Collateral Sanctions

[Anthony]

Gov. John Kasich said, "This is a case where people who are convicted of felonies are basically denied an opportunity to do some really simple things that would allow them to be reintegrated into our society."

Sounds like the Republican Gov. is trying to do the right thing here, right? Many feel Gov. John Kasich is really being pressured by folks like State Sen. Shirley Smith a Cleveland Democrat.

How many folks know about collateral sanctions? Collateral sanctions," the 800 or so stipulations written into Ohio's constitution, laws, administrative codes and court rules that keep many former inmates from qualifying for a myriad of jobs can be changed by a vote.

The article proves that repeat offenders revolving door is created.
Why? We all know the why, to make money. If you stop someone from reintegrating themselves, you, in a sense, take away their civil rights. People have to take responsibility for their own actions, but if someone made a bad decision they shouldn't be forced to make another because they're blocked from making a honest living. In today's judicial system a misdemeanor one can turn into a felony five, depending on what kind of lawyer you can afford, if you have a public defender it depends on the indictment board & the judge. A felony 5 can come with longer probation time & higher court fines & probation bills you have to pay each month & it also mean that you'll have a heavy burden on you when you're competing on a job. Most times you want even be considered & try applying for a student loan & see what happens.

Don't think it just happen to criminals coming out of prison. I know upper class folks feel people shouldn't commit a crime & they wouldn't have the burden of a felony on their record, but nobody is without sin, especially the prestigious. Like the article explains, a very large proportion of the population has been convicted of a criminal offense without going to prison. Over four million adults were on probation, like the article stated. And before many of you turn your nose up in the air, some of your fellow prestigious brothers & sisters went through or are going through this experience. Many of you have relatives & friends that are going through or have been through this experience.

A lot of folks don't fully understand that a felony conviction results in the loss of civil rights, except that a person may vote during a period of probation, like the article stated. We all know that lawmakers, prosecutors and judges have the power to change laws. Which would explain why more than 65% of black folks that apply for law schools applicants are rejected, according to Law School Admissions Council data reviewed by the clinic's researchers. The “shut-out” rate for white applicants was 34 percent. Law school administrators and admissions committees place a substantial weight on LSAT scores because they play an important part in law school rankings

There are four C's & there are four C's.
"Collateral consequences of criminal conviction in Ohio.

Collateral consequences of criminal charges, sometimes called the “Four C’s,”1 are the results of arrest, prosecution, or conviction that were not part of the sentence imposed. Collateral consequences, as distinguished from direct consequences such as imprisonment and fines, 2 include any unintended or unforeseen impact of the charge, even in the absence of a conviction or a trial. Another term used is collateral sanctions. The American Bar Association (“ABA”) defines a “collateral sanction as a legal penalty, disability or disadvantage, however denominated, that is imposed on a person automatically upon that person’s conviction for a felony, misdemeanor or other offense, even if it is not included in the sentence.

Almost 17% of adult black males have been incarcerated, compared to 2.6% of white males. Scholars estimate that 14 percent of illegal drug users are African- American, yet they make up 55 percent of those convicted and 74 percent of those sentenced for drug possession

Automatic Restoration of Rights:
A felony conviction results in the loss of civil rights, except that a person may vote during a period of probation (“or parole. Ohio Rev. Code Ann. § 2961.01(A). Other civil rights are restored upon a final release from parole or post-release control. § 2967.16(C). A final release is not available earlier than one year after release on parole or post-release control, and in the case of a person serving a minimum sentence of life, not earlier than five years after release on parole or post-release control. § 2967.16(A). A person sentenced to a “community control sanction” (including probation or a fine) regains the right to hold office and sit on a jury upon completion of the sanction. §§ 2961.01, 2967.16(C)(3). The disqualification from office or employment for persons convicted of soliciting or receiving improper compensation terminates seven years after the date of conviction. Ohio Rev. Code Ann. § 2921.43(E). The general restoration of rights includes only civil rights and not firearms privileges, which may be restored either by a pardon or by a court (see below). A general survey of the collateral consequences of conviction in Ohio can be found in Kimberly R. Mossoney and Cara A. Roecker, “Ohio Collateral Sanctions Project,” 36 U. Toledo L. Rev. 611 (2005).

Yours truly,

Anthony Smith

Here's the article:
http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2011/11/gov_john_kasich_and...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Ohio lawmakers are looking for ways to ease the hundreds of restrictions blocking felons released from prison from obtaining jobs.

They are called "collateral sanctions," the 800 or so stipulations written into Ohio's constitution, laws, administrative codes and court rules that keep many former inmates from qualifying for a myriad of jobs.

Depending on their crime, some felons cannot obtain a driver's license or a professional license to hold jobs requiring even minimal education, such as cutting hair and driving trucks. And they could be blocked from dozens of other professions, too, from banking to insurance sales to athletic training or being a pawn broker.

Gov. John Kasich convened a meeting Monday of lawmakers, prosecutors and judges to begin talking about how to knock down some of those road blocks to employment for non-violent ex-cons.

"This is a case where people who are convicted of felonies are basically denied an opportunity to do some really simple things that would allow them to be reintegrated into our society," the Republican governor said. "If you are convicted of a felony, and that could be a non violent felony. . . you can't get a commercial driver's license.

"So we have 5,000 truck driving jobs in the state of Ohio, and you can't drive a truck."

The governor said this issue likely won't be too popular with many of his fellow Republican lawmakers who over the past decade passed a series of tough-on-crime laws with mandatory sentencing guidelines.

"Sometimes legislation gets put up at a time when there is a political firestorm going on and the next thing you know there are some things done that shouldn't have been done," Kasich said.

The administration has reviewed a report, "Collateral consequences of criminal conviction in Ohio," authored by a group led by Lawrence Travis at the University of Cincinnati's Center for Criminal Justice Research.

The report surveyed hundreds of Ohio judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and parole officers who generally agreed that it was time for the state's criminal justice system to address the unintended impact of some collateral sanctions.

"This is evidenced by considerable agreement that some collateral consequences should be repealed, consequences should not last forever or be made any more troublesome, and defendants should have a chance to restore their rights," the report concluded.

"We're looking for some kind of common ground to move forward with sanctions, to remove some of them," said Carlo LoParo, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

State Sen. Shirley Smith, a Cleveland Democrat, was at Kasich's meeting on Monday.

She for years has fought for legislation to help convicts re-assimilate into their communities but often saw her efforts defeated by GOP-controlled legislatures.

Smith said Kasich is reframing the issue not as one that looks harshly at felons but as a move that could bolster society.

"He speaks about it from a moral perspective," Smith said. "If we do the right thing we will be saving families and neighborhoods. I think with him approaching it that way, people will see the problem from a different light.
"I am absolutely pleased," she said.

Kasich noted that he and Smith won't agree on eliminating what they call the "box," that question on a job application that asks whether the applicant has been convicted of a felony. Kasich wants to keep it. Smith wants it removed. Many employers won't consider hiring a person who has checked the yes box to that question.

Kasich said employers still ought to know that a prospective employee is a felon but should be encouraged to consider other factors in deciding whether to hire the person.

[Anthony]

I never take credit for some else work.
This was written by Alan Predergast

The following is a summary of an article entitled, "Prisons-R-Us" on the American Correctional Association "prisonfest" held last month in Cincinnati, Ohio. The article appeared in The Dayton Voice on September 20 and was written by Alan Predergast, a Denver based free-lance writer. Copies of this issue of The Voice (Vol. 3, No. 38) can be obtained by sending $1.00 to: The Dayton Voice, 915 Salem Ave., Dayton, OH 45406. Here's the summary:

Thanks to stiffer drug laws, tougher parole requirements, mandatory minimum sentences, "three strikes" laws and other legislation, the American prison population has tripled since 1980...The growth has been particularly dramatic -- and painful in Ohio, which now competes with California for the dubious honor of having the most overcrowded prison system in the country. Niki Schwartz, the Cleveland attorney who helped negociate an end to the Lucasville riot, is fond of pointing out that Ohio's prison budget was 1/6 of its higher education budget in 1982; as of 1993, it has risen to 1/3. "Soon we'll be spending more on corrections than on higher education, and that's crazy," Schartz declares.

Punishment, not rehabilitation, is the name of the game... At the 125th congress there was no shortage of speeches denouncing the current prison binge, an indication of the growing anxiety among corrections professionals over swollen budgets, crowded prisons, and increasing punitive legislation that is making those prisons harder to manage. Jim Gondles, the soft-spoken, genial executive director of the ACA, says the biggest task facing the ACA is"educating people who don't work in corrections" about the industries growing professionalism and changing needs.

Some aspects of privitization involve lucrative kickbacks to corrections agencies, at the expense of prisoners and their families. Phone companies bid agressively for the right to provide costly, hi-tech phone services to prisoners...the companies offer a commission on billing revenues to the prison that range as high as 35%. Inmate collect calls are a sore point with Charles Sullivan, director of CURE (Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants), a national prison reform lobbying group. The cost of an inmate phone call can vary widely from system to system, depending on what the phone companies can slide past the regulators. "We don't think that kind of gouging is right," Sullivan says, "Why should prisons be making money from families on inmate phone calls?" Even the building of prisons is not as straightforward as it once was. Typically, the state corrections system will "lease" a new prison from a state authority, which issues bonds through private underwriters such as Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Prudential. The investors receive a significantly higher rate of interest than that paid by general obligation bonds. "Prison bonds are a good investment," reports Brad Sprague, an investment banker with Columbus office of A.G. Edwards Co. "I put my kid's money in them. You get individual investors, bank trust departments, mutual funds, insurance companies -- they all know the state of Ohio isn't going to go out of the prison business anytime soon." Corrections Corporation of America is the nation's largest owner and operator of privatized correctional and detention facilities and one of the largest prison operators in the United States, behind only the federal government and three states. CCA currently owns and operates more than 60 facilities including 44 company-owned facilities, with a design capacity of more than 85,000 beds in 19 states and the District of Columbia.

The Company specializes in owning, operating and managing prisons and other correctional facilities and providing inmate residential and prisoner transportation services for governmental agencies. In addition to providing the fundamental residential services relating to inmates, CCA offers a variety of rehabilitation and educational programs, including basic education, life skills and employment training and substance abuse treatment. These services are intended to reduce recidivism and to prepare inmates for their successful re-entry into society upon their release. The Company also provides health care (including medical, dental and psychiatric services), food services and work and recreational programs.

Goldman Sachs, a securities firm, owns Global Tel Link, which is a prison phone call provider. Global Tel Link’s annual profits are in excess of a $100 million. The prison phone call business is thought to be an excellent investment because they are companies that have a locked in/ fixed customer base. Goldman Sachs is in the process of trying to sell Global Tel Link for $800 million. This means that in a three year period Goldman Sachs would have earned close to $1 billion in profits from prison phone calls.

You can’t get any job at Goldman Sachs with a felony conviction. Goldman Sachs doesn’t donate money to any reentry organizations. Why would they? Recidivism is good for business. Goldman Sachs list charities, that they donate to, on their website. What does Goldman Sachs do with its money? It provides the movie production company The Weinstein company with a $50 million line of credit. The Weinstein company is responsible for the Oscar winning movie “The King’s Speech” and the current release “I Don’t know How She Does It.”

The advocacy group Small Business United on Thursday called on Wells Fargo to provide a full accounting of investments related to private prisons and immigrant detention centers. Wells Fargo is one of the largest investors in Geo Group, Inc. — the second largest private prison company in the world contracted by state and federal government agencies. The groupspends millions lobbying for stricter immigration enforcement.

Wells Fargo has claimed the investments in the GEO Group were made by Wells Fargo mutual funds on behalf of clients, not investments made by Wells Fargo and Company.

“We demand transparency,” said Marco Reinoso, owner of Superstar Deli for 26 years and resident of Brooklyn. “I pay my fair share of taxes and deserve to know where the dark money trail leads, and whether our money is being used to further anti-immigrant bills that hurt our economy and lead to many in our community being treated with violence and inhumanity in these detention centers.”

"The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners' work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself," says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being "an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps."

The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. "This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies,construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors."
According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens.

Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly;
46% of body armor; 36% of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.

[Anthony]

Global Research Articles by Vicky Pelaez

[Former] Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix recently urged Nike to cut its production in Indonesia and bring it to his state, telling the shoe manufacturer that "there won't be any transportation costs; we're offering you competitive prison labor (here)."


Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the 1861-1865 Civil War, a system of "hiring out prisoners" was introduced in order to continue the slavery tradition. Freed slaves were charged with not carrying out their sharecropping commitments (cultivating someone else's land in exchange for part of the harvest) or petty thievery - which were almost never proven - and were then "hired out" for cotton picking, working in mines and building railroads. From 1870 until 1910 in the state of Georgia, 88% of hired-out convicts were Black. In Alabama, 93% of "hired-out" miners were Black. In Mississippi, a huge prison farm similar to the old slave plantations replaced the system of hiring out convicts. The notorious Parchman plantation existed until 1972.


During the post-Civil War period, Jim Crow racial segregation laws were imposed on every state, with legal segregation in schools, housing, marriages and many other aspects of daily life. "Today, a new set of markedly racist laws is imposing slave labor and sweatshops on the criminal justice system, now known as the prison industry complex," comments the Left Business Observer.


Who is investing? At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month. The highest-paying private prison is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners receive 50 cents per hour for what they call "highly skilled positions." At those rates, it is no surprise that inmates find the pay in federal prisons to be very generous. There, they can earn $1.25 an hour and work eight hours a day, and sometimes overtime. They can send home $200-$300 per month.


Thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that was designed for Third World labor markets. A company that operated a maquiladora (assembly plant in Mexico near the border) closed down its operations there and relocated to San Quentin State Prison in California. In Texas, a factory fired its 150 workers and contracted the services of prisoner-workers from the private Lockhart Texas prison, where circuit boards are assembled for companies like IBM and Compaq.


[Former] Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix recently urged Nike to cut its production in Indonesia and bring it to his state, telling the shoe manufacturer that "there won't be any transportation costs; we're offering you competitive prison labor (here)."


"The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners' work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself," says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being "an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps."


The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. "This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors."


According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36% of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture.

[Anthony]

Say something is done to stop the 800 stipulations that were written into Ohio's constitution, laws, administrative codes and court rules to keep former inmates from qualifying for employment? Most people are in debt, so what make folks think felons have A-1 credit. Everyone know employers are unfairly using credit histories to weed out the down and out, especially people of color. So when folks who fought so hard to get Gov. John Kasich to change some of the laws look around & wonder why it's not successful it's because they didn't see the blindside or the chess move that was played 7 moves ahead. So folks like State Sen. Shirley Smith & others who fought hard  look around & don't see a change it's by design.

[Evelyn Blacksher]

wow! Thank you for getting the information out .So much of this I DID NOT know.

[Anthony]

A lot of folks don't & that's the problem because of a lot of folks complain about the system & how they're trapped in the system & how the system discriminate against them. They complain about the court system but want vote or do research on the judges & politicians that's elected. They complain but want work with the folks that's trying to change the laws that's structured to make money off them & keep them in the prison system. Spreading the word is the best thing to do for folks with no voice. Thank u sister for reading the post & understanding because a lot of folks don't understand the structure of the court system or the structure of collateral sanctions.       

[Anthony]

 Ask yourself, how does 800 stipulations be written into law? Here's another one nobody paid much attention to. The National Defense Authorization Act was signed into law on New Year’s Eve. Nobody paid attention to that one, at least not yet . I bet in about 6 years or so a lot of folks will be paying real close attention to the National Defense Authorization Act.  I did a thread on that one as well. Click here-->>  http://abcpreachers.ning.com/forum/topics/president-obama-signs-pol...  

[newview]

Its a different kind of slavery.

Some things just stay the same.

 

You should go to the NPR website and click on the show This American Life.  It has all kinds of stories you can listen to that are so informative and interesting.

Anyway - there is one called 'Sentencing'.  It will make you want to pull your hair out.

Its unbelievable how the laws are so unjust thats its unsettling.  But listen to it.