Posted on 07/27/2005 7:36:50 AM PDT by twas
EAST ORANGE, N.J. -- If Sunni A. Salahuddin is not in when you call, his voice mail message instructs you to leave not just your name and number, but your "date of arrest or conviction." That's the kind of information Salahuddin needs, so he can make it go away.
Clear Your Record! That's the name of Salahuddin's business.
Salahuddin calls himself an "expungement technician." For a few hundred dollars, a fraction of what a lawyer would charge, the paralegal helps people scrub their records clean of arrests or convictions -- blots that can mark them for life, foreclosing opportunities to rise above their misdeeds.
Salahuddin is the manifestation of a nationwide movement to contend with a crisis: With unprecedented numbers of African-Americans carrying some kind of record, and post-9/11 employers ever more vigilant in checking backgrounds, black communities are choking with folks who remain blacklisted even after paying their debt to society. Depending on the crime and circumstance, they may be denied jobs, public housing, welfare benefits, student loans or the right to vote.
In recent months, expungement has come alive as an issue in black America.
Black elected officials are at the forefront of efforts to expand expungement opportunities in Ohio, Illinois and California, as well as on the federal level. Thousands of people have brought copies of their criminal records to "expungement summits" staffed by volunteer lawyers at schools and churches in Mississippi, Chicago and Oakland, Calif. The San Francisco public defender's office has a full-time lawyer doing nothing but expungements.
U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis of Chicago, whose district includes stretches where 70 percent of black men aged 18 to 45 have a criminal record, began the summits a few years ago. When he arrived at the first, he recalls, "I'm thinking to myself, `Somebody must be giving out food baskets here.' There were 700 to 800 people." Subsequent events have drawn more than 3,000 each.
Earlier this year, the Rev. Mark C. Olds, who served time for bank robbery and manslaughter, launched the National Restoration Movement USA in Cleveland, holding expungement forums there and in other Ohio cities. Olds, who was inspired by a revelation while playing golf, hopes to take the movement to 150 cities nationwide, beginning with Birmingham, Ala., Lafayette, La., and Wichita, Kan.
Expungement has dubious appeal for a broader public wanting more to be safe than sorry.
"It's just a fraud to suggest that America is the land of second chances, because clearly it is not," says Margaret Colgate Love. Love, the former pardon attorney for the United States, just completed the first study to look state by state at the legal options available to ex-offenders seeking relief from the collateral consequences of their criminal conviction.
What Love discovered was a motley, ungainly collection of provisions that defy clear understanding. While many states have some sort of expungement provision, quite a few have been scaled back since the 1970s and most apply only to first offenses or misdemeanors.
Love finds expungement problematic -- first because it is based on "rewriting history," then because it assumes that in this day and age information can truly be erased.
"On the other hand, we don't seem to be able to persuade people that they should not freak out when they see that someone has an old conviction," she says. "We need a national dialogue on how we're going to neutralize a criminal record so it is not toxic."
In the meantime, there is expungement.
"Everybody deserves a second chance," says Salahuddin, dressed in a gray three-piece suit with mustard gold shirt and a knit kufi skull cap. He works from his home, a vestige of East Orange's now faded glory -- 18 rooms, four fireplaces. His sister, Frances Patterson, bought it 30 years ago, and lives there as well. It is alive with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Despite its suburban patina, East Orange is as chockablock with ex-offenders as neighboring Newark. Near Salahuddin's house a street is blockaded by police who have designated it a drug hot spot. Nightfall belongs to gangs.
The strength of the community is in folks like Ar-Rahiem Muhammad Lawrence.
Lawrence, who just turned 56, is a model citizen. Husband. Father. Pop Warner football coach. He was for many years the Parent-Teacher Organization president for the Dionne Warwick Institute, the public elementary school his sons attended in East Orange. He now works at an after-school program and, in the summer, a YWCA day camp.
He is the kind of figure who makes children feel safe. But when he was 20, he was arrested with some heroin and put away for two years.
"I paid for it and it never happened again," Lawrence says.
A few years ago, Lawrence was a school lunch aide when a background check turned up his record. He was fired. The pharmacy across the street wouldn't hire him as a security guard when he told them about his drug conviction. But when he went to local authorities to get a copy of his record so he could try to get it expunged, they couldn't find it, leaving him in limbo.
But here he is, 35 years later, "on pins and needles; you're afraid it's going to come up."
Salahuddin advertises with fliers he leaves at neighborhood check-cashing stores, beauty parlors and nail salons, at the Crown Fried Chicken around the corner, and pinned to the bulletin boards at local mosques. The flier features a drawing of a plaintive man in prison stripes, the ball and chain around his ankle evoking an Alabama chain gang.
Wornie Reed, former director of the Urban Child Research Center at Cleveland State University, grew up during segregation near Mobile, Ala. He says the situation is actually worse now across the nation than it was then in the South.
"An African-American male in Ohio today stands several times more likely to go to prison than a black male in the South in 1920, and the crime rate is not that much higher," says Reed, now at the University of Tennessee.
At current rates, according to the Sentencing Project, which studies alternatives to incarceration, "one of every three black males born today can expect to be imprisoned at some point in his lifetime." Many more, beyond count, will have an arrest record, which itself can cause indelible damage.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a bad situation got much worse. Now, Love notes, federal law mandates background checks and disqualifies anyone with a record from a huge swath of jobs in education, health care, child and elder care, financial services and transportation.
"To get a barbering license, a license to be a cosmetologist, a license to be a plumber or electrician in this state, you can't have a criminal record," says U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who plans to hold expungement summits in each of his district's 23 counties.
The first three, in July, were held in Jackson, Greenwood and Greenville -- in churches, a setting that Thompson found fitting.
"For those of us who attend church regularly, a common theme that you hear from ministers is he who is without sin should cast the first stone," Thompson says. "All of us have done wrong at some point in our lifetime, but we were blessed in some instances not to have been caught."
In New Jersey, you have to wait five years after completing the sentence to expunge a misdemeanor, and 10 years to expunge a first felony. Once the record is expunged, you can legally answer "no" when asked if you have been convicted of a crime. But Love says that is not the case in every state with an expungement law. And in most cases, she adds, law enforcement still can access the real record.
Salahuddin, 57, says he came of age at a time when you couldn't get close to a good-looking black woman without first answering the question: "What are you doing for the (black) Nation, brother?"
In 1994, he started taking the law classes that have enabled him to provide an answer.
"The Black Nation is not healing right now," he says. Expungement, he believes, heals.
He charges a flat fee of $350, unless the record is complicated by multiple jurisdictions, to guide you through petitioning the court in the county where the crime was committed for an expungement.
"You don't need an attorney," Salahuddin tells clients. "You don't even need me."
But it helps to have a wily guide.
"I do it like it's me," he says.
It once was.
Salahuddin was 13, growing up in Newark, when he and his friends came upon an abandoned Breyer's ice cream factory with "windows that just looked delicious to break." Next thing it was "jiggers, the cops." Salahuddin was the one who didn't get away. "It was like I was public enemy number one. They gave me a record," he says.
When he was arrested in his early 20s for being drunk and disorderly on a Newark bus, his juvenile record popped up.
"It's like a shadow that's always on you," he says.
July 26, 2005
(Jonathan Tilove can be contacted at jonathan.tilove@newhouse.com.)
Sounds like this guy has a pattern of lawbreaking going on in his life. If you don't won't a record, then don't break the law.
"When he arrived at the first, he recalls, "I'm thinking to myself, `Somebody must be giving out food baskets here.' There were 700 to 800 people." "
This is the funniest part of the article, even funnier than felons not wanting to not be held accountable for their crimes.
As opposed to a guy who has never had a cocaine conviction, and isn't likely to take a trip down cocaine memory lane after he's promoted?
When I was in elementary school, the white school nurse would only check for lice on the white children, since apparently blacks cannot become infested with lice. No one objected.
Wrong thread- whoops.
Not to say I don't sympathize with you (for, if you are a male, as I am, who wasn't young and stupid?), but I don't see any reason for a "young and stupid" "out." If that can get a crime removed because you were young and stupid in the past, it's only a matter of time till it can be used in the present. Your Honor, it's clear my client is young and stupid....
"If the prison system does it's job correctly, the accountant would not be released from jail if there was a good chance he'd commit the crime."
It is only the prison system's job to keep the prisoner behind bars for the length of his sentence. It is not up to the prison system to decide "if there was a good chance he'd commit the crime." Surely you're not talking about the parole mechanism to decide if the prisoner won't commit a crime again.
Bottom line: restricting employment opportunites creates recidivism.
Ah -- reflecting that very attitude that brings that "F" word to mind.
I faced the music. Your post illustrates the ways in which people like me continue to face it nearly three later. *sigh* The lifetime record is handed down not by the law I broke, but by those with timid minds and limited experiences. Given the chance to trade places, I'd pass. I'd rather have a bolder mind, even if its conclusions and empathies are built on rougher experiences that offend narrower sensibilities.
Nobody said life was fair. I accept that it's not, give thanks for my many blessings, and lie on job applications. Methinks that if the situations were reversed, YOU would be the last to be so cavalier. I suspect you're the type who can dish it out, but can't take it.
most states have standards for some form of expungment and some have it limited to ONE case.
Thus ONE indiscretion in early life can be removed.
HOWEVER, if you apply for some sentive job or apply to be a lawyer you have to disclose the expunged offense. (and while there is no record after expungement, there is a record of the expungement.)
It makes sense for CERTAIN crimes to be expungable if the person has earned redemtion by their deeds.
Or ... as opposed to a guy who has NO IDEA how to recognize the signs of cocaine addiction in colleagues, and whose lack of experience with the hard ugliness of cocaine addiction rather makes him the better possibility to become a cocaine user if he falls in with the wrong crowd.
Yeah, I think the expungement thing is iffy at best, I more empathize with the effort than suppor it -- the real culprits here, the guys who do the real damage, are prospective employers who will not look twice at an applicant with any kind of record. Many posts on this thread illustrate that mentality.
"Bottom line: restricting employment opportunites creates recidivism."
BOTTOM line: A system which punishes serious crimes (discounting those that are eventually expungeable under current state systems) with a lifetime mark--a "record"--serves as a deterrent to people. If everyone knows that in time, it will just be "wiped out anyway," where's the disincentive?
Only a generation or two ago, there was an incredible onus on being an unwed mother--and unweds were relatively rare. Over time, this onus has been eroded to the point where, if a girl gets "knocked up" these days, she has made a "lifestyle choice." I am not exaggerating one bit. Many of today's 30- and unders see it that way. What has happened? The number of unwed mothers has grown exponentially.
That is not necessarily a perfectly valid comparison (as no such thing exists), but it's to suggest that, to remove a consequence to a behavior that's bad for the individual and bad for society is to remove a barrier.
As for "restricting employment opportunities"...I am not going to sink to the absurd level I've seen here lately, where people you disagree with are simply declared trolls, disruptors, or told to "go back to DU!", but I see that phrase as Lib-speak. You commit a crime, the nature or fact of which makes me not want you near my enterprise...and I'm restricting your opportunity?
Agree to disagree. Have a good day.
I knew what was right and wrong in my early teens and did not break the law. Th situation is do not break the law unless you are willing to face the bar of justice. And part of that in many cases is a lifetime record.
Sorry, that's not working for me. This fellow's situation: I WAS a LEO in another state, and I'm no longer one, and I'm in a new state, but I want the old rules to apply in the new place? That is fairly tortured. If everything is as you say, I hope he gets a break--but it will derive literally on the mercy of the court, because on the law he is dead-bang guilty as charged.
How much of a deputy could he have been, BTW, to not know the law re guns? Or did he think he should be excepted, because he HAD BEEN a LEO?
And by the way, not to be provocative or snarky, but, as someone who's known a lot of cops, and had a few in the family: There is ALWAYS a story. I'm betting the one you recounted is not the whole thing.
I agree with you, Finny. If I'm an employer, and I reject someone worthy for a crime he did 20 years ago--when of course it can be established that those last 20 are clean--then I'm a jerk. That's the kind of zero tolerance thinking that gets honor students expelled from H.S. because they forgot to take a Midol pill out of an old coat pocket, and wore it that day....
It is used now for downward departures from guidelines. It is "youthful offender" designation for those being tried as adults but just young and stupid. It is only available ONCE.
It should be noted that expungement must be applied. Just as a permanent record might be a disincentive, an EARNED expungemnt might be an INCENTIVE.
Redemption should be rewarded.
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