SOME CRIMES DOG EX-CONS A LIFETIME

Public Housing Ban Among Penalties Not Spelled Out At
Sentencing

Chicago -- Maurice Stewart finally got out of prison last summer after
serving 14 years for armed robbery and manslaughter. He needed a place
to live, so he called his mother.

Stewart, a husky 33-year-old, wanted to come home to Stateway Gardens,
the decaying public housing project on Chicago's South Side where he
had grown up.

It sounded simple enough. But his mother, Pamela Stewart, knew
otherwise. Under a little-noticed provision of federal law, anyone
convicted of a crime is barred from public housing, and if Stewart
took her son in, even for a visit, the Chicago Housing Authority could
evict her.

The ban on living in public housing is among the penalties for
criminals that are not spelled out at sentencing and do not begin
until the sentence runs out.

Most of the sanctions were passed by Congress and state legislatures
in the 1990s to get tough on crime. Now, as the record number of men
and women who filled prisons in the past decade are finishing their
terms, the consequences of the penalties are being felt.

The penalties also include a lifetime ban on receiving welfare or food
stamps for those convicted of drug felonies, prohibitions against
getting certain jobs in plumbing, education and other fields, and the
loss of the right to vote, for life in some states.

Felons with drug convictions are barred from receiving federal student
loans, and women who serve more than 15 months in prison may be forced
to give up their children to foster care.

Aiming at Drug Trade

When the laws were passed, supporters called them extra deterrents to
crime.

They carried no cost and in some cases even saved money by reducing
the number of people in public housing or on welfare.

Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr., R-Fla., who was one of the main architects of
the lifetime ban on welfare for women convicted of a drug felony,
said: "We were mostly aiming at the drug trade. The thought was that
if someone was buying drugs, we don't feel an obligation to support
them."

Similarly, Shaw said, the bar on public housing for people convicted
of a crime "was to deter people so they wouldn't get involved in
drugs." Public housing tenants themselves wanted it, Shaw said, "so
they didn't have drug deals going down in front of them and their children."

Although the sanctions were often passed with broad bipartisan
support, some judges, prosecutors and advocates for the poor, are now
criticizing the laws as counterproductive and urging that they be
re-examined.

"They make it even harder for newly released inmates to find jobs,
housing and reunite with their families and therefore to lead
productive lives," said Jeremy Travis, a senior fellow at the Urban
Institute in Washington, who coined the phrase "invisible punishment"
to describe such penalties.

Stewart put it more starkly in a furtive visit to his mother at
Stateway Gardens.

"Basically, this stuff is telling me I've served my time, I'm out, but
I'm never going to be allowed to be part of society again," Stewart
said. "So what do you want me to do? I'm going to end up doing
something wrong again."

The criminal justice section of the American Bar Association adopted
new guidelines recently suggesting that the laws need to be
re-examined. Margaret Love, a former Justice Department official who
headed the committee, said all the punishments should be codified in
one place and made part of sentencing, so that defendants, their
lawyers and judges understand what is happening.

The consequences affect millions of Americans. Thirteen million felons
who are in prison or have done their time live in the United States,
according to an estimate by Christopher Uggen, a sociologist at the
University of Minnesota.

That is almost 7 percent of the adult population.

Avoiding the Sanctions

Robert Johnson, the prosecutor for Anoka County, in the suburbs of
Minneapolis and St. Paul, says the new laws have begun to affect the
way he does his job.

"Now you have to factor in these additional sanctions, almost as if
they are part of a mandatory sentencing concept," said Johnson, a
former president of the National District Attorney's Association. He
said he had seen judges reduce charges to misdemeanors from felonies
or expunge convictions entirely to avoid the sanctions.

In recent years the states have also passed legislation lengthening
the list of jobs that bar people with a criminal conviction. In New
York, there are more than 100 prohibited job categories, including
plumbing, real estate, barbering, education, health care and private
security.

In Pennsylvania, the legislature in 1997 passed a sweeping law that
prohibits people convicted of a long list of crimes, including the
theft of two library books, from working in nursing homes or home
health care for the elderly.

Florida has the largest number of disenfranchised voters, estimated at
more than 600,000 banned for life, according to a lawsuit by the
Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.
The lawsuit maintains that the ban disproportionately affects
Florida's black population, prohibiting about one quarter of the
state's black men from voting.