Lifting a hurdle to a welcome home

In the past three decades, an estimated 2,000 American cities adopted housing policies encouraging or requiring landlords to deny rental dwellings to formerly incarcerated people and evict existing tenants with criminal histories – including 104 municipalities in California. This week the state adopted the first law in the United States banning the practice.

The new measure fits into a broader reconsideration in California and across the U.S. of the relationship between punishment and redemption. That shift recognizes that the rehabilitating aims of justice rest – both behind prison walls and within communities – on seeing the inherent dignity and capacity for good in all individuals irrespective of their worst mistakes.

“If you look at everything that needs to change, yes, it has to happen internally” in the way that prisons prepare inmates to return to society, said Jessica Fernandez, chief of community reentry services for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. But “then you have also to change the mind of the community,” she told the Los Angeles Times days before the new law came into effect.

So-called crime-free housing policies sought to improve safety in multifamily rental blocks in response to drug crises like that of crack cocaine in the early 1990s. A Rand Corp. study in November, however, documented how the policies have instead destabilized low-income, predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Evictions rose in places where the laws were applied, the report found, while crime rates remained unchanged.

In 2020, Oakland and Berkeley became the first U.S. cities to ban criminal background checks from housing applications. More communities have followed since. A handful of states, such as New York and Illinois, may be poised to enact reforms similar to California’s.

Making it easier for formerly incarcerated people to find stable housing after their release dovetails with a range of ways prison reformers are rethinking the outcomes of incarceration. California and Pennsylvania are transforming prisons to focus on wellness, education, and community living to better equip people in prison for life on the outside. That approach helped Norway cut its recidivism rate from nearly 70% in the 1990s to 20% today.

But reintegrating formerly convicted people in society also requires cultivating trust and empathy where they seek to settle. One way to improve those prospects may involve erasing the walls between life inside and out – even temporarily. A so-called inside-out college program run by the University of Delaware, for example, enables outside students and people in prison to take classes together.

“When I’m in a room on a Monday night with my outside students and my inside students, it’s a classroom, not a cell block, and we’re doing education, not prison,” Daniel O’Connell, senior scientist at the University of Delaware’s Center for Drug and Health Studies, told the National Institute of Justice. “I have my outside students constantly telling me how enlightening it was for them to be part of that experience. And I’ve had inside students who found out that they could sit in a college classroom, participate, be successful, and do the assignments.”

The new California law passed without a dissenting vote. Communities throughout the state may now discover – as students in Delaware did – that their safety involves a recognition of individual worth cultivated on both sides of prison walls.