OPINION: Public safety or second class citizenship?

Recently, the state legislature took up Senate Bill 191, a bill that is designed to reduce the rate at which people released from prison return there. The bill does nothing of the sort. The bill allows law enforcement officers to conduct searches, without a warrant, of the persons and property of folks released on parole or probation.

Let me say that the safety of the people of South Carolina is of the highest concern to me. I want to give our police officers the necessary tools to provide safety to our state and our communities, but there are three critical weaknesses of the legislation that need to be addressed.

The main weakness of the bill is that it does not achieve its stated goal. It is important to realize that any action that increases detentions, searches, and incarcerations is directly opposed to the goal of reducing recidivism. In fact, it actively pursues the opposite goal: the continued re-arrest of these citizens. After realizing that the law cannot achieve what it intends, I would like to move on to the other weaknesses of the bill.

The second weakness of this legislation is that it fails to make a distinction between parole and probation. What does this mean, in reality? The law treats two different groups of people, who have different legal statuses, in the same way. A person on parole is a prisoner who is still serving his time, but who is released into the community because he is not a threat to the safety of the community. His release can always be reversed, if he violates the terms of his parole. Parolees are subject to continued searches and monitoring as well as compliance with certain terms and conditions for a specified period. In other words, parolees have the same expectation of privacy – none – as they would have if they were in prison.

Probation is a way of dealing with offenders without putting them in prison. Probationers are in the process of serving their sentence, and are never in custody. Therefore, they have the same expectations of privacy and legal protections against unreasonable searches as guaranteed in the Constitution.

We should not treat probationers the same way as we treat parolees. We should not create a second-class citizenship status for those serving probation.

The third weakness of Senate 191 is that the bill undermines the constitutional rights of citizens with no criminal record. Specifically, law enforcement can rely on this bill as an excuse to conduct unreasonable searches of people who they think might be parolees.

How will they determine who to search? The bill gives this discretion to the officers to determine who “looks like a parolee.” In a state like South Carolina, with our particular history and peculiar institutions, we should not leave it up to the officers to decide whose constitutional rights to violate. How will this happen in reality? There is a risk that officers may abuse the constitutional rights of our citizens in South Carolina. How should we think of this risk? Shall we use the term “unconstitutional profiling?”

In an election year, we can easily find our elected representatives supporting irresponsible laws. As a patriot and as your elected representative for Florence and Marion counties, I encourage every citizen to help me defend the Constitution of the United States. Choosing between constitutional protections and public safety is a false choice. Supporters of this bill in the Republican majority would trade safety for liberty, and give us neither. I did not support the passage of this bill, and I think it is irresponsible for the South Carolina legislature to pass laws such as Senate Bill 191.