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April 10, 2008
Restoring Financial Aid to People with Drug Convictions
From the NAACP: RESTORING FINANCIAL AID TO MINOR DRUG OFFENDERS
On behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), our nation’s oldest, largest and most widely-recognized grassroots civil rights organization, I strongly urge you to support a repeal of current law that says that if you need some financial help in order to go to college, one drug conviction can make you temporarily ineligible, and multiple convictions may lead to a permanent bar on receiving aid. Specifically, I hope that you will use the opportunity of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act to overturn this ill-conceived and detrimental provision.
While the goal of this law, to ensure that drug dealers do not set up shop on our nations college campuses with federal backing, was laudable, the result is in fact racially and economically discriminatory and adversely impacts tens of thousands of lower-income young adults. In fact, as a result of this law, more than 200 thousand young men and women, a disproportionate number of whom are racial and ethnic minorities and the vast majority of whom come from families with total annual incomes of less than $30,000, though they’ve paid their debt to society, are being unfairly and unnecessarily denied access to a higher education, the only sure way to end the cycle of drug addiction, crime, violence poverty and incarceration. Instead of affecting major drug dealers, the group this law was intended to affect, this provision has in-fact primarily impacted students convicted of minor possession and nonviolent related offenses.
The current law has affected African American and Hispanic American youth in devastatingly disproportionate numbers. According to reports from the US Department of Justice and the US Department of Health and Human Services, people of color commit drug offenses at a rate proportional to our percentage of the US population, over 25% for African Americans and Hispanic Americans combined. Yet almost 75% of the people charged in this nation with a drug offense are either Hispanic or African American.
To predicate educational assistance on laws of dubious racial integrity is not only un-American, but it continues to condemn individuals, as well as families and whole communities, to a life of hopelessness and despair. By denying individuals access to higher education, and basing it on laws that are carried out in such a racially disparate manner, the United States Congress has made it even more difficult for the most vulnerable of Americans to ever have a real chance.
Please do all that you can to see that this misguided and overly punitive law is repealed during the HEA reauthorization. Only a full and complete repeal of the penalty would address all of our concerns regarding the importance of access to college for people struggling to keep their lives on the right track. We therefore urge the conferees to include language fully repealing 20 U.S.C. 1091(r) in the Higher Education Act reauthorization bill.
Posted by lois at April 10, 2008 10:39 PM