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Drug convictions should not lead to lack of Federal aid
4/11/08|Collegiate Times| by Gabriel McVey

Ten years ago, without debate or even a proper vote, Congressman Mark Souder, an Indiana Republican and Christian fundamentalist fanatic, slipped the Aid Elimination Penalty (also known as the Drug-Free Student Loan Amendment) into the 1998 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.
As a result of this little-known provision, the Department of Education blocks access to federal financial aid for students with drug convictions.

Since then, this stipulation has denied roughly 200,000 applicants financial aid because of prior drug convictions, according to Students for Sensible Drug Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit advocacy organization. These convictions are generally for nonviolent possession charges and mostly for marijuana.

Before Congress enacted the penalty, judges could strip aid eligibility from individuals at their own discretion.

Most judges saw that putting barriers to higher education in the path of a problem youth was no disincentive to drug use and so reserved it for the most violent and dangerous offenders as a purely punitive measure.

In 2006, Congress scaled back the penalty by eliminating its "reach-back" provision -- thereby limiting its consequences to crimes committed only while receiving aid.

Previously, it had been fully retroactive and therefore a good deal more punishing, but the penalty is still both grossly unfair and absurdly ineffective, as is the Drug War in general … but that's a story for a different time.

Of course, there's no really accurate way of calculating this law's costs, because we don't know how many applicants simply don't request aid because they refuse to embarrass themselves by trying.

Let me be clear: Murderers, rapists, thieves, frauds and arsonists are not denied aid.

Violent felons are free to apply on their release from prison.

Yet the eighteen-year-old kid who the courts fine $500 after the cops bust them selling nickel bags is barred from receiving federal student aid.

An offender can avoid the penalty by attending drug counseling. But the students who most need financial aid often can't afford the private drug counseling that would restore their eligibility for aid -- a catch-22 that unreasonably affects the poor, who are also the most likely to use and sell illegal drugs.

The Department of Education's student aid denial constitutes a second punishment of a student who has already served a court-imposed sentence.

It places a particular stigma on drug charges. After offenders "pay their debt" to society, the penalty bars them from receiving student aid ad infinitum, even for nonviolent offenses.

Congress' own investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office, found no evidence that the Aid Elimination Penalty reduced drug use in general or student drug use in particular.

The congressionally-created Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance recommended that Congress remove the question from the student aid application, calling it "irrelevant."

By barring the most at-risk students from federal student aid, Congress has actually increased the likelihood that these people will use drugs, commit crimes and fail to become productive taxpayers.

The Aid Elimination Penalty does nothing to solve our nation's drug problems, is fiscally irresponsible -- keeping students from competing in the workforce -- pushes students into recidivism and makes our streets less safe, violates local control and decision-making and usurps judges' and college administrators' authority to punish legal and campus policy violations.

But once again, we encounter the modern American political susceptibility to illogic in the name of truthiness.

In order to make Americans feel safe -- not actually make them safer -- politicians cater to voters' base instincts and castigate societal outsiders to reinforce a social norm with no real underlying utility.

 

SpiralArchitect

Good article. I especially liked this line which summed it up pretty well;

Talk about some serious backward logic, eh? I hope this is fixed soon, being a college student myself I know several peers who were turned down financial aid because of previous drug charges - they were absolutely furious, especially because they didn't even use anymore!

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ritika

Okay friends, what colleges give full scholarships to National Merit Finalists and Scholarship recipients? I heard that there are some colleges that give scholarships to students who have been named either scholarship winners or possibly just finalists in the National Merit Competition. Does anybody know what they are?
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