There is an understandable desire by many to be “tough on crime.”
The age-old debate is whether a criminal justice system and its punishments should be based on a theory of retribution or rehabilitation or some magical combination of both. For this reason, Ohio, the federal government, and every state in the union are continually tweaking their sentencing guidelines to reflect the social feelings of the day, swinging that punishment pendulum from retribution to rehabilitation and back again.
While these sentencing reforms receive all the ink in the media world, there is another aspect of punishment that seems to percolate quietly in the background. Indeed, most people outside the criminal justice system might not even be aware of this shadowy system of punishing wrongdoers.
These are the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction.
As an example, perhaps the best-known of these collateral consequences is that a person convicted of a felony can’t own a firearm.
However, there are thousands of other collateral consequences. And they are scattered all across the law books and administrative regulations and are not declared by the judge during sentencing.
The American Bar Association has created a database of these consequences at http://abacollateralconsequences.org/. The National Inventory of the Collateral Consequences of Conviction came about after Congress realized the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction — legal sanctions and restrictions imposed upon people because of their criminal record — are hard to find and harder to understand. The Congress then ordered the National Institute of Justice to collect and study collateral consequences in all U.S. jurisdictions. From this comes the interactive database.
In December, National Public Radio did a story on the dangers and often unintended consequences of these collateral consequences (http://j.mp/1Q8phVc). The broadcaster used Maurice Alexander, of Washington, D.C., as a great example of how these collateral consequences can unfairly punish someone.
Alexander was 61 years old when he came across a scene where “the police had a group of black guys, young men, sprawled out on the sidewalk. … I became perturbed and I shook my finger at the police and said something to the effect of ‘shame on you,’” he told NPR.
Because of that, he was found guilty of attempted threat to do bodily harm, which is a misdemeanor. He served 10 days in jail.
Six years later, while looking for subsidized housing, he was denied and ended up homeless for seven months. All because he had the audacity to shake his finger at some cops.
In the online database, the ABA has found 46,416 collateral consequences to a criminal conviction in the United States, 1,671 in Ohio alone and another 1,157 from the federal government.
These collateral consequences of conviction affect nearly every aspect of a person’s life, including eligibility for social services, professional licenses, housing, student loans, parental rights, immigration status, and even volunteer opportunities.
In Ohio, if you commit a felony, you lose or cannot obtain a certificate of competency to be an elevator inspector. You can’t get a real estate license if you have any felony on your record or any crime of moral turpitude, fraud, dishonest, or money laundering.
Some of the consequences might make sense, such as keeping a person with a drug problem out of a health care job, especially one where there could be easy access to drugs.
Many of them are downright nonsense and, instead of serving as a deterrent to crime, end up being a cause of recidivism because they often make it hard for convicts to succeed as contributing members of a community so they go on to commit more crimes.
Additionally, many of these collateral consequences bear little or no relation to the crime committed. For example, in Ohio you can lose your driver license for any number of non-driving-related offenses.
These collateral consequences are even more frightening and more damaging in a nation with too many laws — where nearly every person breaks a law every day — and a nation that imprisons more of its population than any other nation on Earth.
It’s time Ohio and the other jurisdictions take a hard look at all the collateral consequences on their books and eliminate or narrow the ones that can be amended without sacrificing public safety. The website cataloging these consequences is a good step in the right direction.
