La Cloche Law
An interesting piece ran in the New York Times’ NY/Region section highlights a little known law regarding citizens who have previously been incarcerated and acquiring trade licenses once they are released. Marc La Cloche spent eleven years in New York prisons for robbery charges. While he was incarcerated, Mr. La Cloche studied barbering and when released applied for a license to do so with the state. When the state discovered he possessed a “criminal history”, he was declined the license. Mr. La Cloche fought the denial in the court system, but has since passed away. Since then, members of the New York state assembly have taken up the issue and are now working on bills to reverse the law.
With Mr. La Cloche in mind, they [State Senator Velmanette Montgomery and Assemblyman Michael Benjamin] introduced bills to forbid the state to deny a license to a would-be barber or cosmetologist just because of an applicant’s criminal record. Barbering and cosmetology were singled out because they are skills valued both in prison and in the neighborhoods to which many inmates return, once freed.
“You can’t transfer making highway signs and garbage bins to the community because there’s no industry out here for them,” Ms. Montgomery said. “But for cosmetology and barbering, there is. It’s also a skill that can be translated into a small-business opportunity.”
Some state officials didn’t like the bills. When they were passed by the Legislature last year, Gov. Eliot Spitzer vetoed them. One argument against them was that discrimination based solely on a criminal record is already forbidden by the state’s Correction Law.
But as we all know, and as the La Cloche case showed, what is law and what is reality do not always walk hand in hand. The Community Service Society, an antipoverty group, said during last year’s debate that it had detected a pattern of denying licenses to former inmates based on “spurious concerns over ‘character’ that can only be attributed to bias related to their criminal record.”
The bill to reverse the previous law was recently sent to Governor David Patterson which he signed.
