Shadow Citizens: Felony Disenfranchisement and the Criminalization of Debt

The disenfranchisement of felons has long been challenged as anti-democratic and disproportionately harmful to communities of color. Critiques of this practice have led to the gradual liberalization of state laws that expand voting rights for those who have served their sentences. Despite these legal developments, ex-felons face an increasingly difficult path to regaining the franchise. This article argues that, for ex-felons in particular, criminal justice debt can serve as an insurmountable obstacle to the resumption of voting rights and broader participation in society. This article uses the term “carceral debt” to identify criminal justice penalties levied on prisoners, “user fees” assessed to recoup the operating costs of the justice system, and debt incurred during incarceration, including mounting child support obligations. In recent years, another disturbing voting rights challenge has emerged that has received little attention from scholars. State appellate and federal courts across the country have affirmed the constitutionality of statutes that require ex-felons to satisfy the payment of all carceral debts in order to resume voting privileges. Such a paradigm has a clearly differential impact on the poor: if only those who can pay their debts after a criminal conviction can regain the right to vote, those who cannot will remain perpetually disenfranchised, rendering them “shadow citizens” and raising a host of policy and constitutional questions

Confronting Race and Collateral Consequences in Public Housing

Access to affordable housing is one of the most critical issues currently facing low-income families. In many urban areas, rising costs, dwindling economic opportunity, and gentrification have foreclosed access to previously available rental stock and contributed to a crisis in housing. For African Americans lingering economic disparities arising from generations of forced racial segregation and the disproportional impact of mass incarceration have magnified these problems. In this Article I explore legal barriers to publicly subsidized housing, a “collateral consequence” of criminal convictions that increasingly serves as a powerful form of housing discrimination. Evictions, denial of admission, and permanent exclusion of family members from public housing—based on almost any type of criminal system exposure—have served to further entrench poverty, contribute to homelessness, and trigger unwarranted family disruption. These widespread barriers to public housing are a detriment to many low-income families, but especially African Americans, owing to their historical experience of both housing discrimination and hypercriminalization

Confronting Race and Collateral Consequences in Public Housing

Access to affordable housing is one of the most critical issues currently facing low-income families. In many urban areas, rising costs, dwindling economic opportunity, and gentrification have foreclosed access to previously available rental stock and contributed to a crisis in housing. For African Americans lingering economic disparities arising from generations of forced racial segregation and the disproportional impact of mass incarceration have magnified these problems. In this Article I explore legal barriers to publicly subsidized housing, a “collateral consequence” of criminal convictions that increasingly serves as a powerful form of housing discrimination. Evictions, denial of admission, and permanent exclusion of family members from public housing—based on almost any type of criminal system exposure—have served to further entrench poverty, contribute to homelessness, and trigger unwarranted family disruption. These widespread barriers to public housing are a detriment to many low-income families, but especially African Americans, owing to their historical experience of both housing discrimination and hypercriminalization

Deadbeat Dads & Welfare Queens: How Metaphor Shapes Poverty Law

Since the 1960s, racialized metaphors describing dysfunctional parents have been deployed by conservative policymakers to shape the way that the public views anti-poverty programs. The merging of race and welfare has eroded support for a robust social safety net, despite growing poverty and economic inequality throughout the land. This Article begins by describing the influence that metaphors have on the way people unconsciously perceive reality. It proceeds by examining historical racial tropes for Black families and how they were repurposed to create the Welfare Queen and Deadbeat Dad, the metaphorical villains of welfare programs. It also tracks the demise of welfare entitlements and the simultaneous ascendency of punitive child support enforcement intended to penalize both “absent” parents and families with non-normative structures. Ultimately, this Article argues that the focus on demonizing Black parents in the welfare system has created an obstacle to providing necessary resources to alleviate the suffering of a growing number of poor children of all races, the intended beneficiaries of public assistance

Bringing Families In: Recommendations of the Incarceration, Reentry and Family Roundtables

Building on the findings of the New Jersey Reentry Roundtable and a growing concern around the state about how to improve outcomes for the more than 70,000 individuals expected to return home from prison over the next five years, the roundtable examined the complex role that families – broadly defined – play in the lives of prisoners during incarceration and after their release. This document presents a set of recommendations emerging directly from roundtable sessions and provides a road map for individual and collaborative efforts accepted by a range of key players in New Jersey, including government officials, community and faith based service agencies, advocacy groups, family members and formerly incarcerated people

Models of Invisibility: Rendering Domestic and Other Gendered Violence Visible to Students through Clinical Law Teaching

The proliferation of university courses about domestic violence includes clinical courses in law schools in which students represent victims in their legal cases. This essay advocates for a broader approach to teaching about the problem. Using examples from their clinic cases, the authors show how teachers can overcome pedagogical challenges and render domestic and other forms of gendered violence, including state and community violence, more visible to students by intentionally raising and placing it within larger frameworks of structural inequality. In this way, students learn to identify and address gendered violence even when it is not the presenting problem

The Rights of Parents with Children in Foster Care: Removals Arising from Economic Hardship and the Predicative Power of Race

The following symposium at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York explores the predicament posed by the surge of child removals through neglect petitions, and the subsequent placement of those children in foster care. The panel, whose comments are published here, offer some poignant reflections on the crisis of the child welfare system

Making Work Pay: Promoting Employment and Better Child Support Outcomes for Low-Income and Incarcerated Parents

The New Jersey Institute for Social Justice prepared this report in response to concerns about child support debt—in particular as it creates a barrier to employment for low-income parents and works at cross-purposes with the goals of the child support program. Drawing on examples from other states, this report identifies a range of policies that inform child support practice in New Jersey and offers administrative, legislative, and programmatic solutions to address child support arrears owed by low-income and incarcerated parents