EIGHT

ADVOCACY ON ANOTHER LEVEL

MY INVOLVEMENT WITH the Homeless/Formerly Homeless Forum led me next to walk down two related paths. It was through them that I ended up becoming a board member of the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust, and through them that I was introduced to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. I will always remember the H/FHF as the first organization I made a conscious commitment to be engaged in and where I advocated for something. I was able to work with other directly impacted people and know that the work that we were doing was actually making a difference. It wasn’t just about us sharing our stories. It was about us being able to give input to help create policies or even to direct policies and to make decisions as to the strategies involving reducing the homeless population. This advocacy on another level created a thirst in me and others in the group to want to do more.

THE MIAMI-DADE COUNTY HOMELESS TRUST WAS A GOVERNING BODY THAT HELPED facilitate ending homelessness in our county. I first came in contact with them because they were one of two partners, along with the Homeless/Formerly Homeless Forum, that coordinated a yearly candlelight vigil to honor homeless individuals who had passed away. It was celebrated on National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day and held by the fountain near the Stephen P. Clark Center in downtown Miami. We would call out the name of every homeless person who had died during the previous year; there could be as many as a hundred names being read out, one at a time, to raise awareness that there was still an invisible population out there. Some of those people died a natural death, some died a violent death because of crime and because they were easy marks for predators. Some of them were former veterans; some of them were teenagers, while some of them were old enough to be grandparents. There was a story behind each one of those names, and we brought it out in public.

The Homeless/Formerly Homeless Forum had two seats at the table for the Homeless Trust, and they selected me to take up one of those. That was an empowering step on my journey, to be sure. To be able to sit, not only in a room but at the same table, with commissioners of governmental agencies and leading organizations like the United Way and Chapman Partnership, with one of the most powerful lobbyists in Florida as the chair, was pretty mind-blowing. Here I was, a man who, not too long before, had been homeless and in drug treatment, in the same boardroom as these powerful and influential people making decisions that are impacting peoples’ lives. That really built up my self-worth.

We met on a monthly basis to administer a homeless reduction program. One of the things I learned while serving on the Homeless Trust board was that homelessness could be defined quite broadly. If you’re sleeping on the streets, yes, you’re homeless; if you’re sleeping in a car, you’re homeless. But you’re also considered homeless if maybe a family member has given you a bed in a room or you are crashing on someone’s couch. Because if that person decides to withdraw their generosity for any reason, then you don’t necessarily have a place to go. You may not think of yourself as homeless, but until you have your name on a lease and you’re paying rent, then you don’t have a home—your home—that’s how you’re considered.

By that definition, I was homeless for approximately eleven years. The overwhelming majority of that time I was living on the street or squatting in abandoned buildings. But even when I was fortunate enough to be camping out with someone for a time, I couldn’t tell you, “I own that home,” or, “I’m paying the rent.” That was the goal of the Homeless Trust, to get as many people as they could in the state of Florida to be able to say that.

__________

THE SECOND PATH THAT MY WORK WITH THE HOMELESS/FORMERLY HOMELESS FORUM led me to was even more impactful. The forum was a member of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. In 2006, I was able to go on a trip with fellow members of H/FHF to the annual convening for the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition in Tampa, Florida, at the Stetson University College of Law.

Up until that point, I knew very little about the restoration of civil rights. It wasn’t until I attended that convening that I started getting an understanding of the impact that my felony convictions have had on my life as they relate to voting, serving on a jury, running for office, housing, employment, and even something as simple as obtaining a business license. That convening was the first time I heard the word “disenfranchisement” in connection to people who were in my situation. We listened to experts from around the state and from around the country, and I spoke with them personally, including the keynote speaker, Walter McNeil, who was the secretary for the Florida Department of Corrections.

It was an odd experience. On the one hand, all I had were questions. I wanted to be able to understand everything that was being discussed, and I was a rookie. My mom always used to tell me that it’s better to be quiet and let people think you’re stupid than to open your mouth and confirm it. In this group of folks who were very well-versed in felon disenfranchisement, I didn’t know what I had to contribute that was meaningful. At the same time, I grasped that for some of the folks I was talking with, the discussion was more theoretical. They hadn’t experienced the roadblocks and the stigma and the shame and the frustration. It occurred to me that if I listened well, I could build the policy knowledge I was lacking and add to their discussion from my bank of personal experiences in a way that could be very useful for that coalition. I wanted some day for them to be able to use me as a voice, as I worked my way back up from the bottom.

At that time, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) was just as its name states, a coalition of organizations throughout the state and the country. It included state offices, like the public defender’s and state attorney’s offices; religious organizations, like the Episcopal and AME Churches; and civic and nonprofit groups, like the League of Women Voters, the ACLU, the NAACP, the Advancement Project, the Sentencing Project, and the Brennan Center for Justice. It also included smaller grassroots organizations like Brothers of the Same Mind. At one point, there were over seventy independent organizations in the FRRC. All of these organizations came together with a primary focus on the restoration of civil rights for people formerly convicted of felonies.

FRRC wasn’t an entity on its own. It was a project housed within the ACLU headquarters in Miami. After the convening, I started attending their steering committee meetings. I learned a lot from the ACLU staffers, who were always around the office, as well as from a gentleman by the name of Elton Edwards. Elton was a highly intelligent man, very professional and knowledgeable, but he had been to prison, and he had gotten a taste of how that would change his life forever. From him, I learned strategies for coordinating all the different individuals from all the different organizations that the coalition had to pull together. Most importantly, I learned that returning citizens have more than their “voice” to contribute in advocacy.

IN THOSE YEARS, FRRC HAD A TWO-FOLD STRATEGY TO CONVINCE POLICYMAKERS ABOUT the importance of felon re-enfranchisement. The first part was to lobby the Florida legislature to make the changes we wanted to see. That effort was not that successful, but we did make some headway on our second front, which was to try to reach the governor and members of his cabinet, which included the attorney general, the chief financial officer, and the commissioner of agriculture. In April 2007, the governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, established new rules that would automatically restore rights for returning citizens so long as they had completed their probation, had no pending criminal charges, and had paid their restitution. Returning citizens with less serious convictions would have their rights restored automatically, while returning citizens with more serious convictions would have to apply to have their rights restored.

It sounded amazing, except the term “automatically” was pretty misleading. The restoration of voting rights was automatic more in name than in nature. The only people who really felt the immediate benefits of that policy were those who were incarcerated at the time it was put into effect. For those folks, approximately six months before they completed their sentence, the department of corrections would send their paperwork to the Florida parole commission to be processed. By the time those individuals had completed their sentences and were walking out of their prison cells, they would get a certificate saying that their rights had been restored. For those who were not incarcerated, however, even if they had been convicted of less serious offenses, they still had to apply for the restoration of their rights just like the returning citizens with more serious convictions did. That created a huge backlog of people submitting their applications to be processed, because that population consisted of approximately 1.54 million people who had completed their sentence at the time, and many of them wanted to get their rights back.

The other reason for the backlog was that at the same time the new policies were implemented, the agency that was tasked with processing these applications, the Florida parole commission, had its budget slashed dramatically. Where at one point they may have had, say, fifteen people working on processing applications, that number was reduced to five. So you had a smaller staff and a huge influx of applications coming in at the same time, which created a massive bottleneck. At one point there were over one hundred thousand people waiting for their rights to be restored.

Nonetheless, the policy was a major victory. FRRC put on workshops throughout the state of Florida, which I attended. These events, which occurred at various spots around the state simultaneously, helped people apply for the restoration of their civil rights. During a four-year period, over 155,000 people were able to get their rights back, and the FRRC played a significant role in helping that happen.

WHEN THE FOLKS AT FRRC SAW HOW ENTHUSED I WAS AT THE CONVENING, THEY nominated me to become the steering committee secretary. I was already doing so much in my life: running the three-quarter-way house and going to meetings, supporting my own sobriety as well as other peoples’, and then being in school and mentoring others through the Law Center, and running the Society of Law and Community Service. . . . But there was no way I could say no. They nominated me, and I didn’t shy away from it.

Being secretary meant that I had to be on monthly conference calls with all of these experts. My job was to transcribe the call and prepare meeting minutes for the next call. Now, I was no typist, but in the end it worked out to my advantage, because while everyone else on that call got one hour of education, I ended up getting eight hours of education—that was how long it would take me to type up the transcript between listening and fast forwarding and rewinding over and over again to make sure I heard things correctly and got them down properly.

All of that knowledge and the strategies and the different points about felon disenfranchisement—I was getting it eight times more than everybody else. This went on every single month for about three or four years. Sometimes things would be mentioned that would send me off doing research, because I definitely wanted to be able to understand everything that was being discussed. Little did I know at the time that I was being set up to be in the position that I am in today. When our president resigned, the committee looked around and saw I was the most active directly impacted person in the organization at the time. As a body, FRRC had previously determined that it wanted to move impacted people to the forefront, to have them be more involved in the processes and the decision-making and the strategies. So here I was, I’d been on the calls for years now. I knew all the key players. I knew all the key organizations. I got along well with people. It was just natural for them to ask me to be the interim president until the next convening was held. I was subsequently voted in as the president. The “interim” was taken off my title in 2010, and I’ve been the president ever since.

NOT TOO LONG AFTER I WAS VOTED IN AS PRESIDENT OF FRRC, WE HAD A NEW GOVERNOR take office in Florida. His name was Rick Scott, and he was a former executive at a healthcare company. Charlie Crist had chosen not to run for a second term, so the election came down to Scott versus the Democratic candidate, Alex Sink. Sink had been the state’s chief financial officer, and she was the first woman elected to the state cabinet in more than a decade. The election was close—it was decided by 1 percentage point—fewer than sixty thousand votes. There was a bit of a red wave that came over Florida at the time, and Rick Scott benefited from the Tea Party’s rise to prominence, as well as running in opposition to the Affordable Care Act.

One of the first things that Governor Scott did was to roll back the clemency policies for the restoration of rights to returning citizens. I was baffled. Neither Scott nor his attorney general, Pam Bondi, had run on a platform addressing the restoration of civil rights. Neither of them mentioned rights restoration prominently in their campaigns, and I’d never heard them make any statements or take any positions either for or against it, in fact. Yet that was their very first official act as a Cabinet once in office.

They rolled back the previous policies and made it even more difficult for people to actually get their rights restored. Now people had to wait either five or seven years before they were even allowed to apply, based on the level of the severity of the crime. This waiting period even affected people in the backlog. They weren’t grandfathered in. It wasn’t as if an application was already submitted; they would still fall under the old policy.

I was one of those people in the backlog. I had submitted my application in 2006. Now, in 2011, five years later, I finally got a letter saying that I didn’t even qualify to apply because I’d had to wait seven years owing to the nature of my crime. So my application had been rejected. A bunch of us from FRRC went to Tallahassee to try to lobby the governor. There were a lot of grassroots organizations, along with organizations affiliated with the FRRC, that mobilized to go before the clemency board. Mark Schlakman, a professor out of Florida State University, testified and said basically that this went against common sense. Making it more difficult for people to reintegrate back into their community was counterproductive. It goes against what studies have clearly shown: the quicker we help a person reintegrate into their community, the less likely they are to re-offend.

I remember one moment hearing from the commissioner of agriculture, Adam Putnam, who asked if there was any empirical data that supported changing the policy, to make it more difficult for people with felony convictions to be re-enfranchised. Of course, there was no answer to his question because there weren’t any studies that justified Scott’s new policy. But we knew that one member of the clemency board at least had some misgivings, even though he still didn’t vote against it, in spite of all the testimony. It passed unanimously and was a very depressing moment that took the wind right out of our sails.

We spent so much time and money and energy and resources to get to the policy that Governor Crist had implemented. It wasn’t a perfect solution in 2007, but we were able to help a lot of people. To see all that work evaporate, to be for naught, devastated a lot of people. A lot of organizations were frustrated. It dampened a lot of spirits. There wasn’t that much energy around FRRC after that. A lot of folks fell off because they didn’t see what else we could possibly do.

Here I was, the newly elected president, and we were dealt this crushing blow. I didn’t have any hatred in my heart, but I was sorely disappointed. To have all of our work undone by just the signature on a piece of paper? Just like none of that work mattered? I couldn’t get over it. I kept thinking, Wow, you mean to tell me that four politicians have that much power, where they can decide which American citizen gets to vote and which American citizens don’t get to vote? They can have that decision become a policy or a law with just the stroke of a pen? That was way too much power for any politician to have. Whether you were a Democrat or a Republican, it didn’t matter. To see politicians trivialize civil rights, and to see how partisan politics played a role in that, was heartbreaking.

It was our lowest point as an organization, but it was also the beginning of the way back up to great heights. That moment marked the beginning of a new FRRC, and it truly set the stage for Amendment 4.