A New Person: The Rehabilitated Criminal

Brian Sullivan is a housing attorney at MFY Legal Services  in New York City. This is his first guest post on the Criminal Justice blog, where he’ll be a frequent visitor. He will be writing about housing issues for people with criminal records, mental health issues in the criminal justice system, and his close, personal friendship with a Golden Retriever-Chow named Nelly.

Below, he considers the rehabilitation narrative demanded of the formerly incarcerated by America’s public housing systems.

I recently represented a client in New York City who was denied access to public housing because of a past criminal conviction. The collateral consequences of criminal convictions are obviously far-reaching; they go from trouble finding jobs, to potential ineligibility for certain public benefits, to deportation. What I noticed in my representation was the creation of new type of person: the rehabilitated criminal.

If you have a conviction on your record, and the New York City Housing Authority decides that conviction is serious enough, you become ineligible for public housing. That is, you are ineligible unless you can prove to the Housing Authority's satisfaction that you have been rehabilitated. This basically involves showing that you are a different person from who you were when you committed the crime, that you are deeply regretful about the crime, and that you have reformed those portions of your old personality that caused you to commit the crime.

This new, rehabilitated person strikes me as important for two reasons. First off, it really is a new person. Judges who hear criminal cases and Housing Authority officials who rule on people with criminal records have a narrative in mind, and my clients have to fit their lives into that narrative. In the case I handled recently, it was not at all clear to me that my client thought of himself as rehabilitated before I started telling him that the Housing Authority wanted him to be. When I asked him about the conviction he talked about how he was homeless and poor when he committed the offense. He talked about some of the economic and social pressures that he was experiencing at the time. He didn't talk about personal remorse and the burden of individual responsibility. But after we practiced his testimony and discussed his case, he started becoming this new individual, the rehabilitated criminal. The narrative required by the Housing Authority changed my client's understanding of his life in a tangible way; a whole new person was created.

The second thing I want to point out is my role in the transformation. In providing services, it is easy not to notice the power I exercise over my clients and the role I play in spreading the official narrative required by the criminal justice system. I am there to ensure that my client receives a public benefit to which I think he is entitled. As it turns out, I am also there to assist in the creation of the reformed criminal, there to coach my client on how to create his life in a way that will demonstrate his reformation.

If we like this new person, the rehabilitated criminal, then there is no real cause for concern. If we aren't so sure about this new person, then we need to turn our attention to the roles we play in creating him, and to the ways in which a criminal conviction stays with an individual, and requires them to create new lives even years after they have served their time.