illegal. It also set forth criteria—such as the nature and length of time since the offense—that must be considered by employers. Similarly, at the local level, working with a broad coalition of partners, CLS helped develop and pass the “fair chance hiring” law enacted in Philadelphia last year.

Another employment barrier that many of our clients face stems from overly broad laws prohibiting employers from hiring people with criminal records. For example, in 1997, Pennsylvania enacted a law prohibiting long-term health care facilities from employing people convicted of crimes as minor as library book theft at any point in their lifetimes, no matter how clearly they had been rehabilitated. CLS filed suit challenging these restrictions, and in December of last year, the law was struck down for violating Pennsylvania’s state constitution.

Improving accuracy in background checks

Another major problem people with criminal records face is erroneous background checks—particularly when they are prepared by commercial screeners, a cottage industry that’s grown dramatically over the last 20 years. Common errors include reporting expunged cases or providing the wrong grade of an offense (such as stating that a misdemeanor was a felony). Sometimes screeners even report cases that didn’t involve the person who is being screened.

In addition to helping our clients correct faulty reports, CLS frequently brings class action lawsuits under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, seeking to fix systemic problems and require companies to ensure accuracy in their background checks.

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Over the years, my CLS colleagues and I have developed a practice that helps at least some people who have paid their dues move on and make their way out of poverty. This work has been enormously gratifying. I have never seen clients more overjoyed—or relieved—than when they finally get an expungement, or when the job they’ve desperately needed comes through.

The community of legal aid and public interest lawyers doing this type of work around the country has grown tremendously over the nearly 30 years since I met my first client who’d been turned away from a job because of his record. Civil legal services organizations like mine have come to play a central role in making successful reentry possible for countless people with criminal records seeking to move on with their lives. As we commemorate National Reentry Week, expanding the capacity of civil legal services to help the millions of Americans struggling to enter or reenter the workforce will be key to addressing what I believe is the civil rights issue of our generation.

Sixteen years ago, I left prison like many of the 600,000 people released from federal and state institutions each year: full of excitement and trepidation. On the day of my release, my mother and step-father rented a vehicle, a Lincoln town car, to pick me up. At the time, I did not give much thought to the gesture because I was solely concerned with leaving that place as quickly as possible. A few years later, I asked my step-father why they went through the trouble of renting a luxury vehicle, something more suited for a trip to the senior prom, to pick me up from a maximum security prison. His response was that they wanted to make some sort of grand gesture to truly welcome me home.

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Over the years, they continued to offer support in both tangible and intangible ways, including providing food, clothing and shelter; helping to fund my college education; and never solely defining me by my past mistakes. Their collective efforts illustrate what I think of as a “Second Chance culture”—a deep, sustained investment in my future success, more profound than any single reentry program or policy. Now, I am hardly suggesting that federal and state governments rent luxury vehicles for the 10 to 12 million people released from prisons and jails each year. But I am encouraging the government and the private sector to adopt policies and practices that embrace a Second Chance culture—one that envisions a prolonged commitment to the successful reintegration of people impacted by incarceration.

The Obama Administration and DOJ—through the Office of Justice Programs (OJP) and the Reentry Council—have taken great strides toward creating a Second Chance culture. Since the passage of the Second Chance Act in 2007, OJP has made over 700 grants, totaling over 400 million dollars, to local reentry programs. These community-based programs meet many of the basic life needs of people with criminal records by providing housing assistance, job training, and substance abuse treatment.

President Obama directed the Office of Personnel Management to “ban the box” for federal employment, which delays questions about criminal history until later in the employment process so applicants with criminal records have a fair chance at competing for jobs.

And members of the Reentry Council from more than 20 federal agencies have adopted policies that remove barriers and create opportunities for successful reintegration. For example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development issued policy guidance to housing providers on how to evaluate people with criminal records when they seek to rent or buy houses or apartments. Moreover, the Department of Education started a pilot program to give currently incarcerated people access to post-secondary education.

Importantly, Assistant Attorney General Karol Mason, who oversees OJP, is issuing policy guidance to 15 offices within OJP encouraging them, when appropriate, to avoid using terms like “ex-offender” and “ex-felon,” in an effort to diminish the stigmatization of people who have been justice-involved. And most notably for me personally, DOJ created the Second Chance Fellow position, specifically for a formerly incarcerated criminal justice expert, to help advise the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), the Reentry Council, and the entire Department on effective reentry policy and practice.  These combined efforts are the foundation of a Second Chance culture at the federal level because they signal a long-term, sustained commitment to improving the lives of millions of people with criminal records.

During my fellowship, I will contribute to the Department’s burgeoning Second Chance culture by advising the Second Chance portfolio of BJA, consulting with the Reentry Council on effective reentry policies, and serving as a conduit to the broader justice-involved population to ensure that DOJ is hearing from all stakeholders. The latter charge—garnering the perspectives of formerly incarcerated people to inform effective reentry policy—is critically important, as well as essentially uncharted territory for DOJ and most criminal justice agencies. I will compile the perspectives of formerly incarcerated people through a series of qualitative interviews with highly successful formerly incarcerated leaders. The goal will be to learn what about reentry works from people who have actually done it and are now making tremendous contributions to their communities.

Another benefit of the interviews is that they will be digitally recorded and compiled into an online story bank accessible the public. The purpose of the story bank is to challenge the pervasive negative stereotypes of people with criminal records, with the aim of humanizing the justice-involved population and thereby creating more public momentum for the adoption of effective reentry policy.

If America does not embrace a Second Chance culture, we miss the opportunity to reduce victimization, save precious public safety resources, and, most importantly, capitalize on the potential of people who have paid their debt to society and now want to contribute to their communities. Missed opportunities risk negatively impacting the economic vitality of the country as we undergo important demographic shifts. Over the next few decades, the Baby Boomer generation will age out of the workforce, while the majority of our nation’s population will become people of color. If African-Americans and Latinos, who comprise roughly 60 percent of the prison population, are denied the ability to get a job or an education to build their human capital, then there will be fewer qualified people to replace a dwindling workforce. A less qualified workforce means lower economic activity and production, which hurts the entire country.

National Reentry Week is an opportunity to acknowledge that no person is defined by their contact with the criminal justice system—and everyone deserves a second chance. Let us also use this week as a chance to embrace a larger cultural shift wherein we seek to invest in the long-term success of those who have been involved in the criminal justice system. The very health of our country depends on it.

The views expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Today, as part of the Department of Justice’s inaugural National Reentry Week, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro visited Philadelphia to hear how brushes with the criminal justice system have stood in the way of employment, housing, and more—and how people have persevered.

Here are three stories told to Attorney General Lynch and Secretary Castro—they are representative of the experiences of millions of Americans held back by a criminal record.

Ronald Lewis: “So many doors have been closed in my face I know what wood tastes like.”

More than 10 years ago, when I was 25, I was convicted of two misdemeanors.  In one case, I was on the street with my brother when he was selling drugs, and I warned him that the police were coming. In the other, I tried to steal a pocketbook at Neiman Marcus.  I did my probation for these cases, and have been a law-abiding citizen ever since.

I am a father, a husband, a son, a friend, and ambitious to get ahead in life. I got a building engineering license in hopes of getting a good job. I am starting my own company so that I can give other people second chances working for me. I give freely of my time to be a role model to kids in my community and to younger men who are tempted by the streets. But to so many people, I am an “ex-offender,” and nothing more.

I’ll never forget the first time I was turned down for a job because of my record. I had been on the job for about a month when my background check came back. I was called into Human Resources and told they had to fire me because of my record. Security was called to immediately remove me from the building. It was the worst feeling of my life. It was humiliating to tell my family, who had been so proud of me, that I had failed again.

That was the first of many times that I was turned away from jobs I was qualified for because of my minor record. More times than I can count, companies have told me, “You’ll be great. Your skills are exactly what we are looking for.” But then that question about my background comes up.  So many doors have been closed in my face, I know what wood tastes like.  And because of my record, I can’t even take my kids on school field trips.  Do you know how devastating that is?

I do not and will not give up. My family is depending on me. My children are depending on me. I hope that one day, my record can be cleared, reflecting who I am now. That is why I am speaking out to support the Clean Slate Act, a bill in the Pennsylvania legislature that would automatically seal non-violent misdemeanor convictions after someone has remained crime-free for 10 years, as I have. This law would make a world of difference for people like me—and for our families and kids.

Helen Stokes: “I was denied from senior housing because of my arrest record”

I was 56 the first time I was ever arrested, in 2008. My husband, whom I later divorced, attacked me. When I called the police, he claimed that I had assaulted him. Can you imagine? Then two years later, after I took his ATM card for our joint account so that he wouldn’t spend our money on drugs, I was arrested for theft. Both times, the charges were dropped. I have never been convicted of a crime in my whole life.

After that, even though I had not been convicted, I got turned down for jobs because of my arrest record. Eventually, in 2014, I went to Community Legal Services for help. My lawyer got my cases expunged, and I thought that was the last I would hear of them.

But about six months later, when I was trying to move into subsidized housing for seniors, I was denied admission because of the record that I wasn’t supposed to have anymore. I couldn’t believe it. I called the lawyer who had gotten my cases expunged, and she called the property managers and provided my expungement orders, but they still wouldn’t let me in. I had tears in my eyes when I got the rejection letter. Even after I told RealPage, the company that had done the background check, about my expungements and filed a dispute, they again reported my expunged cases to another senior housing facility, which also rejected me.

By this point, I was panicked. My house was being foreclosed on since I could no longer afford the mortgage payments after my divorce. I was worried that I would end up on the street or that I could no longer live on my own.

Eventually, a social worker at Community Legal Services helped me find a senior apartment, where I will soon be moving. It is a huge relief. But I don’t understand why senior housing would hold cases like this against me to begin with, given that I wasn’t even convicted.

Community Legal Services has since filed a class action lawsuit against RealPage for illegally reporting expunged cases like mine. I am proud to be the main plaintiff in that case, because I think justice must be done for other people like me. Background check companies like RealPage must learn that they cannot report expunged cases. But housing facilities should also give people like me a fair chance instead of turning people away just because of an arrest record.

Tyrone Peake: “Employers weren’t allowed to hire me because of my 30-year-old record”

When I was 18 years old, I was arrested with a friend for trying to steal a car. We had our girlfriends in town for the weekend. When one of the girls’ mothers insisted that she come home, we tried to steal a car to take her back. Mind you, I couldn’t even drive—and we weren’t even able to get the car started. But we had broken open the ignition, and I ended up being convicted of attempted car theft. I did three years of probation, and I never got in trouble again.

I am now 53 years old. I raised three daughters who are now all grown up. All my life, I’ve had a passion to help people, so I decided to pursue an associate’s degree so I could do health care work, graduating from Community College of Philadelphia in 2014. I never dreamed that a mistake I made when I was 18 years old would follow me for the rest of my life. But until recently, my decades-old record kept me from getting a full-time job in the field I’d gone to school to work in.

After I got my degree, I learned that Pennsylvania had a law that prohibited me from working in long-term care jobs because of my record. Even though more than 30 years had passed without me getting into trouble again, employers that wanted to hire me were not allowed to because of the law.  I eventually got a part-time job working as a recovery specialist, but the law prevented me from doing other jobs with the organization no matter how qualified I was—and no matter how much time had passed since my conviction.

Last year, Community Legal Services and pro bono lawyers challenged the law on behalf of me and other Pennsylvanians who had unfairly been stopped from working in jobs that we should be able to have. In December, Pennsylvania’s appellate court agreed with us and struck down the law.

The problems that I had because of my record caused me to doubt myself—and my future—for a long time. But I have a lot of joy knowing that this unfair law has been changed, there is a lot of hope and opportunity for me and others who come behind me and are trying to get ahead.

Editor’s Note: All three of these individuals were represented by lawyers in Community Legal Services’ Employment Unit. They gave permission for CLS and TalkPoverty.org to share their stories to help shine a light on the lifelong barriers associated with having even a minor record.

To commemorate National Reentry Week, TalkPoverty.org will feature posts throughout the week by leaders on reentry—all exploring the barriers to opportunity facing people with criminal records, and why addressing these barriers is a critical part of criminal justice reform.

One of the plaintiffs in the case, Cesar Matias, is a gay Honduran seeking protection in the United States. Since 2012, he’s been detained at the Santa Ana City Jail because he is unable to afford the $3,000 bond a judge set for his release. Xochitl Hernandez, the other plaintiff, is being held at a for-profit detention facility so notoriously dangerous that 29 members of Congress submitted a letter to the Department of Homeland Security requesting that women not be detained there. Hernandez, a mother of five U.S. citizen children (and grandmother of another four citizens), faces the prospect of remaining in detention for years until her case is resolved because her bond was set at $60,000.

Both plaintiffs were found eligible for release, which means that they pose no danger to their communities. Any chance of flight risk would be mitigated by conditions placed on their release. Yet they remain in immigration detention facilities that have dismal human rights records simply because they can’t afford to pay up.

Unfortunately, the cases of Matias and Hernandez aren’t isolated incidents. The U.S. immigration detention system holds some 34,000 people daily who are awaiting decisions in their immigration cases. Many of them are detained because they are unable to make bond. The ACLU estimates that there are at least 100 immigrants detained in Los Angeles alone just because they cannot afford to pay bond. At the Santa Ana City Jail, where Matias is being held, only three of 651 detained immigrants were bonded out in 2015. I’ve received reports from attorneys working across the country—including in New Jersey, Texas, and Arizona—about LGBT people detained due to bonds as high as $100,000.

Detention not only subjects immigrants to terrible conditions—conditions that are particularly dangerous for LGBT individuals—it can also carry devastating long-term consequences. The New York Immigrant Representation study found that detained immigrants who are represented by counsel have only an 18 percent chance of a successful case outcome, compared to a 74 percent success rate for immigrants who are represented but have not been detained.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has criticized cash bonds in the criminal justice system that result in the incarceration of people solely because they can’t pay.  Congressman Ted Lieu also introduced legislation to end money bail. Yet immigration officials do not consider an immigrant’s ability to pay when setting a cash bond either, and in contrast to the criminal justice system in which an individual typically must post 10 percent of the bond in order to be released, immigration detainees must pay the entire bond.

As attorney Michael Tan of the ACLU told me, “Ironically, at a time when the Department of Justice has argued that it’s unconstitutional to lock up criminal defendants simply because they’re poor, its officials are engaged in the same practice in the immigration system. But it’s just as irrational—and unlawful—to lock up immigrants solely because they can’t afford to make bail.”

According to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson, bond amounts are determined by an individual’s flight risk. ICE reviews each case and takes a variety of factors into account to determine the level of flight risk—including immigration history, criminal history, and community ties.

Hernandez was considered enough of a risk to warrant a $60,000 bond determination, despite living in the U.S. for the past 25 years and having children and grandchildren who are citizens. According to the ACLU’s complaint, the additional factor taken into account appears to be her criminal history, which consists of a decade-old shoplifting conviction for which she was sentenced to one day in jail. As for Matias, the complaint doesn’t specify a determination of his flight risk; it simply states that the judge believed the $3,000 bond set was “pretty generous.”  The judge who reviewed that determination two years later agreed the amount was “reasonable,” despite Matias’ continued inability to afford it.

While ICE has broad discretion in determining which factors to weigh in setting conditions for release, there is a statutory bond minimum of $1,500. Moreover, officials are not required to consider whether alternative conditions of supervised release—such as periodic reporting requirements or ankle bracelets—can be utilized alone or in combination with lower bond amounts to ensure that individuals appear in court. These alternatives to detention cost an average of $10.55 per day, compared to an average daily cost of $158 to detain a person. In cases where bond is used, the very least ICE and DOJ should do is consider the ability of an individual to pay it.

The government has now spent $153,300 to keep Matias in detention.  Until the DOJ and ICE make smart and humane reforms, these costs will continue to mount, and people like Cesar Matias and Xochitl Hernandez will languish in cells, solely because they are too poor to make bail.

A woman and her ex-husband shared custody of their 18-month-old daughter. After spending the weekend at her dad’s house, the girl was returned to her mother’s home with a case of diaper rash.

The dad notified the mom of the rash and gave her a tube of ointment that he had been applying. The mom watched the rash for several days, applying the ointment as directed by the medication’s instructions. When the rash did not go away, she took her daughter to the doctor, who found that the rash had become infected and reported the mother to the local child-welfare agency for child neglect.

The mom had done what almost every parent would have under the circumstances—she had treated the rash, watched it closely, and ultimately made the decision that it required medical attention. However, she was placed on the civil statewide Childline and Abuse Registry and lost her job as a home health aide. Until she was able to get a hearing and clear her name—a process that can take as long as a year—she was unable to get another job in the profession she had been trained in.

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In the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex-abuse scandal, the Pennsylvania legislature passed 23 bills containing hundreds of amendments to the Child Protective Services Law (CPSL). Exactly two of those amendments may possibly have stopped Sandusky’s abuse of children at an earlier stage. Most of the other changes involved redefining child abuse and expanding background checks in ways that are increasingly—and irrationally—resulting in significant consequences to the employment, reputations, and child custody of low-income people, especially people of color.  These consequences inevitably have great impact on children and families.

We’ve heard about the college professors and parent volunteers in schools offended by the inconvenience and intrusiveness of having to get child-abuse background checks. Little, however, has been reported about the people most affected by these background checks: low-wage employees, such as cafeteria workers, school secretarial staff, home-health aides, and day-care teachers.

Many people are being needlessly barred from employment—sometimes even losing long-term jobs—due to criminal records that are extremely old, minor, or irrelevant to their ability to safely be employed around children. Many more are barred from jobs because of placement on the registry without any court proceedings, or even proof. Under the new amendments to the CPSL, these consequences are being exacerbated.

Protecting children is necessary and commendable. But the registry is an arbitrary and inaccurate tool for assessing who presents a risk, either to their own children or those under their care at work. Yet the registry is regularly used as a screening tool. People with “indicated” reports are listed in the registry and barred from working in day care, education, health care, nursing homes, paratransit, and a growing number of other jobs, predominantly ones filled by low-wage workers.

Placement on the registry has always been too easy. When a county agency responsible for children’s welfare receives notice of suspected child abuse or neglect—from a teacher, a doctor, a neighbor, and (not too rarely) sometimes an angry ex-spouse—it is required to investigate the allegations within 24 hours. After speaking with the child (if that child is of speaking age) and any other relevant parties, and reviewing whatever evidence is available, the agency makes a decision whether or not to “indicate” the report—that is, place the suspected perpetrator on the registry.

There is no hearing, no opportunity to present evidence. A caseworker checks off a box, and an individual is placed on the registry effectively for life—unless this person successfully appeals within a very short deadline. The individuals concerned are not entitled to view the investigation file before or after placement.

All too often, indicated reports are based on faulty or incomplete investigations, or on actions or omissions by parents or caretakers that simply do not meet the statutory definitions of child abuse. Even with a careful investigator, the sometimes-fine distinction between lawful discipline through spanking and abuse can be lost.

In the experience of Community Legal Services, some social workers and supervisors put people on the registry too casually and do not comprehend the significant financial and emotional toll on the family that can ensue from a child-abuse report.

From an institutional perspective, checking off the box seems like a less intrusive option than removing a child from the home, and creates a record that the agency “did something.” It is a matter of routine. We also see many instances in which false accusations of abuse are raised in the course of contentious custody disputes, a circumstance that can be noted by a social worker as a concern, but disregarded in a “better safe than sorry” posture. 

The recently expanded definitions of child abuse make this bad situation worse. The removal of the word non-accidental from the definition increases the risk that parents and caretakers will be placed on the registry for accidents that happen in the normal course of children’s lives.

It is now child abuse if a parent or caretaker acts or fails to act in a manner that creates a “reasonable likelihood” of injury, whether or not an injury actually occurs. Neglect is defined as, among other things, any repeated or prolonged act that “threatens a child’s well-being.” These are extremely low standards; all parents make judgment calls, knowing their child and their individual and family circumstances, that arguably could carry a reasonable likelihood of harm to body or well-being.

In our experience, low-income parents and caregivers are more likely to have governmental agencies involved in their lives and questioning their judgment calls; in effect, they are held to a higher standard of parenting than middle- and upper-class parents and professionals.

The CPSL amendments have also broadened requirements for background checks to an absurd degree. Now, anyone on the registry who has “routine interaction” with children at work is barred from such employment, even if children are never under their care or supervision. One government agency has interpreted “routine interaction” as passing in the hallway.

I am certainly not suggesting that convicted sex abusers be able to work in day cares or schools. However, are we really concerned that someone who once accidentally left an iron on, who didn’t treat a burn sufficiently, even who once lost it and slapped her delinquent teenage daughter, is such a danger to others that he or she can never drive a school bus, hand out food in a cafeteria, or even diligently and safely care for children in a day care?  Certainly there are individuals who inflict great harm to children and those individuals should face appropriate consequences.  But lumping them in with parents and caregivers whose actions were accidental or the result of a minor and isolated incident results only in detracting resources and energy from the more egregious cases and in deepening poverty for families.

The commonwealth should revisit the recent CPSL amendments to effect a more rational and balanced approach that will both protect children and afford parents the ability to make sound and reasoned parenting choices without losing employment opportunities for life.

But mass incarceration is not the end of the story. Each year, more than 600,000 individuals are released from lock up and return to their communities. And then America proceeds to punish them for having been punished.

The felony drug ban is just one example. Adopted by Congress twenty years ago, the ban imposes a lifetime restriction on the cash assistance program known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and nutrition assistance (SNAP) for anyone convicted of a state or federal drug felony, unless states opt out. In states where the ban applies, a person released from a long prison sentence could be denied basic assistance at a time of extreme vulnerability and risk.

A study by The Sentencing Project found that in the 12 states that impose the lifetime ban, an estimated 180,000 women are impacted. If we include the other 24 states that impose a partial ban, the number of people affected is significantly higher. And because drug law enforcement is conducted with racial biases, people of color are disproportionately denied assistance.

The felony drug ban can be traced back to the 1990s, when politicians of both parties sought political gain by getting “tough on crime.” Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), the sponsor of the ban, argued that “we ought not to give people welfare benefits who are violating the nation’s drug laws.”  After just two minutes of floor debate, the measure was adopted by unanimous consent as part of the 1996 welfare “reform” legislation.

The felony drug ban was consistent with other efforts in Congress to get tough on formerly incarcerated individuals.  In the early 1990s, Congress began to erect barriers and cut services for people struggling to reenter society. First, Pell grants were barred for incarcerated individuals, ensuring that most could not receive a college education prior to release. Then restrictions were enacted to deny people with drug convictions access to welfare benefits, public housing, and financial aid for higher education. Largely missing from the debate was any discussion of whether such post-incarceration punishments are effective or even counterproductive.

Two decades later, there is little evidence that these tough on crime policies have improved public safety.  In general, post-incarceration punishment does little to deter crime, as most people are unaware that a conviction could result in the loss of public benefits.  For example, one study found that of 26 women facing drug charges, not a single one had been aware that she could lose food stamps or welfare benefits as a result of a conviction.

Meanwhile, the felony drug ban is counterproductive to safe reentry. After an individual leaves prison, food and welfare benefits can help meet basic survival needs as she searches for a job and housing.  The denial of such assistance increases the likelihood that formerly incarcerated individuals will return to criminal activity to provide sustenance for their families. And when welfare benefits are not available to offset the cost of drug treatment, it is less likely that former prisoners struggling with addiction will be able to live drug-free and avoid a return to prison. A study by researchers at the Yale School of Medicine even found that denying SNAP to women with felony drug convictions is harmful to public safety.

In recent years, there has been a broad re-thinking of policies that put thousands of people behind bars for long prison terms. States in every region of the country have scaled back harsh penalties that have contributed to mass incarceration.

In Congress, a bipartisan group of Senators has introduced the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, which would reduce the impact of harsh mandatory minimum penalties and create rehabilitative programming in federal prisons. The bill would mean fewer people locked up for decades for low-level drug offenses and it would free up funds that could be used for crime prevention and substance abuse treatment.

Federal sentencing reform is indeed necessary to reduce excessive rates of incarceration, which have had diminishing returns for public safety over the years. But along with that should come a reconsideration of post-incarceration punishments that strip former prisoners of the basic assistance they need to get back on their feet. In the past year, Texas and Alabama have taken steps to opt out of the felony drug ban. Until Congress acts to repeal the ban altogether, other states should follow their lead.

It is time to stop punishing people after they have been released from prison—not only to improve the life prospects of people who have served their time, but also as part of a broader effort to strengthen public safety and our communities.

The police exploited his cognitive limitations to secure an unreliable confession. Prosecutors took advantage of his vulnerability to engineer his conviction. And the court refused to sufficiently correct these and other obvious injustices. Perhaps most troubling is the fact that Dassey’s own lawyer—who had been appointed by the court—assumed that his client was guilty and refused to investigate his claims of innocence.

All of this and more is explored in the much-discussed Netflix documentary series, Making a Murderer. It exemplifies exactly what the Supreme Court declared in the 1963 case, Gideon v. Wainwright: only with the aid of effective defense counsel is justice for all ensured.

Unfortunately, defendants across America have experiences like Dassey’s each and every day. Public defenders—who represent more than 80 percent of those accused of crimes—are dramatically under-resourced and overwhelmed. As a result, despite their devotion to their work, they are unable to live up to their critical role in a system that consistently tramples on society’s most marginalized members.

Now we have an opportunity to do something about it.

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We are finally having a national conversation about our criminal justice crisis. But while many of the reforms offered are critical, calls for robust support for public defenders—which should be at the center of the discussion—are notably lacking.

Police, prosecutors, and judges often face pressures to rush to judgment. A capable defense attorney ensures that these professionals play by the rules. Defense counsel also brings to light relevant characteristics of the accused—including any history of mental illness or substance abuse—as well as many of the circumstances of the case that must be understood in order to reach a just verdict. Finally, the defense lawyer is best situated to challenge assumptions that are often made about poor people—including assumptions about how they should be treated—that too often lead to indifference towards the raw deal that many defendants receive.

Reformers are currently working to address some of the more obvious flaws in our criminal justice system, such as over-criminalization, draconian sentencing laws, and irresponsible pretrial detention practices. Collectively, these policies and practices facilitate the funneling of poor people into our nation’s prisons and jails.

However, even if we address these issues, the people dumped into the system will remain almost exclusively poor and disproportionately of color. Many officials who are responsible for administering justice will still fail to spend the time necessary to understand the accused and protect their rights. Public defenders will continue to have overwhelming caseloads, leaving them insufficient time to develop a zealous defense for their clients. Overall, there will continue to be an environment that spawns lawyers like Brendan Dassey’s—lawyers who come to understand their role as helping to facilitate the status quo rather than standing up to fight against it.

This is about more than providing increased funding to public defenders in order to reduce absurd caseloads. At Gideon’s Promise, which I co-founded with my wife, in addition to teaching defenders law and lawyering skills, we focus on the values and ethics essential to providing effective representation. Importantly, we give lawyers the tools and strategies to maintain these ideals in our pressure cooker of a justice system. Through training, mentorship, and community support, these defenders remain strong advocates for individual clients and, collectively, are a movement of change agents.

Put simply, we have to bring to scale this kind of deep support for public defenders if we are to change the embarrassingly low standard of justice we currently accept for the poor.

Numerous politicians, including the President, are speaking passionately about the need for criminal justice reform, but not enough discuss what we need to do to live up to the hallowed right to effective counsel.

A recent program on the role of the courts in addressing our criminal justice crisis illustrates the inherent problem of leaving public defenders out of the reform conversation. The panel included two prosecutors and a former federal judge. No one talked about the critical role of lawyers for the poor in realizing equal justice.   One panelist explained that he became a prosecutor because his experience in law school taught him that “[defense counsel has] the least amount of power in the courtroom and the prosecutor has the most.” The judge then shared her opinion that because of structural problems, “You can give public defenders gigantic resources and it will make no [material] difference.” These remarks, and the fact that there was no indigent defense advocate present to respond, reflect a view that public defenders are not critical to the criminal justice reform effort. Moreover, comments like these could encourage reformers to ignore the pressing need to support public defenders, and the real difference that such support can make.

If we are serious about criminal justice reform, we must ensure adequate resources for public defenders offices so that they can give every client’s case the time that they need and deserve. We must offer salaries commensurate with those afforded to prosecutors so that our nation’s most talented lawyers see public defense as a viable career option. But even resources and time will not transform a lawyer like Brendan Dassey’s into the advocate poor people need and deserve under the Constitution. We must also make sure that these lawyers have the training and support they need not only to perform well on the job, but to stay focused on the vital role they play and resist systemic pressures to abandon it.

Dassey’s co-defendant, Steven Avery, had the resources to hire a pair of excellent attorneys—the kind who would never ignore a client’s claims of innocence. The difference in the quality of representation that the two defendants received cannot be overstated. Had Dassey been able to afford similar counsel, he would likely be home today.

For every Steven Avery there are tens of thousands of Brendan Dasseys. And until we make the investments we need to protect the most vulnerable members of our society, the justice reform we seek will remain elusive.

Stories like this one are becoming commonplace, as the increasing number of judicial vacancies (74 at present) has led to the largest backlog of federal criminal and civil cases in American history. Yet, despite the courts’ impact on consequential and timely issues, the process of appointing a new federal judge can be arduous and slow.

As explained in our Just a Judge video, a judicial vacancy occurs when a judge retires, steps down, or is otherwise unable to perform their duties. The process from there is complex: following the president’s nomination of a qualified judge (usually following consultation with home-state senators), senators from the home state of the nominee are then responsible for submitting blue slips of paper to demonstrate their approval. The Senate Judiciary Committee then holds a hearing and vote, and only then is there a confirmation vote in the Senate.

Unfortunately, this confirmation process leaves our judicial system vulnerable to partisan obstruction by the legislative branch. Home-state senators often delay their submission of the blue-slips, and senate leadership regularly delays scheduling the requisite hearings and votes. As a result, in 2015, the Senate confirmed judicial nominations at the slowest rate since 1960, which means many judicial vacancies have remained open for months and, in some instances, years.

The large number of vacancies has wreaked economic havoc on communities. In Texas, which has the most vacancies of any state, a 2015 study by the Perryman Group revealed that if two judicial vacancies were filled, it would likely lead to the creation of over 78,000 jobs and an increase of $11.7 billion in economic activity by 2030. The study found that fully-staffed courts lead to increased personal income, worker earnings, and retail sales “by reducing uncertainties and the time required to resolve business disputes.”

Even more alarming is the federal backlog’s effect on criminal cases. The Constitution grants all persons the ability to be heard before the court; more specifically, the Sixth Amendment enshrines the right to a speedy trial. However, since 2009, the average time to resolve a felony case has doubled to 13 months. This can result in the creation of what are known as “plea-bargaining mills,” where defendants are incentivized to plead guilty (even if they are innocent) to end waiting periods spent in prison that can far exceed the actual sentence for the offense in question. Indeed, a criminal defense lawyer who practices in the Eastern District of Texas, stated that the delay in felony cases is often used by prosecutors as a “hammer” over a defendant’s head: “Plead guilty and you’ll be out of jail.”

It is clear that the political jousting that occurs throughout the judicial confirmation process is having unintended effects that harm everyday Americans and create instability in the judicial system. This is the same system in which, just a few months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a challenge to the affirmative action policy at the University of Texas. And this month, the Court heard arguments about whether unions can require contributions from employees who benefit from union-negotiated conditions. Now, the Supreme Court is gearing up to hear oral arguments challenging President Obama’s immigration actions.

And so, in order to ensure the functioning of this vitally important system and prevent further infringement on Americans’ constitutional rights, the Senate needs to do its job and hold timely votes on federal judicial nominees. While the judiciary may not be as glamorous as the executive or legislative branches, it is vital for us to invest more time to learn about the judicial process, fill our vacancies with judges whose diversity reflects that of this country, and hold our Senate accountable for denying Americans their day in court.

Let’s start today. Learn more about the federal judicial process through this short and sweet video: Just a Judge.

I felt it was important to be there. I wanted to ask candidates how they would reform a criminal justice system that is ripping apart our most vulnerable communities, especially communities of color. What would they do to redirect public funding to support—not strangle—opportunity for people of color? How would they reverse the barriers faced by the 650,000 people released from prison every year?

The issue of how to invest in our struggling communities is one that all candidates—regardless of party—need to address. Yet, for all the debates, forums, stump speeches and glad-handing, not enough of them are talking about it.

I know firsthand how a lack of hope and opportunity desiccate once-thriving families and communities.

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I grew up on the South Side of Chicago during a time when parents, including my mother and father, could find work on the docks or in the factories that dotted the skyline. Our neighborhood was vibrant and solidly working-class. We had a good life. Then, one by one, the factories closed. My parents and the parents of my friends were all laid off.

There were so few people working it seemed like every day was a federal holiday. With every passing year, during the 1970s and 80s, I saw the lights dim in my community. In a short time, we became defined by unemployment and poverty, and then drugs—first heroin, and then crack cocaine. As a young man, I saw the hustlers, pimps, and drug dealers flashing their money, nice cars, and trendy clothes. Their lifestyle represented the only glitter I saw in the neighborhood. So, at an early age, I became a hustler too. I used drugs and committed identity theft to pay for my habit.

It caught up with me and I served 11 years in state and federal prison. While there, I saw countless 17-, 18-, or 19-year-olds who were sentenced to decades in prison for drug crimes. And once you are in the system, it is designed in a way that keeps you in. It is a vicious cycle where the odds are stacked against you, every door is closed, and any small mistake sends you right back.

It starts with the exorbitant fees and rates that incarcerated people have to pay for things like talking on the phone to stay in touch with family. It continues when people get out—often they cannot even go back home to their families because of “one strike and you’re out” policies that prevent people with criminal records from living in public or subsidized housing. Too many young men end up couch surfing just to keep a roof over their heads at night.

And then there is the job search. When I was released in the mid-1990s, the only work I could get was as a dishwasher. Eventually, I found a second job as a telemarketer. Both jobs paid minimum wage. It is nearly impossible for people coming from prison to get re-established if they can’t get a decent job at a decent wage. You can’t pay all those fines and restitution earning poverty wages.

I now live in Dane County, Wisconsin—home to Madison—where I work as an advocate for the formerly incarcerated. I see the prison system as a form of genocide as I watch hope drain from people who are permanently tagged as “felons.” It’s no wonder they don’t feel they are part of America.

We need to re-invest funds—not toward more police weapons and militarized gear that are used to threaten our communities—but toward programs that create opportunity for people and their relatives who have been scarred with convictions. We need to remove barriers that keep formerly-incarcerated people from working or living with their families. We need to identify the types of jobs available to incarcerated people and prepare them for those jobs.

I was a smart kid growing up. I learned that my people had little chance at a legitimate good life. But I hope all the presidential candidates recognize that we need an America where our young people hope for bright futures, rather than think that the best they can do in this world is not be killed.

Back in 2006, I was convicted of disorderly conduct (a third-degree misdemeanor) after a run-in with law enforcement. While I was recording an incident in my neighborhood where a cop was beating up a person on his corner, the officers saw me taping them and told me to stop. They also tried to take my camera phone. I pulled away and a group of cops started running after me and assaulted me. I was hurt pretty badly and sustained multiple injuries, including a fractured hand and bruises all over my body. I still have scars to this day.

And so even though I had done nothing wrong, I was convicted of “disorderly conduct” and sentenced to 6 months of probation. I didn’t do any jail time, but I was left with a criminal record.

That was hardly the end of my punishment. At the time, I was making enough to support my family as a customer service representative for a health insurance company. I needed to take medical leave after the assault and was told I could come back when I was ready. But when I tried to go back to my job, I was forced to “re-apply.” I had to fill out a job application that asked if I had ever been convicted of a felony or a misdemeanor. I had to check yes, and they refused to take me back.

Even with just a third-degree misdemeanor on my record, I haven’t been able to find a steady job since. I’ve tried to find work in customer service, but I have been told over and over that I need a “clean background” to be hired. And so, to try to make ends meet, I am currently doing part-time work for my brother who owns a small trucking business. The company doesn’t have enough business to pay me even a fraction of what I was earning before. I make just $150 per week, which means I need to turn to food stamps to keep my family afloat.

It’s been almost 10 years since I paid my debt to society, but I’m still being punished. My whole family is still being punished. All I want is to be able to move on and to support my family so that my kids have a chance at a better life.

And I’m far from alone. According to a new study by the Center for American Progress, nearly half of kids in the United States now have a parent with a criminal record.

As policymakers debate fixing the criminal justice system, I hope they hear my story. People like me should be able to earn a clean slate once we’ve paid our debt to society so we can support our families.

And instead of having our resumes thrown in the trash just because we checked the box, we deserve a chance to show employers that we’re worth hiring.

I’m not asking for much—just that people like me get a second chance so that we can be the parents we want to be.

As members of Minneapolis’ Black community staged a peaceful protest against what one relative of Jamar Clark called his “execution-style” killing by police, a masked man—accompanied by three accomplices—shot five Black Lives Matter protesters outside of a police station.

Activists who were on the scene say that police nearby did nothing to protect the protesters and that it took approximately 15 minutes for ambulances to arrive.

The shooting of peaceful protesters by white vigilantes is terrorism, plain and simple. The victims were shot as they exercised their right to free assembly. The horrific act should have been met with a state response that takes these ongoing threats seriously and did not perpetuate the devaluing of Black life. Instead, the response by the City demonstrates that the policing and criminal justice systems in Minneapolis are irredeemably broken.

The police in Minneapolis were aware of threats to the protesters but took no action to avert this tragedy. All four suspects managed to get away after drawing guns and shooting five protesters only a block away from the Fourth Precinct police station. Activists reported that during the chaos of the shootings, not only did police fail to protect the demonstrators, but they taunted and maced them. In the past week, the Minneapolis Police Department further escalated tensions by using a chemical irritant against protesters.

The shootings in Minneapolis took place on the same week as the one-year anniversary of the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. They also occurred the week that first-degree murder charges were filed against a Chicago officer in the merciless shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.  Indeed, Minneapolis is the latest example that our criminal justice and policing systems are not designed to keep Black communities safe. All around the country, Black people are finding that they are as under-protected as they are over-policed.

We must address not only this current crisis but the root causes that created it.

We need meaningful community control of police and support for Black communities to address safety concerns. Communities are experts in the type of policing they need and must have the power to set police priorities, determine policing tactics, and make hiring and firing decisions. Police departments in San Francisco and Newark have introduced programs in which local communities have a meaningful say in setting priorities for the department, but there are currently no existing ideal models for community control of local police.

We need to ensure that our communities are protected not only from white vigilantes, but from other forms of violence ignored by the state, including poverty, a dearth of employment opportunities, failing education systems, homelessness, and a lack of mental health services. We know that investments in education, affordable housing, mental health services, restorative justice programs, and higher wages are vital for rebuilding these traumatized communities.

The United States spends $100 billion annually on policing alone—this despite a steady decline in crime rates. Growth in corrections spending has outpaced growth in expenditures in other critical areas. State spending on higher education rose by less than six percent between 1986 and 2013, yet corrections spending jumped by 141 percent.

If all of the energy and resources that go towards policing and incarceration were instead redirected toward these basic needs and opportunities, we would see a kind of safety we have not seen in this country since its original sin.

Legislators and state officials have stripped our communities of basic resources, preyed and profited on our exploitation, and continue to fill prisons while shutting down schools. The killing of Jamar Clark and the terrorist event in Minneapolis are the latest symptoms of our great American tragedy.

My mother had Martha Stewart on her mind too. Not realizing that Martha had actually gone to trial and lost, she said, “Martha Stewart pled guilty and went to prison for six months. Why don’t you plead guilty, go to prison, and get this nightmare over with. You can’t beat city hall.” My mother also used my love of watching 24/7 TV news in her efforts to persuade me. She said, “At least you will get cable TV in prison. I didn’t get that in Auschwitz.” I had no words.

Ultimately, my mother was right: I couldn’t beat the government’s charges of tax evasion and mail fraud, even though I was innocent. And so, eight years after Martha went to prison, my case went to trial and I was convicted. But from the moment I entered Alderson, I realized it was no country club. After being fingerprinted and having my mug shot taken, I was given “newbie” clothes, that is, the clothes inmates wear for the first day only. The slip-on sneakers were two sizes too large; the bra had as little material as a G-string and didn’t hold my breasts in place. The oversized outfit could have fit two women.

After this initial intake, I waited with three other new arrivals in a freezing cell in the Receiving and Discharge (R & D) building. We got the prison bag lunch of a bologna sandwich, cookies, an apple, and a water. When we missed dinner, we got another bag of bologna sandwiches.

Soon after our arrival, R & D officers gave each of us a large laundry bag which contained a blanket, two sheets, soap, shampoo, a comb, a toothbrush, and, most importantly, “Maximum Security” deodorant.

The R & D building was separated from the sleeping quarters (the “units”) by a long stretch known as “Hallelujah Hill.” For some, this nickname was a reference to its proximity to the prison chapel, but for the older crowd, making it to the top merited a shout of “Hallelujah.” During my first trek to the Admissions and Orientation (A & O) units, I was forced to stop several times to catch my breath while carrying the heavy laundry bag. I lagged far behind the younger women.

During my first two weeks in prison, I went through orientation with thirty other women. Correctional officers showed us a film on the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) and emphasized there was to be no lesbian sex. I understood that to mean lesbian sex was the only kind of sex that merited punishment, as opposed to some of the contractors’ well-known proclivity for sexually abusing prisoners. They also lectured us on the rules of the compound, the different facilities, and told us we had to work.

In Alderson, everyone was required to work in the kitchen for their first 90 days. That is, everyone but Martha Stewart, who requested but was denied kitchen duty. I suspect she was refused because this chore might have given her an inkling of pleasure within the miserable prison environment. She was instead assigned instead to the humiliating task of mopping the floors and cleaning the toilets of the warden and other higher-ups.

My first job at the Alderson kitchen was cleaning floors after the lunch and dinner shift. Although I worked seven or eight hours a day, I earned only $5.25 during my first month. There were also few accommodations based on age—elderly women were given the exact same jobs as younger women; even older women who could barely walk had to endure the long work hours. And after our work was done, we were not permitted to go back to the unit between lunch and dinner. We were not allowed to read, do crossword puzzles, knit, play cards, or sleep. Instead, everyone had to spend long hours in plastic seats attached to the table. As an older woman, this took a real toll on me physically.

After my days of kitchen duty were up, I got transferred to the landscaping department, which meant that, at the age of 60, I was charged with the backbreaking work of mowing the lawns in the hot summer and shoveling snow in the winter. Once, I was assigned a heavy 1950s-style lawnmower but could not get it started without assistance. When I went to push it, I couldn’t even move it an inch.

After I went to landscaper and asked for a different assignment, he gave me a broom and instructed me to sweep the streets. I cleaned the road of rocks but quickly realized that the area would be filled again as soon as a truck came by. And so, I asked the officer if I could remove the stones and put them far from the road. He replied, “But then you would have nothing to do.”

At an age where working a physically demanding job for seven- and eight-hour days was grueling, I served as the Sisyphus of Alderson, sweeping rocks off the streets only to see my work undone by passing vehicles. My experience is far from unique. While there are 75,000 prisoners over the age of 60 that are under the jurisdiction of correctional authorities, accommodations that take into account the reality of aging behind bars are all too rare.

What I’ve come to realize is that although older people do commit crimes that warrant punishment, there are few reasons, public safety or otherwise, to incarcerate elders. Certainly, any basis for incarceration is outweighed by the negative consequences we experience behind bars. Instead, we need alternatives to incarceration that acknowledge that older people are too vulnerable a population to be held in our prisons and jails.

As for Martha Stewart, well, Martha was lucky. She went home to a billion dollar company. But as for me, I’m homeless, broke, and living proof that Alderson is no “Camp Cupcake.”

In my case, that gig was working as an editor-writer at a magazine, and I jumped at the chance. As a 29-year-old writer, I didn’t see any opportunities for growth in St. Louis. This was a town, after all, that had slowly sucked civic pride right out of me. Underneath its veneer of friendliness, St. Louis felt like a dystopian world in which everyone is in play or being played by forces known and unknown.

It was a place, in fact, where a group of CEOs and wealthy elites working under the mantle of “Civic Progress” made the real decisions about the city’s direction. The benefits of said “progress” never extended to me or other members of my community—not in terms of adequate jobs, housing, education or anything else that would offer us the opportunity to thrive.

On August 9, 2014, these tensions between the powerful and the disregarded boiled over when an 18-year-old black teenager was shot by a 28-year-old white police officer. I was in St. Louis at the time, celebrating my mother’s 70th birthday with families and friends. Our joy quickly turned to sorrow, frustration, and anger. We gathered around the television and watched as police officers, dressed for war, met protesters with batons, tear gas, and rubber bullets.

These events added to the sense of exclusion and disaffection that I had experienced during my years growing up in St. Louis—feelings that persisted until this September when I downloaded the 16-person Ferguson Commission report. Instead of burying the institutionalized racism and poverty my community has struggled with, the authors state an unequivocal truth: “We know that talking about race makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But make no mistake: this is about race.”

In painstaking fashion, the report details how multiple municipalities in the region use poor, black citizens as veritable cash machines, collecting fines and fees from them to fill the city coffers. The Commission adds to the findings of an Arch City Defenders report, which had revealed that one town, Bel Ridge—about the size of a square mile with a population of 2,700 people, 81 percent of whom are black and 42 percent in poverty—filed almost 8,000 cases in municipal court. Almost a quarter of the city’s revenues came from court fines and fees.

For me, reading the report evoked a memory going back some thirty years when I watched the police try to arrest my mother.

My father was out enjoying his morning routine, grabbing coffee at White Castle and reading the paper, when two police officers—one older and gruff, the other younger and visibly apprehensive—came to the door and announced that my mother was under arrest for amassing parking fines; fines that were all incurred in front of our house, mostly for alternate-side parking violations. Forking over cash for fines just didn’t rank as high as other needs like paying the mortgage and buying food.

Neither officer was expecting Angela Davis, but that’s what they got. My mother sat on the staircase in the foyer and said she wasn’t getting up. They threatened her and tried to pick her up, but she pulled away and yelled. Things escalated when the older police officer shouted at my grandmother who was slowed by a stroke and trying to calm the situation. The front door was open and a crowd gathered.

The older officer unbuttoned the holster to his service revolver and placed his hand on the grip. My mother said, “Well, it’s a good goddamned day to die.”

Thirty years later she tells me she has never been more scared—or more defiant—than at that moment. Like so many others who have had similar experiences—some of whom are included in the Ferguson report—her resistance was not rooted in hatred of the police. Her brother, her father, two of her uncles—they were all in law enforcement. This was about respect. My mother offered to pay the fine in person on Monday, but the officers wanted it their way.

Just as I thought the arrest was about to become terrifyingly violent, my father came home. I remember how he shifted from confusion to fear to anger.

Now that I am about the same age as my father was then, I realize he had felt what so many black men feel in situations like that: emasculation. My father, the Marine, the civil engineer, with no criminal past—the man who talked philosophy with friends and could handle himself around roughneck construction workers—was forced to navigate a path that a white man of the same socio-economic status would likely not encounter. They didn’t have that history of police harassment; black male subjugation in the face of a baton or gun; and the gut punch of knowing that the man behind the badge has total control over you.

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Thankfully, a higher-ranking police officer, who was black, arrived on the scene. He sorted it out and reprimanded the lead officer. The next day my parents paid the fine with a little help from a family member. If my mother had been arrested, the cost to my parents—bail, a lawyer, court fees, the fine itself—would have financially crippled us.

The Ferguson report demonstrates that my family’s experience was not unique, and that the truths laid bare in the document don’t just apply to Ferguson, the St. Louis area, or Missouri. In fact, the report is an indictment of a country that is breaking the backs and hopes of the poor and people of color.

But the report also offers sweeping reforms that would help us move beyond the current, unjust status quo—actions raging from police training and consolidating police departments, to court and sentencing reform, to increasing healthcare coverage for the poor and addressing hunger, to raising the minimum wage, ending predatory lending, and investing in quality job training for disconnected youth that leads to employment.

In recognizing the lived realities of African Americans—and offering reforms that speak to those experiences—the Ferguson report is a blueprint on how to tear down the racial wall that divides us. Now we need to respond with action, until young black people no longer have to leave repressive hometowns in search of opportunity as I did.

“In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important, groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.”

Police and prosecutors are the good guys in white hats.  Those accused of crimes are threatening and already presumed to be “offenders.”  And defense lawyers—the men and women who protect the rights of the accused—are rendered irrelevant.  We see this narrative dominant not only in our culture, but in our policy and politics today.

Even last week, President Obama ignored the role of public defenders in a panel he convened on criminal justice reform, a long-neglected issue I applaud him for tackling.  The panel included a police chief and a federal prosecutor but no defense attorney, much less a public defender. Like every set of recommendations introduced since this conversation began, the discussion failed to include public defenders as part of a broader reform strategy.

This devaluing of defense counsel is completely contradictory to our democratic ideals.  Our system recognizes counsel for the accused as essential if we are to achieve equal justice.  The Supreme Court said as much in Gideon v. Wainwright when it ruled that poor people accused of crimes must be provided counsel.  The Court recognized that without lawyers there can be no justice, for it is through counsel that all other rights are protected.

That decision was made in 1963, and we understood from experience that we could not always count on the judicial system to protect society’s most vulnerable members.  Poor people, and especially African Americans, had too often been treated abhorrently, and Gideon demanded that—through the right to counsel—there would be greater protections against such treatment in the realm of criminal justice.

Indeed, our nation came to understand the defense lawyer as heroic.  We rooted for lawyers like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960 and awarded an Oscar for the film adaptation the year of the Gideon decision. We understood the criminal justice arena as a civil rights battleground, and the defense lawyer as critical to challenging a system that is inclined to trample the rights of the poor if left unchecked.

But as a “tough on crime” mindset took hold of the public psyche over the past four decades, we forgot the importance of our constitutional obligation to protect the vulnerable.  Instead we have created a community of “others”—almost exclusively poor and non-white—which needs to be monitored, controlled, and isolated from the rest of us.  In our rush to punish, the right to counsel gets short shrift as we fail to provide adequate resources so that defense lawyers can serve all of their clients effectively.

Indeed, we have cheered law enforcement while demonizing the populations that are locked up and the advocates who speak for them.  In doing so we have fueled our generation’s greatest civil rights crisis—mass incarceration.   Of the 2.2 million people locked up in America, almost all are poor, and disproportionately of color.

And who represents the people who are being locked up? Public defenders, who serve roughly 80 percent of all of the accused. As a result of our under-investment in these vital public servants, many poor people are forced to rely on lawyers who may juggle 800 cases annually, or are so overwhelmed that they can only spend several minutes on any particular client. John Oliver brought national attention to this problem earlier this year. He highlighted how, for example, some New Orleans public defenders were limited to seven minutes per case, and their office was so under-resourced it had to resort to Kickstarter to raise needed funds.

If we want lasting criminal justice reform and a real end to mass incarceration, we must reverse this practice of ignoring the need for a strongly supported system of public defenders.

We can change laws designed to govern how police, prosecutors, and judges do their jobs, but if we do not adequately support public defenders so that they can point out when the rules are broken, violations will go undetected.

We can devise alternatives to incarceration, but if lawyers do not have the time and resources to unearth mental health issues, substance abuse problems, and other important life circumstances, judges will not have the information they need to ensure just outcomes.

The current national conversation offers us our best shot at comprehensive criminal justice reform since Gideon v. Wainwright.  If we truly care about justice and liberty for every American accused of a crime—regardless of income—then we need to stop treating this conversation as though it were an episode of Law & Order.

Public defenders—and how we as a nation support and invest in them—must be at the center of the reform debate.

For most returning citizens, release from a correctional facility doesn’t mark the end of their punishment. Individuals are commonly sent back into a community with only a few dollars, a bus ticket, and a few days’ worth of any needed medications. Many have no housing to return to—and living with relatives could put their families at risk of eviction due to draconian “one strike and you’re out” public housing policies. Finding a job is unlikely to happen overnight—or even within the first year of release—because of the great challenge of securing employment if one has a criminal record. And in many states, people convicted of felony drug offenses too often go hungry as they are barred for life from accessing the meager assistance that income and nutrition aid programs provide.

To make matters worse, many returning citizens face debts in the tens of thousands of dollars due to child support arrears. In many states, these payments accumulate while individuals are behind bars, even though they have little or no way to earn income. And in a growing nationwide trend, states and localities are closing budget shortfalls through tactics such as charging inmates “pay-to-stay” fees for incarceration, collection fees, and even fees for entering a payment plan to pay off their debts. With funding for public defenders falling drastically short, some courts are even charging public defender fees for exercising one’s constitutional right to counsel.

In addition to trapping returning citizens in poverty, these financial debts can be a path to re-incarceration for those who are unable to pay. These and other obstacles to successful reentry are a big reason why more than two-thirds of formerly incarcerated individuals are rearrested within three years of release, many for crimes of survival. For example, M.H.—homeless, pregnant, and hungry—was rearrested for stealing two plums and three candy bars while on probation for another low-level retail theft offense.

So, what does all of this have to do with civil legal aid? Even though civil legal aid attorneys do not represent defendants in criminal proceedings, they play a critical role in dismantling a system that fuels a vicious cycle of re-incarceration by continuing to punish people long after they have served their time.

For example, civil legal aid attorneys help formerly incarcerated individuals secure affordable child support orders and fight other unjust fines and fees, so that they are able to avoid modern-day debtor’s prison. They help people obtain the necessary documentation to replace lost identification—which is key to getting reestablished in society. Civil legal aid attorneys also assist in getting driver’s licenses restored, which can be crucial to getting and keeping a job.

When employers illegally exclude jobseekers with criminal records, civil legal aid can help individuals challenge hiring discrimination. And many civil legal aid attorneys also help people clear their criminal records which improves their chances of finding employment.

Unfortunately, funding for civil legal aid has long fallen far short of what is needed to meet demand. As a result, for every client served by legal aid, a second person in need of services is turned away. Overall, less than 20 percent of low-income Americans’ civil legal needs are being met—a phenomenon known as the “justice gap.”

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While sentencing and prison reforms are key aspects of building a fair and equitable criminal justice system, these reforms are not enough. Reversing the nation’s decades-long trend of mass incarceration will also require removing unnecessary barriers to employment, housing, education, and more. This means we must ensure access to the critical re-entry services that civil legal aid provides.

Earlier this year, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed an appropriations bill that—while far from sufficient to meet demand—would boost legal services funding for FY 2016 by $10 million. Meanwhile, House appropriators have called for slashing legal services funding by $75 million—a staggering 20 percent below the current funding levels. While Congress has passed a stopgap measure to keep the government funded until mid-December, as it continues to debate the budget it should ensure that any proposal includes adequate funding for civil legal aid.  Additionally, Congress should take swift action to reauthorize and boost funding for the bipartisan Second Chance Act. This legislation allows the Department of Justice to award federal grants to government agencies and nonprofit organizations—including civil legal aid programs—that provide services to support re-entry.

If the criminal justice reform legislation introduced this fall is enacted, many currently incarcerated individuals will have an opportunity to petition for reduced sentences or early release. Civil legal aid lawyers will be important partners in helping these individuals transition back into our communities and get back on their feet. Neglecting the back end of mass incarceration—including by failing to adequately invest in civil legal aid—is a recipe for ensuring that most people will end up behind bars again, and that many of the gains we see from criminal justice reform will be short-lived.

I have been in prison twice. The first time, I was 60 years old, and I was convicted on three felony counts of tax evasion and one count of mail fraud. I was released when my case was overturned as two of the tax charges were deemed legally insufficient based upon the evidence presented by the government. I then went to prison a second time at age 63 when one of the tax evasion charges was retried. Prior to both trials, I was offered plea bargains with no jail time, but I was innocent so I fought the charges.

Prior to my arrest, I worked for decades. I had a home, family, extended family, and friends. And while I was awaiting trial—a period that lasted 12 years—my father was my greatest supporter. He wanted me to be close to family so he offered me an apartment in New Jersey. He supported me financially by covering my health insurance, electric bills, phone, and car payments. But after I moved there, he passed away unexpectedly.

After my father died, I had my apartment but no money. I lost my attorney. I was hungry and would go to Sam’s Club to eat their samples for dinner. And, after I was convicted and went to prison, my apartment was rented out. I had lived there for more than ten years while I awaited trial following my arrest.

Incarceration

After I lost my first trial, I was sent to a federal prison camp that was difficult for an older person. The prison camp was divided into an upper compound, which contained the housing units, health center, library, chapel, and recreation buildings; and a lower compound, which consisted of the dining hall, laundry, education center, and commissary. The return trip from the lower compound to the housing unit was over a mile and up a steep hill. I had balance problems—on rainy or snowy days I walked slowly because I feared falling. I had to stop every ten feet or so to catch my breath. The weather—severe heat in the summer and arctic cold in the winter—the terrain, and the physically tough environment of the prison were hard for older women. The stress of surviving was added pressure.

The second time I lost at trial I was sent to a higher security prison in Florida. One Physician’s Assistant (PA) there was notorious for telling every woman he examined that aches and pains were due to fat. He told me the same thing he told the others, “You are fat. You need to walk on the track and drink water.” Once, one Latina woman went to him complaining of severe stomach pains. He gave her the fat speech and several weeks later she died when her gallbladder burst. When I heard this story, I wrote about it. I sent the story via email for a friend to post on my website. Correctional officers read our emails and when they saw an officer was mentioned, I was arrested, handcuffed, and taken to solitary—the Segregated Housing Unit (SHU). The officers told me I was being punished for writing about an officer.

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I was held in solitary for seven weeks. Immediately I started suffering migraines, which were soon joined by vertigo and high blood pressure. I requested medical attention but was denied. The freezing temperatures added to my physical suffering; I asked for and did not receive an extra blanket.

I also repeatedly asked the prison staff to check my blood pressure—my family had a history of heart disease. Two weeks went by before they checked it. It was 200 over 100—stroke territory. I asked the PA, “Are you going to take me to the hospital to be checked?” No, he said, and I knew my life was in jeopardy. The migraines, vertigo and high blood pressure conditions are still a problem today, and I believe the stress—the physical and mental challenge of being in solitary—caused me permanent damage.

Finally, at an age when most of my friends were preparing for retirement, I was released from the higher-security prison as a homeless, financially broke, convicted, and aging woman. I had nothing to call my own and my legal bills had consumed a lifetime of savings. I was full of fear and anxiety. I came home an orphan with a living family.

Reentry

After I arrived back in New York, I had to report to a residential reentry center (RRC aka a halfway house). Under current law, RRC placements can last up to one year. However, I was permitted to stay only six weeks—a very short amount of time for reentry, especially given that I was 63, homeless, and penniless.

On top of that, this halfway house’s rules were borderline Kafkaesque. Phones were prohibited within the house. There was no Internet. Permission to leave the house was limited and often unattainable. If you managed to get permission to go somewhere that had a computer, you could apply for a job online. However, since there was no way for an employer to call you, the effort was futile. Even if you got an email response, you might not get permission to go to the job site for an interview.

Because I couldn’t demonstrate proof of employment on an application for housing or pass a background check, the only choice I had after the halfway house was a homeless shelter, aka the last place I wanted to live. And so, I arranged to join a three-quarter house, which are unlicensed facilities that rent shared rooms to people leaving mental hospitals, drug treatment programs, and prisons or jails. It’s a profitable business. This one was run by a purported feminist who claimed to care about the women she was housing.

It was a frightening sight. Eleven women were crowded into a few rooms. One working bathroom was available. I lived in a space half the size of my prison cell. My roommate and I could not stand in the room at the same time. One of us had to stay on the bed for the other to get her clothes.

I worked a $9.00 an hour job at Old Navy for the Christmas season. Standing on my feet seven hours a day was painful, and I couldn’t straighten out my back and needed to sleep to endure the next full day of work. And, although I was assigned evening hours, the house curfew was at 11:00. Women who didn’t get home on time found their belongings in garbage bags on the street. The so-called-feminist found it easy to throw women out, and I had to call her when I arrived at the house from work each night to get back in after hours.

My struggles to obtain housing in New York City haven’t ended as I don’t have credit or a job. In one telling instance, I had three in-person interviews in one week with an agency whose work focused on the formerly incarcerated. Although I was hired, the job offer was retracted only two days later. I was—and I still am—stunned by the lack of interest in employing formerly incarcerated returning citizens.

In short, I’m writing this story because I believe in coming out as a convicted felon. I believe in disclosing my history to employers, friends, and practically everyone. And as there are as many as 100 million Americans with a criminal record, if everyone “came out as a criminal,” most people would know someone. We would see increased momentum for reform on jobs, housing, and criminal justice reform more broadly. And we could build an elder justice movement that works for alternatives to incarceration for the elderly; the release of incarcerated elders; and responsible reentry specifically focused on the needs of the elderly who are returning home.

But right now I have no job and no housing. I am 64 years old and fearful I will end up in a shelter. I have fought every day to jumpstart my life, but I feel I am losing the battle.

Editor’s Note: The Federal Bureau of Prisons did not respond to TalkPoverty’s request for comment at the time of publication.

John, Mary, and Lawrence* don’t have to imagine it. All three were shocked and scared when they received notices from the Philadelphia courts threatening arrest, driver’s license suspension, and referrals to collections for alleged court debts of tens of thousands of dollars. John received a notice threatening arrest because he supposedly owed $10,000 to the courts. Mary received threatening phone calls from a collection agency—and a notice that her public assistance would be cut off—if she didn’t pay an alleged debt of more than $40,000. Lawrence was told he owed more than $150,000.

Seeking help from Community Legal Services of Philadelphia (CLS) where I am an attorney, John asked: “I was never convicted of anything—how can I owe any money, let alone thousands of dollars?”

Thus began a 4-year advocacy campaign by CLS and many allies to stop the Philadelphia courts from harassing the city’s poorest residents.

In the fall of 2010, the Philadelphia courts undertook an effort to collect an estimated $1.5 billion in “criminal debt,” including forfeited bail, supervision fees, restitution, and fines and costs going back to the 1970s. No effort had ever been made to collect these monies before.

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Without investigating whether the debts were accurate, and relying solely on an error-ridden computer database, the courts sent notices in 2011 to more than 320,000 Philadelphians, or roughly 1 in 5 of the city’s residents. This effort made about as much sense as trying to get blood from a stone: by the court’s own estimation, at least 70 percent of the individuals being chased for old debts had no means to pay, since they were very low-income, unemployed, elderly or disabled.

The lion’s share of the alleged debts stemmed from forfeited bail judgments—penalties that are automatically assessed when defendants fail to show up for a court date. (It didn’t matter if an individual had a good reason for missing court, returned to court soon after, or had a case that resulted in a non-conviction—sizable judgments were assessed despite such circumstances.) The cost of missing a single court date ran as high as $100,000.

Because the Philadelphia courts had never previously taken action to collect these assessments, most individuals had no knowledge of owing any money. Indeed upon completing probation, many people were told by probation officers that their debts had been paid. Yet decades later, scores of low-income Philadelphians suddenly received phone calls or letters that threatened substantial collection fees—on top of what was allegedly owed—unless payments were made promptly. Hundreds of individuals sought legal help from CLS.

In many of these cases, individuals faced large bail forfeitures despite having missed court for reasons like hospitalization or being in prison. Court files were frequently missing or lacking any documentation to substantiate the alleged debts; some files even reflected that the debts were incorrect. Most CLS clients were able to get their judgments reduced or eliminated altogether—more than $1 million in bail judgments were eliminated for our impoverished clients.

In some cases, however, the court’s rulings still left people with thousands of dollars of debt. CLS appealed, arguing that the Philadelphia courts’ debt collection practices violated the law governing the forfeiture of bail.  While we were not successful in the appellate courts, our litigation did bring further attention to these unjust collection practices.

Our work on this issue also introduced us to Philadelphians who became the faces and leaders of our campaign to reform the collection process and to implement due process standards. We also built a dynamic coalition of advocates and other stakeholders, including the ACLU of Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Defender Association, local social service providers, and others who worked directly with the communities that were being chased for these debts. We met with representatives of the Philadelphia courts, the Mayor, and other state and city policymakers, advocating not only against an unjust policy of trying to make the poorest residents of the city bear the burden of funding the financially strapped courts, but also that these collection efforts were penny-wise and pound-foolish—it cost more to fund this approach than the city could ever hope to recoup from its lowest-income residents.

Additionally, CLS engaged in a large public education campaign to bring local, national, and even international attention to this issue. We also helped University of Pennsylvania law students produce a documentary film that was influential in putting a face on the negative consequences of the courts’ practices.

On September 30, 2014, the city and the courts finally decided that bail judgments entered prior to March 4, 2010 would no longer be collected, effectively writing off nearly four decades of alleged debts. Upon learning of the decision, one CLS client broke down, relieved, saying, “I just wanted to move on with my life.”

Indeed hundreds of thousands of low-income Philadelphians can now move forward with their lives, including many who are now eligible for expungement of their criminal records and pardons, neither of which was available to anyone owing criminal debt.

Unfortunately, Philadelphia’s criminal debt collection efforts are not unique. In a growing nationwide trend, states and localities desperate to close budget gaps have increasingly turned to fines and fees to fund their law enforcement and court systems. Ferguson, Missouri offers perhaps the most widely noted example, with the city relying on municipal court fines to make up 20 percent of its budget in 2013.

As the conversation about criminal justice reform continues in states across the country, reform of counterproductive state and local criminal debt policies—and the modern day debtors’ prisons they can create—is an essential piece of the puzzle.

*These names have been changed to protect the identities of the individuals.

Author’s note: If you want to start a campaign to end unjust court collection efforts in your community, contact Suzanne Young at SYoung@clsphila.org, or 215-981-3700.

I’m one of those Americans who committed a crime and have a criminal conviction. At one point, I was just like the two-thirds of people who are released from prison or jail only to commit a crime again, be rearrested and convicted.

I know some people may say that I deserve to live in poverty because of my mistakes. But they don’t know my story. They don’t know that I was born to an abusive father and a mother with severe mental illness; or that I was given narcotics as a young child by a relative who was supposed to care for me, but instead molested me and sold my pictures through a child pornography ring. They don’t know that by the time I was 12, I was on the streets, on my way to a life of crime and addiction, and—with no adult to care for me or advocate for me—I was in and out of the juvenile justice system, never receiving the mental health care I needed.

Truth is, I don’t care if people know these things about me or not, because I love myself now and that is what matters. But I do care that people have another chance after their arrest or conviction.

I’m on the right track now, doing right by myself, my god, my family and my community. One of the ways I’m giving back to my community is by working to create an economy that includes me and others who have served our time and are following the rules of probation or parole.  A study released by the Vera Institute of Justice found that states across the country are giving people like me a second chance not just because it is the right thing to do, but because it will reduce crime and prison costs by preventing recidivism.

One obstacle to opportunity that many states are addressing is the lifetime ban on receiving public benefits and job assistance through Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for people who have a prior drug-related felony conviction. Research has shown that this policy increases recidivism and crime and is also harmful to children as well as adults who are trying to start over.  In addition to causing hunger and hardship, it can also prevent people from getting the mental health or substance abuse treatment they need, as many of these programs rely on public assistance funding to pay individuals’ room and board. Repeal of this harmful policy has been supported by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and is included in the REDEEM Act, bipartisan legislation co-sponsored by U.S. Senators Cory Booker and Rand Paul.

Federal law already allows states to waive or modify the ban, and many have done so. For example, this April, California lifted the lifetime ban on TANF and SNAP so that people with a felony drug conviction who are complying with their probation or parole are now eligible for nutrition assistance, income support, and job training. Approximately 6,000 families in the state now experience hunger less often, have access to job training and employment services, and their children are no longer denied child care. For me, the biggest change is the child care help that I am able to receive for the first time. After my release and getting sober, it was hard to build a new life with my son when he was denied childcare because of my conviction. Not only was it hard for me to find work—he missed out on the great opportunities offered through childcare programs.

In June, Texas modified its lifetime ban so that people with a felony drug conviction are now eligible for SNAP (although a parole violation would lead to a “two-year disqualification”, and a second felony drug conviction would result in a lifetime ban).  Last year, Missourians took similar action so that people with felony drug convictions are able to receive nutrition assistance while participating in substance abuse treatment, as long as they are following the rules of probation or parole.  While fourteen states including California have opted out of the lifetime ban entirely, two-thirds of states continue to enforce the ban—or a modified version of it, as in Texas and Missouri.

In my opinion, no one should go hungry for a crime that they have served time for, especially if they are following the rules now. I’ve gone hungry and it is an experience no human should have to go through—especially not in America, since we have the resources to prevent hunger. Being hungry also doesn’t help people who have had an addiction stay straight, or stay away from crime.

This is why I have worked with a whole bunch of people and organizations over the past couple of years to end this unfair and unsafe lifetime ban on assistance. It isn’t easy telling my story to others, but it has made a difference. Sometimes I forget how messed up my childhood was and how far I’ve come, but I will never forget this harmful policy, how it made me feel, and how it made me feel to end it.

Tracey: And I’m Tracey Ross.

Rebecca: So, Tracey, before we dive into what today’s episode is gonna be about, I thought we should do the number of the week.

Tracey: All right, let’s do it.

Rebecca: Ready?

Tracey: I’m ready. I’m burning up.

Rebecca: She’s ready! She’s so ready! You are so ready! All right.

Tracey: Give it to me.

Rebecca: The number of the week is… 25.

Tracey: Okay. So, since I was involved in the planning of this episode-

Rebecca: I didn’t really hide the ball there, did I?

Tracey: No. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that it’s the number of years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed.

Rebecca: Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner. Yes, indeed. It is the 25^th anniversary of the ADA. It happened just this past weekend. And actually we’ve been celebrating all week long over at TalkPoverty.org with what we’ve been calling talkpoverty and disability week, because the intersection of poverty and disability is all too rarely discussed.

Tracey: We’ve got some great pieces, some personal testimonies, some work by advocates in the field that are working closely on this issue, so please check out the pieces they’re fantastic. They’re on TalkPoverty.org.

Rebecca: Greg will really appreciate what a solid plug we’ve just put in.

Tracey: You’re welcome, Greg.

Rebecca: But we also have a fabulous lineup on today’s show – and, in fact, many of the folks who have been contributors to TalkPoverty and Disability Week are actually gonna be guests on our show today. So we-

Tracey: I’m excited. I know! I was like, “wow!”

Rebecca: I’m excited too. I should have paused for excitement there.

Tracey: So who do we have?

Rebecca: We have Alice Wong, she’s the founder of the Disability Visibility Project, which is a partnership with StoryCorps.

Tracey: We also have Michael Morris, executive director of the National Disability Institute.

Rebecca: Courtesy of the Vera Institute, we will also be featuring some remarks from attorney and civil rights activist T.L. Lewis. Also the founder of HEARD, an important organization that does advocacy on behalf of deaf individuals. But first we’re joined by Talley Wells, Director of the Disability Integration Project at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society.

Tracey: You’re listening to TalkPoverty radio. I’m Tracey Ross. I’m joined by Talley Wells, Director of the Disability Integration Project at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. Thank you for joining the program.

Talley: Thank you for having me. It’s very exciting to be here. And happy anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Tracey: Yes, and happy 25^th anniversary back to you. And we’re excited to be commemorating this anniversary on today’s show. So I want to start out by asking, what is the significance of the ADA in the work that you do?

Talley: The ADA is at the heart of the work that I do. My work is based on the United States Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision. Olmstead was decided in 1989; it is the most important civil rights decision for people with disabilities. It’s often called the Brown v. Board of Education decision for people with disabilities, because it is a decision that is transforming our country’s infrastructure for people with disabilities from a system that was all about institutionalizing people – separating them from society – especially here in Georgia, where we had thousands and thousands of people in institutions – and instead, providing them the accommodations and supports so they can live full and meaningful lives in the community, so they can work and live in their own homes, and be as much a part of the community as every other person. So the ADA is at the heart of the work I do, and the reality is just because the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision eight years after the ADA was passed and told the country that it needed to provide supports and services for the community, that’s still not happening. And so my work is about really realizing the promise of this extraordinary Supreme Court decision, and this extraordinary Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Tracey: And you wrote this week for TalkPoverty.org about these very issues – the ADA and the Olmstead case. And you say that people are still segregated into institutions and excluded from participating in society. In what ways have you seen this occurring?

Talley: Well, just think about it. And, I’m sure, in the neighborhood that you are in – and every community across this nation – we have nursing facilities. And nursing facilities are basically institutions that have a lot of people who have disabilities who could be living in the community if we had a much more robust system of homecare and support, so that people don’t actually have to go into a nursing facility – and that’s just one example. In Georgia, we have institutions that were created in 1842, and still exist today – where people with developmental disabilities and people with mental illness are confined, many times for years and years. Now that’s changing in Georgia because we’ve been at sort of the forefront of Olmstead because of the Supreme Court case, and because the Justice Department came back in 2007 through to the present, and has really sort of enforced Olmstead here. But we’ve had a long way to go, and it’s systems that exist not only here but throughout the country. I was recently in New Jersey, where there are thousands of people who are still in institutions.

Tracey: And we’re using, you know, ADA and Olmstead back and forth. Can you actually just explain for our listeners who might not be familiar with the law and with the case, how these relate to one another?

Talley: I would love to. So the ADA – what most people are familiar with – the Americans with Disabilities Act – are – is the fact that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires either a reasonable accommodation or a reasonable modification. And basically what the ADA says is that if someone wants to work in a job, then the employers should provide some sort of modification or accommodation so they can get equal rights to that job as other people. It’s also thought of with respect to architecture and infrastructure so that if a wheelchair ramp would enable someone to get inside a courthouse, or get inside a school, or get inside their home or workforce. And that’s sort of what people think of with the ADA and the reasonable accommodation is at the heart of the Olmstead case. If we step back, and look at when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, Congress issued a number of findings. And in those historical findings, which Congress made at the very beginning of the Act, Congress said in this country, people with disabilities had historically enough to that time of the Act, in 1990, been discriminated against and segregated. And one of the ways that they had been discriminated against and segregated was by institutionalizing them. Essentially, if you institutionalize someone, you are separating them from everyone else. You are also making it very difficult for them to go to the store, for them to have a job, for them to be part of the day to day life that everyone else is a part of. And so, when Congress made those findings, they then said that people with disabilities must be included as long there is a reasonable accommodation. And “reasonable” is a word that’s used throughout the law, and most people think of it with respect to “reasonable doubt,” but pretty much – most of the law has some sort of reasonableness component and that is, essentially: “what would an objective person think is reasonable?” And so, whatever that is, then you apply it with the combination, so: how can you accommodate someone to include them? And when the Olmstead case was brought on behalf of two women, Lois Curtis and Elaine Wilson, who were here – just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. And they had repeatedly been held in Georgia Regional Hospital in Atlanta, which is our psychiatric hospital locally. And their doctors said they were perfectly capable of living in the community, but they needed support. And the problem was Georgia only provided those supports in the institutions. So if they were gonna get the supports they needed, they had to essentially be segregated from society. So the argument that happened in the Olmstead case was a simple “reasonable accommodation” argument – that it would be a reasonable accommodation for the state of Georgia to enable them to live in the community, and provide the supports they’re providing to them – just not in the institution, but in the community. And with that simple statement by the United States Supreme Court, the walls of segregation that have separated so many people with disabilities not only here in Atlanta – but in every city, every state in this country – have begun to come down.

Tracey: And yet, without enforcement the ADA and what Olmstead provided would be a theoretical framework. So, what is the role of an organization such as yours in ensuring that these rights and protections are actually experienced by people with disabilities?

Talley: That’s been one of the great learning experiences for me in this work. I – go to law school, and you see these Supreme Court decisions, and you learn all about them, and you sort of think that that – that will change things. But if you really spend your time looking at it, and remember what happened with Brown v. Board of Education, just because you have the Supreme Court say something, doesn’t mean that a state’s actually gonna do what the Court said. Going back to Brown v. Board of Education, and Olmstead is very much the same thing. You had the states fighting all the way up to the Supreme Court, and then the Supreme Court turns around and says “State, you have to do it.” And so the state that has fought it all the way up to the highest court in the land, now has the obligation to carry it out – and so are they actually going to do what the Court has said when they’ve been fighting it all along? What we saw, of course, with school integration was “no,” that the states simply were not going to carry it out, and that the courts had to get more and more involved. And with disabilities we had sort of the same experience. In 1999, we had the decision; the state of Georgia decided to do a lot of committees. They basically created a blue ribbon commission, they created a Governor’s commission, to look at Olmstead. They had the legislature do some findings. They did a lot of planning, but very little implementation, of how the state was gonna actually provide the reasonable accommodation – not just to Lois and Elanie, who were the two plaintiffs, but to all people with disabilities who were confined in institutions. And then what really became the impetus for change in this state was that we were involved in the last month of cases and got The Atlanta Journal Constitution involved, which is our newspaper here, and they did a huge expose on all of the problems inside of the hospital. They found over 100 people who, as they put it, “would have lived but for the fact that they were in the hospital,” and who died in the hospital. And there were all sorts of incidences of abuse and neglect. So while we were finding these cases – and the role of our organization as a legal services organization and the role also of protection advocacy organization is to represent individuals. But we needed additional help, and the newspaper article brought the United States Justice Department, and ultimately resulted in a settlement in 2010 where Georgia now not only had to serve Lois and Elaine but this settlement was a statewide settlement that Georgia was finally gonna close these hospitals that have been around since 1842 – not only close them, but provide the supports and services to the community for individuals throughout our state. And this settlement that happened here in Georgia – similar settlements are happening across the country, because the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has now made Olmstead one of its number one priorities. And if you go on the Justice Department’s Olmstead website, you can see cases are happening in pretty much every state in the land to ensure that everyone with a disability doesn’t have to live in an institution, but can live full and meaningful lives in the community.

Tracey: And I really appreciate you drawing some of the comparisons between the Olmstead case and Brown v Board and something we’ve talked about a few times on the show is the need for other social justice movements to include a disability lens. So whether it’s, um, you know a racial justice cause or LGBT rights there are obviously in all of these social movements people who experience disability. How do think that other movements can do a better job of incorporating the disability lens?

Talley Wells: There’s a woman named Kate Gainer who lives here in Atlanta and she was part of the civil rights movement for African Americans and people of color. She says that when the laws changed, and society changed, she was able – she had the right to get in the front of the bus but it wasn’t until much later, and the push from the disability rights movement that she was able to actually get on the bus because she uses a wheelchair. Every single group- socio-economic, ethnic, racial, age- has people with disabilities, and they are vibrant parts of that community. Yet many times they’re still excluded. I had a friend come and meet with us for, um, a gathering who is a disability rights advocate and uses a wheelchair. And we realized that in this group of fairly progressive people, twenty people, she could not go to a single one of those peoples house because she could not get into their house. That’s what it means to be excluded, to not go over to your friends’ houses, to not be able to get into the workforce. So, and another favorite example I have is there is a museum called the Disability Right Museum Right Museum on Wheels that has been part of this extraordinary celebration of the American’s with Disabilities Act that is traveling across this country to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary. And in that museum there is a letter from President George H.W. Bush who signed the Americans with Disabilities Act and he said that he was extremely proud, that is one of the most important things he did in his administration but it really came to his understanding of how important this was, and what it meant to have simple things like curb cut when he became someone who uses a wheelchair. And so that’s something he wrote in March of this year and it shows that President Bush, I’m sure, never thought that he would be a person with a disability. But it can happen to any of us. There are people with disabilities that have been President, that are part of every movement and it is so integral to include the disability rights movement. I enjoyed watching the celebration of the civil rights movement, at the LBJ, the Lyndon Baines Johnson, anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and the disability rights community did a great job of talking to the LBJ library about making sure that they included people with disability. And that wasn’t necessarily the way the program was going to be at first, but they changed it because the disability rights community stood up and made it clear that that’s absolutely a part of the civil rights movement.

Tracey: And one way that you’re disseminating more information about disability rights and getting resources to advocates is through your new website, Olmsteadrights.org. Can you tell me what prompted the creation of this site and what resources does it provide?

Talley: I’m so proud that you have brought this up, because we are so proud of Olmsteadrights.org. OlmsteadRights the impetus for the creation of this was that we have this amazing transformation that’s happening throughout the country, changing from a a nineteenth century system of segregation and institutionalization to a twenty-first century system that is not even a system – it’s an understanding that people with disabilities don’t have to be in institutions they can live full and meaningful lives in the community. Of course most people with disabilities don’t live in institutions, but there are so many of them that do and that even though this whole transformation is happening, so few people know about it. So we decided to do three things: We wanted to tell the story of people with disabilities who had been in nursing homes, who had been in institutions for developmental disabilities, who are now living full and meaningful lives in the community. We also wanted to tell the stories of people who were able to avoid going into the institutions. So we have lots and lots of stories, one of my favorite stories is my former client, Harold Anderson, who is now my boss because he’s on the board here at, at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. We advocated for him, we had a mediation set up in the nursing home where he had been living, he had lived for I think seven years in various nursing homes, and we got him out, he’s now not doing all sorts of things in Atlanta including being on the executive committee of our board. So we wanted to tell stories like Harold’s- of real people- and we also wanted to ensure that self-advocates, people with disabilities, families of people with disabilities could advocates for themselves based on Olmstead. And third we wanted to provide legal tools and so we have a lot of legal tools, legal pleadings, legal outline, for lawyers so they can do Olmstead cases, and our focus is legal services organizations, protection and advocacy organizations, that do this work every single day. But it’s also for lawyers across the country to make sure that anyone who is either at risk of going into an institution or who is in an institution can live in the community. So I hope everyone will come to Olmsteadrights.org, the other thing we have in it is a history videos, we have the oral argument from the Supreme Court case, we’ve got a lot of resources so people can really come to understand the Olmstead case and how it’s transforming the country but how much further we have to go.

Tracey: Our guest is Talley Wells, director of the Disability Integration Project at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, thank you for joining us.

Talley: Thank you.

Rebecca: Next up, we’re gonna play some remarks for a recent event hosted by the Vera Institute, on the intersection of criminal justice and disability. And specifically, we’re gonna play some remarks from TL Lewis, the founder of an organization called HEARD, Helping Educate to Advance the Rights of the Deaf.

TL: I begin every discussion that I give, that I present, by centering the space, and that means uplifting the names of people who are no longer with us, making sure that we all recognize that we’re not talking about numbers, we’re not talking about statistics, but what we’re talking about are human lives. So I will begin today, like I begin every other day, not with scanning the building upon which we all sit, or stand. Tanesha Anderson, Freddie Gray, Anthony Hill, Ezell Ford – these are African American people with disabilities whose lives were cut short by law enforcement. News media and advocates alike erase parts of their identities; they often mention that they are black people who have been murdered by police officers, but what they don’t often mention is that these are people with multiple marginalized identities, and those marginalized identities all together are what led to their untimely murders. Their lives mattered. Their black lives mattered. Their disabled black lives mattered. And that’s important for us to be able to state in this space. Today, I want to propose to you all something that some people might call lofty, others might call revolutionary- others might say it’s impossible. But before I begin, I want to remind you that those same words were used with advocates like the Honorable Senator Harkin as related to the ADA 25, 30 years ago when it was conceived of. So I want you all to dream with me for a while. Let’s explore what’s possible, and not worry about what exists now. Let’s think outside of the box, outside of the realm. So that’s what I’m challenging us to do today. So stay with me. So here’s what I propose: I’m proposing an end to police brutality and mass incarceration by engaging in intersectional disability justice advocacy that – because of its historic and present work related to deinstitutionalization and creative community-based solutions – is already steeped in creative – creative and innovative, transformative deinstitutionalization policies and practices. And at its core, that’s what mass incarceration is – it is institutionalization, and it’s important to name that as well. So here are the statistics and information that provide a framework for my proposal. I’m just gonna run down some brief statistics that are available online. Children with disabilities are three times more likely to be placed in foster care than those without disabilities. Children with disabilities are four times more likely to be living in poverty than those without disabilities. 65% of boys and 75% of girls in juvenile detention have mental illnesses. Children with disabilities are 50% more likely to drop out of school than those without disabilities. Black children represent 18% of the preschool enrollment population but 48% of those preschoolers – preschoolers, yes – were receiving more than one out of school suspension. The larger question, of course, is why are we suspending preschoolers, but the second is, okay let’s talk about racial disparity and disability disparity in those – in those numbers. Children with disabilities enter the juvenile system at 5 to 6 times the rate of youth who do not have disabilities. Up to 85% of children in juvenile detention have at least one disability – and of that 85%, only 30-some-odd percent of them are receiving access to services in their schools pursuant to IDDA which Dara mentioned earlier. 60% unemployment rate which was mentioned by the Honorable retired Senator, and disproportionately underemployed or not employed within the deaf and disabled communities. So, those are the kind of key statistics that should paint the- the- the broad strokes and these last three are super critical, so stay with me. The largest mental health providers in the nation are jails – Cook County in Chicago; Riker’s Island in New York; and LA county jails. Blacks and Latinos make up 30% of the US population, 60% of the incarcerated population, and now 20% of our population here in the United States, of course, has disabilities. We represent 20% of the population that is in the United States. We represent – studies have shown – 60-80% of those who are incarcerated in jails and prisons across the nation. So at the end of the day what that means is people with disabilities are the largest minority population in jails and prisons. Period. If ever there was a crisis of institutionalization with people with disabilities, that crisis is now. It’s impossible to address the issues of mass incarceration without addressing it with a disability and deaf justice lens.

While many have begun the important discussions surrounding the harms visited upon so many communities of color and different communities, religious affilitations and so on and so forth – our native nations. There’s been, you know, a very – a vast chasm of discussion about disability. And there is absolutely right – those discussions that do center on disability and criminal justice tend to focus on very specific portion of people with disabilities to the detriment of other disability communities which is highly problematic. (26:13) For example, I’m gonna skip some stuff because I can come back to it later for example people who are deaf, diabetic, epileptic, you mentioned these things, have actually been murdered by police officers, because people don’t have intellectual disabilities, don’t have mental health conditions, are not experiencing crises, but have physical conditions that render them, because the police officers are not utilizing the ADA, mitigating, or taking time to stop before they resort to lethal violence against our community members, literally are being murdered because they have a disability, so we have to state in this space, and our jails and prisons are literally overflowing with people with disabilities, out in California and many other states. We’ve had judges actually ruling we need to de-incarcerate specific prisons because they are literally overflowing with folks, so that’s kind of the large lay of the land and despite this long standing federal disability rights laws that we all know of and love and cherish- the ADA, the rehabilitation act- which so many people before us spent so much of their lives invested- their hearts, invested- in creating these laws, what we have to acknowledge is that laws alone do not create, we cannot legislate social, cultural, and organizational and agency change. We have to take further action, and that’s kind of where we are today, and I’ll give you some “for instances” right? So, for instance, although it’s rarely discussed deaf people and people with disabilities are often wrongfully convicted because of lack of access to police officers, attorneys in the courts, then once they’re institutionalized they’re physically and sexually assaulted and subjected to depressing isolation and other forms of exploitation. I’ve worked for a decade on more than fifteen death wrongful conviction cases. The majority of these cases have uncanny similarities, in at least two respects- there are many others but I’ll name two- private police departments fail to provide reasonable accommodations in terms of communication. Detectives, attorneys, and judges alike- the entire system is guilty. Let’s be clear. We’re not blaming police, we’re not blaming just- the entire system is ableist and audist and we need to name that in this case. Ableism is discrimination based on your ability; audism is discrimination based on your ability to speak or hear, um, as opposed to sign and listen with your eyes or listen with your hands if you’re a tactile sign language user. We can’t prioritize certain kinds of abilities over other abilities and that’s really important also to name. Similarly, deaf, deaf blind, deaf disabled, and hard of hearing prisoners customarily experience discrimination and terrible abuse in our prisons, punished for failure to obey commands that they can’t hear, using sign language to communicate, for failure to follow rules that were never conveyed, for missing counts that they were never aware of, for filing grievances about these persistent inequities, they’re denied interpreter services, deprived of access to medical and mental health care services in the prisons, denied access to education and reentry programs, cut off from access to the most basic human interaction, all of this coupled with inaccessible telephone systems in the prisons, which I will get to momentarily. I recently submitted, testimony to the Senate, they had us- their second ever hearing on solitary confinement and I shared with the Senate and the world- hopefully folks are actually reading our testimony- that the solitary- the use of solitary confinement against people who are deaf and people with physically disabilities is- let’s be clear- solitary confinement is torture for anyone, period. It should not be used against anyone in any elongated way and I would argue it shouldn’t be used at all but that’s a whole other revolutionary idea that’s not the point of discussion today. But what we do know is that we have deaf people who within weeks, sometimes hours and often in months, literally try to kill themselves as a result of the deprivation that happens, while they are experiencing solitary confinement at the hands of our government. That is in our name. We are responsible for that. There’s a large discussion about solitary and people with mental health. Where’s the discussion about solitary and people with other disabilities? And our children, we- the ACLU did a wonderful job of recently bringing, shedding light on the issue of putting our babies in boxes in solitary confinement and what that does to them mentally and otherwise but there is not a discussion about physical disabilities and solitary confinement. We should be fighting for all of us at once, not one thing at a time, not only mental health but not deaf. There is no reason a deaf person or any person with any other disability, which is the vast majority of our prison population, should be in solitary confinement. And that’s what we need to be saying as advocates, not “let’s not put people with mental illness in pri-, in solitary.” So, I’m gonna hold on that because I’ve got more I wanna share, alright. Finally, despite the existence of these wonderful laws which we all support and uphold, will soon we, my organization -an all-volunteer non-profit organization- will soon be on our fourth year of advocacy just to get telephones for people who have communication disabilities in prisons across the nation. As of last month, eight prisons across this nation had videophones. Eight. That means for decades countless deaf people, deaf, deaf blind, deaf disabled, hard of hearing, have had no access to their loved ones, their babies, their families, their attorneys. And we know that people who are deaf actually experience the least access to the justice system in the first instance, so why don’t we make sure that they can at least communicate effectively once they’re in the jails or prisons across the nation? This is the kind of advocacy we need to see from folks. So right now we’ve got criminal justice reform and prison advocates who are really finding ways to drastically decrease mass incarceration. They’re proposing things like capping sentences, legalizing certain drugs, etc., etc., alternative courts, what I’m proposing, is that this, the situation of mass incarceration is, has grown way too large and that those things are not going to work; we will still end up, even if we were to release all of those people in these proposals, with mass incarceration levels above what we had in the 1980s. So what I would like us to do is to think about a justice system that- what would it look if we applied disability justice principles, right? And so here’s my alliteration of the day, and this is what you should take home with you. Our justice system could decriminalize disability, deescalate law enforcement situations for people in crisis, divert all people with disabilities away from jails and prisons, demand disaggregated data collection on disability in jails and prisons, deinstitutionalize those of us who are presently trapped in the clutch of the system because society has failed for so many decades to provide meaningful support and accommodations for people with disabilities in the first place. Many people who are presently incarcerated, um, are incarcerated now for behaviors that forty years ago would have landed them in a psychiatric facility. That’s important to state. We have to start re-envisioning and reimagining criminal justice. Criminal, what is criminal? Right, because criminality is a social construct, and what is justice? And what could that look like if we actually applied a racial justice, a trans justice, a disability justice lens? I think that that is the way we can advance the rights of all of us and we really need to recommit ourselves to the long and bitter struggle for justice as the honorable Senator mentioned, so thank you.

Rebecca: This is TalkPoverty Radio on the WeAct Radio network. I’m Rebecca Vallas, and for a very special episode commemorating the 25^th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, or the ADA, I have with me Alice Wong. She is the founder and the coordinator of the Disability Visibility Project, which was done in partnership with StoryCorps. Alice, thank you so much for joining TalkPoverty Radio.

Alice: Thank you so much for having me.

Rebecca: So I understand that you and I were both at the White House event commemorating the 25^th anniversary of the ADA. I didn’t see you, but I understand now that you were there in a special way.

Alice: There’s a really awesome device, called BeamPro, and it’s basically a teleconferencing device that allows a person to use their left hand at home and they can operate a robot. So it’s kind of like people can see me through the monitor, and I’m moving around in the Red Room and the Blue Room and the East Room. I couldn’t believe it. It was thrilling to be in the White House, and to actually say hello the President.

Rebecca: So, you – you were the first person to ever use this BeamPro technology in the White House. Is that right?

Alice: I believe so. That’s what they told me at the White House. So it was a huge honor, and really – you know- an adventure to try to use it and to make sure it all worked. Kind of sort of similar of the President and me side by side, virtually.

Rebecca: It’s pretty amazing.

Alice: Well, this is life in 2015, now. I think there’s a lot of amazing interest in technology and things that are available online now that really give people with disabilities a way to participate in ways that they haven’t before, and one thing that I maybe should I mention: so many amazing people with disabilities using Twitter and Facebook, makes me think about when I was younger – in the pre-Internet days – and, wow, if I had that as an option, the world would be so different.

Rebecca: Well, in full disclosure to our audience: that’s how you and I know each other is through Twitter.

Alice: Yeah, it’s pretty funny.

Rebecca: So, tell us a little bit about the Disability Visibility Project you coordinate in partnership with StoryCorps? What is that project about and how did it come into being?

Alice: The Disability Visibility Project is kind of like a grassroots campaign that I launched last year, and it’s kind of a one year project, kind of encouraging people with disabilities to stand a part of this lead up to the really landmark 25^th anniversary of this Americans with Disabilities Act. There aren’t enough stories – people with disabilities telling their stories on their own terms, and it’s kind of an easy way to really get the community involved. And Storycorps is a wonderful national nonprofit located in Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco, and they have a mobile tour that goes throughout the country. And we’re just trying to encourage people from all over the country to try to participate and just tell the stories of their lives and what they care about. And now with the StoryCorps app, people don’t have to travel. They can just use their smartphone and record their story. There are a lot of different ways.

Rebecca: And tell us about a few of those stories that you received through the Disability Visibility Project. I think you have some actually for us on tape that we’ll be able to play for our listeners.

Alice: A lot of people talked about education in their career lives. And one thing that has been clear that – in some of the interviews, is the notion of economic self-sufficiency. People who grow up having a disability – how they need to take care of themselves. And what they need to do in order to take care of themselves. In many ways, they need education, earning money, working hard, and sometimes, there are a lot of policy areas that come along with that, so that’s been in some interviews so far.

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Rebecca: And let’s play a clip of one of those interviews.

Speaker: If you don’t have a disability, you know, you basically are encouraged to always present yourself in terms of what you can do, that’s your identity- hopefully, if you have a healthy sense of self. The things that you can’t do are simply the things you haven’t learned how to do yet, or that you didn’t really care about in the first place. I feel like the message that a person with a disability gets is: your identity is based on what you’re unable to do. It’s how well you can argue for not being able to do something.

Rebecca: Alice, now I understand that several of the interviews you did for this project were on the subject of people with disabilities fighting for economic justice. Let’s hear a clip from one of them.

Speaker2: Well, and I think the next frontier – and I know there are people working on this, and talking about it, so it’s like some nuanced idea – it’s really economic justice for people with disabilities. I mean, we are among the poorest of the poor in this country, the most unemployed or underemployed demographic. And you know I think economic justice is really the next fight – and it’s the fight now, right, and it’s the fight in the future.

Rebecca: Something we talk a lot about on TalkPoverty radio is how disability is both a cause and a consequence of poverty. What are some of the ways in which we need to see policy change building on the successes of the Americans with Disabilities Act and other pieces of critical legislation to really move forward and realize the goals of those pieces of legislation?

Alice: One of the easiest things in my mind – and easy in my mind, but really difficult, I think, politically is really the asset and income limitation for people with disabilities to receive either SSDI or Medicaid. For so many people with disabilities, these are major disincentives towards working. Whether or not they have the drive, the talent, and the opportunity to work, these kind of barriers really keep people with disabilities who want to work, who want to pay taxes, earn income, and actually create access and wealth and contribute to society and it’s punitive for many of us, in modern community-based services, because there are linked with Medicaid, and all of these aspects, income limitations, are really hampering a lot of disabilities – younger people, who want to work, are wanting to enter the workforce, but cannot.

Rebecca: And where can our listeners find more about the Disability Visibility Project?

Alice: We have a website called disabilityvisability.com. We also have a Twitter, at D-i-s-v-i-s-i-b-i-l-i-t-y.

Rebecca: It’s a doozy to spell. Well, thank you so much Alice Wong for being on TalkPoverty radio today. This has been – this is a really special episode for me in a lot of ways and I’m really glad you were able to join us for it. Alice Wong is the project coordinator for the Disability Visibility Project, a community partnership with StoryCorps.

Alice: Thank you so much Rebecca.

Rebecca: You’re listening to TalkPoverty radio. I’m Rebecca Vallas. And to continue this special ADA-at-25 episode of TalkPoverty Radio, I have a very special guest with me – Michael Morris. He is the executive director of the National Disability Institute. Michael, thank you so much for joining the program.

Michael: Thank you for bringing me on and I look forward to the conversation.

Rebecca: Well this is obviously a wonderful and celebratory week, but a point that you and other people have made is that we really still have a lot of our work cut out for us. For example, one tragic sentence that I write and say routinely is that “disability and poverty go hand in hand.” And this is something you and I have discussed at length over the years- that 25 years after the ADA, this is still the case. Why is this still the case?

Michael: I think there’s no single reason. I think attitudes change slowly. I think that there’s discrimination in this country still that prevents many people with disabilities from being employed. The estimates vary of anywhere from 50-80% of the disability population is not in the labor force. We know people with disabilities are two times more likely to be living in poverty than their non-disabled peers. But I think the real issues that confront us is a combination of policy and practice.

Rebecca: And, going back to the poverty rates of people with disabilities even who are working, something that is perhaps less well known but really is quite staggering is that poverty rates are disproportionate for people with disabilities even when you compare part-time workers and full-time workers with and without disabilities. Maybe part of this is about the disability pay gap – we’ve got new research finding that for workers without disabilities who are paid a dollar, workers with disabilities are paid just .68c on that dollar. Do you think that maybe these – how do you explain these disparities?

Michael: Well, it’s so interesting. That’s really some new research which compounds the challenges people with disabilities face. So those who have been fortunate enough to get into the workforce find their pay gap than women, racial and ethnic minorities. So, what does all that mean? It means that, culturally, we have a long way to go for people with disabilities to truly be accepted for their talent, for their value, for their contributions to communities, to the workplace, and to our economy.

Rebecca: Now, switching gears a little bit, it’s not just a story all about income poverty disparities. The National Disability Institute, which you lead, has also looked at how people with disabilities are doing when it comes to having savings – even just a little bit of savings. What have you found there?

Michael: Yes. We’ve been able to analyze data from several major studies- one by Finra, one from FDIC- surveying households. And here again we see some stark contrasts. When people with disabilities were asked do they have enough funds for any kind of financial emergency – car breaks down, could be a healthcare emergency – people with disabilities were 2 to 3 times more likely not to have any rainy day fund, any emergency fund. So, it’s more than the income gap. It’s this lack of savings. And, we investigated further and see that 80% of people with disabilities have no retirement account, have not ever seen a person to talk about any financial planning. So, we really are at a point in time, that I would have expected when – frankly, I was there at the White House, back on the lawn, with about a thousand others, when President Bush signed the ADA, and I don’t know if I could have seen the future 25 years later, but my expectations- and I think so many people in the disability community, their expectations as well – that promise of the ADA, in addition to promoting independent living and community participation, was also about advancing economic self-sufficiency. We’ve got a long way to go.

Rebecca: And it isn’t just retirement accounts, right? Some of the work you guys have done has also found that almost half of households headed by working-age people with disabilities are either unbanked – have no bank at all, no mainstream financial inclusion – or underbanked. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Michael: Yes, that information came from the new study we did with FDIC that almost 1 in 2 individuals with disabilities heading households were either unbanked or underbanked – and if that isn’t a serious problem enough by itself, the secondary problem was people with disabilities as compared to people without disabilities were more likely to use alternative financial services- kind of a fancy name for pawn shops, and check cashing places, predatory lending operations, that – on top of – let’s kind of add up the pieces here. If you’re working, you’re probably earning less on the dollar from new research. You’re also not in the financial mainstream. You’re also using alternative financial services. And you’re less likely to be planning for the future in terms of retirement, or down the road – even to have emergency funds. So if there’s anything that I would stress to people thinking about “well, we’re at 25 years, where do we go?” I think the compass couldn’t be pointed more directly than on this issue of poverty and disability. It’s unacceptable and we know we can do better.

Rebecca: So what can we do to increase the numbers of people with disabilities who are included in that financial mainstream?

Michael: Well, we’re working with 19 community partners in 6 cities in a project called “Roads to Financial Independence,” where we’re providing on a 1-to-1 basis opportunities for financial education and financial coaching to individuals with disabilities who want to return to the workplace, or get into the workplace for the first time, are already working- is help them assess their financial capability and status, set financial goals, and look at – if they have no credit, how do you establish credit; if they’re heavily in debt, how do we help them reduce debt; how do we help them establish a savings account? We do expect, over the next several years, to be working with several thousand individuals with disabilities, and learn – really, for the first time – how can the financial world and the disability world and all kinds of community partners, work really well together and what kind of results can we then achieve?

Rebecca: And in your TalkPoverty column this week, you mention that there are a number of recent policy developments that offer concrete opportunities to help bring people with disabilities into the financial mainstream. And specifically, you mention the ABLE Act, legislation that was passed last year. Can you tell us a little bit about the ABLE Act – what it does, and maybe if there are ways in which you don’t think it goes far enough?

Michael: Sure. ABLE Act is, to me, a historic piece of legislation. Took 8 years to get through Congress, and basically it sets up for a certain number of people, who will be eligible – people with disabilities – to establish tax-advantaged savings accounts. It’s somewhat modeled after the 529 college savings accounts, but with several important differences. Number one: the use of the money in the account is not limited just to paying college tuition, and housing, and books. It covers the range of needs that people with disabilities face, often as an extra cost of just living a better quality of life, that’s related to transportation, employment, education, purchase of technology, extra healthcare costs. So it really covers a lot of ground to change a person’s outlook on what they can do. But it even does more than that. It allows, for the first time, for people on SSI to get past the asset limit we talked about a few minutes ago – of $2000 for an individual, $3000 for a couple. No federal public benefit that is means or resource-tested will be able to count the ABLE account that would disqualify someone from being any longer eligible for that public benefit. So in those several ways, this is really a historic change in thinking. Now, unfortunately, it is limited to only a segment of the disability community. It will only help people whose age of onset of disability was age 26 or younger- that leaves out millions of people – and it also restricts the amount of money you could put aside in a savings account annually to $14,000. Now, over time one is going to accumulate more money, but this is so important because, to me, it also is the first time in public policy where Congress is recognizing, “wait a minute. People with disabilities have extra costs other people don’t have.” Sometimes just to get out of bed with personal assistance services. Sometimes it’s technology which will help them speak, or read. Sometimes it’s other assistance related to employment, or transportation. These are costs that could be covered as part of the money set aside in ABLE account. So it’s pretty significant, and I think – I hope – we’ll continue to be able to build on it, expand the population who’s eligible. But, more than that, I really see over the next 5 years, a potential 5 million ABLE accounts opened across the country. What’s exciting about that to me is it sets up a culture of savings, which we didn’t have. It takes away the fear of losing public benefits because those asset limits related to an ABLE account, an ABLE account will be excluded. It really allows a person to dream, and I consider an ABLE account as almost a down payment of really – a first step toward freedom, and independence.

Rebecca: And another policy you mention in your TalkPoverty column relates to the Earned Income Tax Credit, or the EITC. What is it that you think should be done with the EITC, and why is important for people with disabilities?

Michael: Well, EITC -I know, Rebecca, you know- is for people with and without disabilities. It has lifted millions of people out of poverty. For people with disabilities, many of them are unaware they may even be eligible. There’s a lot of myths and misinformation about Earned Income Tax Credit. During the past ten years, National Disability Institute has worked collaboratively with the IRS to do outreach and education to the disability community that: you do not have to be a family, you do not have to have a family with children, to be eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit. We have helped, over the past 10 years, 10 million low-income taxpayers with disabilities actually be helped with their tax return, and have recouped over $2 billion in tax refunds. But what we do know is the Earned Income Tax Credit could be even better. Right now, you have to be age 25 or older to be eligible. And it really – this is something, unusually, both at the Republican and Democratic sides – or spectrum – of ideology, there is agreement to bring down the Earned Income Tax Credit to a much lower age – 18, 19, 20. We also know the benefit is skewed towards families with children, and so an individual, which represents lots of folks with disabilities who are not part of a family – they’re getting a much lower credit or benefit. We had one of the key people of the IRS at our summit last week, who shared a very interesting statistic: despite our work with helping people with disabilities access the Earned Income Tax Credit, there are still 1.5 million individuals with disabilities who are eligible for the credit but have not realized that what they have to do is file a tax return. So we’ve got a way to go, but the EITC is an important tool. I think we’ve proven it to be, that is helping thousands of people in the disability community, and millions of low-income Americans really finally escape poverty.

Rebecca: Michael Morris, executive director of the National Disability Institute. Where can our listeners find more about the reports that you guys have done, and the other resources that you have?

Michael: Thank you for asking. We have a website that we hope will be easy to remember. “www.realeconomicimpact.org” And we urge people as well to join our Real Economic Impact Network.

Rebecca: Michael Morris, thank you so much for joining TalkPoverty radio.

Michael: Thank you, Rebecca.

Rebecca: And that’s our show. Thanks for listening to TalkPoverty radio on the WeAct radio network. We’ll be back next week, Thursday at 4. Also available on iTunes as a podcast or you can listen online at weactradio.com. Special thanks to our executive producers Alyssa Peterson and the one and only Greg Kaufmann, CAP’s amazing poverty and press teams-

Tracey: -and, as always, DC’s own Christlyez Bacon gets the last word. Thanks for listening.

Christlyez: [raps] I work and get paid like minimum wage, sites to hit the clock by the end of the day, hot from downtown until the hood where I stay, the only place I can afford cuz my block ain’t safe. I spend most of my time working trying to bring in the dough, and none of those could come at me with a HMO, and nowadays it’s common for grandparents to outlive their grandkids, and those the type of odds that we handlin’. I’m not a slave to a man with a whip, I’m a slave to the U.S. mint, and it got me doing things in my life that never made any sense, but it paid me in dollars and cents. I need the money for the food and healthcare, the schools and bus fare, you can’t pay the rent without the U.S. right there, with shackles on my hands and toes – they got a brotha moving slow but my soul is determined to go. I want freedom. Freedom. Now I don’t know where it’s at, but it’s calling me back. I feel my spirit is revealing amount. We just tryna get freedom. Freedom.

Millions of American families are working multiple jobs to make ends meet but are still living paycheck to paycheck.

Millions more who are undocumented can’t plan for their futures because they fear la migra (the immigration police) will haul them and their loved ones away at any time.

And still others, who have served often excessive sentences for past transgressions struggle to find work when they are released from prison.

In total, about 106 million people live on the brink, fighting to overcome the barriers to success that keep them living in marginalized communities or in such chaos that financial stability is out of reach.

Yet what are the chances that their struggles will be addressed in any meaningful way during the first Republican presidential debate hosted by Fox News on Thursday?

What are the chances the Fox News moderators will ask candidates about their agenda to address the needs of neighborhoods facing high unemployment and low wages?

What is the likelihood that the candidates will be asked to outline plans to improve the lives of the working families who live in forgotten communities where there is little investment in infrastructure and jobs?

If the most recent presidential elections are any indication, the chances that these issues will be raised are slim to none. While there was plenty of rhetoric about the dwindling middle class, the last presidential election was noticeably devoid of any references to Americans living in poverty. In fact, The Nation reported that from 2008 to 2012, at least five consecutive presidential or vice presidential debates went without a single question about poverty.

This first debate of the 2016 election is an opportunity for the leading Republican candidates to go on the record about the issues that matter most to working families.

So in an effort to help the candidates and the Fox team find their way, here’s a roadmap. We asked four Americans struggling to make ends meet about what they want to hear on Thursday:

Rachael Collyer, 22, Cleveland Heights, Ohio:

Rachael graduated from The Ohio State University with a major in Spanish and English. She works as a bartender with a fluctuating income that on a good day nets up to $14 an hour and on soft days earns her the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

She also has almost $26,000 in student loan debt.

Rachael can’t afford her own apartment, so after she graduated, she moved back home with her parents in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. She’s a volunteer organizer now for the Ohio Student Association because mounting debt is holding too many students and their families back. The state has decreased its college grants to students, she says, even though more than half of all jobs in Ohio will require a college education by 2020. It is no wonder then that about 68% of Ohio’s college graduates have an average of $29,000 in debt.

“We are like frogs in boiling water,” she says. “College debt has been going up and going up and suddenly we’ve reached this point where we yell, ‘How did this happen?’ “

Rachael wants the Fox News moderators to ask the candidates: Given the cost of attending college, most students work while they are in school. And, in Ohio, if a student works 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job, they won’t earn enough to cover the average cost of attending Ohio State. How do you propose addressing the wage needs of recent college graduates and current students so that paying for their college education is not a barrier to success?

Duane Edwards, 34, Fredericksburg, VA:

Duane’s life changed drastically when he was 14 years old. His father, an Army veteran, was killed in a car crash, leaving behind a wife and three children. At that moment, Duane told himself he had to find a way to earn money so he wouldn’t be a burden on his mother. So he secretly began selling marijuana.

He was eventually caught on a drug charge and sentenced to community-based probation. His mother tried hard to keep him straight, but she had to work to maintain the family and he took advantage of her absence. He says there were few mentors or teachers who looked at him and saw any potential. Without a job and no prospects, Duane eventually landed in prison and served a three-year sentence.

“Being incarcerated made me grow up,” he says. While behind bars, he earned an associate’s degree in childhood education, and he tutored other inmates who were trying to get their GEDs. He wanted to make good on his life when he got out.

So when he was released in December 2006, he had high hopes that he would turn around the troubled life he once lived. But it was dependent on him finding work. In the first six months alone, he applied to more than 40 jobs. None would hire him because of his record. Since he’s been out, Duane has applied to more than 120 jobs and has received call backs for just 15 of them, with most offering low-wage work washing or loading trucks.

Today, the married father of two girls, who are three and four years old, has a bachelor’s degree in theology and is a pastor at a local church. It’s taken him almost nine years since he got out, but he finally has a full-time job driving a truck, making $14.50 an hour. He says he’s grateful for the job, but says it’s still hard to make ends meet.

“I would like an opportunity at a good job so I can take care of my family,” he says.

He wants to ask the candidates: Given that the school to prison pipeline starts early, particularly for young black men, and there is a decided lack of opportunity for young African Americans, what is your plan to invest in schools in marginalized communities made up primarily of people of color so that the outcomes of the students in those schools are the same as in wealthier, predominantly white neighborhoods?

Patrice Mack, 45, Euclid, Ohio:

Patrice is the single mother of a 24-year-old daughter and three boys, a 14-year-old and 11-year-old twins. She owns her own home and has a college degree in business administration. Earlier this year, she left a job that paid her so little that her sons were eligible for government health insurance because she couldn’t afford the company’s insurance.

“You can have a degree and still struggle to survive,” she says. “I’m a paycheck away from poverty.”

Patrice is tapping into her retirement savings in order to get by until she finds a job. She is looking for work, but opportunities for good jobs have dwindled. And due to unpredictable, constantly shifting schedules, and a lack of paid leave and paid sick days, many jobs make it impossible to balance work and caregiving responsibilities.

She wants to ask the candidates: The minimum wage is at a level where working families can’t survive unless they work multiple jobs. So how do you propose we do a better job of parenting our children and being there for them, while at the same time earning enough income to provide for our families? And how do you think employers can incorporate paid leave or paid sick days?

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Astrid Silva, 27, Las Vegas, NV:

Astrid grew up most of her life under the tinsel and lights of Las Vegas. As a young person, she was a standout student and graduated at the top of her class in her magnet high school. She’s earned associate degrees in arts and political science and is working on a bachelor’s degree. Astrid could be a poster child for today’s diverse and civic-minded millennial generation.

She’s also an undocumented immigrant.

At the age of four, Astrid rode a tire raft with her mother and crossed the Rio Grande. She wore black patent leather shoes and the “biggest poofiest white dress with purple flowers and a purple sash.” Her mother had wanted her to look pretty when they met her father in the States.

“As a young person, you understand,” she says. “I understood there was something different about us.”

She says their status affected her family in big and small ways. Neither she nor her mother were able to drive because they couldn’t get driver’s licenses. They wouldn’t go to certain areas, or leave Nevada, because they were worried they would get picked up by immigration authorities. And unlike other people in their neighborhood, they couldn’t leave the country and visit Mexico. She remembers the pain and sadness that overwhelmed her family when her grandmother died in 2009. Her father couldn’t leave and see his mother one last time because they feared he wouldn’t be able to return.

Their biggest fear came true in 2011. Her father was arrested and given deportation orders. He’s since been granted a stay, which he has to apply for every year, and Astrid says she doesn’t know how long it will last.

Since then, she has become a vocal advocate for immigration reform. President Obama even mentioned her in a speech where he deplored our “broken” immigration system.

Thanks to an executive order signed by President Obama that allows undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children to remain in the country, Astrid has a stay until 2017.

But she says that too may end after Obama’s term ends.

“I’m trying to figure out how to keep my family together here,” she says. “This is not a political strategy. For us, it’s real.”

Her question for the candidates is: Given that there are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, what kind of concrete plan do you have for immigration reform? Not one that dismantles what the President has done or that focuses only on border security, but that offers real solutions for issues such as family reunification; the ban on re-entry to the U.S. by undocumented immigrants that spans three to ten years; or the rights of asylum for undocumented immigrants?

When I was preparing to move from seventh to eighth grade, I came home with my list of pre-selected classes—we were tracked and I was on the gifted and talented circuit.  I was able to choose two electives. My mother and I had a horrible relationship that was filled with physical, verbal and emotional violence on her part. On my part, it was fueled by reluctance to just “keep my mouf shut,” as my mother put it. However, once in a while I would play nice with her. On this particular evening she was sitting in her black leather recliner chair—it was a part of a pair, but its partner was in another home with my “no count cheatin’’ stepfather—napping before going to her third job.

“Ma, I needa figa out what Ima take fo’ my ‘lectives next year.”  (This was before I learned to assimilate and forget my first language—that would come a little more than two years later). My mother opened her eyes, sat up and responded, “Take typin’, Cupcake. As long as you kin type you neva gonna be outa job or havta clean no White folks home.” Then she fell asleep. Normally, when I asked her these questions, I was just humoring her. But something happened that evening. I looked at her tired, skinny frame. My eyes lingered on her cracked and peeling hands, and I saw a future that scared the shit out of me. I checked off Typing I and Spanish I.

During high school, I was placed in foster care with well-to-do families. I went to college, and I wanted for nothing financially because the money that used to go to my foster parents became my stipend as a young adult in “Independent Living” until I was 21. However, I had no family to return to because my last foster family left me while I was in my senior year of high school. They moved away to another state and did not take me with them.

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I spent my holidays and summers with my college boyfriend’s family. I worked as a Temp and put my typing and computer skills to use. Whenever I would sign up with a temporary employment agency, they would give a typing test and completely flip out that I was Black and smart and could type over a 100wpm with less than four errors. My mother was right. In my adulthood, I was never out of a job because, when times were hard, I could fall back on my typing skills and do Administrative and Executive Assistant work. I have never cleaned anyone’s house for a living. In fact, there was a time when I was financially solvent enough to hire a housekeeper.

My mother was right until now—Post-Prison. I am now as poor as I was before I went into foster care. I am poorer than I have ever been in my entire adulthood, and I am recently homeless. Prison did not just leave me worse off financially; it caused my mental state to deteriorate to how it was when I was in foster care. Throughout my high school years, I attempted suicide several times. I spent years before my first attempt planning my own death.

While incarcerated, everyday was a battle to live. There, I was sexually bullied and physically attacked on two occasions. In my experience, this is what happens when you report your attackers in prison: the administration arranges for you to be sent to a higher security prison. And when you are attacked or threatened at the higher security prison and you report it, they lock you away in the Segregated Housing Unit (SHU). In the SHU, you spend 23 hours a day in a cell for five days a week and the entire weekend. You get one 15-minute call per month.

When I was not locked in the SHU, I was put on suicide watch. There were times when I was put on suicide watch in retaliation for submitting grievances alleging I was being harassed by an officer. Suicide Watch consists of a big blue quilted gown that is accurately named the “Turtle Suit”; a quilted blanket; a cold, cold cell (so cold my fingertips turned blue); and psychiatric help in which the psychologist (if you are lucky to have one instead of an intern) yells questions about your mental well-being through the steel door. I stopped talking and eating for days at a time. Ultimately this punishment would cause me to become suicidal.

While I was not without my mental health woes pre-prison, my suicidal ideation and anxiety had never approached what I felt in prison. No one can survive that environment without internalizing the daily subjugation of dehumanizing treatment. The threat of violence was always present (from officers and inmates). The trauma from prison has caused my self-worth to deteriorate. I suffer from anxiety, panic attacks, and flashbacks daily.

I am employed very part-time with an organization and they know my story, respect me for who I am, and acknowledge my gifts. Yet on my own, I cannot even get an interview with a temp agency. I cannot pass a background check for housing, and even if I could, my income puts me well below the poverty line and I cannot afford my own place.

Prison does not rehabilitate; that propaganda is a lie. I have been home from prison for almost a year, but I am still not free. Prison has impoverished me financially and mentally, and so I cling to the hope of having a life worth living.

As the President was about to recap his administration’s numerous accomplishments over the past six and a half years—from ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to the recent elimination of discriminatory bans on gender transition care from federal employee health insurance plans—he was interrupted by a woman in the audience’s urgent request for his attention.  The woman, Jennicet Gutiérrez, wanted to draw his attention to one of the darkest marks on his presidency: the abhorrent treatment of LGBT immigrants—particularly transgender women—in the more than 200 immigration detention facilities across the nation.

On June 19th, DHS issued new guidance on detention decisions for transgender immigrants that was made public on June 29th. For the first time, in limited circumstances, transgender women will be allowed to be detained in women’s facilities. Unfortunately, the guidance ignores the fact that they often should not be detained in the first place.

Here are 5 reasons why Jennicet’s protest still needs to be heard:

1) LGBT people in confinement face extremely high rates of abuse. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found nearly 40 percent of transgender inmates in prisons and local jails were sexually assaulted. We don’t have comprehensive data for immigration detention, but a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Center for American Progress (CAP) returned nearly 200 reported incidents of abuse against LGBT immigrants in detention. Moreover, the Government Accountability Office found that 20 percent of substantiated sexual assaults in immigration detention were against transgender people. Prior to DHS’s new guidance, transgender women in immigration detention were routinely detained with men, or given the option of either being transferred to a segregated pod for gay and transgender immigrants in California or kept in protective solitary confinement.

2) Many LGBT immigrants are arbitrarily detained. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recognizes the particular vulnerability of LGBT people in detention. However, a FOIA submitted by CAP revealed that DHS consistently detains LGBT people who should be released. Seventy percent of LGBT immigrants who said they feared harm in detention because of their sexual orientation or gender identity could have been released under DHS’s automated intake system, but DHS instead chose detention in 68 percent of those cases.  Rather, they should be released on parole or placed in alternatives to detention pending the outcome of their cases.

3) Not being detained is critical for the safety of LGBT immigrants. Studies show that the factors with the greatest influence on case outcome are representation by counsel and not being detained. A CAP report found that, even with excellent legal representation, LGBT people in detention are more than 10 percent less likely to win asylum. For LGBT asylum seekers, being in detention can mean the difference between life and death.

4) In the rare instances bail is set, it is impossibly high. CAP found that while only 30 percent of LGBT immigrants in detention were subject to mandatory detention, 64 percent of LGBT immigrants in detention are detained without the possibility of bond—only 11 percent are eligible for bond. That 11 percent face a statutory minimum $1,500 bond, but more commonly the bond is set much higher, as high as $15,000. For LGBT people seeking protection in the US, who often used all the resources they had just to get here, or were living here without access to lawful employment, these amounts are nearly impossible to pay.

5) Immigrants provide guaranteed profits for private prisons. In addition to a Congressional quota requiring that DHS maintain the capacity to detain 34,000 immigrants every day, a report by Detention Watch Network found DHS is contractually obligated to guarantee for-profit private prisons that a minimum of 9,422 beds will be filled each day.  At an average daily cost of $164 per bed, these quotas guarantee for-profit prisons a lot of money, over $1.5 million every day. These quotas and sky-high profits disincentivize release, even of vulnerable populations like LGBT immigrants who should not have been detained in the first place.

The day before the White House Pride event, 35 members of Congress sent a letter to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson expressing concern over the treatment of LGBT immigrants in detention and urging an end to the practice.

Ms. Gutiérrez’s protest was a reminder that—while we celebrate how far the country has come in recognizing the rights of LGBT people—our work is far from over.  We must continue fighting for the equal treatment, safety, and dignity of all LGBT people.

As a civil legal aid advocate for people living in poverty in Arkansas, I’ve seen firsthand how this policy represents the criminalization of poverty at its worst. For example, one couple was charged under the law when they fell behind on their $585 monthly rent payment and didn’t move out quickly enough. Another woman was sentenced to probation even though she had been in the hospital after suffering a stroke when she was served an eviction notice.

By criminalizing conduct that all other states treat as a private breach of contract, Arkansas puts struggling citizens in jeopardy of getting stuck in financial dire straits. What’s more, saddling renters with criminal records affects their ability to keep their job (or find a new one) and therefore makes them less able to afford rent. It also worsens their chance of securing a new home, which leads to homelessness for a lot of families.

To make matters worse, when low-income individuals are charged for nonpayment of rent, they are often unable to access the legal services that they need to defend themselves. In fact, the vast majority of the approximately 2,000 failure-to-vacate cases filed each year under the criminal eviction statute involves tenants, mostly women and children, who do not have legal representation. But, in a completely lopsided state of affairs, landlords seeking to evict a tenant always have an attorney, because the court appoints a prosecutor at the taxpayers’ expense.

Thankfully, civil legal aid advocates have seen some recent success in the effort to end this terrible policy . Artoria Smith recently found herself in an eviction dispute over back rent. She was late on her rent after the landlord demanded she pay an additional $300 to cover the cost of repairing her floor. The floor was damaged because Ms. Smith had fallen through after it rotted out.

Her story could have ended like most do: with a move, a conviction, and a fine. However, she was fortunate enough to qualify for civil legal aid at the Center for Arkansas Legal Services, one of Arkansas’s two nonprofit legal aid organizations.

Smith’s attorneys argued that the failure-to-vacate statute was unconstitutional, stating that it was a violation of due process and equal protection, unconstitutionally chilled her right to a trial, violated state and federal prohibitions against debtors prisons, and constituted cruel and unusual punishment. The judge agreed, striking down the law in its entirety in Arkansas’s largest county, which has historically prosecuted about 25% of all criminal eviction cases in the state. This case represents a major step forward for the tenants of Arkansas. Cases in two other judicial districts in the state have recently followed suit.

Unfortunately, Arkansas lawmakers have been reluctant to consider any changes to the state’s landlord-tenant laws. In 2015, two bills that would have strengthened renters’ rights were voted down in committee in the Arkansas House. HB1814 would have repealed the criminal eviction statute and HB1486 would have enacted a very basic “implied warranty of habitability,” which would have required landlords to make residential rental properties livable for tenants. Such a warranty certainly would have helped Ms. Smith.

The Arkansas legislature will have a chance to revisit the need for more balanced landlord-tenant laws when it meets again in 2017. Until then, Arkansas legal aid attorneys will be working to achieve that balance one renter at a time.

As my colleague Rebecca Vallas and I explained in a recent Center for American Progress report, having a criminal record is a major cause of poverty, and cleaning up a criminal record is one of the most powerful tools for overcoming the barriers associated with it. The states have recognized the power of this policy alternative, with 23 states having expanded their record-clearing laws between 2009 and 2014, as documented by the Vera Institute.

In contrast, there is virtually no statutory authority to clear records of federal court cases. Indeed, even though nearly every state permits arrests not leading to conviction to be cleared, there is no similar authority for federal cases. Even a person who is acquitted in a federal court has no explicit right to seal that case.

Jane Doe was desperate enough that she forged ahead with an expungement petition, even though it was the longest of long-shots. She is a Haitian immigrant who in 1997 was struggling to raise four children on a net monthly income from her home health aide job that was exceeded by her monthly rent alone. She participated in a staged accident as part of an automobile insurance fraud scheme which, had it been successful, would have paid her $2,500. Instead, she was found guilty of a federal charge of insurance fraud. She was sentenced to five years of probation, ten months of home detention, and a restitution order of $46,701 (toward which she faithfully paid $25 monthly, no matter how bad her financial position in later years). But in the eight years since her probation ended in 2007, Jane was fired from home health care jobs a half-dozen times after her background check. As a result, she has been unemployed most of the time.

In considering Ms. Doe’s petition, Judge Gleeson had to determine whether he had the authority to expunge a federal criminal case. In the absence of a federal law explicitly permitting expungement, he looked at whether federal courts have “ancillary jurisdiction” for that purpose. He concluded that of the nation’s twelve federal circuit courts of appeal, five may permit expungement, while five explicitly do not (with apparently no ruling in the other two). Even though he serves in one of the five circuits that may permit such a ruling, Judge Gleeson acknowledged that he was “acutely aware that ‘courts have rarely granted motions to expunge arrest records, let alone conviction records.’”

Judge Gleeson found “extreme circumstances” warranting expungement of Jane Doe’s case. The factors he pointed to for justification of his ruling included Jane’s otherwise clean record, the 17 years since the offense, the “dramatic” adverse impact on her ability to work, and her role as a minor participant in a nonviolent case.

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But here’s the thing: While the impact of the federal conviction on Jane might be “extreme,” it is not unusual in the least. At the Philadelphia legal aid program where I work, we received more than 900 new requests for help last year alone by people whose criminal records were preventing them from working. A great many of these people also had old, nonviolent cases that cost them jobs and leave their families in poverty.

For instance, consider my following clients who have been involved in federal cases:

• JT was convicted of sale of heroin in 1985, after a bad decision to try to sell drugs to provide for her children quickly ended when she sold to an undercover cop. She learned her lesson, served five years’ probation, and hasn’t been arrested since. Now 57, JT has been prevented from working with troubled children and from serving as a home care worker because of the 30-year-old case.
• AA also was convicted of a single drug case in 1994. She too served five years’ probation and has avoided trouble ever since. She too has been threatened with loss of employment in a school because of her 20-year-old conviction.
• In 1997, PV was convicted by a federal jury of harboring and concealing a person from arrest (she was accused of not turning over her common law husband to police). The judge overturned the verdict after the trial and acquitted her. But her case also remains available to the public and adds to her difficulties in getting work at age 64, despite 23 years in a very responsible position in a university until she was laid off.

Because the circuit court in Philadelphia has ruled that our judges have no authority to expunge criminal cases, I cannot file an expungement petition for these three women.

Fortunately, the REDEEM Act is a vehicle for change. Introduced by Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Corey Booker (D-NY), it would permit all three of my clients – and hundreds of thousands more – to seek to seal their records. The bill is not perfect. It limits sealing to nonviolent cases, including nonviolent arrests. All cases that have not resulted in conviction should be permitted to be sealed. But enactment of the REDEEM Act would be a very important step forward.

Judge Gleeson concluded, “[Jane Doe’s] case highlights the need to take a fresh look at policies that shut people out from the social, economic and educational opportunities they desperately need in order to reenter society successfully.” Amen to that. Let’s pass the REDEEM Act and provide the federal expungement remedy that is so desperately needed by people across the country like Jane Doe.

That the DOJ is now investigating the Baltimore shooting is a testament to the fact that the nation has suddenly awakened to the disregard that some police departments have for the lives of our most marginalized citizens. In Freddie Gray’s case, a cell phone video helped to publicize the abuse, and then widespread demonstrations forced public officials to pay attention.

But as egregious as the police conduct is in these killings of unarmed black men, it is routine injustice – the utter disregard for the humanity of those arrested and processed every day, often for minor offenses – that wreaks far more havoc on the poorest people in our nation. For every person killed by a police officer, tens of thousands are arrested and processed into prison cells. Ronald Hammonds flood our overflowing penal system, with 2.2 million people now sitting in America’s jails and prisons. They come out incapable of securing housing, employment, or educational loans. Many are not allowed to participate in the democratic process. They are literally rendered second-class citizens.

This routine injustice has destroyed countless lives, families, and communities. But we are so used to it that there is no sense of public outrage. And yet, every day, judges, prosecutors, and elected officials help perpetuate this system, and there are no cell phone videos to record it or demonstrators out there demanding change.

However, there is, in theory, a built in protection against routine injustice – the right to counsel. Lawyers are the guarantee that people will have their voices heard. But Hammond did not have a lawyer when he admitted to possessing marijuana. Fifty-two years after the Supreme Court made clear in Gideon v. Wainwright that the lawyer is the engine necessary to ensure justice, our nation’s public defenders are overwhelmed, under-resourced, and unable to ensure every person brought so carelessly through the system is treated justly.

But despite these challenges, our public defenders fight mightily—even as most others in the judicial system wish they would just go away and stop interfering with the “efficient” processing of people who are arrested.

The protests in response to the killing of Freddy Gray were led by members of neglected communities throughout Baltimore who denounced the inhumane treatment they receive at the hands of city officials. But the official response only reinforced the demonstrators’ position that their lives are devalued by those in power. While a relatively small group of protesters engaged in destructive behavior, police declared war on all demonstrators. In the first week nearly 500 protesters were arrested, many illegally – swept up for simply being in the vicinity of protests.

Officials in Baltimore showed no regard for the rights of those they rounded up and jailed. Rather than questioning the decision to deal with protesters by locking them up, Governor Hogan facilitated this response. He immediately suspended a Maryland rule that requires anyone detained by police to be brought before a judicial officer within 24 hours to ensure that no one is illegally deprived of their liberty. The Governor’s position was clear: if the rules designed to protect individual liberty make it difficult to process arrestees, they can be disregarded.

Nearly half of this wave of arrests occurred on a single day. Because of the rioting – which Dr. Martin Luther King once described as “the language of the unheard” – the Governor closed the courts the next day. Judges and prosecutors took the day off.   As a result, many protestors were held for two days without any charges being filed, only to be released with no apology for the infringement upon their rights. Never mind the toll these illegal detentions may have taken on the detainees’ employment status, family obligations, or other commitments.

But if no one else felt a sense of urgency about this situation, the city’s public defenders did. They immediately mobilized to challenge illegal detentions and to visit terrified citizens who otherwise would have had no idea why they were being held or what to expect next. They worked throughout the day to interview the detainees and to ensure that their rights were protected. What these public defenders found was jarring.

One public defender described the conditions under which the protesters were confined—many of them “held for days even though they hadn’t been charged with any crime.” There were fifteen women in one cell that was designed to hold a few people for a few hours. Each cell had one sink and one toilet. Water was scarce – the women were instructed that the water from the sink was not safe for drinking. There were no beds, pillows or blankets. There was not enough room for all of the women to lie down at the same time. The women were given four pieces of bread, a slice of American cheese, and a small bag of cookies three times a day. The women didn’t want to eat the bread, so instead they used the slices as pillows “so that they wouldn’t have to lay their heads on the filthy concrete floors.”

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By the time the rest of the criminal justice system returned to work on Wednesday, the public defenders had succeeded in demonstrating the illegality of many of these detentions and as a result nearly half of the arrestees were released without charges ever being filed.

But against the backdrop of the demonstrations, this story of how arrested citizens were treated received little attention.   This routine indifference is the story of criminal justice in America. While the six officers charged in the killing of Freddy Gray are back home, many of the Baltimore protesters continue to be held on bonds they are unable to afford.

While cell phone video has helped to tell the story of deadly police abuse, the story of routine injustice is being told by public defenders. They took to social media, television, and blog posts to document the egregious treatment of those arrested.   They served as the voice for people who would otherwise be voiceless. Baltimore shows how, collectively, public defenders who speak on behalf of marginalized people and communities remind us of their humanity and how we all should be treated.

While public defenders have largely been ignored in the conversation about how to reform our broken criminal justice system, as events in Baltimore demonstrate, they are an essential part of the solution. And while it is encouraging to see outrage over what happened to Freddy Gray, justice demands that we muster equal outrage over the Ronald Hammonds of the world, and that we support our public defenders who are trying to make things right.

Judge Jeffrey Weill seems to believe public defenders should be more deferential to him and less passionate in the representation of their clients.  Apparently disapproving of the zealous advocacy of one public defender, Judge Weill removed her from all of her cases and, according to Public Defender Michelle Harris, to identify any specific behavior that violated the lawyer’s professional obligations to her clients, or the court.  In doing so he has disrespected the right to counsel for the poor. When the Hinds County public defender office refused to abandon those they are charged with serving, and collectively resisted Judge’s Weill’s attempts to further interfere with their representation of clients, he held an attorney and the head of the office in contempt.

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This case is yet another example of local authorities disregarding the rights of our most vulnerable citizens.  It should leave every person who is concerned about justice troubled.  Wielding power to interfere with fundamental rights of the least powerful is exactly what our Founding Fathers feared the most.  Few things could be less consistent with what our Constitution demands of those given the privilege to preside as judge.  Many of us are a paycheck away from needing the services of the public defender should we be wrongly accused of a crime.  The citizens of Hinds County are fortunate to have a public defender willing to fight for their constitutional rights.  They should demand their judges do the same.

Our Founding Fathers valued liberty above all else, and in the 6^th Amendment guaranteed every individual a lawyer to ensure a fair fight, whenever liberty was at stake. In a nation committed to equal justice, the public defender is essential to ensuring that one’s ability to protect his or her fundamental rights does not depend on income.

Sadly, public defenders are often not given the respect and support they need to protect the most vulnerable among us.  Since our poorest citizens are prosecuted and punished more than those with means, true justice remains elusive.  For every person accused of a crime who can pay for a lawyer, four more are too destitute to do so.  Public defenders are left to fight back against a system that has accepted an embarrassingly low standard of “justice” for the poor.

No one should respect the critical role of defense counsel more than a judge.  Judges should be committed to protecting the most marginalized and supporting those who advocate for them.  But some judges, like Judge Weill, apparently think the courtroom belongs to them, rather than the public.  They think they can dictate how a lawyer defends her client and somehow still be impartial.  That kind of behavior is a great threat our democracy.

This case is particularly shameful, but it is hardly unique. Across the country we see judges who abuse their power at the expense of the powerless, and only when public defenders are treated with the respect and dignity they deserve can this situation be corrected.

Much of the bipartisan focus in Washington has centered on the need for sentencing reform, through proposals like tackling overly harsh mandatory minimums. Sentencing reform is urgently needed, and bipartisan efforts such as Senator Lee’s (R-UT) and Senator Durbin’s (D-IL) Smarter Sentencing Act provide cause for optimism.

But the problems with our broken criminal justice system don’t end when an individual is released from jail or prison. Every year, more than 600,000 Americans are released into their communities after serving their time. Moreover, millions more end up with criminal records without doing any time–through arrests that don’t lead to conviction or through probation-only sentences.

All in all, between 70 million and 100 million Americans—or as many as one in three of us—now have some type of criminal record. And due to the rise of technology and the internet—as well as federal and state policy decisions—having even a minor criminal record can stand in the way of employment, housing, education and training, building good credit, and even meager public assistance. For example, nearly 9 in 10 employers use background checks in hiring, and 4 in 5 landlords conduct background checks on potential tenants. Even a minor criminal record can mean every door is closed to you as you seek to get back on your feet.

The result? Punishment has been transformed from a temporary to a lifelong experience for many justice-involved individuals. In addition, mass incarceration and the barriers associated with a criminal record have come to serve as major drivers of poverty in the US. This has broad implications—not just for the tens of millions of affected individuals, but also for their families, their communities, and our national economy. For example, the cost of shutting people with criminal records out of the labor market runs as high as $65 billion per year in GDP terms. Thus, as the criminal justice reform train continues to move forward full speed ahead, it’s imperative that efforts include reforms to give people a second chance.

Senator Rand Paul’s and Senator Cory Booker’s REDEEM Act, introduced yesterday, is a good first step. Take a look at this summary if you want to see everything it does. Here are three key provisions, which, if enacted, would go a long way toward putting second chances within reach for Americans with criminal records.

1. Creates a mechanism for cleaning up a federal criminal record. As my colleague Sharon Dietrich and I explained in a recent Center for American Progress report, cleaning up a criminal record is one of the most powerful tools for overcoming the barriers associated with a criminal record. While state laws vary a great deal, the vast majority of states have “expungement” or “sealing” mechanisms to allow people to put their criminal records behind them. In fact, as the Vera Institute documented in a recent report, 23 states broadened these laws between 2009-2014 through efforts such as expanding the categories of offenses that can be expunged or shortening wait times.

Yet despite the exponential increase in federal criminal prosecutions that resulted from the War on Drugs, there is no such mechanism to expunge federal records, even those resulting from arrests that did not lead to a conviction. Federal law thus lags far behind the states. By creating a judicial mechanism for sealing federal nonviolent records, the REDEEM Act thus fills an important void. (We have called for including all federal arrests that did not result in conviction, given that the presumption of innocence is a bedrock principle of our criminal justice system—but the REDEEM Act is a good first step.)

 2. Improves the accuracy of FBI background checks. Understandably, employers and other users of background checks believe the information presented there is reliable. However, that information is often incorrect or not up to date. FBI background checks in particular are notoriously inaccurate – some 600,000 jobseekers received an inaccurate FBI check in 2012. One of the most common problems with FBI background checks is that they fail to provide the outcome of a criminal case. Given that many cases don’t result in convictions or are resolved on lesser charges, having a criminal record that has not been updated to reflect the outcome of criminal charges can be highly prejudicial.

In recognition of this widespread problem, the REDEEM Act would require the FBI to review each record for accuracy and completeness before it can be provided to a requesting party. It would also prohibit the FBI from distributing criminal record information pertaining to arrests that are more than two years old if they don’t contain a final outcome of the case.

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3. Reforms the harsh and outdated lifetime ban on public assistance for people with felony drug convictions. In many states, even meager public assistance is out of reach for people with certain types of criminal records. The 1996 welfare law included a lifetime ban on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps) for people convicted of a felony drug offense. The law gives states the option to modify or waive the bans, and many have. Yet most states continue to enforce the ban in whole or in part for TANF, SNAP, or both. This outdated and harsh policy deprives struggling families of nutrition assistance and pushes them even deeper into poverty at precisely the moment when they are seeking to regain their footing. According to The Sentencing Project, in the 12 states with the most punitive policies, an estimated 180,000 women were subject to the TANF ban in 2013. The REDEEM Act would lift this ban for people who were convicted for drug use or possession. (The ban would remain in effect for people convicted of drug distribution crimes.)

As bipartisan members of Congress take up criminal justice reform, we must not lose sight of the need to include reforms to give people a second chance. Passing the REDEEM Act would be a great start.

 The Mississippi Center for Justice is fighting not only to end the school-to-prison pipeline, but to reform structures that perpetuate poverty in one of the poorest states in the nation.  TalkPoverty Assistant Editor Alyssa Peterson spoke with Reilly Morse, President and CEO, about the organization’s work.

Alyssa Peterson: Tell me about what your organization does and your role?

Reilly Morse: The Mississippi Center for Justice was founded in 2003 by Martha Bergmark, a longtime civil legal aid lawyer and a Mississippi native. We saw legal services as an antipoverty tool go through the wringer in the late 70s through to the 90s. And, after seeing all that on the national level, [Bergmark] worked on ways to arrive at a privately-funded version of what I think had originally been the vision of a lot of legal services programs: to provide meaningful impact work and to use the system of justice to eliminate poverty or reduce it.

The idea was to identify locations in Mississippi where meaningful, smart strategies that looked at economic justice issues on the civil legal aid side, could make a real impact. We began working on restoring Medicaid benefits to people living below the poverty level, seniors, and people with disabilities. Later, two years into the life of the organization, Hurricane Katrina struck, and [Bergmark] hired a couple of people, including me, to start a Katrina Recovery office. Over the next seven years, we did a lot of impact work, but the most significant was getting Governor Barbour to commit $132 million to finish a housing recovery that he had [previously] walked away from halfway through. This money has all gone to low-income households to repair, restore, and reconstruct their homes.

We also remain very focused on healthcare efforts. We have basically a totally recalcitrant legislature when it comes to expanding Medicaid, but we are also seeing such great strains on rural hospitals that we are hoping that these strains will turn around our state legislature when it comes to the need to find a way to put a floor under those hospitals, to put some kind of financial support, to keep them open.

Conservatives have limited the kinds of legal aid services that can be supported by federal funding. Can you provide background on historical context for that and why it’s really important that legal aid be at the center of anti-poverty efforts?

So, the Center’s view is that we need to be a voice that has fiscal independence. We have to be able to go in whatever direction we need to. We are not going to solve problems of poverty in Mississippi just by providing assistance to individual poor people one at a time. So, we have to be able to step into the layers of institutional inequity and alter them at that systemic level if we’re going to have any kind of effect at all. Just about every system that’s here – whether it’s the judicial system, whether it’s the political system or otherwise – is already calcified against poor people. It takes a powerful incursion into that to try to make meaningful change, so we have to have flexibility.

You do a lot of work on the school-to-prison pipeline, where students, primarily students of color, are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile justice system and criminal justice system. How is this playing out on the ground in Mississippi?

Well, in the Mississippi Delta, where a lot of this work is done, you have public schools that are sharply underfunded; that are predominantly African-American; and in which teachers and administrators tend to turn school infractions into criminal or youth court infractions more than they should. So, you have a higher than normal number of referrals to youth court for offenses that are not criminal offenses and that can be properly addressed by the school systems.

We [also] learned that the rules for school discipline are wildly different between districts. In some cases, the basic rules and requirements of due process are hardly there. In other cases, you can’t find where [the rules concerning due process] are, and still in other cases, the rules are contradictory.

Our job is to intervene on behalf of these kids and their parents to make sure the law is observed and to invoke in the fullest possible way all the rights they have. This means fighting so that there aren’t referrals to youth court for things that aren’t criminal offenses, and ensuring that, if there’s an offense, that it’s treated with proportionality.

Still, there are instances in our state where there are widely disproportionate penalties placed on children. From what we’ve discovered, the students’ first experience with the justice system, whether it’s school discipline or youth court, tends to have a very powerful, negative effect on their lives, especially on the school system side. Contact with the justice system sours their view about how things are when they get out of school and when they get into the world. That, I think, erodes confidence in law enforcement and in the courts, and that stays with them for life. In addition, once kids are referred to court system and pick up a criminal charge, that charge stays with them and produces barriers to housing, future employment, and public assistance.

I was told that you all represented a first-grader who was suspended for a year for bringing a pink toy gun to school. Are these sorts of punishments for minor incidents common?

That’s a particularly colorful example, but you’ll have all kinds of instances like that. In fact, there was a Department of Justice consent decree entered in the Meridian School District with similar types of examples – children disciplined for wearing nonmatching socks, or doing various other things that are just trivial, flippant, kid things. They are not stuff that you send somebody to youth court for.

We try to build the capacity to address poverty so we do not have to depend on someone from the outside swooping in, solving one problem, and leaving. This is about building a consistent, long-term force for upward mobility for Mississippi.

The President requested a 33 percent increase in their budget request for the Office for Civil Rights, which often enforces these cases. Do you think greater federal enforcement would have an impact in Mississippi?

It can only help but it’s important that there is also state-level recognition and respect for these requirements. It ought not only be on the Feds to enforce the Constitution of our nation. It ought to be part of what our state Attorney General does, and it ought to be part of what our legislature takes into account when it passes laws. But they [the legislature] only seem to have an appetite for increasing punishment for the poor.

For example, last year, they passed a law to do drug testing of TANF beneficiaries, and the initial version of that law said that any person who did not pass the drug test would be disqualified. But then, our [implementing] agency passed rules saying that anyone in the family who was receiving benefits would also be disqualified. That wasn’t in the scope of the law, so we pushed back. You can see that there’s a default tendency to find a way to punish more poor people if you can get away with it, and that’s happening at the state level.

It seems on the national level that there is momentum between conservatives and progressives to reach a consensus to reform the criminal justice system? Have you seen that in Mississippi, and what would that compromise look like?

That’s interesting because [reform] has some momentum on the sentencing side. Last year, the high cost of incarceration reached a threshold of pain for our state leaders, and they started to look at ways to deal with non-violent offenders, particularly by resentencing or altering parole and probation rules for certain classes of offenders. They’re finding ways to lower the population in our prisons for non-violent offenders, and that’s kind of a remarkable step forward for our state. I’m very happy about it. It’s a small, but important, step.

So what are some of your upcoming fights and goals for the year?

We are very interested in putting some kind of uniform due process standards into place for school districts when dealing with discipline issues. This is how to root out systemic problems and how to make headway on our education and poverty challenges

We also are very interested in further pushing out an initiative we began about two years ago called the New Roots Credit Partnership. The program is an alternative to pay-day lending, and involves pairing public employers with banks and credit unions that offer saner alternatives to payday loans. [These alternatives have] lower interest rates, better repayment terms, and mechanisms that aren’t engineered to push people further into a hole. Those are probably the top two priorities.

This problem of low employment rates among reentering citizens is simply too large to ignore. As many as one hundred million adults in the United States have criminal records. People with criminal backgrounds face all the same frustrations as other job seekers: a sluggish job market; a low response rate to applications; and the stigma of long term unemployment. However, in my role recruiting businesses willing to consider reentering citizens for employment, I have seen that there are additional barriers for people with criminal records that make job-seeking especially frustrating and disheartening.

One common obstacle to employment is often the lack of appropriate identification.   Many individuals’ personal effects go missing during the process of arrest and incarceration or due to the instability of their housing. Getting the appropriate documentation to replace lost identification can be difficult and time-consuming, especially from out-of-state agencies. This seemingly simple process can delay the start of a job search for weeks or months. As a consequence of this delay, many former offenders end up settling for informal work, putting themselves at risk for both wage theft and further involvement with the justice system.

However, stereotypes and myths remain the biggest barriers to reentry employment. Many believe “once a criminal, always a criminal,” despite studies that show that past crimes are not necessarily predictors of future actions. And, since background checks have become relatively inexpensive and easy to access through the Internet, the ability of potential employers to act on these stereotypes and myths to discriminate against people based on a criminal record has increased. Additionally, many commercially available background checks contain errors that applicants struggle to refute. Most retail chains now do background checks and, as a result, entry-level jobs that used to be available to reentering citizens are now out of reach. Further, many national companies have now outsourced this hiring process so local managers have no control over whether to hire someone with a criminal background. They simply receive an application marked hirable or un-hirable. For this reason, individuals returning from incarceration are less able to depend on their existing network to help them find employment.

In contrast, food service and building trades are two fields with relatively low barriers to entry. However, both job types are also very physically demanding and too often fail to provide living wages. Workers in building trades are also often required to have both a valid driver’s license and a working vehicle, resources that are often out of reach for people coming out of jail or prison.

When the odds are stacked so heavily against people with criminal records, we can’t be surprised that recidivism is too often the result. But we also have to wonder how much of it could be avoided if people were able to find jobs and support themselves?

Here are some steps we can take right now to improve employment outcomes for reentering citizens:

1. For businesses, if you have had positive experiences hiring reentering citizens, follow the example of Alsco, and Virgin Companies and talk about it. If you are interested in considering an ex-offender, contact a local reentry organization. This list can help you get started.

2. Publicize the facts about people with criminal backgrounds and share stories about people who have successfully negotiated reentry; also, increase employers’ awareness of resources like the Federal Bonding Program and the Work Opportunity Tax Credit that support second chance hiring.

3. Make basic computer literacy and modern job search techniques a part of reentry programming in prisons and jails. Also, ensure that job training programs are matched to employment growth areas and are in fields that do not have significant restrictions for ex-offenders. (For example, HVAC is a popular training program in many facilities, but companies that hire people to go into other’s homes are reluctant to hire anyone with a theft charge or offense involving violence or sexual assault.)

4. Finally, we need to see a movement to support local and national businesses that positively engage in second chance hiring, a kind of reverse boycott. This would help assure business owners that they will not be negatively affected by second chance hiring and that it could even help them gain popular support.

For the reasons outlined above, communities decimated by mass incarceration face the long-term, lingering effects of severe underemployment. If we are to address the root causes of inter-generational poverty, we must dismantle the barriers formerly incarcerated citizens face as they strive for self-sufficiency and financial security by obtaining a job. Most reentering citizens are able and eager to work and it makes no sense to lock them out of the job market.

Selma is set in 1965, and—just as we did 50 years ago—we continue to view some lives as less valuable than others. We still embrace an embarrassingly low standard of justice for our most marginalized populations. We persist in promulgating policies that ensure certain communities will never be able to fully participate in our society.

2.2 million people are incarcerated at any given time in America, far more than any other country in the world. Nearly 6 million have lost the right to vote because of a criminal conviction. Countless others are rendered ineligible for student loans, public housing, benefits necessary to care for their families, and employment opportunities. The victims of this injustice are almost exclusively poor. They are disproportionately people of color. Our race- and class-based system of mass incarceration is tearing apart families, destroying communities, and making it almost impossible for children of incarcerated parents to ever break the cycle. So, much like 50 years ago, we need a movement to address this civil rights imperative.

Like any other feature-length movie focusing on a complex event, Selma was reduced to a simplified narrative in which the heroes overcome adversity to achieve victory—the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. But, as much as Dr. King sought to push for policy reform, his larger vision demanded much broader transformation.  He understood that while a law can temporarily force those with a warped sense of justice to change their behavior, true equality only occurs when we collectively embrace it as a fundamental and inviolate American value; when we reshape our culture into one which truly views each and every citizen as deserving of respect and dignity.  King fought not only for legislative victories, but also the transformation of the hearts and minds of Americans. Selma was part of a broader campaign designed to shine a light on the inhumane treatment of African Americans and awaken our national consciousness to the fact that this behavior violates our greatest ideals.

Likewise, if we are to realize equal justice today, we must work to transform a criminal justice narrative that assumes people in our poorest communities are somehow inherently dangerous; that measures justice by the harshness of the punishment; that lumps the world into categories of “us” and “them” with law enforcement as “the good guys” and those they police as “the bad guys.” Strategies to reform unjust polices are necessary. Of course we must scale back the criminalization of an ever increasing index of behavior. Certainly we should end a system of bail that detains people pretrial simply because they are too poor to pay the bond that is set. We absolutely need to reform overly punitive sentencing laws.

But if we do not change the fact that we have come to equate justice with punishment and to associate the most negative qualities with race and class, equal justice will remain elusive. Those who administer our justice system will continue to disproportionately monitor, arrest, prosecute, and punish poor people and people of color. We must work to transform our assumptions about our most marginalized populations and how they deserve to be treated. So, while policy reform plays an important role, as was the case 50 years ago, we need a movement to transform the hearts and minds of a nation.

Public defenders can help to drive this campaign. With 80 percent of people accused of crimes too poor to afford an attorney, public defenders are the voice of our impoverished communities in the criminal justice system. By organizing public defenders, we can harness the collective voice necessary to speak up for the humanity of people in these communities and to infuse the system with values essential to justice.

A movement of public defenders has the power to reframe the criminal justice narrative in this country—an essential precursor to sustaining a movement for reform. Lawyers for the poor have the opportunity to humanize their clients every time they speak in court. Public defender leaders can spread the message more broadly as they speak on behalf of the populations they represent in meetings with judges, policymakers, and the community. There are thousands of public defenders across the nation speaking for millions of people whose voices are routinely ignored or dismissed. Their clients are frequently cast as demons, when in fact they are the people who bag our groceries, care for our children, and serve us in restaurants. Most Americans are a paycheck away from needing a public defender. Yet, we do not see people caught up in the criminal justice system as part of our shared community. Until we see these lives as just as valuable as the lives of people we care about, we will not have equal justice. We must mobilize this army of advocates to achieve that transformation of hearts and minds.

That is how we will continue the march that so many heroic civil rights warriors began in Selma.

Considering that around 50% of inmates in federal prison are incarcerated for drug charges, the new guidelines promise to lead to a significant reduction in mass incarceration.  In fact, beginning in November 2015, the shorter sentences can also be applied retroactively to over 40,000 eligible prisoners. These bipartisan reforms represent a beacon of hope for many inmates and their families.

However, progress in sentencing must be matched with equal attention to what will happen to former prisoners after they are released.  Reentry is never as simple as opening the gates and letting someone out.  Even short periods of incarceration cause major life disruptions, including the loss of jobs and housing.   These barriers, plus expensive court fees, make rebuilding a life immensely difficult and complicated.  Because of their time and jail and overcrowded living conditions, reentering citizens often suffer severe mental and physical effects such as PTSD and a much higher rate of communicable diseases.  Given the many serious obstacles that come with involvement in the criminal justice system, few people are able to navigate reentry without significant support.

Yet despite the clear need for assistance, former offenders are blocked from many federal and local aid programs that are designed to help people secure basic necessities. Probation officers in some jurisdictions even give out tents to their clients because they know that it will be difficult to find a place to live. Even social services that are available are often difficult to access, since many former offenders lack things like a valid driver’s license, car, and a working telephone.

One widely acknowledged key factor in successful reentry is employment, which is extremely difficult for ex-offenders to obtain.   Even individuals with solid work histories and marketable skills are rejected repeatedly, often on the basis of their status as a reentering citizen, although their charge does not impact their ability to do their job.  When they finally do find an employer willing to hire them, the job is often low-paying and unsustainable.

As a direct service worker who provides employment services to reentering citizens, I worked with a middle-aged woman who had a single shoplifting charge but a decade of solid work experience in an office.  She struggled for two years to find work and finally settled for a low-paying janitorial job.  An employment specialist at another agency told her not to bother looking for a better job until her charge was at least five years old.  People who have served longer sentences face the additional barrier of long gaps in their resumes; lack of familiarity with modern technology; and disconnection from support systems.

At best, many individuals in this situation become dependent on nonprofit aid and social services.  At worst, they re-offend and are once again involved in the criminal justice system.  This vicious cycle serves no one.

In order to ensure that the new sentencing guidelines will bring the most benefit, we must improve the existing reentry process.  Here are five ways to do that:

1. Shore up existing, successful reentry programs and share their models.  Ensure that nonprofit agencies and government programs can handle increased caseloads and provide the material support people need as they transition back into the community;
2. Update laws to remove barriers that keep ex-offenders with drug charges from receiving benefits like SNAP, TANF, or housing assistance.
3. Eliminate penalties that serve no public safety purpose.  For example, license suspension is a common penalty applied to force people to pay court fees and fines.  When you take away someone’s ability to drive, you greatly decrease their ability to work and pay what they owe. People can even be re-incarcerated for failure to pay, destroying whatever progress they have made, and trapping them in cycles of incarceration.
4. Update employment laws related to the hiring of ex-offenders.  Many jurisdictions have begun this process with ban-the-box legislation.  But these laws will do little if they merely postpone a negative answer.  There need to be laws with real consequences for discrimination against former offenders or substantial incentives for companies that have positive second chance hiring policies.

Real rehabilitation and successful reentry are possible.  The new sentencing guidelines are a great start but they need to be matched with an equally strong push for smart, effective reentry policies.  Without such measures, the myth that criminals can never change becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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In 1963, the Supreme Court declared that states are obligated to provide a lawyer to anyone accused of a crime who cannot afford one. In Gideon v. Wainwright, the Court made clear that a lawyer is essential to ensure justice is served and liberty is protected—that laypeople cannot possibly safeguard their own liberty in a complex system of law and procedure without a lawyer.

Job applicants with criminal records, especially men of color, face a high hurdle to employment.  Studies have shown that black men without criminal records get callbacks for job interviews at rates below those of white men with criminal records; and for a black man with a record, the callback rate is almost negligible.

Arrests that never led to conviction shouldn’t affect employment—innocent until proven guilty is a fundamental principle of American justice, after all.  Because there is a presumption that arrests without convictions don’t hinder employment opportunities, this issue has received far less media and political attention than the employment obstacles created by past convictions.  But the fact is that when it comes to getting jobs, a mere arrest can be just as bad as a conviction for millions of people like Tyrae and N.R.

Many companies conduct pre-employment background checks using FBI rap sheets, which are notoriously hard to read: employers often can’t discern whether the charges resulted in conviction, were withdrawn, or dismissed.

State-level databases can be equally confusing.  In Pennsylvania, if an item turns up when an employer runs a background check through the state police, the system immediately responds with a generic code, indicating that details will follow within four weeks.  If someone only has arrests on his record, the report eventually comes up clean, but many employers won’t wait that long for the clarification—they simply move on to the next job applicant.

Other employers use unofficial court records, often available online for free.  In Tyrae’s case, two arrests—one seven years ago, the other fifteen—were visible to employers with just a few mouse clicks, and the mere existence of the arrest reports cost him multiple job opportunities.  As for N.R., the companies interested in hiring her didn’t give any weight to her recent bachelor’s degree—once they learned she was arrested on a misdemeanor four years ago, they stopped calling back.

Courts will sometimes order the expungement of arrests from criminal records, but even that doesn’t always solve the problem.  Private consumer reporting agencies—which sell background reports to employers—often maintain databases that include outdated court records; so arrests which were expunged are sometimes still reported to employers.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission notes that excluding applicants based on arrests-only has a disparate impact on black and Hispanic workers, and thus constitutes employment discrimination.  Therefore, under federal law, “an arrest record standing alone may not be used to deny an employment opportunity.”  In Pennsylvania, state law also says that employers may only consider convictions if they are relevant to an applicant’s suitability for a given job.  However, as Tyrae, N.R., and thousands of other people have discovered, these laws are widely and routinely violated.

The good news is that advocates can employ a number of strategies to lessen the burden of arrest records.  In many states, legal services attorneys can petition the courts to expunge or seal arrests.  In Philadelphia, Community Legal Services (CLS) did just that for N.R. and Tyrae, so their records are now completely clear.  When black and Hispanic workers are rejected as job candidates due to arrests, advocates can help them file discrimination charges with the EEOC or state and local fair employment practices agencies.  People denied jobs due to arrests may also be eligible to collect back pay, and offending companies can be forced to change their policies.  Finally, when consumer reporting agencies tell employers of arrest records that the courts had ordered expunged, workers who are denied jobs can sue the reporting agency, and also demand a correction of the background report.  CLS has successfully brought cases for our clients in all of these areas.

States should now adopt fair chance hiring laws that include reforms like “Ban the Box”—which precludes employers from inquiring about criminal records on job applications—and implement other important protections such as not considering non-conviction arrest records.

But perhaps the single most effective legislative change would be to expand opportunities for the expungement and the sealing of records.  Advocates can push their states for automatic expungement whenever possible—such as when charges are dropped after an arrested individual completes a pre-trial diversion program—and for a clear legal right to petition for expungement of all other non-conviction data.

A clean slate is the best pathway to employment and equal opportunity.

After a four-decade incarceration binge, the state is taking steps to reduce prison populations, which have come at ruinous costs for state coffers and for the disproportionately black and Latino individuals and families who are affected.

The latest step came last month, as California voters approved a ballot measure to reclassify a number of low level offenses from felonies to misdemeanors.  Under Prop 47, offenses such as shoplifting, writing hot checks, and drug possession would be punished less harshly.  This would potentially allow 10,000 individuals currently imprisoned to petition to have their sentences reduced and to return to their families sooner.

In recent years, California has served as an intriguing case study for reducing prison populations without harming public safety.  After the state was ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011 to address its prison overcrowding crisis, lawmakers responded with a policy of “realignment,” which shifted supervision of non-violent offenders and parole violators to local communities.  In 2012, California voters approved a ballot proposal to ensure that the state’s notorious Three Strikes Law would not send people to prison for life for non-serious offenses.

The effect of these and other changes has been dramatic.  Between 2006 and 2012, California’s prison population decreased by nearly a quarter and while doing so, its drop in violent crime exceeded the national average.  These developments, along with similar developments in New York and New Jersey, show increased support among both policymakers and the public for a public safety strategy that is less reliant on incarceration.

But the largely untold story of criminal justice reform in California is what could happen with the savings.

Under Prop 47—of the hundreds of millions of dollars of projected state prison savings each year—a significant portion will be allocated to preventing crime from happening in the first place.  This will include investments in mental health and substance abuse treatment, programs to reduce school truancy and prevent dropouts, and support for victim services.

Research—as well as common sense—suggest that such interventions can be more effective in reducing crime than incarceration.  But that is not the way our nation has been operating.

Like other states, California has for decades used the criminal justice system to respond to social problems.  Following the failure of other institutions to provide opportunity and education—and yes, to deal with behavioral problems—police, prosecutors, and prisons have taken on roles that used to be left to schools, parents, social workers, and others in local communities.

This is particularly true with the war on drugs, which is a primary driver of mass incarceration and racial disparities.  Today, about 75 percent of incarcerated individuals have a history of substance abuse.  One of every six has a history of mental illness.  Many were abused.   About two-thirds of individuals imprisoned on a drug charge are black or Latino, even though people of all races use and sell drugs at roughly the same rates.

Though we have initiatives aimed at early childhood education, therapeutic interventions for at-risk youth, and treatment for substance abuse and mental illness, they are painfully underfunded compared to the scope of the problem.  Instead of investing in such interventions, we have turned to the criminal justice system, which is an extremely expensive way to address these problems.  Few would dispute that incarceration is sometimes necessary, but the question we should be asking is whether incarceration is the most effective way to ensure safe and healthy communities.

In a definitive report earlier this year, the National Research Council concluded that the rise of mass imprisonment in the United States has “transformed not only the criminal justice system, but also U.S. race relations and the institutional landscape of urban poverty.”

To truly address America’s mass incarceration epidemic, we will need to divert people to substance abuse and mental health treatments rather than sending them to prisons and jails.  We’ll need to remove barriers that keep people with criminal records from starting a new life.  And above all, we’ll need to shift resources away from prisons and invest them in communities.

Prop 47 is only a start, but it may mark a new day for criminal justice reform.

Two misdemeanors.  I did no jail time, and my probation was terminated early.  I’ve had no incidents at all since then.

A lot of people think of me simply as an ex-offender, but I refuse to let that define me. Ronald Lewis is a father, a son, a friend, and a very ambitious person who is righting my wrongs. It’s been so long since I made those mistakes and second chances are very important—for me and millions of other Americans.

I have a building engineer license, and I am presently in school so I can start my own company and give second chances by teaching the trade that I went to school for.  It was hard for me to get work even after I trained for my trade.  So many doors have been shut in my face I know what wood tastes like.

The first time was gut-wrenching. I worked at a job for maybe a month, then they called me to the office—Human Resources. And they said, “You are no longer able to work here because of your criminal background.” I told them I was the same person they fell in love with at the interview—until that paperwork from the background check came back. Once the paperwork came back, it was like—“Security get this guy out of the building fast.”

It’s so embarrassing. It’s hard. You finally start to see you’re turning the corner and you’re getting a sense of purpose. Your life is starting to mount and your family is going to be proud of you. But then you have to tell them, “I failed again,” or you just feel like a failure.  It was the worst feeling of my life. The worst.

Since then, there have been numerous times when the background check stopped me from getting a job.  The employer says, “You’ll be great. Your skill level is exactly what we are looking for.” But then there’s that question. It’s like the elephant in the room—I hate that question: “Do you have anything on your background?” And when you tell them, they’re gone.

So we need to shed light on this now—the way things are—and the fact that people need second chances. A lot of people that I run across in school now—there are a lot of people who are ex-offenders in my class.  So on the first day, everybody walked around with a bravado—nobody is talking to anybody else. It’s almost like the jail house mentality. So, the second day of class I stood up and said, “Listen, jail is not going to define us.   Obviously you want a second chance or you wouldn’t have come to school.”

At first they thought I don’t get it.  Because I don’t walk around like jail is a badge of honor. It’s shameful. My mother was shamed, my family name was shamed.  But then when I talk to the other students, we sit down and we have a conversation, and I let them know some of the things that I’ve been through—then they are like, “Okay, I understand. He made it; I can make it.”

My class now has the highest average in school—a 90 average.  And I think my leadership and being able to relate to some of the other students has played a role in that.  And it starts with knowing that people really do want second chances, but they come home with no hope. There’s no hope. So then you resort to what you resort to in order to feed your family. You understand? It’s bad. My community is sad.  And it’s all about hope.

You want to know Ronald Lewis?  Don’t focus on some piece of paper that says I made mistakes ten years ago. Look at all of the positive things I’m putting right in front of you right now.

Unfortunately, stories like J.B.’s are all too common in Pennsylvania and across the nation. As a new report and web tool released by the Juvenile Law Center in partnership with CLS reveals, the vast majority of states do not thoroughly protect juvenile records from public view. Furthermore, expungement or sealing of juvenile records does not happen automatically when young people leave the jurisdiction of the juvenile court or reach a certain age. Youth are often not advised of their right to petition for expungement, and many states limit the types of offenses that are eligible. The result is that hundreds of thousands of young people are burdened by juvenile records, unable to move forward with their adult lives and escape poverty.

Even within the legal advocacy community, many people are surprised to learn that juvenile records are so widely available. There is good reason for their surprise – allowing the public to access juvenile record information runs completely counter to the very purpose of the juvenile justice system.

The system was created in order to provide treatment and rehabilitation to young people. Experts ranging from neuroscientists to Supreme Court justices have acknowledged that youth are less able than adults to understand the consequences of their actions, make sound decisions, and resist the pull of peer pressure. But because their brains are still developing, they are also particularly capable of significant transformation. So it makes good sense—both for youth and society as a whole—to maintain a separate system for rehabilitating youth and then to support them as they transition to adulthood.

Yet despite the original purpose of the juvenile justice system, during the “tough on crime” era many states rolled back the rehabilitative aspects of their systems in favor of a more punitive approach. As a result, confidentiality protections for juvenile records were weakened, and there is now a tendency to view juvenile adjudications as equivalent to adult criminal convictions. This era also ushered in a period of criminalizing youth for many behaviors that in the past would have been handled in school or at home. For example, one CLS client was issued several criminal citations for disorderly conduct because she had gotten into verbal arguments in the school hallway with a male student who was harassing her. This over-criminalization has disproportionately impacted low-income youth, youth of color, youth with disabilities, and LGBT youth, making it even more difficult for these already vulnerable and underserved young people to connect with meaningful economic opportunities.

The time is ripe for change. Cities and states around the country are struggling to address a youth unemployment crisis—the youth unemployment rate is as much as four times the unemployment rate for adults. As policymakers seek to connect low-income youth with the education, job training, and employment opportunities they need in order to be successful in today’s economy, it is also time for states to revisit their juvenile records laws.

In particular, states should ensure that juvenile records are rarely, if ever, accessible to the public; that youth are given information about their rights and how to get their records expunged; and that records are either automatically or easily expunged when youth leave the supervision of the juvenile court.  These three reforms would ensure that youth who have been rehabilitated are able to move forward with their lives.

There are countless young people like J.B. around the country who have the potential to move out of poverty and want desperately to work.  We as a society just need to let them.

This is not an issue unique to New York City. Across the country, people with mental health needs are too often warehoused in overcrowded, chaotic, and violent correctional facilities rather than treated in the community.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), however, presents a tremendous opportunity to address this national crisis and ensure that patients like Murdough don’t end up on Rikers Island. The ACA provides one of the largest expansions of mental health coverage in U.S. history—extending it to 27 million people who previously lacked health insurance—and a wider range of benefits to 62 million U.S. citizens overall. Millions of uninsured, undertreated, and destitute people cycling through correctional systems will be covered for the first time.

This expansion of treatment opportunities, coupled with bipartisan agreement that we need a comprehensive overhaul of the criminal justice system, presents a rare opportunity for reform that we can and must seize.

The criminal justice system has expanded to such a degree that mass incarceration is now one of the major public health concerns facing poor communities, according to a new report from the Vera Institute of Justice. Since the 1970s, state prison populations in the U.S. have grown by 700 percent. Yet the nation’s overuse of incarceration succumbed to the law of diminishing returns long ago—creating more harm than good—with widening disparities in health as one of the results.

The concentration of incarceration and the omnipresence of the criminal justice system in the lives of residents in poor communities of color are well documented.  Now research is starting to reveal the extent to which mass incarceration impacts community health. For example, decades of disparate exposure to incarceration among communities of color has fractured families and exacerbated socioeconomic inequities in ways that have contributed to wider gaps in infant mortality rates between black and white Americans.

The criminalization of addiction and mental illness is a core driver of overall health disparities in the criminal justice system. The War on Drugs in essence delegated to criminal justice agencies what should be the responsibility of our community health system. As a result, people coping with serious clinical conditions are gravely overrepresented in correctional facilities. Yet the traditional punitive tactics that corrections departments too frequently turn to—such as solitary confinement—tend to promote the very behavioral problems that lead to incarceration.

There are signs that the social and political climate is changing. U.S. Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) have reached across the aisle to work on federal legislation that aims to remove the stigma and legal barriers that prevent millions of Americans with a drug conviction from securing employment and public benefits. Additionally, state officials are pursing legislative and programmatic solutions to trim their prison populations: A recent Vera study found that more than 29 states have amended, scaled down, or repealed laws that mandated lengthy prison sentences for drug and other crimes.

But undoing mass incarceration’s public health crisis will require more than changing sentencing laws and providing people with health insurance. We also need state and local investments to establish a robust network of community health centers and a culturally competent workforce in neighborhoods where mass incarceration is most entrenched.  These investments are needed in order to stop relying on jails and courts as default healthcare providers.

This strategy is being pursued in New York City, where Mayor Bill DeBlasio announced a sweeping plan to prevent people with mental health needs from ending up at Rikers Island when they encounter law enforcement. The plan includes the opening of a Public Health Diversion Center, under the auspices of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. It would redirect people to community-based services—in lieu of arrest and prosecution—in communities where health disparities and incarceration are most prevalent. The diversion center would include a 24-hour drop-off location where people accused of low-level crimes could receive health services, withdrawal treatment, case management, overnight shelter, and food.

Finally, we need our political leaders to repeal unjustly harsh policies that deprive individuals who have served their time—and their families—of a fair chance at finding secure housing, entering the labor market, and rising out of poverty.

Momentum is building in the right direction. Ending mass incarceration and restoring the health of our communities is a mission that we all must get behind.

State economies would be much stronger over time if states invested more in education —which many states have cut in recent years — and other areas that can boost long-term economic growth and less in maintaining extremely high prison populations.  Our recent report discusses how states can reduce incarceration rates and shift the savings to more productive uses.

When I first started working in criminal justice in the early 1990s, it was almost impossible to have a conversation with an elected official or a high-ranking criminal justice policymaker of any political persuasion without talking about the need to be “tough on crime.”  The backdrop for these conversations was a pervasive sense of fear (of lawlessness on the streets) and despair (about the prospects of successfully rehabilitating offenders).

Today, I turned on my computer to discover that Newt Gingrich has endorsed the idea of reducing incarceration in the United States.  He is not the only voice on the right calling for change.  Indeed, hopeful analysts have cited criminal justice reform as one of the few potential areas where Democrats and Republicans in Washington might find common ground in the final two years of President Obama’s term.  Clearly, the center of gravity has shifted in terms of the politics of crime.

A lot of hard work has gone into making this happen. The “justice reinvestment” movement has played a particularly crucial role, advancing a bipartisan approach to criminal justice that relies on hard data rather than the politics of emotion.  The U.S. Department of Justice has also made an important contribution by documenting what works and then disseminating this information to the field (crimesolutions.gov).

These national-level efforts have been bolstered by numerous reformers working at the state and local level to demonstrate that it is in fact possible to reduce the use of incarceration without undermining public safety.

Take New York, for example.  Between 1999 and 2012, New York reduced its prison population by 26 percent—a decline of nearly 20,000 inmates.  The use of jail in New York City has also been reduced—the daily head count on Rikers Island is now less than 11,000, down from more than 21,000 at its peak.

Even as New York’s jail and prison rolls have gone down, so too has crime, declining by 69 percent over two decades.

Most of the public acclaim for these developments has gone to the New York Police Department and New York City mayors who have made crime-fighting a priority. Under the radar, the judicial branch has also played an important role.

Thanks to the leadership of Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman and his predecessor Judith S. Kaye, the New York courts have made a sustained institutional commitment to creating a variety of alternative-to-incarceration programs.  The courts have developed special programs for defendants with substance abuse and mental health problems.  They have sought to increase the use of services in cases involving 16 and 17-year old defendants and victims of human trafficking.  And they have launched a number of community-based programs that have sought to promote alternative sentencing in high-crime neighborhoods. (In the interests of full disclosure, my agency—the Center for Court Innovation— has worked with the judiciary to conceive and implement many of these projects.)

Crucially, the alternative programs launched by the New York courts target not just felony defendants but also people charged with misdemeanors.  Misdemeanor convictions may expose defendants to less time behind bars, but the consequences can be long-lasting in terms of employment, housing, child custody, student loans, immigration status, and a host of government benefits. For many, a misdemeanor conviction is another step along a path that leads toward a life of poverty.

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While much of the popular discussion focuses on federal sentencing guidelines and the need to reduce state prison populations, there is significant work to be done at the local level to reduce the use of jail.  (Jails are typically administered by counties and are designed to hold defendants awaiting trial and inmates sentenced to a term of less than 1 year. Prisons are run by the state or the federal government and typically hold inmates serving sentences of more than 1 year.)

One of the hidden truths of the justice system is that minor cases are much more voluminous than serious offenses. As John Jay College recently documented, nearly 75 percent of the arrests that the police make in New York City are for misdemeanor crimes – more than 235,000 in 2012, for example.

In response to the preponderance of minor cases, the New York courts (with an assist from the Center for Court Innovation) created Bronx Community Solutions to provide criminal court judges in the Bronx with additional sentencing options for non-violent offenses such as drug possession, shoplifting and prostitution.  This includes community restitution projects as well as social service classes, job training and individual counseling.

One challenge that has long plagued alternative-to-incarceration programs is the Field of Dreams question: if you build it, will they come?  Will judges actually avail themselves of alternatives?

The experience in the Bronx suggests that when alternative programs have been developed with the active involvement of the judiciary, they are more likely to win the support of the judges on the ground who ultimately determine whether someone is incarcerated or stays in the community.  According to the New York City Mayor’s Office, after Bronx Community Solutions began offering alternative sentences to misdemeanor defendants in the Bronx, the percentage of convicted defendants sentenced to jail fell from 23.7 percent in 2004 to 13.5 percent in 2012—a 43 percent reduction.  Keep in mind, this is not a boutique program dealing with a handful of participants; each year Bronx Community Solutions works with about 9,000 defendants.

But this battle is by no means won—plenty of work remains to reduce the number of people in Rikers Island, particularly those who are detained pre-trial.  However, Bronx Community Solutions has made one thing perfectly clear: change is possible—even in high-volume, urban justice systems.

Work not only reinforces an individual’s sense of pride, purpose and identity – and, of course, allows an individual to earn a living – but also contributes to strong communities and a thriving economy.  When one in four Americans faces the very real prospect of being locked out of the labor market because of a criminal record, then we all suffer a great loss in productivity and human capital.  However, if we seize on promising solutions, we can change this reality and create new opportunities for people who are struggling against significant odds to turn their lives around.

As featured in the CAP report, multiple strategies must be pursued in order to address the collateral damage caused by the proliferation of criminal background checks for employment. It starts with aggressive enforcement of federal civil rights and consumer laws that are already on the books to strictly regulate employers and the background check industry, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Credit Reporting Act.  Reform must also include broader sealing and expungement of misdemeanor and felony records, correcting faulty criminal records databases, and strengthening appeal protections that allow workers to navigate the thousands of occupational licensing laws that require criminal background checks.  Ultimately, we must create a process that allows people to compete for employment based on their merits instead of being stigmatized by their criminal records.

Significantly, organizations and elected officials from across the ideological spectrum have rallied around fair chance hiring reforms.  Fair chance hiring incorporates “ban the box” policies, which remove the criminal history question from the job application and delay the background check until later in the hiring process.  Fair chance hiring also incorporates the criminal background check guidelines adopted by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which require employers to take into account the age of the offense, whether the offense is related to the individual’s job, and whether the individual has been rehabilitated.  And finally, fair chance hiring calls for strong standards of accuracy and transparency to maintain the integrity of the background check and protect workers against unfair and arbitrary treatment.

In just the past two years, eight states passed fair chance hiring laws, which increasingly extend not just to government employers but private sector employers as well.  Most recently, Republican Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey signed fair chance hiring legislation, stating, “We are banning the box and ending employment discrimination.”  There are now 13 states and over 80 cities and counties that have adopted ban the box and other fair chance hiring reforms.  And three of the top five U.S. retailers – Walmart, Target and Home Depot – have also joined the effort by delaying criminal history inquiries until later in the hiring process.   Meanwhile, 2015 promises to be another big year, with fair chance hiring campaigns already underway in Ohio, Texas, New York City, and Los Angeles, to name just a few places.

These reform policies can have a measurable impact on employer hiring practices.  For example, in the four years since Durham implemented its fair chance hiring policy, city officials have documented a seven-fold increase in the hiring of people with criminal records.  Progress has also been demonstrated in Minneapolis and Atlanta since the enactment of their fair chance hiring policies.

While fair chance hiring is not a panacea for all barriers associated with a criminal record, it is a strategy that resonates deeply with communities severely impacted by over-criminalization.  It provides a platform to engage elected officials in a serious debate about the devastating legacy of the War on Drugs and its effect on struggling families and communities.  In fact, “ban the box” was the brainchild of a membership organization of the formerly incarcerated, called All of Us Or None. Together with faith-based leaders, including the PICO Network, the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Movement, and other allied organizations, All of Us Or None is fighting to restore the full rights of people with criminal records to access employment, housing, education, public assistance, and the vote.

Now is the time for the federal government to act boldly, building on the wave of fair chance hiring reforms at the state and local levels.  The Obama Administration should require fair chance hiring by federal contractors and clean up the flaws in the federal hiring process, which unfairly disadvantage people with criminal records.  The recommendation of President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Task Force resonates loud and clear:  “Our youth and communities suffer when hiring practices unnecessarily disqualify candidates based on past mistakes.  We should implement reforms to promote successful reentry, including encouraging hiring practices, such as ‘Ban the Box,’ which give applicants a fair chance and allows employers the opportunity to judge individual job candidates on their merits as they reenter the workforce.”

Given the bi-partisan support for criminal justice reform, backed by organizations like Right on Crime, the new 114^th Congress will also be well-positioned to enact fair chance hiring legislation.  The new Congress should immediately take up the REDEEM Act, co-sponsored by Senators Corey Booker (D-NJ) and Rand Paul (R-KY), as well as legislation sponsored by Congressmen Bobby Scott (D-VA) and Keith Ellison (D-MN)  that would correct the millions of faulty background checks for employment  generated each year by the FBI.

These are challenging times for the nation. But if ever there were a time to seize momentum and make lasting change in the lives of people with criminal records, this is it.

Individuals processed through the judicial system in many states are charged fees and fines at every turn. There are fines intended to punish an individual for the commission of an offense, like speeding fines.  There are fees intended for repayment of any harm caused to victims, including restitution payments and contributions to victim funds.

But there are other, less visible costs as well.  For example, correctional facilities across the nation charge fees to their inmates for countless reasons. The Mason County Detention Center in Kentucky charges $25 a day to stay at the facility, in addition to a $20 booking fee, a $5 release fee, and a $7 medical co-payment fee. Other jails charge for toilet paper and clothing. Then there are fees for using the criminal justice system itself. Forty-three states and the District of Columbia allow fees for a public defender, and 44 states charge individuals for using probation services. Though many of these fees may seem relatively small – public defender fees range from about $50 to $200 – they add up quickly and a defendant can emerge from the system with thousands of dollars in debt.

These charges are an outgrowth of mass incarceration. As the criminal justice system expanded to include almost 7 million individuals under correctional control through supervision or incarceration, so did its costs. States – many facing tight or disappearing budgets – chose to shift the increasing cost burden to defendants instead of picking up the tab.  For example, in Ferguson, Missouri, the city relied on rising municipal court fines to make up 20 percent of its $12 million operating budget in fiscal year 2013. These fees and fines impose an additional penalty on individuals above and beyond their actual sentences. Even worse, it is at cross-purposes with the goal of release: to reintegrate the individual as a productive member of society. This is an extremely difficult goal to accomplish when one is already set back by a mountain of debt obligations.

“Criminal justice debt” refers to the accrual of these fees and fines, and they are onerous for most individuals entering the justice system. Approximately 80 percent of those who enter the criminal justice system cannot afford an attorney for their own defense, which suggests that they have little additional savings to pay back new debts.  Upon release from incarceration, the average formerly incarcerated white male earns about $11,140, or just around the federal poverty line.  Studies demonstrate that African Americans and Hispanics who are released from prison earn even less.  All the while, new debts await their return to the community.

The collection of criminal justice debt can be aggressive and further prevent successful integration. Some individuals face the withholding of income from paychecks.  Others face liens on their homes.  Placing barriers to obtaining a driver’s license is a common practice among the states, even though it frequently impedes an individual’s ability to secure employment.

In many jurisdictions around the country, failure to pay criminal debt extends an otherwise law-abiding individual’s entanglement in the justice system.  Many states extend the term of supervision for failure to pay, despite the reality that supervision costs money.  Another enforcement mechanism – the issuance of warrants for nonpayment of fees – pulls individuals before the court and may result in incarceration. Therefore, an individual can pay a penalty for an offense, and then be incarcerated for failing to pay off the debt incurred as a result of that offense.

Ironically, these tactics are costly to the state.  Probation officers, judges and court personnel must spend time serving as debt collectors. The privatization of debt collection is increasingly common, but the success of these companies is difficult to assess.  By 2011, uncollected criminal justice debt in the United States totaled $50 billion. Very little of this debt will be collected.  Florida, for example, expects to recover just 9 percent of the fees and fines imposed in felony cases.  In Washington State, the county clerks collect, on average, less than 5 percent of the total fees and fines imposed in a particular case.

In the end, criminal justice debt burdens more than just the individual caught up in the criminal justice system.  It burdens the state through collection. It burdens the family of the individual who cannot cover the debt payments necessary to stay out of jail, so the family tries to pay it for him.  It burdens the communities where these individuals return because criminal justice debt perpetuates poverty and prevents the accrual of resources necessary for socioeconomic equality. Moreover, criminal justice debt hinders reentry, often leading to extended periods of court-supervision and incarceration for individuals unable to pay. Such realities burden society at large by threatening public safety and increasing incarceration in already overburdened jail systems. These realities make clear that criminal justice debt reflects bad policy.

The Brennan Center for Justice, along with a growing number of policy organizations, practitioners, and academics, are working to improve the policies surrounding criminal justice debt. Reforms include advocating for the elimination of fees for using the criminal justice system – like the elimination of jail fees for the incarceration of individuals the state chooses to detain.  It also includes improving the assessment of whether an individual has the ability to pay fees and fines prior to their imposition.  Finally, on a broader scale, addressing criminal justice debt requires recalibration of the justice system to understand exactly how resources are spent, and why.  These steps are all part of a bigger battle to reduce our overreliance on incarceration – with its harmful side effects – in order to create a more rational and fair justice system.

Many have only a minor record—a misdemeanor, or even an arrest without a conviction. But even a minor criminal record carries with it lifelong barriers that can block successful reentry and access to many of the essentials for economic security and upward mobility, like employment, housing, education, and job training.

The reason? Policy choices at the federal, state, and local levels, as well as the rise of technology and the ease of accessing data via the internet. A generation ago, access to criminal record information for housing applicants and jobseekers was unusual. Today, however, background checks are ubiquitous, with 4 out of 5 landlords and nearly 9 in 10 employers using criminal background checks to screen out people with criminal records before they even get a shot.

The result is that tens of millions of individuals are prevented from becoming productive members of society, and their families, communities, and the national economy are held back as well.

It is important to note that the lifelong consequences and stigma of having a criminal record stand in stark contrast to research on “redemption.”  Studies show that once a person with a nonviolent conviction is crime-free for three to four years, his or her risk of recidivism is no different from the risk of arrest for the general population. Put differently, people are treated as criminals long after they pose any significant risk of committing further crimes—making it difficult for many to achieve basic economic security, much less upward mobility.

As detailed in a new Center for American Progress report to be released tomorrow—which I co-authored with Sharon Dietrich—mass incarceration and hyper-criminalization are now major drivers of poverty and inequality. Having a criminal record can stand in the way of employment, housing, public assistance, education and training, and more; convictions can result in significant monetary debts too. In fact, a recent study finds that our nation’s poverty rate would have dropped by 20 percent between 1980 and 2004 if not for mass incarceration and the subsequent criminal records that burden people for years after they have paid their debts to society.

Communities of color—and particularly men of color—are disproportionately affected, and high-poverty communities generate a disproportionate share of Americans behind bars. Approximately 60% of people in America’s prisons are racial and ethnic minorities.  Of those individuals serving time for drug offenses, about two-thirds are black or Latino.  Research shows that mass incarceration and its effects have been significant drivers of racial inequality in the U.S., particularly during the past three to four decades.

The barriers associated with a criminal record also hurt the nation’s bottom line. The Center for Economic and Policy Research estimates that the cost of people with criminal records being shut out of the labor market is a $65 billion annual hit to GDP. And that’s in addition to our nation’s skyrocketing expenditures for mass incarceration, which now total more than $80 billion annually.

It’s long past time that we create policies to ensure that Americans with criminal records have a fair shot at earning a decent living, providing for their families, and joining the middle class. Failure to address the lifelong barriers associated with a criminal record as part of a larger anti-poverty, pro-mobility agenda risks missing a major piece of the puzzle.

President Obama’s administration has been a leader on this important issue, for example by establishing the Federal Interagency Reentry Council, which has brought 20 federal agencies together to coordinate and advance effective re-entry policies. States and cities across the country are also beginning to take action: To date, 13 states and 70 municipalities have enacted fair-chance hiring policies to help level the playing field for jobseekers with criminal records. And cities such as New Orleans and New York City have taken steps to remove obstacles to public housing for people with records.

But further action is needed at all levels of government. Our new report offers a roadmap for the Obama administration and federal agencies, Congress, states and cities, employers, and colleges and universities to ensure that a criminal record no longer presents an intractable barrier to economic security and mobility.

Bipartisan momentum for criminal justice reform is growing, due in part to the enormous costs of mass incarceration, as well as an increased focus on evidence-based approaches to public safety. Policymakers and opinion leaders from across the political spectrum are calling for sentencing and prison reform, as well as policies that give people a second chance. Now is the time to find common ground and enact meaningful reforms that ensure a criminal record does not consign an individual to poverty.

We are thrilled that in conjunction with our report, TalkPoverty.org is featuring posts throughout the week from leaders in the criminal justice reform movement—including the Brennan Center, the Vera Institute of Justice, The Sentencing Project, the Center for Court Innovation, Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, and more—all exploring the link between mass incarceration and poverty, and solutions that would break that link. This week is not intended to be a comprehensive examination of criminal justice reform—we know it will only scratch the surface. But we hope it will help advance this important conversation, and we look forward to TalkPoverty.org continuing its commitment to criminal justice reform throughout the year.

Gideon’s Promise is a movement of hundreds of public defenders nationwide who are working together to change this unacceptable status quo.

In 1963, when Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, civil rights abuses were prevalent and devastating in the arena of criminal justice. So it is no coincidence that during that same year, the United States Supreme Court sought to address the role that race and class played in the administration of criminal justice.

In Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court required that the state provide poor people accused of a crime with an attorney.  It noted that a layperson simply cannot effectively navigate the labyrinth of laws and procedures that make up the criminal justice system.  Only the right to counsel would ensure that a person accused of a crime would receive justice.

But the right to counsel is only meaningful if state-appointed attorneys have the same skill, training, resources, and level of commitment as lawyers who represent people with means.  As I began working on criminal justice reform efforts across the South a decade ago, I saw systems that fell far short of providing basic standards of representation for poor people. I met countless young public defenders who had begun their careers filled with enthusiasm, only to have the passion beaten out of them by a system that effectively expects public defenders to help process poor people into prison cells.

These lawyers were deprived of the resources, training, and support they needed to live up to their constitutional obligation. They were forced to handle crushing caseloads that didn’t allow them to give the time their clients deserved and needed. Many began to feel hopeless and eventually quit. Others were worn down, resigned to the status quo. A few remained inspired, continuing the Sisyphean task of fighting a system that had abandoned its quest for equal justice. But all too often these individuals were like a lone voice screaming against a deafening wind.

In 2007, my wife and I founded Gideon’s Promise to build a strong community of public defenders who would have the training and support necessary to immediately improve the standard of representation for their clients.  We wanted to develop this community into a movement—one focused on changing a criminal justice culture that is anything but just, and pushing back against the forces that pressure public defenders to simply process clients.

Gideon’s Promise began with just 16 young public defenders drawn from two offices.  To date, more than 300 public defenders in 15 states have participated in our initial, three-year training and support program. A national faculty comprised of more than 60 experienced public defenders volunteer as our trainers and mentors.  We have added programs that serve our graduates, senior lawyers, and public defender leaders. With more than 35 “partner” public defender offices, Gideon’s Promise is changing the landscape of public defense for tens of thousands of people who depend on court-appointed counsel each year. Through partnerships with law schools, we are also creating a pipeline for recent graduates to join our effort where the need is greatest. Finally, by working with jurisdictions across the nation to share our model, Gideon’s Promise has indeed evolved into a comprehensive movement of inspired public defenders committed to transforming criminal justice in America.

There is no greater threat to equal justice than when our public defenders are beaten into submission.  At that point, a poor person accused of a crime has no chance. But through a strong and supportive community like Gideon’s Promise, lawyers for the poor can stay inspired and continue to fight one of the least popular, but most important, civil and human rights battles of our day.

But we don’t just punish people for being poor.  In some cases, we punish them for being punished.

Consider the felony drug ban, which imposes a lifetime restriction on welfare and food stamp benefits for anyone convicted of a state or federal drug felony.  Passed in the “tough on crime” era of the mid-1990s, the ban denies basic assistance to people who may have sold a small amount of marijuana years or even decades ago and have been law-abiding citizens ever since.

Because the felony drug ban was adopted with little debate, it’s hard to know exactly what Congress intended.  But we can measure the law’s effect.  Last year, The Sentencing Project found that the legislation subjects an estimated 180,000 women in the twelve most impacted states to a lifetime ban on welfare benefits.

Given racial disparities throughout the criminal justice system — particularly related to the war on drugs — banning benefits based on a prior drug conviction has brutally unfair consequences for people of color.  About 60% of people in America’s prisons are racial and ethnic minorities.  Of those individuals serving time for drug offenses, about two-thirds are black or Latino.  Further, blacks are three to four times more likely to be arrested for drug offenses than whites, even though they use and sell drugs at roughly the same rates.

People who cannot meet basic needs may be more likely to turn to dangerous activities.  A study by researchers at Yale Medical School found that women who are denied food assistance due to a drug conviction are at greater risk of hunger. These women are also more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior such as prostitution in order to get money for food.

The felony drug ban is just one of many collateral consequences that formerly incarcerated individuals face as they strive to reenter society.  Some of these barriers are informal: an employer who will not hire a person with a criminal record; a university application that requires all applicants to “check the box” for a prior arrest or conviction.

But private sector discrimination has been compounded by laws that erect barriers and cut services for people sent to prison.  In the 1990s, Congress barred Pell grants for incarcerated individuals — ensuring that most could not receive a college education prior to release — and restricted access to public housing and financial aid for higher education for some former prisoners.

Felony disenfranchisement laws – which date to colonial times but were tailored in the post-Reconstruction era to exclude black voters – place voting restrictions on an estimated 5.85 million Americans.  In the upcoming elections, more than one in five black adults will be denied the right to vote in Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia due to a criminal conviction.

Fortunately, as public attitudes about mass incarceration have changed, there is a growing recognition that fair sentencing can meet the mutual goals of punishment and rehabilitation.  Imposing collateral consequences after a criminal conviction is not only vindictive but also counterproductive to building safe and healthy communities.

In recent months, federal lawmakers in both parties have introduced legislation to remove some of these barriers and promote a safer transition into society.  The REDEEM Act, introduced by Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rand Paul (R-KY), would allow the sealing of criminal records and lift the ban on benefits for some people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses.  Though the bill should go much further — for example, by also lifting restrictions on housing and education benefits — it is a good first step toward restoring access to assistance for individuals who urgently need it.

Former President Bill Clinton — who signed the felony drug ban into law — recently told a group of mayors and law enforcement officials that some measures intended to address crime have been misguided and others have gone too far.  Clinton predicted that criminal justice reform would be debated in the 2016 presidential race.  If so, it will represent a major shift in our politics, which have too often focused on getting tough on crime rather than on promoting healthy communities.  But for millions of people who are still being punished long after completing their sentences, 2016 is too long to wait.

It is an injustice to punish people for being poor.  It is doubly unjust to punish them after they have already been punished.

When I got out of prison 30 years ago, the only job I could get took me right back inside the gates of San Quentin, where I helped inmates through the prison’s law office. What I witnessed 30 years ago is still happening now: that small box on job applications that asks have you ever been convicted of a crime continues to make it tough for formerly incarcerated folks to get a job.

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However, Ban the Box is much more than just the removal of the dreaded question about conviction history from employment applications. Ban the Box is actually a larger effort to dismantle structural discrimination. For example, we demand the right to return to our families upon release. Research shows our families are a strong source of support and may live in public housing, from which we are often banned. With the kind of pervasive discrimination we face—not only with jobs but also housing, professional licenses, and school applications—it’s time to consider laws that protect Formerly Incarcerated People from discrimination.

With the poverty rate at an unacceptable 14.5 percent and economic inequality stuck at historically high levels, one might assume that chronic economic insecurity and an off-kilter economy are the “new normal”—that nothing can be done to fix it.

But there is nothing “normal” or inevitable about more than 45 million Americans living in poverty. It is the direct result of policy choices. With different policy choices, we will see a more equitable economy—it’s as simple as that. 

Here are 10 steps Congress can take to cut poverty, boost economic security, and expand the middle class.

1) Create jobs.  

The best pathway out of poverty is a well-paying job. To get back to prerecession employment levels, we must create 5.6 million new jobs. To kick-start job growth now, the federal government should invest in our infrastructure by rebuilding our bridges, railways, roads, ports, schools and libraries, neighborhood parks, and abandoned housing; expanding broadband; develop renewable energy sources; and make other commonsense investments that create jobs and boost our national economy. For example, extending federal unemployment insurance would have created 200,000 new jobs in 2014. But Congress failed to act, leaving 1.3 million Americans and their families without this vital economic lifeline. We should renew federal unemployment insurance, and also build on proven models of subsidized employment to help the long-term unemployed and other disadvantaged workers re-enter the labor force.

2) Raise the minimum wage.

In the late 1960s, the minimum wage was enough to lift a family of three out of poverty.  Not so anymore. The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 is a poverty wage, and had it been indexed to inflation it would be $10.86 per hour today. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour and indexing it to inflation would lift more than 4 million Americans out of poverty. Nearly one in five children would see their parent get a raise. Recent action by states and cities shows that boosting the minimum wage reduces poverty and increases wages.

3) Increase the EITC for childless workers.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) lifted more than 6.5 million Americans—including 3.3 million children—above the poverty line in 2012. Kids who receive the EITC are also more likely to graduate from high school and have higher earnings in adulthood. Yet childless workers largely miss out on the benefit—their maximum credit is less than one-tenth that awarded to a worker with two children. Policymakers across the political spectrum have called for boosting the EITC. Importantly, this policy change should be combined with a raise in the minimum wage—one is not a substitute for the other.

4)     Support pay equity.

With female full-time workers earning just 78 cents for every dollar earned by men, we must take action to ensure equal pay for equal work. Closing the gender pay gap would cut poverty in half for working women and their families and add nearly half a trillion dollars to the nation’s gross domestic product.  Passing the Paycheck Fairness Act to hold employers accountable for discriminatory salary practices would be a key first step.

5)     Provide paid leave and paid sick days.

The United States is the only developed country without paid family leave and paid sick days, making it exceedingly difficult for millions of American workers to care for their families without having to sacrifice needed income. Paid leave is an important antipoverty policy—having a child is one of the leading causes of economic hardship. Additionally, nearly 4 in 10 private sector workers—and 7 in 10 low-wage workers—do not have a single paid sick day, so they must forgo needed income in order to care for a sick child or loved one.  The Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act, or FAMILY Act, would provide paid leave protection to workers who need to take time off due to their own illness or that of a family member, or after the birth of a child. And the Healthy Families Act would enable workers to earn up to seven job-protected sick days a year.

6)     Establish work schedules that work.

Low-wage and hourly jobs increasingly come with unpredictable and constantly shifting work schedules. These erratic schedules make accessing childcare even more difficult and leave workers uncertain about their monthly income. Further, things many of us take for granted—such as scheduling a doctor’s appointment or even a parent-teacher conference at school—become herculean tasks. The Schedules That Work Act would require that workers receive two weeks advance notice of their schedules, create and protect an employee’s right to request needed schedule changes, and provide guaranteed pay for cancelled or shortened shifts—important first steps towards making work-family balance possible for all workers.

7)     Invest in affordable, high-quality childcare and early education.

The lack of affordable, high-quality childcare serves as a major barrier to reaching the middle class. Federal child care assistance reaches only 1 in 6 eligible children. One year of childcare for an infant costs more than a year of tuition at most states’ four-year public colleges. Poor families who pay out of pocket for childcare spend an average of one-third of their incomes.  Boosting investments in Head Start and the Child Care and Development Block Grant, as well as passing the Strong Start for America’s Children Act—which would invest in preschool, high-quality childcare for infants and toddlers, and home visiting services for pregnant women and mothers with infants—will help families obtain the childcare they need in order to work, and improve the future economic mobility of America’s children.

8)     Expand Medicaid.

Since it was signed into law in 2010, the Affordable Care Act has expanded access to high-quality, affordable health coverage for millions of Americans. However, 23 states refuse to expand their Medicaid programs to cover adults up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line, which makes the struggle for many families on the brink much harder. Expanding Medicaid means more than just access to healthcare—it frees up limited household income for other basic needs, like paying rent and putting food on the table. Having health coverage is also an important buffer against the economic consequences of illness or injury—unpaid medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy. Studies link Medicaid coverage not only to improved health, improved access to healthcare services, and lower mortality rates, but also to reduced financial strain. It’s time for all states to expand Medicaid.

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9)     Reform the criminal justice system and enact policies that support successful re-entry

The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country in the world. Today, more than 1.5 million Americans are behind bars in state and federal prisons, a figure that has increased fivefold since 1980. The impact on communities of color is particularly staggering: One in four African American children who grew up during this time period have had a parent incarcerated.

Mass incarceration is a key driver of poverty. When a parent is incarcerated, his or her family must find a way to make ends meet without a necessary source of income. Additionally, even a minor criminal record can result in lifelong barriers to climbing out of poverty. For example, people with criminal records face substantial barriers to employment, housing, education, public assistance, and building good credit. More than 90 percent of employers now use background checks in hiring, and even an arrest without a conviction can prevent an individual from getting a job. The “one strike and you’re out” policy used by public housing authorities makes it difficult for individuals with even decades-old criminal records to obtain housing, and can obstruct family reunification. And in more than half of U.S. states, individuals with felony drug convictions are burdened with a lifetime ban on receiving certain types of public assistance.

In addition to common-sense sentencing reform to ensure that we no longer fill our nation’s prisons with non-violent, low-level offenders, policymakers should explore alternatives to incarceration, such as diversion programs for individuals with mental health and substance abuse challenges. We must also remove barriers to employment, housing, education, and public assistance. A decades-old criminal record should not consign an individual to a life of poverty.

10)  Do no harm

The across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration—which took effect in 2013—slashed funding for programs and services that provide vital support to low-income families. Sequestration also cost the American economy as many as 1.6 million jobs between mid-2013 and 2014.  As Congress considers a continuing resolution to fund the federal government past October 1 and avoid another government shutdown, it should reject further cuts to vital programs and services which would once again take us in the wrong direction. Thereafter, Congress should make permanent the improvements made to the EITC and the Child Tax Credit as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which are set to expire in 2017. And it should protect and strengthen vital programs such as Section 8 housing, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, which suffered two rounds of deep cuts in 2013 and 2014.

Conclusion

It is not only possible for America to cut poverty, it is possible for us to cut poverty dramatically.  Between 1959 and 1973, a strong economy, investments in family economic security, and new civil rights protections helped cut the U.S. poverty rate in half. Investments in nutrition assistance have improved educational attainment, earnings, health and income among our nation’s children when they reach adulthood. Expansions of public health insurance have lowered infant mortality rates. And, in more recent history, states that have raised the minimum wage have shown the important role that policy plays in reversing wage stagnation.

There is nothing inevitable about poverty, and there is nothing inevitable about the lack of political will to dramatically reduce it.  Share this article with your friends, and get involved.

Even though the FBI has identified Washington, D.C. as a high-frequency area for sex trafficking of minors, city officials there are expressing reservations about a critical component of an anti-trafficking law that advocates say would expand protections for survivors of this violence.

Nationally, the average age of entry into commercial sexual exploitation is 11-14 years old, and many of these survivors are lured by traffickers with false promises of economic security and emotional support.  Some don’t enter through a trafficker, but simply because they need to meet their basic needs of food and shelter. City Councilmember Mary Cheh and anti-trafficking advocates claim that the “Sex Trafficking of Minors Prevention Act” would take important steps toward changing that.

The proposed legislation would increase public awareness, boost reporting of missing and runaway minors who are especially vulnerable to trafficking, improve training for survivor identification, and expand access to services by requiring the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to refer minors to providers. The measure also includes a “safe harbor” provision that would require MPD to treat all minors suspected of engaging in commercial sex as survivors of trafficking, instead of arresting and charging them. National anti-trafficking advocates such as the Polaris Project support these safe harbor laws because they believe treating survivors as criminals instead of victims is re-traumatizing and harmful.

Despite strong advocate support for the legislation, Paul A. Quander Jr., the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice — who is tasked with overseeing the police department — objects to the safe harbor proposal, among other provisions. At a public hearing on the legislation earlier this month, Quander claimed that some minors arrested for the crime of prostitution are “legitimate offenders;” that some “prostitute through their own volition;” and that some “have procurement duties amongst a group of friends, who have decided that payment for sexual favors is the best way to gain monetary security.”

When asked for additional comment on these opinions, a representative for Quander stated, “Deputy Mayor Quander believes his testimony from last month is quite straightforward and speaks for itself. Nothing has changed since then, and he does not have anything to add to it.”

Councilmember Cheh, who introduced the anti-sex trafficking legislation alongside three other lawmakers, acknowledged to ThinkProgress that the bill still requires some adjustments. However, she believes that the legislation will “expand the possibility that people can get help.”

Advocates concerned with victim-blaming more forcefully objected to Quander’s assessment of the minors who are arrested for prostitution.

“Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, any child who is sold for sex is automatically a sex trafficking victim — full-stop,” Andrea Powell, who founded FAIR Girls, told ThinkProgress. “Children cannot choose to engage in prostitution in this country and those who buy them are having sex with a victim. When a police officer arrests a child for prostitution, they are arresting the victim.  This is a human rights issue for the District and the country.”

“Children under 18 who have been sexually exploited deserve support and services, not prosecution,” Audrey Roofeh of the Polaris Project added.

Ultimately, the Deputy Mayor’s reluctance to support a core provision of the legislation may delay benefits for marginalized groups that are particularly victimized. Advocates comment that this legislation, if passed, would especially benefit runaway, low-income, disabled, and LGBT youth, who are all at increased risk of exploitation.  Other groups, such as survivors of sexual abuse and undocumented immigrants, are also disproportionately targeted because they are already vulnerable.

“The vast majority (of minors) are from families living in extreme poverty because traffickers prey on vulnerable children,” Powell explained to ThinkProgress. “Traffickers want to take advantage of young people who won’t be missed. Of those 300+ American girl victims we’ve served, only two had missing children reports. The majority were not reported missing because they were in the foster care system. Instead, they are listed as repeat runaways and non-critical missing…. Pimps tell their young victims that if they speak up, they will just be arrested and treated as prostitutes. They are told no one will believe them and they are scared of the police.”

Despite the prevalence of sex trafficking of minors, the District’s human trafficking laws are currently ranked in the bottom half of all states by the Polaris Project. Mayor Vincent Gray’s administration has yet to take a formal position on Cheh’s bill, which is awaiting markup.

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Many of us who work in the criminal justice system have come to understand the profound connection between poverty and mass incarceration.  Put simply, individuals with criminal histories – even minor ones – find it exceedingly difficult to enter the workforce and provide for their families.  One pragmatic response to this problem is to incarcerate fewer people, particularly in local jails.

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Without BJI, Rick and Meagan probably would have spent considerable time at Rikers Island, New York City’s jail.  A recent report from the Independent Budget Office documents that the City’s annual cost per inmate at Rikers is $168,000 – a significant expenditure at a time of rising public needs and increasing public concern about the overuse of incarceration.  While the institutional costs of incarceration are enormous, the human toll is even greater.  And for people struggling with limited financial resources, time in jail means time away from school, work, family, and other social supports, exacerbating an already formidable constellation of challenges to economic mobility.

Criminalization laws can take many forms.  Most commonly, they outlaw sitting, sleeping in vehicles or outdoors, lying down, “hanging out,” sharing food, and camping. What makes them even more insidious is that they can be difficult to detect. Curfews on public parks are often explained by municipalities as a way to deter drug-related crimes.  In reality, they are frequently a way to ensure that homeless people don’t use park benches as beds. By not having enough safe sleeping spaces, cities are forcing their homeless persons to live on the streets with virtually no other options, and then arresting them for doing so. These laws represent a gross violation of human rights, and have received a large amount of criticism from civil rights advocates around the country and the world.

In March, criminalization laws led to a man’s death. 56-year-old Jerome Murdough, a homeless veteran, was without shelter in New York City on a cold night. Searching for a safe place to sleep, he took refuge in an enclosed stairwell in a Harlem public housing building. He was discovered and arrested for trespassing. Since he didn’t have $2,500 to post bail, he was sent to Riker’s Island Prison, where he was placed in a hot cell and ignored for hours by prison staff. According to a city official, Murdough “basically baked to death” in the cell, and was found dead on the floor. His disturbing saga highlights the dangers of criminalization laws; instead of receiving needed assistance, Murdough was treated like a criminal, and ultimately lost his life by trying to protect it.

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The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty recently released a report entitled, No Safe Place: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities. The report details the alarming upward trend of these inhumane and ineffective statutes that criminalize homelessness—with specific examples from around the country—and highlights how the laws are both ineffective and also violations of human rights.

While Murdough’s death represents the most extreme effect of criminalization laws, countless other homeless people face situations every day that put their lives in danger. In No Safe Place, the Law Center recounts the story of Lawrence Lee Smith, a man in Boise, Idaho who became homeless after a degenerative joint disease made him unable to continue to work construction.

“He lived in a camper van for years until it was towed. He couldn’t afford to retrieve it, leaving him with nowhere to reside but in public places…due to frequent overcrowding of area homeless shelters. Mr. Smith was cited for illegal camping and was jailed for a total of 100 days. Due to the arrest, he lost his tent, his stove, and the fishing equipment he relied upon to live.”

In addition to a loss of property, many homeless people who are cited for sleeping in public also must pay fines that they can’t afford, which often results in jail time. A homeless woman, Sandy, tells her story in the report:

“I just basically wanted to get in a little bit safer situation so I hid . . . in this church. And they gave me a ticket and now I can’t pay for this ticket; it’s four-hundred bucks! You know, I can’t pay $80 dollars. I have no income whatsoever.”

In some cities, it is illegal to share food with homeless people. The report details the case of Birmingham, Alabama Pastor Rick Wood, who was ordered by police to stop serving hotdogs and bottled water to homeless people in a city park.

“‘This makes me so mad,’ Wood told a local news station. ‘These people are hungry, they’re starving. They need help from people. They can’t afford to buy something from a food truck.’”

Bans on food-sharing exist in 17 of the cities studied by the Law Center and are based on the wrong assumption that free food services will bring an influx of homeless persons to the area. In reality, the bans simply force people to search for food in less safe places like dumpsters and trash cans.

There has been a nationwide increase in criminalization laws since 2011, despite mounting evidence that criminalization is the most expensive and least effective way to deal with homelessness. As cities increasingly opt for these bad policies, there will eventually be no safe place left for homeless people. Instead, communities should focus on constructive alternatives to criminalization that actually work; policies like the “housing first” strategy that provides housing and supportive services to homeless people and is also much less costly than the price of jail stays and emergency room visits.

Could you survive if there were no place you were allowed to fall asleep, store your belongings, or stand still?  There are far better policy choices than criminalization and making it illegal for people to simply try to survive; policies that are better for homeless people, and better for the character of our nation.