“Nonwithstanding any other provision of law to the contrary, applicants or recipients of food stamps who are not also applicants for, or recipients of, family or safety net assistance shall not be subject to the finger-imaging matching identification system.”
This simple legislation would put to an end one of the most controversial programs of the Bloomberg administration, by which his Human Resources Administration requires individuals to be fingerprinted to receive food stamps or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds.
This legislative language would also help remove generations of stigma that have been attached to the poor in our city while preventing the instillation of fear among low-income communities of color and ensure that the rights promised to our residents in Article 17 of the New York State Constitution are fulfilled.
New York is one of two remaining states in the country that still requires finger-imaging for recipients of food stamps. Proponents of finger-imaging say it reduces fraud, but according to studies by the Food Research Action Center and others, it is wholly inefficient and ineffective. New York pays a private contractor $5 million to run our finger-imaging programs every year, ignoring much more cost-effective and less intrusive options for fraud prevention. With this faulty logic, neither the taxpayers nor the needy families come out ahead and it is only our own whom we leave behind.
Finger-imaging perpetuates the stereotypes that have helped hold down lower-income communities for hundreds of years. Poor people are criminals. Poor people will take any chance to defraud the government. Poor people deserve to be treated as lesser human beings.
The connotation of fingerprinting the poor is one thing, but the actual effect is exponentially greater and much more serious. The effect is children, the elderly and families going hungry because they were ashamed or scared away from the help promised by our forefathers.
Communities of color have long been subject to the stereotypes I speak about, be it in society as a whole or in our neighborhoods specifically. In 1930s Alabama, prospective Black voting registrants were scared away by law enforcement. In 2012 New York City, Black and Hispanic food subsidy applicants are scared away by a law enforcement device that is historically distrusted throughout our communities.
In 1930s Alabama, the voting registrar was only open a few days a month and during specific hours, requiring people to take a day off of work in order to register to vote. In 2012 New York City, the agency handling food subsidies is purposefully overburdened and underfunded, with lines hours long in order to make it difficult for applicants to receive the benefits promised to them by our state constitution.
It is time that we end the veiled war against the poor in New York City. As we heard in his State of the State speech, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has gotten the message, and it is my hope that he will soon be signing my bill or an executive order to end the arcane and abusive requirement of finger-imaging in New York State.
Assemblyman Keith L.T. Wright is the state assemblyman for Central and Western Harlem and chairman of the State Assembly Labor Committee. He is the author of Bill A5303, which ends the finger-imaging provision for food stamp recipients.
