Lifting a hurdle to a welcome home

California rescinds housing laws that discriminate against people previously incarcerated as part of a broader shift binding rehabilitation to individual dignity.

|
AP Photo/Eric Risberg
The watchtower at the entrance of San Quentin State Prison in California, July 26, 2023. The state is transforming the maximum security facility to focus on preparing inmates to reenter society. Classrooms and community living will replace cells and bars.
  • Quick Read
  • Deep Read ( 2 Min. )

In the past three decades, an estimated 2,000 American cities adopted housing policies encouraging or requiring landlords to deny rental dwellings to people once incarcerated and evict existing tenants with criminal histories – including 104 municipalities in California. This week the state adopted the first law in the United States banning the practice.

The new measure fits into a broader reconsideration in California and across the U.S. of the relationship between punishment and redemption. That shift recognizes that the rehabilitating aims of justice rest – both behind prison walls and within communities – on seeing the inherent dignity and capacity for good in all individuals irrespective of their worst mistakes.

“If you look at everything that needs to change, yes, it has to happen internally” in the way that prisons prepare inmates to return to society, said Jessica Fernandez, chief of community reentry services for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. But “then you have also to change the mind of the community,” she told the Los Angeles Times days before the new law came into effect.

The new California law passed without a dissenting vote. Communities throughout the state may now discover that their safety involves a shared recognition of individual worth on both sides of the prison walls.

In the past three decades, an estimated 2,000 American cities adopted housing policies encouraging or requiring landlords to deny rental dwellings to formerly incarcerated people and evict existing tenants with criminal histories – including 104 municipalities in California. This week the state adopted the first law in the United States banning the practice.

The new measure fits into a broader reconsideration in California and across the U.S. of the relationship between punishment and redemption. That shift recognizes that the rehabilitating aims of justice rest – both behind prison walls and within communities – on seeing the inherent dignity and capacity for good in all individuals irrespective of their worst mistakes.

“If you look at everything that needs to change, yes, it has to happen internally” in the way that prisons prepare inmates to return to society, said Jessica Fernandez, chief of community reentry services for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. But “then you have also to change the mind of the community,” she told the Los Angeles Times days before the new law came into effect.

So-called crime-free housing policies sought to improve safety in multifamily rental blocks in response to drug crises like that of crack cocaine in the early 1990s. A Rand Corp. study in November, however, documented how the policies have instead destabilized low-income, predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Evictions rose in places where the laws were applied, the report found, while crime rates remained unchanged.

In 2020, Oakland and Berkeley became the first U.S. cities to ban criminal background checks from housing applications. More communities have followed since. A handful of states, such as New York and Illinois, may be poised to enact reforms similar to California’s.

Making it easier for formerly incarcerated people to find stable housing after their release dovetails with a range of ways prison reformers are rethinking the outcomes of incarceration. California and Pennsylvania are transforming prisons to focus on wellness, education, and community living to better equip people in prison for life on the outside. That approach helped Norway cut its recidivism rate from nearly 70% in the 1990s to 20% today.

But reintegrating formerly convicted people in society also requires cultivating trust and empathy where they seek to settle. One way to improve those prospects may involve erasing the walls between life inside and out – even temporarily. A so-called inside-out college program run by the University of Delaware, for example, enables outside students and people in prison to take classes together.

“When I’m in a room on a Monday night with my outside students and my inside students, it’s a classroom, not a cell block, and we’re doing education, not prison,” Daniel O’Connell, senior scientist at the University of Delaware’s Center for Drug and Health Studies, told the National Institute of Justice. “I have my outside students constantly telling me how enlightening it was for them to be part of that experience. And I’ve had inside students who found out that they could sit in a college classroom, participate, be successful, and do the assignments.”

The new California law passed without a dissenting vote. Communities throughout the state may now discover – as students in Delaware did – that their safety involves a recognition of individual worth cultivated on both sides of prison walls.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Lifting a hurdle to a welcome home
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2024/0105/Lifting-a-hurdle-to-a-welcome-home
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe