Michael Sweig, JD

Virginia Employers Can Refuse to Hire Based on Arrest for Suspicion of Committing a Crime

Michael Sweig, JD — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:01:05 +0000

Last October, when Renita Parker organized the Higher Heights Job Fair in Newport News, she hoped to hook up ex-offenders with decent jobs. Parker is co-founder of Good Seed, Good Ground, a local advocacy group that believes one way to reduce violence in the community is to give ex-offenders who’ve paid their debt to society a means to mainstream.

Studies show reintegration works. That ex-offenders who aren’t denied work or a place to live are far less likely to re-offend. But Parker is learning that society, in general, doesn’t care about such studies. It doesn’t care about common sense or compassion. Employers are still loath to hire someone with a record, even for a nonviolent offense. In fact, in Virginia an employer can refuse to hire someone who’s only been arrested on the mere suspicion of committing a crime.

Ex-offenders are often denied welfare assistance and student loans. Landlords don’t want to rent to them.One client, Parker says, was evicted from the apartment he’d lived in for years — not because of some new offense, but because the complex was renovated and the new management didn’t want an ex-offender for a tenant.

Even clients who’ve been out of prison for decades are being denied work and housing. "How long do they have to pay?"

Most Texas parole officers say they are overworked,”

Michael Sweig, JD — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:54:56 +0000

A Dallas TV station has a story entitled "Most Texas parole officers say they are overworked," based on a report from the state auditor discussed on Grits a couple of months ago. A lawyer quoted in the story identified the main problem:

“Proportional Unemployment” for People with Criminal Records is Smart

Michael Sweig, JD — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 11:42:08 +0000

All we want is "proportional unemployment," not preferences.

“We” are people with criminal records.

We are the people for whom in a "normal" or "typical" economy (remember those?) unemployment rates can range from 25% – 70%, depending upon our relative levels or lack of education.

We are not "ex-offenders," "offenders," "ex-cons," "cons" or the like, because those labels define us by the crime, not by what we are: people.

We are also not "returning citizens," as some of my colleagues now say. We don’t return to citizenship. If we’re citizens before our convictions, we don’t lose our citizenship afterwards – even if we lose the right to vote. That’s losing a right of citizenship; not citizenship.

And for those who are citizens, we’re legal citizens. That’s no swipe at the people who are here working without the right to do so. It’s just a fact.

We are 65 – 70 million Americans. We are roughly three times larger than the mid-20th Century African-American community who brought about the Civil Rights Act (even when the now pejorative terms like "Colored" or "Negro" predominated our lexicon).

We are about twice as many people as there are Americans without health insurance.

We are approximately 20 million felons – about the same number as America’s alleged illegal alien community.

We are the 800,000 or so who are released annually from state and federal prison.

We are the 2-3 million are incarcerated at any given time, many if not most for non-violent crimes.

We are 9 million who are released annually from local jails.

We are the people on whom taxpayers spend more money for prisons than for schools.

We are the people who on balance don’t commit more crimes if we have jobs. We are the people who once out of the criminal justice system for 3-5 years with jobs, are statistically no more likely to be arrested or convicted for a crime than people who lack a criminal record.

We are the people about whom employers wise enough to hire us say are the best workers they have, and the workers with the lowest attrition rates.

We work for cheap, and in most states it’s perfectly legal to pay us less money for the same work that someone who doesn’t have a criminal record gets paid.

The lack of a criminal record says nothing about the character, work ethic or potential of the person who doesn’t have one. But there is no such thing as an "ex-felon." We have the "F" always, absent a pardon from the President of the United States or our Governor, even if we’ve long ago paid our dues by serving our sentences, and even if are lucky enough to work and pay taxes – and child support.

In Canada, after ten years out of the criminal justice system, for many crimes a pardon is an administrative process, and a right. Not here.

Here, in America, it’s been said recently that our criminal justice system is the new Jim Crow. There is a good book out about that now, but I disagree with its thesis, because not all people with criminal records are African-American. But if our criminal justice system is the new Jim Crow, then we felons are all the new African-Americans.

Felony and the collateral consequences of conviction know no race or class boundaries. It’s true more African-American men are prosecuted and convicted than any other demographic. But the consequences of felony in employment, housing and other discrimination are the same. We white-collars don’t have our own networks and social connections to reintegrate us and help us with reentry. The prejudice is as virulent – it’s just different.

All felons have stigmatized identity, the degree is all that varies. We all walk around with a sense of otherness that can invade our psyches and damage our futures beyond words. The shame we must conquer is extraordinary. The anecdote is employment, almost always.

Most people have a “background.” Not everyone’s background is memorialized. So, next time someone like me comes knocking to convince you to hire a person with a criminal record, please don’t be so quick to judge and remember that all we want is "proportional unemployment."

Hire one of us and see what happens. You’ll want to hire another.

And so it goes.

Corrections agency may sell off prisons

Michael Sweig, JD — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 14:12:37 +0000

(By MICHELLE MILLHOLLON Advocate Capitol News Bureau, Oct 14, 2010 – Page: 12A)

The state Department of Corrections is contemplating the sale of prisons and the closure of an inmate isolation unit in order to cut costs during difficult budget times.

“Everything has to be put on the table,” state Corrections Secretary Jimmy LeBlanc said Wednesday.

In the past week, the agency, which operates the state’s prisons, made $1.2 million by selling a piece of property that was used to distribute newborn cattle. Also for sale: 2,000 acres on the Mississippi River near Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel.

A bigger ticket item could be prisons in Allen and Winn parishes. LeBlanc said the sale of those facilities could net the state $70 million.

The state is grappling with heavy financial problems.

Changes to parole law fail

Michael Sweig, JD — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 14:07:18 +0000

( By Shira Schoenberg / Concord Monitor staff October 14, 2010)

House and Senate Republicans failed in their attempts to get the Legislature to reconsider part of a parole law that passed last session.

As legislators returned to Concord yesterday to reconsider five bills vetoed by Gov. John Lynch, Republican leaders in both chambers tried to introduce new legislation to amend the parole law. Because the rules do not allow new legislation to be introduced on veto day, the Republicans had to suspend the rules. The House voted against suspending the rules, 193-143. The Senate rejected the motion 14-10. In both cases, the votes were largely along party lines, with Democrats opposed to bringing the parole bill, Senate Bill 500, back.

“As a father, grandfather and state senator who presides over some of the most dangerous, crime-filled neighborhoods in the city of Manchester, I can stand here today and tell you S.B. 500 makes New Hampshire a safer place than it was before this bill was enacted,” said Manchester Democratic Sen. Lou D’Allesandro. “This bill does more than we’ve ever done before to address recidivism.”

The Progressive Tradition Series from the Center for American Progress

Michael Sweig, JD — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:51:49 +0000

Three more papers in the Progressive Traditions series from the Center for American Progress.

By John Halpin, William F. Schulz, Sarah Dreier, Conor P. Williams, Marta Cook

The new Progressive Tradition Series from the Center for American Progress traces the development of progressivism as a social and political tradition stretching from the late 19th century reform efforts to the current day.

The series is designed primarily for educational and leadership development purposes to help students and activists better understand the foundations of progressive thought and its relationship to politics and social movements.

The following is the next three installments of this series:

Part four, Universal Human Rights in Progressive Thought and Politics explores the origins of human rights principles in religious, philosophical, and political contexts; examinse the ongoing challenges progressives face in turning this inspirational vision into reality; and finally, discusses some of the contemporary debates about human rights from a domestic and international perspective.

Part five, The Progressivism of America’s Founding explores the progressive nature of the Founding Era and explains how progressives came to combine the egalitarian and individual rights-based ideals of Thomas Jefferson with the national greatness tradition of Alexander Hamilton.

Part six, The Role of Faith in the Progressive Movement seeks to explore the religious roots of progressivism in more detail, given the primary role that faith played in the development of the original progressive movement and in later civil rights and antiwar activism.

Job Retraining Is Worthless

Michael Sweig, JD — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:20:50 +0000

by Peter Weddle (HigherEdJobs.com)

Job retraining is a waste of time. That’s the conclusion of a study conducted by the U.S. Labor Department (DOL). After studying the experience of 160,000 laid-off workers who went through DOL subsidized training programs, it found that the education neither helped them land a job nor hang onto one if they were able to get hired.

Does that mean you shouldn’t bother with additional education and training if you’re in transition? Absolutely not. But, there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about upgrading your skills. And, the key to success is to recognize the difference and immerse yourself in the kind of retraining that will actually help you.

Job retaining is just that. It trains you to pursue a certain kind of job. There’s nothing wrong with that… if you’ve done your homework.

U.S. too extreme in prison sentencing, UVa law professor says

Michael Sweig, JD — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:36:43 +0000

(The Daily Herald, By Tasha Kates, August 12, 2010) As an assistant public defender in Georgia, Darryl Brown occasionally handled cases where he thought an offender’s sentence was extreme for the crime committed, especially for younger defendants.

Brown, now the O.M. Vicars Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, said he has continued to hear of cases where the punishment didn’t seem appropriate. For example, he said a youthful offender might get an enhanced sentence for committing a petty crime, such as graffiti writing, because he was part of a gang.

“We shouldn’t try to solve the gang problem by increasing punishments for petty offenses when we find out someone was part of a gang,” Brown said.

Brown is researching overcriminalization — the idea that the country has too many laws and punishments that are too harsh. Brown is advocating for a legislative method that resists creating crimes and repeals older crimes, although he said he’s not optimistic that it will happen soon.

People of Color with Criminal Records Should Not Self-Identify as ”Minorities”

Michael Sweig, JD — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:10:09 +0000

The “minority” label inhibits rather than advances equal justice or reform. “Minority” is pejorative jargon. People of color with criminal records: please stop using that term. All people with criminal records are already stuck like gum on the bottom of the majority’s shoe; we don’t need to make pulling the gum from the shoe even more difficult for people with color by willingly using imprecise language like “minorities.”

Language has many uses, among them it can inspire or condemn. Using a pejorative term to describe oneself does not promote equal justice. “Minority” was inspired by the “majority” establishment long ago when “minorities” were viewed essentially as an inconvenient problem.

Roderick J. Harrison is a demographer with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which is an African-American (not a “minority”) think tank.[1] Harrison notes that “minority” refers to more than just numbers. “The word’s origins are that these are populations that once had the status of minors before the law,” … These are populations that, in one way or another, did not have full legal status or full civil rights.” When considering doing away with the term, “the question is, how far along the road to full equality have they come?” [2]

When people with criminal records speak, our language and lexicon should not suggest any lack of equality; it’s tough enough having criminal records. We should speak with a unified voice, or we shouldn’t speak at all. Why compound the problem? Or, if the extra challenges that people of color with criminal records face is a perceived wrong we want to “fight to right,” let’s not begin with a “color persona” that suggests an inadvertent acceptance of less than full equality.

Driving social change for equal justice requires that we must reframe the manner in which “majorities” look at the social problems people with criminal records face, regardless of what color we are. The collateral consequences of conviction know no race or class boundaries. We must be mindful that talking about social justice without transformative action and justice is just that – talk. So, it doesn’t help advance the ball down the field to self-identify as a beleagured subset of people with criminal records.

People with criminal records should be ultra-careful about being misperceived as advancing a pity party just because “XX% of the people with criminal records are minorities” – as if that alone were a reason to support our cause? A “minority” compared to whom?

A preferable mainstream term is “people of color,” because the term encompasses all non-white people. And, it’s preferable because it provides the opportunity to broadcast this message any time people with criminal records write, speak or congregate. The term “people of color” has a more positive connotation than “minorities.” “People of color” are culturally significant. “Minority” conjures images of marginalized people who have less value than the majority.

One cynic has queried speciously as to how “colored people” is a vulgar, racist term, but “people of color” is politically-correct? Aren’t “colored people” and “people of color” the exact same thing?[3] No, they are not the same. “Colored people” derives from a pre-Civil Rights Act time when it was pejorative, and importantly, when “colored people” were nowhere near in numbers anywhere near the road to becoming “majority” like today.

People of color with criminal records should never want to telegraph to majorities that they don’t matter as much as the majority. An admirable example of mainstreaming the cessation of “minority” from the lexicon occurred in 2001, when San Diego’s city council struck “minority” from official usage and stopped using the term “Southeast San Diego” to denote largely black and Hispanic neighborhoods. This helped “move away from the pejorative connotations … and move to something that was respectful,” said Danell Scarborough, a human resources manager with the city.[4]

It’s already old news that in America the minority has fast been becoming the majority. [5] And “people of color” as a concept and term has become mainstream among those who do not have criminal records.[6] So, those of us with criminal records need to join the people of color crowd and put “minority” in the lexicon garbage can along with ‘’negro,” “nigger,” and all the other words no one these day would ever say.

[1] From it’s web site: “The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies is one of the nation’s premier research and public policy institutions and the only one whose work focuses exclusively on issues of particular concern to African Americans and other people of color. For over three decades, our research and information programs have informed and influenced public opinion and national policy to benefit not only African Americans, but every American. http://www.jointcenter.org/index.php/about_the_joint_center

[2] The Term ‘Minority’ Criticized As Outdated, Inaccurate As Nation’s Demographics Change. http://www.blacknews.com/pr/minority201.html

[3] Christopher Skeet, “People of Color,” The Chicago Flame (Feb. 11, 2008) http://media.www.chicagoflame.com/media/storage/paper519/news/2008/02/11/Opinions/People.Of.Color-3199140.shtml

[4] The Term “Minority” Criticized, Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] See, e.g., Human Rights Campaign: Working for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Equal Rights, http://www.hrc.org/issues/people_of_color/people_of_color_introduction.asp; People of Color Network: Building Healthy Communities by Supporting Children and Strengthening Families, http://www.pocn.com/

Jew-Haters Attack Abramoff for Working in a Pizza Parlor

Michael Sweig, JD — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:11:39 +0000

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised how many ignorant Jew-haters are littering Yahoo News with nasty, scurrilous comments about Jack Abramoff working in a Jewish-owned, Baltimore pizza parlor. Abramoff’s first job for menial wages working for a Jewish boss now that he’s left the half-way house and prison undoubtedly proves there is a global Jewish conspiracy, that Jews surely control the Federal Reserve and the Media, and that American Jews are “Big Mafiosi,” as one commenter remarked.

Suppose a Black man hires a formerly incarcerated Black man to serve chicken and ribs in one of the hundreds of BBQ/Chicken hut restaurants that populate the Black neighborhood in Baltimore in the shadow of Pimlico Racetrack; or if an Asian person in any one of the hundreds of Chinatowns across America were to hire an Asian with a criminal record to work as a dishwasher or host in their Chinese restaurant. Or, if a toothelss, white trash Billy Bob hired another white trash lowlife Gomer to drive a long haul 18-wheeler, or to fry eggs as a short order cook or wash dishes in a white bread diner. Not a head would turn; no one would say a nasty word. Likely all anyone would think or say, if anything at all, is something akin to: “oh, that’s nice. The employer made room for someone who has paid their dues.”

But we Jews can’t ever pay enough dues for being an industrious, outspoken, educated, freedom and life-loving people who like in every other culture, ethnic group, or religion have our share – no more; no less – of people who make mistakes, break the law, go to prison, pay their dues and return to society.

Abramoff and his family already have enough challenges cut out for them dealing with the infamy of his felony and the pretty much life long collateral consequences of his conviction.

It behooves Yahoo to take down the anti-semitic posts. It reflects poorly upon Yahoo and only invites more of the same.

Read here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_lobbyist_probe#mwpphu-container