SNAP would deny those released from prison vital access to food
The House version of the 2018 Farm Bill is an attack on all working people and out of step with our values of community and equity. If the bill were to pass, more than 2 million people — overwhelmingly, working families with small children making low incomes or living in poverty — would see their home’s food supply reduced or erased through cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps. This cannot happen.
More than 40 percent of households cannot cover basic needs. These households and families are hidden in plain sight among reports of low unemployment. The reports camouflage an important reality: people are struggling to make ends meet working two or more low-wage jobs, often in a precarious gig economy. Hidden further in this economically unequal society is the reality faced by our neighbors who return home from prison.
Every year, more than 600,000 people are released from incarceration. These individuals face 48,000 laws and statutes (approximately 70 percent of which apply to employment) that impede the rights of all people living with convictions; their right to eat should not be one. Yet according to one study, nearly 91 percent of people immediately become “food insecure” upon release. We also know that unemployment and food insecurity are inextricably linked, and this is particularly true for people with criminal records.
As it stands, the bill introduces work requirements, expands the list of convictions that trigger a lifetime ban on benefits, and provides inadequate subsidies for workforce development. Proponents use the language of “workfare” — the idea that people must lift themselves out of poverty by their bootstraps — to justify the very cuts that undermine the ability of people to work. As Martin Luther King Jr. wisely said, “It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.”
http://thehill.com/opinion/finance/406162-snap-would-deny-those-released-from-prison-vital-access-to-food
Sounds like a good way to assure recidivism.
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