Criticism of U.S. Felon Program Grows

A federal program designed to catch fugitives and deny them welfare benefits has snared thousands of blind, disabled and aging Californians. The program is coming under growing criticism from California lawyers representing the indigent.

The fugitive-felon program has funded a massive computer dragnet that has saved $130 million and led to the arrest of thousands of fugitives, law enforcement officials said.

Most of those caught are the aged, blind and disabled who are accused of violating probation and parole or other nonviolent crimes, many of which are decades old.

The program has suspended Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits to nearly 7,500 blind, disabled and aged Californians since 1996, according to figures from the Social Security Administration.

The SSI recipients also have been ordered to reimburse the agency for some payments.

The program compares computer databases of aid recipients with fugitives. When Social Security turned the names and addresses of those aged and disabled recipients over to California law enforcement agencies, authorities apprehended 2,831 of them, according to Social Security statistics. The statistics showed that very few of them were murderers, rapists, robbers, kidnappers or other violent offenders.

About 90% of those arrested in California have been violators of probation, parole or some nonviolent crimes.

Nationwide, 4,721 have been arrested and 45,000 recipients have had their benefits suspended.

Since midsummer, public defenders, court officials, legal aid lawyers and law enforcement officers in California have been contacted by people threatened with loss of benefits.

Social Security officials said they will restore assistance if recipients provide proof that warrants have been cleared, said Mariana Gitomer, spokesman for the Social Security Administration in California.

“A lot of taxpayers would be indignant to know that public funds are being used as fuel to escape law enforcement,” said Dick Lynch, director of Social Security’s Strategic Enforcement Division at the agency’s Office of Inspector General in Baltimore.

“Who can argue against the benefit of taking murderers, kidnappers and armed robbers off the street?” he said.

Critics complain that the program has not focused on such crimes.

“They make this sound like a law enforcement jihad, when they actually are getting old, toothless people who are easy to find and not fleeing from anyone,” said Bruce Schweiger, a Los Angeles County deputy public defender, who alone has answered more than 100 calls in the last three or four weeks.

“They are using a fire hose to extinguish a birthday candle,” he said.

San Francisco lawyer Jane Gelfand, whose Positive Resource Center represents people with HIV, said, “These are people who are severely disabled with limited assets and income and frequently cut off from family, friends or other social support.”

One of her clients, Mark Pruitt, thought that he had completed probation for a drunken-driving conviction in Florida.

Pruitt, 41, said he never heard anything further about the incident until he got a notice from Social Security officials last year saying that his SSI benefits would be suspended. He said the SSI check provided one-third of his monthly income and helped pay for some of the drugs he needs to combat full-blown AIDS. He has diabetes and high blood pressure. Two hip replacement surgeries, a degenerative shoulder condition and deteriorating joints have left him unable to hold down jobs requiring much physical exertion, Pruitt said.

In San Diego County, Chief Deputy Public Defender Bob Stall said most of the cases “are quite old, 15 years or older, and involve nonviolent offenses, drugs, bad-check cases.”

One great-grandmother in Los Angeles lost her benefits because she never completed probation on a 1973 drug possession conviction. Dora Price, 65, spent six months in County Jail that year and then violated probation early the next year, court records show.

Price said she moved to Shreveport, La., to escape the daily, unrelenting pressure from her drug-using friends to resume her narcotics use.

There, she beat her drug habit and got “a good-paying” job making telephones for AT&T.; She returned to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s and has a clean record.

Her notice came June 17, suspending her $175 monthly SSI check. She was left with $600 a month for rent, utilities and groceries.

Price got good news this week. A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, at the request of her public defender, voided the arrest warrant.

Although the law is called the fugitive-felon law, former SSI recipient Yolanda Randall, 50, never fled after she broke probation 27 years ago over a gambling-related charge in Los Angeles. Randall, 50, continued living in her home for two years after the judge entered a bench warrant for her arrest in 1975. Court records show that Randall’s violation was failure to pay a $150 fine.

Randall is disabled by obesity and arthritis, and has drawn SSI since 1995, her sister, Nora Ashford, said. She was drawing $750 a month when she got her notice on June 25. It also ordered her to repay $18,652 in benefits she had already received.

“I took her to three stations trying to get her into custody so we could clear up the warrant,” Ashford said. Nobody would take her. One officer referred her to the public defender’s office.

Lynch said such violators have no one to blame but themselves.

“You are supposed to pay for your crimes,” he said. “If you have someone in their 80s with a warrant from their 40s, couldn’t you argue they’ve had ample opportunity to turn themselves in?”

One who tried that is Susan Irene Reid, who fled Los Angeles after pleading guilty to kicking a police officer in the leg in January 1988. Reid, who was a 24-year-old psychiatric patient, said she agreed to take medication for her illness and to remain on probation for a year. But she ran away from the probation office on her first visit.

“I couldn’t admit to my psychiatric problems, and I didn’t want to take medication,” she said.

Over the next 11 years, Reid was taken into custody three times-- first in Texas, where she turned herself in and spent nine days in jail, and twice in Minnesota--on the outstanding warrant. Each time Los Angeles authorities declined to extradite her.

SSI helped pay her $400 monthly medication bill and qualified her for assistance for psychiatric care to control her manic depression, Reid said. But when the computers ground out her name July 31 for that 1988 warrant, the agency suspended the SSI.

Last week a judge dismissed the warrant, in part because authorities chose not to seek extradition. Her payments will resume when she provides a copy of the court records to Social Security. Meanwhile, she said, she still has to battle Social Security’s claim that she owes back payments, which she estimates could be at least $5,000.

The fugitive-felon program grew out of a provision of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which also prohibited fugitives from obtaining food stamps. Though the U.S. Department of Agriculture moved quickly to implement the law, the Social Security Administration did not.

In 2000, Social Security gained access to FBI computer data on outstanding warrants. Early last year, the agency signed its first contracts with states to compare the names of SSI recipients to lists of fugitives provided by police. In return, Social Security would provide law enforcement with the addresses to which it mailed benefits.

In California, the program got started earlier than in most states, Social Security officials said. The state’s Department of Social Services started providing Social Security with addresses of SSI recipients it had matched with the Department of Justice’s outstanding warrant files by 1998, Napolski said. In Los Angeles, authorities said they seldom bother with probation violators or others accused of nonviolent offenses that would not carry state prison time.

If such violators ever appear in court, it usually is because the outstanding warrant surfaced in a later police encounter, such as a routine traffic stop.

Only the more serious violators--those accused of murder, rape or other crimes that would put them in a state prison--prompt law enforcement to go to the expense of a search and extradition effort, prosecutors and law enforcement officials said.

“If it’s a probation violation, it usually means the individual has not been sentenced to state prison,” said John Paul Bernardi, director of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s Support Operations Bureau.

“When it comes to felonies, you still have to analyze how serious the offense is, how dangerous they are, its deterrence role, and then you have to decide whether it’s a wise allocation of resources.”

If a trial will be required, the case may not be provable if witnesses are no longer available or evidence is missing, he said.

LAPD Capt. James Miller, area commander of the 77th Street Station, said that even serious larceny cases do not always warrant extradition.

He cited a mid-1980s case in which prosecutors decided not to extradite a man who had fled to the East Coast to escape charges of grand larceny and receiving stolen property.

When asked about circumstances similar to Randall’s gambling-related probation violation, Miller said, “Somebody who has gone for 25 years without being picked up, she’s obviously changed her life, which is the whole purpose of probation.”

Schweiger, the Los Angeles deputy public defender, doesn’t advocate abandoning the fugitive-felon program. It just needs to be amended, he said.

“The problem is that you have these two huge bureaucracies that

“They are doing nothing but matching names and addresses with checks without giving thought to the actual consequences,” he said.