LEGISLATURE PASSED CLEAN SLATE BILL IN JUNE, BUT INSTEAD OF SIGNING IT GOV. KATHY HOCHUL ASKED PRES. JOE BIDEN TO SPEED UP WORK PERMITS FOR MIGRANTS

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While Gov. Kathy Hochul is desperately pleading with Washington for federal work permits for migrants, she's denying the same right to work to more than two million New Yorkers.

"Just let them work," Gov. Hochul begged Pres. Joe Biden in a dramatic live-streamed public appeal on Thursday. 

The governor wants Washington to speed up issuing federal work permits for the more than 100,000 migrants who have arrived in New York since March 2022. Meanwhile, 2.3 million state residents who once committed a crime and have changed their lives are routinely denied good jobs because of decades-old convictions.

The Clean Slate Act would change that by automatically sealing most criminal records once a person demonstrates they’re reformed by staying out of trouble for a specified period of time, the length of which is determined by the seriousness of the crime. Especially serious crimes are not included. The State Legislature passed the bill in June, but Hochul still hasn't signed it into law.

"Governor Hochul is reviewing the legislation," Avi Small, Gov. Hochul's press secretary, told The Free Lance in an email on Saturday. 

Even though they've fully served their sentences, former criminals remain shackled to their pasts by indelible digital databases and ever-expanding background check requirements. They lose almost $2 billion in collective wages every year, in New York alone.

Nation wide, 77 million Americans have criminal records, according to the US Chamber of Commerce. Wide-spread discrimination against employing them causes "extreme rates of unemployment" and loss of $78 to $87 billion in national revenue each year, it found. Former offenders are, in effect, consigned to a life of sporadic or marginal employment and poverty.

I know that's true because I'm one of them.

"That is a moral outrage," Jamie Dimon, Chairman and Chief Executive of JP Morgan & Chase said in a New York Times Op-Ed in 2021.

"This group is ready to work and deserves a second chance—an opportunity to fill the millions of job openings across the country," Dimon explained. "Yet our criminal justice system continues to block them from doing so."

The Clean Slate Act would automatically seal misdemeanors after three years and most felonies after seven years—except murder and sex crimes. Crucially, it would apply retroactively to convictions predating its enactment. That means it helps those blocked from finding work because of criminal records now by stopping most prospective employers from seeing them. 

It would "would create opportunities for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers overnight," according to the Brennan Center. 

The records are not totally sealed. For example, officials may see them to investigate applications for official licenses, including gun licenses. But they're sealed to most private employers, in the vast majority of cases.

“This makes total sense from an economic development standpoint,” Paul Zuber, Executive Director of the Business Council of New York State, said at a Capital rally supporting the Clean Slate Act in January. 

Business leaders like Zuber, JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon, Verizon, unions and others support Clean Slate legislation because it will ease New York's labor shortage. There are about 10 million jobs open across America. 458,000 of them were in New York in December 2022, according to the latest figures available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Enacting Clean Slate would generate about $7 billion in wages annually for the formerly incarcerated.

"Why are we keeping people out of the economy?" Zuber said in January. "It doesn't make sense."

But on Thursday Gov. Hochul said the solution to New York's state-wide employment shortage crisis wasn't Clean Slate. It was putting "these migrants into jobs, jobs that have gone unfilled for too long." 

Hochul's hedging on Clean Slate comes when her politics and the politics of people around the state as a whole are drifting rightward.

The tsunami of police and general social justice reform unleashed by the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 ebbed by the time Gov. Hochul succeeded former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2021. "That era is over,” Hochul said in January 2023.

Hochul insisted changing the law to make it harder for accused criminals to obtain bail earlier this year—even though that required holding up the budget. Now, with a worsening migrant crisis, not just the Governor but the state is poised to pull further right, according to the latest poll.

Still, advocates expect Gov. Hochul to sign Clean Slate into law.

"The Governor has until December 31. We expect her to sign it this fall," Katie Schaffer, Director of Advocacy and Organizing at the Center for Community Alternatives, who organized support for the bill, told The Free Lance on Saturday.

State law gives Gov. Hochul until the end of the year to sign or veto the bill. Out of the 1,010 bills passed the State Legislature in 2022, she signed 841 into law.

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