Originally published at: "Groundless lifetime ban" prevents grocer with a drug-dealing conviction from serving neighbors who rely on food stamps | Boing Boing
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If one set out to create a criminal justice system specifically designed to ensure convicts never better themselves or become full and productive members of society it would look an awful lot like the system we have today.
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But… but… TOUGH ON CRIMEZ is the ONLY WAYZ!!! /s
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This rule would also have the other effect of making it harder for people on SNAP to buy food.
There’s a web of rules and policies that individually don’t really make sense, but taken together definitely look like someone made a special point of trying to make getting out of poverty as difficult as possible.
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i used to think that poverty was the goal. these days i think it’s pure and simple racism. when poor white people get swept up, that’s more like collateral damage. ( noting that in this case, the person in question is not white. )
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I absolutely fucking hate punishments that actually incentivize people to commit more crime. We should not be making it harder for ex cons to make a living unless there are some damn exceptional reasons to do so. It should be obvious that it’s in society’s best interest to help these people succeed.
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Those things aren’t mutually exclusive. Racism is a strong motivator, but the rich always need a poor underclass, and they don’t really care too much who fills it. Generally anybody that white middle class people don’t care if they get abused.
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while true, the ameican dream itself - the rise from rags to riches to change one’s class - was specifically excluded for black americans for much of american history. and the goal of much of conservative policy, especially since civil rights, has been to roll back that clock
so, yes: companies will happily do things like move factories overseas and hollow out the white middle class. but the reason snap is policed the way it is has little to do with the white working class poor. it’s primarily about using government assistance as a proxy for race based policies
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The system doesn’t help to rehabilitate a person and allow them to rejoin society as a productive member. It’s always about excluding them as “undesirable.” When you consider how the law target people of certain groups explicitly and implicitly, the system nudges them as certain direction, the media portray them under prejudice, the whole pipeline from school to prison or military, the education opportunity get priced out for certain demographic/socioeconomic group, you can see where the justice system’s priority is. The point is punishment, torturing, and excluding, not helping these individual get back on their feet.
| Population | |
|---|---|
| White alone, percent | 75.5% |
| Black or African American alone, percent(a) | 13.6% |
| American Indian and Alaska Native alone, percent(a) | 1.3% |
| Asian alone, percent(a) | 6.3% |
| Race | # of Inmates | % of Inmates |
|---|---|---|
| Asian | 2,265 | 1.4% |
| Black | 60,796 | 38.5% |
| Native American | 4,141 | 2.6% |
| White | 90,705 | 57.4% |
https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jsp
As you can see, Black is only 13.6% of total population but take up 38.5% of prison population. This is statistically significant. Why? /S.
This is only when people going to jail. There is numerous issue once the incarcerated getting out: legal status, social stigmatization, visible/invisible barriers to a lot of thing (including job opportunity and social assistance services)…
I mean selling cigarette on the street can get you summary executed (Eric Garner) but living your whole life as a crime lord get you followers, money, and power (Tr&mp). The whole thing is just broken working as intended.
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If anyone is interested, there are organizations across the country that are lobbying to do away with permanent punishments like this. Challenging egregious examples like this are great, and changes at the legislative help even more.
In Illinois, Fully Free is doing wonderful work.
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Definitely a Justice Grinch prize at the Trunk-O-Treat for people who wanted grocering [anyone got the True Job Title Spelling?] to be (voted) a just-getting-started job only ever handled by people that Don’t Need a Living Wage [cue: shambling teenage sackers, but it’s an agility-dog driven maquette. (Thanks, fast zombies!)]
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Folks never actually “serve their time” do they?
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an injustice, congressional grinch prize double feature even
i’ve always preferred “dry goods engineer”
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I should really give them a call. I have many concerns
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Obviously this is absurd and things like this should never happen.
But since they do, how does that even work? He, personally, has a record, therefore the business he owns gets punished? If he’d organized the business differently (made it a (different type of) corporation, maybe one where he wasn’t the only owner?) would that change? Would they make Albertsons stop accepting SNAP benefits if they hired too many people with records at the C-level? Or what if too many people with records bought shares in Kroger? This isn’t even internally consistent BS.
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I’m genuinely curios about this too. I suspect it only applies to sole proprietorships? which seems unreasonable and unfair to me.
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This seems like a job for corporate personhood…
The ‘irrelevant’ aspect seems particularly important. I can see the feds having a strong interest in burning people with SNAP fraud priors from SNAP handling, just as(much more rarely) being Mr. Shkreli can get you barred from further pharmaceutical-adjacent financial engineering; but treating drug convictions as broad-spectrum presumptive moral turpitude is indefensible.
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likely similar to teens cashiering. if someone wants to buy alcohol, you’ve got to call an adult to ring it up. very much a pain, but definitely a thing.
though it’s also possible he’d need someone else to sign the snap contract - because it’s likely he can’t put his own name on it
