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Public housing laws harming hundreds
of thousands of poor people
By Jim Lobe
Washington, DC, Nov. 18 — Hundreds of thousands of poor
people have been denied access to public housing because of past convictions
for felonies or misdemeanors that are unrelated to any threat they might
pose to other tenants, according to a major new report by Human Rights
Watch released Nov. 18.
The 101-page report, “No Second Chance,” argues that public
housing authorities are interpreting laws and regulations that exclude
applicants with criminal records far too broadly, with the result that
needy and otherwise-qualified people are being turned away.
Despite having paid their debt to society, many of these individuals
end up among the estimated 12.5 million Americans who have been homeless,
living on the streets, in overcrowded shelters, or in transient motels
and dormitories, according to the report.
“Everyone deserves safe housing, but these policies yield more
misery and desperation than public safety,” said Corinne Carey,
an analyst in HRW’s US program and the report’s main author.
Decent and stable housing is essential for human survival and dignity,
a principle which is recognized in both US policy and international
human rights law.
To realize that principle, the United States provides federally subsidized
housing to millions of low-income people who could not otherwise afford
homes on their own. There are some 4,000 public housing authorities
(PHAs) in the United States that provide federal housing assistance.
US policies, however, effectively exclude hundreds of thousands of needy
people with criminal records from applying for public housing, ostensibly
to protect existing tenants. Under current housing policies, everyone
convicted of a felony -- about 3.5 million people over the past five
years -- is automatically ineligible for public housing for a minimum
of five years.
In addition, tens of millions of US citizens who have been convicted
of misdemeanors, or merely arrested but never convicted of any criminal
offense, may also found themselves excluded from public housing, according
to the report.
In Pittsburgh, for example, a shoplifting arrest leads automatically
to a four-year ban on applying for housing, while in Austin, Texas,
anyone convicted of possessing a small amount of marijuana may not apply
for seven years.
“Denying these people a home does little to promote the welfare
of existing tenants,” according to the report. “But it can
cause homelessness or transient living for those excluded -- and it
can be counterproductive for community safety, as it is difficult to
be law-abiding while living on the streets.”
The exclusion of people with criminal records from public housing is
often referred to as the “one strike” policy that was developed
in the 1990s as an attempt to address drug trafficking, violent crime,
and disorder in public housing, particularly in urban high-rise developments.
As passed by Congress, federal law bans outright three categories of
people from admission to public housing -- those who have been convicted
of methamphetamine production in federally-funded housing; those subject
to lifetime registration requirements under state sex offender registration
programs; and people who are currently using illegal drugs regardless
of whether they have ever been convicted for such activity.
In addition, PHAs may deny admission to three other categories of applications
– those who have been evicted from public housing because of drug-related
criminal activity for a period of three years following eviction; those
who have at any time in the past engaged in a sustained pattern disruptive
alcohol or illegal drug abuse; and those who have engaged in any criminal
activity, if the PHA deems them a safety risk.
In practice, according to the report, which was based on information
gained from 42 PHAs across the nation, these discretionary categories
are used to exclude a wide swath of people with criminal records without
regard to any reasonable basis to believe they may actually pose a risk.
According to the report, two reasons best explain the sweeping nature
of the exclusions. First, demand for public housing in the US far exceeds
supply, so that state and local governments have an interest in developing
ways of disqualifying large numbers of applicants.
“Excluding those with criminal records has proven to be a politically
cost-free way to entirely cut out a large group of people from the pool
of those seeking housing assistance,” according to the report.
The second reason relates to what the report calls the “widespread
belief in the United States that people who have broken the law do not
deserve a second chance and are the legitimate target of policies that
are little more than expressions of disdain and hostility.”
In both cases, however, such punitive views may not only be unjust,
but counter-productive as well, in that people without fixed and secure
abodes may be more likely to resort to crime and blame others for what
they consider to be unjust treatment.
“Policies that arbitrarily exclude people from public housing do
not advance public safety -- they undermine it,” according to the
report.
The report notes that the federal government has begun paying more attention
to the plight of people who leave prison and are trying to re-enter
society by providing temporary shelter. “But even the best-designed
re-entry program will fail if those returning from prisons and jails
can’t get housing,” according to Carey.
“The United States must address the drastic shortage of affordable
housing, particularly in public housing,” the report concludes.
But, as a first step, it goes on, Washington and local authorities should
eliminate inequities and arbitrariness in the allocation of existing
units.
Source: One World
Exit poll discrepencies and voting irregularities
abound
Compiled by Joshua Phillips
Nov. 23 (AGR) — The 2004 election continues to be mired
by accusations of fraud, voter intimidation, and suppression in different
regions throughout the country. Speculation focuses upon a number of
questions — anomalies surrounding electronic voting (e-voting)
machines — particularly the optical scan types — and numerous
reports of voting “irregularities” in heavily Democratic areas.
Re-counts have been called for in New Hampshire and Ohio.
Exit poll discrepancy
On Nov. 10, University of Pennsylvania Professor Steven F. Freeman,
whose expertise includes “research methods,” compiled an analysis
entitled “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy.” The document
was prepared in view of the unusually large differences between what
exit polls (surveys of individuals who have just cast ballots) had predicted
and the recorded vote tallies. His findings suggest Democratic challenger
Senator John Kerry should have received far more votes than he did.
In three of the key battleground states — Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania
— Freeman’s analysis states the odds of Kerry receiving the
percentage of votes recorded, given the exit poll findings, were less
than three in one thousand, per state. In New Hampshire, Bush tallied
a surprising 9.5 percent more votes than predicted, the most significant
difference in any of the key states.
Highlighting both the expected accuracy of exit polls and the significant
disparity that Kerry’s defeat illustrated, Republican consultant,
commentator and Fox-TV News regular Dick Morris wrote an article, “Those
Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage,” which suggested a pollster conspiracy
to swing the election for Kerry.
In doing so he, perhaps inadvertently, provided ammunition for arguments
from the opposite side — that the exit polls were correct but the
final results were fudged.
“Exit polls are almost never wrong,” argued Morris. In 10
of the 11 key states they had predicted significantly fewer votes for
President Bush than he was eventually credited with.
Morris observed that outside the United States, exit polls are often
used to provide a check on official vote counts, in his words, “to
foreclose the possibility of finagling with the returns.”
John Zogby, president of the polling firm Zogby International, told
IPS he was concerned about the difference between some of the exit polls
and the official vote counts. According to Zogby, it would have required
“wrong sampling in wrong areas throughout the country,” or
the purposeful manipulation of data to obtain exit poll results so significantly
different from the official totals. He described the possibility of
either incompetence or fraud causing the controversial deviation as
“impossible.”
Recount in New Hampshire
On Nov. 5, former consumer advocate and third party presidential candidate
Ralph Nader requested a hand recount of New Hampshire ballots, IPS he
had “reports of irregularities there, and we have the cooperation
of the state government ... the state attorney-general and secretary
of state.”
Nader, who paid $2,000 for the recount, requested it for 11 of the state’s
126 precincts that use Diebold Inc.’s Accuvote optical scanning
machines to count paper ballots. The campaign said that depending on
the results, it could ask for recounts in other states, as well. Nader
also said his headquarters had been flooded with requests for assistance
from a number of states.
In the New Hampshire case, Ida Briggs, a longtime Michigan software
designer and database developer, did a statistical analysis of some
election results, and found them perplexing enough to trigger concerns
in her mind about the efficacy of the electronic vote tabulation system
used.
What she found were striking anomalies — mostly in precincts using
paper ballots that were put through optical scanning machines manufactured
by the controversial vendor Diebold, of North Canton, Ohio. In general,
according to Briggs, the “Diebold precincts” showed larger
and more frequent deviations from expected voting trends than precincts
relying strictly on hand counts, and even than those using an optical-scan
counting system from another manufacturer.
Creating trend patterns by looking at the 2000 and 2004 elections, Briggs
found rural, typically conservative precincts that hand-counted ballots
as voting more for Kerry than they did for Gore, while larger, urban
precincts using Diebold’s AccuVote machines often did the opposite.
Of the precincts where Kerry did less well than expected, according
to Briggs, 73 percent used optical-scan technology and 62 percent used
Diebold machines. Fully 92 percent of all out-of-trend votes were optically
scanned.
Respected analysts have found numerous bugs in Diebold’s system
codes, and complain that the company has failed to release its most
recent revisions, preventing an independent verification of improvements.
Diebold recently settled a civil suit brought by the State of California
alleging that the company sold the state and several counties shoddy
voting equipment. Diebold agreed to pay $2.6 million to the state.
Seeming to brush aside John Kerry’s concession speech, the Ohio
Democratic Party has launched a federal court fight over nearly 155,000
provisional ballots by contending that a proper accounting of those
votes might decide who really won.
Study finds Florida ‘ghost’ e-votes
In the nation’s first academic study of the Florida 2004 vote,
University of California, Berkeley graduate students and a professor
have found intriguing evidence that counties using electronic voting
machines could have mistakenly awarded up to 260,000 votes to President
Bush.
Broadly speaking, the UC Berkeley team found that Bush received tens
of thousands more votes in electronic-voting Democratic counties than
past voting patterns would have suggested. No such pattern turned up
in counties using optical scanning machines.
The UC Berkeley study estimates that all 15 electronic-voting counties
in Florida produced at least 130,733 and as many as 260,000 “ghost
votes” for Bush — votes that either were not cast by voters
or were registered for a candidate other than the one intended by the
voter.
Source: Associated Press, The Nation, Inter
Press Service, Oakland Tribune, Cleveland Plain Dealer
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