Last Updated: July 2023
Every family should have access to monthly cash assistance to meet their basic needs, regardless of past behavior or criminal record. The drug felony ban is rooted in the racist “war on drugs” and disproportionately harms Black and other people of color, who are overly policed and incarcerated. LGBTQ people and people with disabilities are also overrepresented in the criminal legal system. Advocates should aim to fully lift the ban if they can, or fight for a more lenient partially lifted ban if the former is not feasible. For example, Massachusetts’s partial ban is very narrowly construed so that few people are likely subject to a ban at all and those that are only are banned for a year. Crafting a partial ban that is similarly narrow may be a way forward if fully lifting the ban is not viable.
Key Resources:
No More Double Punishment: This brief from CLASP discusses the history and recent trends concerning both the TANF and SNAP drug felony bans, as well as situating the bans in the broader criminal justice policy landscape. This brief is updated every year to reflect changes in state policy.
Remaining States Should Lift Racist TANF Drug Felony Bans; Congress Should Lift It Nationwide: This CBPP blog discusses the racist nature of the drug felony ban and calls for both state and federal action. It is not regularly updated like the CLASP brief.
A Lifetime of Punishment: This 2013 report from The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice organization, provides history and data analysis, with a focus on the ban’s disparate impact on women and children of color. While the analysis of criminal justice statistics is over a decade old, it may still prove useful.
State Data from the Welfare Rules Database (WRD): To find information on the drug felony ban, you will need to do a custom search. Select “Eligibility of Individual Family Members” in Policy Category and “ei_drgfl” under variables. Note that the 4th column in the table (EI_DRGFL) is a yes/no variable that answers whether people with drug felony convictions are eligible for TANF. The WRD provides the best source of current data for all 50 states, but the data can be as much as three years old. Please feel free to contact CBPP staff to see if we have more current data, especially on states that have recently modified or lifted their bans.
In recent years, Illinois, Mississippi, and Virginia each fully lifted the drug felony ban in TANF. Advocates in these states have kindly provided us with examples of tools they used to help persuade lawmakers to undo this harmful policy. You can find the links to these files in the right panel, listed under additional files.