Punishment Delayed

The Prospect: Past Drug Convictions Haunt Katrina Victims

(The American Prospect)  This column was written by Vince Beiser.

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With nowhere to run to when Hurricane Katrina hit, Antoinette Samson huddled together with her husband and three children on the darkened second floor of their New Orleans home as the storm shook the walls.

When the wind and rain finally subsided, they found themselves trapped, the lower level flooded to the ceiling. Rescued from their porch by a passing boat, the family wound up spending two nights sleeping on a highway overpass and three more in front of the infamous Superdome, surviving on water and MREs handed out by emergency workers.

That, however, turned out to be some of the last help the family would get from the federal government. Though they are now homeless and broke, the entire family is cut off from federal housing and welfare assistance – because six years ago, Samson’s husband, Arnold Battiste, was convicted for possession of crack.

“We lost everything,” says Samson, 31, a former New Orleans school bus driver who is now being sheltered with her family by a church in Denton, Texas. “We went through so much trauma, and now we come here and learn we can’t get housing?”

Samson and her family are among possibly thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims who are being denied help because of past drug convictions. Tough-on-crime laws passed mostly in the 1990s bar drug felons – though not other kinds of offenders – from receiving a range of federal assistance, from student loans to cash welfare, now known as Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF). The issue is pressing enough that several members of Congress introduced a bill early this month to temporarily restore such aid to residents of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, who have had their lives disrupted by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

“Parents who have lost everything and are struggling to feed themselves and their family will be denied TANF and food stamps; students who … could continue their education in another school … will be denied student loans; and entire families that have lost everything in the disasters will be denied housing – all due to the federal bans for a past drug conviction,” said Democratic Representative Robert C. Scott when he introduced the bill on November 2. The Elimination of Barriers for Katrina Victims Act, he went on, “would allow families affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita a chance to put their lives back together through the same means as other victims who suddenly lost their homes and livelihood through no fault of their own.”

Nearly 2.5 million people affected by Katrina and Rita have already applied to FEMA for help. How many of them have a drug conviction somewhere in their past? No one knows, but given the enthusiasm with which the southern states wage the war on drugs, the number is undoubtedly considerable. Over 178,000 people are currently locked up or on probation or parole for drug crimes in the states covered by Scott’s bill. And that number leaves out the many thousands more who have completed their sentences but whose convictions remain on record.