NCJ Number
76365
Journal
PRISON LAW MONITOR Volume: 3 Issue: 2 Dated: (February 1981) Pages: 29,43-47
Date Published
1981
Length
6 pages
Annotation
This note explores the disabilities imposed on ex-offenders; the origins and development of such disabilities in European and American law are examined in an attempt to understand their use in contemporary American law.
Abstract
Almost every State imposes some type of civil disabilities on both those serving sentences for criminal conviction and those whose sentences have been discharged. These disabilities, imposed by statute or administrative regulation, include denial of voting rights, exclusion from holding public office, denial of property rights, denial of access to courts, prohibitions against holding certain public and private jobs, and many others. The imposition of such disabilities on those who have paid their debt to society appears less defensible on incarcerated felons. The search for the origins of civil disabilities reveals that nothing similar to modern practices existed in primitive societies. In preclassical Rome and in Anglo-Saxon England, the use of 'outlawry' (removal of certain rights) as a criminal sanction first made its appearance. During the Middle Ages, various Nations imposed myriad combinations and permutations of civil disabilities on those convicted of or charged with a crime. Disabilities imposed under criminal law provisions in Anglo-Saxon England were transported across the Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries; some remain intact today. The first legislative impositions of civil disabilities on those convicted of crime in the United States were passed soon after the opening of the first penitentiary. One source attributes imposition to an unquestioning adoption of this aspect of English penal law. Two independent but ultimately conflicting movements in American law in the late 19th century brought the direction which the law of civil disabilities would take until the present day. These two developments were the increased use of probation and parole and the rapid growth of administrative agencies charged with regulating the practice of various trades. It is argued that the reintegration of the ex-offender into society is thwarted by the imposition of civil disabilities which result in housing discrimination and the denial of many different kinds of jobs for ex-offenders. The article includes 54 footnotes.