Help RI’s Ex-Offenders Shed Scarlett Letter: Guest MINDSETTER ™ Schoos

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Geoffrey A. Schoos, Guest MINDSETTER ™

I’ve read The Scarlet Letter twice, once in high school and once in college. The dynamics of the interaction of Hester, Chillingworth and Dimmesdale as they impacted the fortunes of little Pearl, set against the backdrop of Puritan society were riveting enough. I just didn’t like Hawthorne as a writer. That may be sacrilege, but there it is and I’m sticking to it.

Most of us know the story of Hester Prynne and her adulterous crime. For her “crime” she was required to wear the Scarlett “A” that identified her as an adulteress. She had to wear that “A,” not for a few months or years, but for life. As a result, she was shunned from the community and took up residence on the outskirts of town, taking the random needlepoint job to make ends meet.

It wasn’t uncommon during the early colonial period to mark, brand, disfigure, or force the wearing of a letter on a person’s garments in order to alert members of a community that a malefactor was among them. These punishments were not designed to be of limited duration, they were life sentences.

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Last week, on April 5, the House Judiciary Committee had to grapple with a modern day “Scarlet Letter.” House Bill 5736, a bill that would expand the pool of those eligible to petition the Superior Court for expungement of their past criminal record, was taken up by the Committee. I attended that hearing and testified in favor of the bill. (Spoiler alert: it was held for “further study.”)

I testified in favor of this legislation because if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that people who made mistakes long ago in their youth carry those mistakes with them until they die. Like Hester Prynne’s Scarlet “A,” a criminal record, no matter when it was created, all too often constitutes a life sentence. That isn’t justice. Instead it is gratuitous punishment for the sake of a false impression that such punishment makes the rest of us safe. Indeed, the opposite is often true.

I know people who committed non-violent criminal offenses decades ago. They had epiphanies and amended their lives. They furthered their educations, preserved their families, and held jobs – albeit low paying jobs. They have engaged in public service, working in the non-profit sector and often volunteering their time in service of our most vulnerable citizens.

But no matter how much they tried, they professionally plateaued. In order to make ends meet, they resorted to changing professional direction. One guy I know was denied a chauffer’s license, another was denied a low-skilled job because the BCI exposed his criminal record. Keep in mind that these non-violent offenses were decades old and bore no relation to the people they had become.

To put it another way, for a few moments of mistaken behavior born of stupidity, youth, or circumstance, just like Hester Prynne, they were condemned to a lifetime of struggle. That is not to say that people shouldn’t be punished. Indeed they should, but the punishment needs to be related only to past criminal acts.

Expungement would serve to reward people like those described above (disclosure: they are composites of several people I know) for doing what we all want them to do – earn a good living, raise their families, contribute to the community. A Petition for Expungement triggers a court proceeding where a judge reviews a Petitioner’s history and present circumstances and determines whether to grant the Petitioner’s request. These proceedings do not result in automatic outcomes, but are discretionary and based on evidence before the Court.

In effect, an expungement seals a criminal record and as such relieves the disabilities described above. People who seek housing, employment, credit, and a whole host of other things that most of us take for granted, can be defined on their accomplishments instead of a few mistaken moments taken out of a lifetime.

To those who ask if it wouldn’t be fair that a person be judged on the entirety of one’s history, I would say that it would be fair if life were fair. But it isn’t. We know that ex-offenders earn 40% of the wages of non-offenders for the same work. We know that ex-offenders are 7.5 times less likely economically rise to the top quintile of income, while being twice as likely to be relegated to the lowest income quintile. And we also know that 93% of all employers review and consider a criminal record in their hiring decisions.

Lifelong disabilities in employment, housing, etc., result in enormous recidivism rates. A recent national study of over 404,000 released prisoners across 30 states showed that within three years of release, 67.8% were rearrested on new crimes, and within five years of release, 76.6% were rearrested. According to the RI Department of Corrections (RIDOC), 49% of offenders were returned to RICOC within three years of their release. That’s down from the 54% rate in 2004, but it’s still too high. And it’s costly to the state in innumerable ways, not the least of which is that taxpayers pay an annual average of approximately $50,000 to re-incarcerate each of these offenders.

To flesh this out, let’s assume that 3100 inmates are released this year. By 2020, 1519 will be returned to DOC, and will incur a cost of $75 million dollars each year for the duration of their stay in prison. Think of it this way. We’re spending a lot of money to support a system that doesn’t work, or at least work well as it should.

The expungement bill would allow deserving folks to put their lives back together. However, as I told the Committee, it is only one piece of a broader set of reforms that have been initiated in other states with good effect. One reform would initiate a scheme of so-called Certificates of Rehabilitation that would relieve – for deserving folks – discriminatory employment and housing disabilities. Important to this reform is that Certificates of Rehabilitation have the force of law.

Our current system of how we treat ex-offenders cries out for reform. It isn’t merely unjust, but also economically stupid. That is unless we like paying tons of money to force the wearing of a modern day Scarlet Letter.

Help RI’s Ex-Offenders Shed Scarlett Letter: Guest MINDSETTER ™ Schoos

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