FREED FROM PRISON, BUT STILL PAYING A PENALTY

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.

Mr. 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 Mrs.
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 1990's to get tough on crime.
Now, as the record number of men and women who filled prisons in the
last 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.

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.

Representative E. Clay Shaw Jr., a Florida Republican 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, Mr. 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, Mr.
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.

Mr. 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," Mr.
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.

Even some conservatives have asked whether these penalties have gone
too far. Anne Piehl, an associate professor of public policy at the
John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said, "These laws
tend to get passed independently without considering all the
consequences, so the cumulative effect is greater than what was intended."

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.

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 Mr. 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 one recent case, he said, a judge with a tough-on-crime reputation
allowed an 18-year-old man from El Salvador, who had already pleaded
guilty to burglary and nearly completed his prison term, to withdraw
his guilty plea and ask for a new trial. The reason for the unusual
request, Mr. Johnson said, was that the man faced being deported as a
convicted felon. Mr. Johnson objected to the maneuver but decided not
to try the man again, since he had already served his time.

James Kalven, a writer who advises the residents of the Stateway
Gardens apartments in Chicago, said the public housing eviction law
had created a "whole group of guys who are essentially nomadic because
of their felony convictions, getting out of jail and having nowhere to
go."

It was Mr. Kalven who arranged for Mario Bailey, a 26-year-old at
Stateway Gardens with several drug convictions, to be admitted to St.
Andrew's Court, a residential center for men newly released from
prison, so that he would not provoke the eviction of his grandmother
and other relatives.

"They can't even go home for a visit; it is considered criminal
trespass," Mr. Kalven said of men like Mr. Bailey, who has used a
wheelchair since being shot and paralyzed by gang members.

Amy Hirsch, a supervising attorney with Community Legal Services,
which provides legal assistance to low-income families in
Philadelphia, said many female convicts are hurt by the lifetime ban
on drug felons receiving welfare and food stamps, part of the 1996
welfare overhaul.

States are free to opt out of the ban, as New York and Connecticut
have, but most states have kept some version of it. "The ban is
counterproductive because it makes it so much harder for women to stay
off drugs once they are released from jail," Ms. Hirsch said. "A lot
of the women I see come out of jail after being in drug treatment and
they want to continue in treatment and reconnect with their kids, but
then they run into this brick wall. They need money."

A spokesman for former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, who was an
architect of the lifetime ban on welfare, said Mr. Gramm still
strongly supported the law. "Welfare shouldn't be used to support drug
habits," Mr. Gramm said before resigning from the Senate in the fall
to become a vice chairman of UBS Warburg, the investment bank.

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.

The new law caught Earl Nixon by surprise. Mr. Nixon had spent 30
years working in health care, rising to be the administrator of an
assisted living center in Pittsburgh. But in 1971, when he was 18, he
pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana and received probation.

So when he recently quit his administrator's post and tried to change
jobs, he was shocked to discover he could not be rehired, despite a
shortage of health care workers. Unable to find a new job, Mr. Nixon
moved to Michigan.

Last December, a Pennsylvania appeals court ruled in a lawsuit brought
on behalf of Mr. Nixon that the law had unconstitutionally deprived
him of his right to earn a living.

But Pennsylvania's attorney general, Mike Fisher, a Republican who was
defeated last November in the governor's race, has appealed the
decision to the state Supreme Court.

"The General Assembly passed this law in an effort to protect some of
our most vulnerable citizens from those who would prey upon them," Mr.
Fisher said. The law should be upheld, he said, even if in some cases
it may seem harsh.

"The law makes no allowance for rehabilitation," Mr. Nixon said. "It
just seems designed to go on punishing people forever."

The disenfranchisement laws do that in 13 states, where a felony
conviction can result in a lifetime ban on voting.

Since the 2000 election, several states, including New Mexico,
Delaware and Maryland, have abandoned or modified disenfranchisement
laws.

Florida, which has not changed its laws, 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 African-American population,
prohibiting about one quarter of the state's black men from voting.

Roger Clegg, of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative
research organization in Virginia, said there was no evidence that the
disenfranchisement laws are racially discriminatory.

"We don't let everyone vote," Mr. Clegg said. "We don't let children
or noncitizens vote. There are basic requirements of loyalty and
trustworthiness that we have for letting people vote. People who have
committed serious crimes don't meet that minimum threshold."