Fairness for ex-offenders
Ex-offenders don't make for a powerful constituency, and politicians have tended to treat them accordingly. The Boston City Council is taking up their cause this week, and it should.
Some councilors have recently sought to get involved with reforming the state's CORI law, which guarantees that ex-offenders will be followed and haunted by their criminal records forever. Earlier this year, the council passed a resolution calling for a new look at the law, over which it has no authority.
Now it wants to go one step further and require vendors to interview ex-offenders for jobs as a condition of doing business with the city. The ordinance is scheduled to come up for a vote on Wednesday and is believed to have the support of nine councilors.
''We thought about the power we have, and we have the power of the purse," Councilor Chuck Turner of Roxbury, one of the bill's sponsors, told a conference on Criminal Offender Record Information laws on Saturday at Harvard Law School.
Mayor Thomas M. Menino said last night that he hasn't decided whether he supports this bill.
''Conceptually, I think it's the right path to go on, but legalistically there are questions," Menino said. ''We should be giving people chances. Some of these [ex-offenders] just need a break.
''I don't want to pass a law that doesn't work," he continued. ''We do that a lot, just to get a headline."
If his views over the past 12 years can be taken as any indication, the mayor will probably not approve any measure giving the council any expanded control over how the city spends its money.
Indeed, there is the risk of setting a bad precedent; creative councilors might be able to come up with any number of conditions contractors have to meet to do business. Turner could undoubtedly come up with a number of them single-handedly.
Yet, in a city where ''reentry" has become a buzzword, it is clear that for most ex-offenders there can't be a meaningful second chance without a job.
After years of being mostly ignored, the issue of reforming CORI has gained some momentum at both the local and state levels. The City Council, for once, is much further along in its thinking than its counterparts in the State House, where dozens of bills -- with contradictory aims -- now languish. Some legislators want to decrease access to criminal records while others believe it should be increased, even though 11,000 organizations already have access to the bulk of them.
One terrible idea now circulating would combine the bills on file into a single, completely unworkable bill. The fine minds that run the Massachusetts House are sure to sort out the mess in short order.
At the root of the debate is a law that has become outdated and ineffective. Originally conceived as a means of shielding the records of offenders, the law now has almost an opposite effect since so many people now have access. No one argues that certain offenses should keep people out of some lines of work -- most obviously child care -- but the effects of CORI extend far beyond that.
At the conference on Saturday, some ex-offenders told stories of how their lives have been permanently stained by the stigma of even a mild criminal past. One of them, speaking of her time postprison, said, ''I'm eight years into a life sentence."
Does that sort of stigma really make sense, when nearly everyone behind bars will eventually get out?
Menino suggested yesterday that giving tax credits to firms that hire ex-offenders might be a better strategy than punishing those who don't. As the mayor put it, ''There has to be some carrot."
He may well be right about that. But where he and the proponents of this bill agree is that it's time for a policy, even if the details are still up for debate.
Nearly everyone agrees that ex-offenders have to successfully reenter society to stay out of trouble. If the city wants to help, as Turner suggested, it has the power of the purse.
Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.
