Good for Rep. Sally Doty, R-Brookhaven, who was a prime advocate in getting the Mississippi Legislature this year to allow people convicted of felony drug crimes to seek federal food assistance.
The 1996 welfare reform legislation, negotiated between President Clinton and congressional Republicans, barred for life anyone convicted of a state or federal drug felony from receiving food stamps or welfare. The law permitted states to opt out of the ban, and until now, Mississippi was one of only three that had not.
The punitive impulse is understandable: If you don’t want to lose government food benefits, don’t mess with drugs. But we have nearly a quarter-century of evidence indicating this strategy was too harsh and wasn’t working.
As Doty pointed out, the federal law banning drug felons from receiving food help wound up treating them more harshly than it did people convicted of violent crimes. What’s the sense of that?
Doty also said the federal law had a greater impact on women, “who generally have lower-paying jobs and could greatly benefit from the education and training programs, as well as the nutritional support.”
But the larger point, as the senator noted, is that keeping drug convicts out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program runs counter to the idea of rehabilitation — which is so important to controlling the long-term social costs of drugs.
Under existing law, there is virtually no way for a low-income person with a felony conviction for selling or possessing narcotics to get away from criminal activity. It’s hard enough for many of these felons to get a job after they have served a prison term. To compound this by denying them food benefits is all but telling them the only alternative is breaking the law.
To make things worse, state education and job-training programs were unavailable to drug felons because of their criminal history. There really has been no hope for some of these people, even if they wanted to fix their lives. It is wrong for government policy to impose this sort of permanent sentence.
The Department of Human Services could not say how many more people will qualify for food assistance once the state lifts the federal ban on July 1. Given that the ban has been in place for 23 years, it’s pretty easy to predict that, at a minimum, this change has the potential to help several thousand people, along with their children.
Mississippi should see fairly soon how much difference this change in the law makes. People who receive food stamps, for example, cannot get them unless they have a job, are in a workforce training program or are studying for a high school equivalency diploma.
Previously this was unavailable to drug convicts. If this change steers even a modest percentage of them toward a cleaner, better life, it will have been well worth it.
