CHICAGO - Maurice Stewart finally got out of prison last summer after serving 14 years for armed robbery and manslaughter. He needed a place to live, so he called his mother.
Stewart, a husky 33-year-old, wanted to come home to Stateway Gardens, the decaying public housing project on Chicago's South Side where he had grown up.
It sounded simple enough. But his mother, Pamela Stewart, knew otherwise. Under a little-noticed provision of federal law, anyone convicted of a crime is barred from public housing, and if Stewart took her son in, even for a visit, the Chicago Housing Authority could evict her.
The ban on living in public housing is among the penalties for criminals that are not spelled out at sentencing and do not begin until the sentence runs out. Most of the sanctions were passed by Congress and state legislatures in the 1990s to get tough on crime. Now, as the record number of men and women who filled prisons in the past decade are finishing their terms, the consequences of the penalties are being felt.
The penalties also include a lifetime ban on receiving welfare or food stamps for those convicted of drug felonies, prohibitions against getting certain jobs in plumbing, education and other fields, and the loss of the right to vote, for life in some states.
Felons with drug convictions are barred from receiving federal student loans, and women who serve more than 15 months in prison might be forced to give up their children to foster care.
When the laws were passed, supporters called them extra deterrents to crime. They carried no cost and in some cases even saved money by reducing the number of people in public housing or on welfare.
Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr., a Florida Republican who was one of the main architects of the lifetime ban on welfare for women convicted of a drug felony, said: "We were mostly aiming at the drug trade. The thought was that if someone was buying drugs, we don't feel an obligation to support them."
Similarly, Shaw said, the bar on public housing for people convicted of a crime "was to deter people so they wouldn't get involved in drugs." Public housing tenants wanted the bar, Shaw said, "so they didn't have drug deals going down in front of them and their children."
Although the sanctions were often passed with broad bipartisan support, some judges, prosecutors and advocates for the poor criticize the laws as counterproductive and urge that they be re-examined.
"They make it even harder for newly released inmates to find jobs, housing and reunite with their families and therefore to lead productive lives," said Jeremy Travis, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, who coined the phrase "invisible punishment" to describe such penalties.
Stewart put it more starkly in a furtive visit to his mother at Stateway Gardens. "Basically, this stuff is telling me I've served my time, I'm out, but I'm never going to be allowed to be part of society again," Stewart said. "So what do you want me to do? I'm going to end up doing something wrong again."
The criminal justice section of the American Bar Association adopted guidelines recently suggesting the laws need to be re-examined. Margaret Love, a former Justice Department official who headed the committee, said all the punishments should be codified in one place and made part of sentencing, so that defendants, their lawyers and judges understand what is happening.