What a bargain: the widespread practice of plea bargaining has increased repercussions for people of color who end up literally signing away their lives on the dotted line.

At one time he was known as Tim Jefferson (name has been changed), the youngest child of a black middle-class family. A 34-year-old college graduate who studied mortuary science, he was employed as a licensed mortician. He would quip: "It's not the dead people I need to worry about, and at least I know I'll always have a job."

Today he is inmate No. 51012, a convicted felon at the Federal Correctional Institution in Lompoc, California.

During his college years in Atlanta, Georgia, Jefferson dabbled in drug peddling while living with a brother-in-law who also sold drugs. He was arrested six years later, when prosecutors called him back to Atlanta to testify against 13 others who had been charged with drug trafficking and found him guilty of conspiracy. Jefferson ended up taking a plea bargain that landed him with six and a half years in prison and a permanent felony on his record for a first offense that he had thought would get him probation.

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"It seemed like the right thing to do at the time [to take the plea]," says Jefferson in retrospect. "My attorney was the one that hyped me up about this [plea bargain] shit. The feds said that if I didn't cop a plea that I would get about 15 [years]. I worked, had my degree, took care of my family, and they still gave me the max."

In the United States, more than 90 percent of all cases in the justice system are settled by plea bargaining rather than exercising the right to trial. The rate of felony convictions of nonviolent crimes in communities of color is over-whelming: African Americans constitute 13 percent of all drug users, yet they represent 35 percent of arrests, 55 percent of convictions and 74 percent of prison sentences, according to a 2000 study by the Sentencing Project.

These two factors mean that the widespread practice of plea bargaining--where prosecutors overcharge for a crime and defense attorneys usually urge defendants to cop a plea for a lighter sentence--has increased repercussions for people of color who end up literally signing away their lives on the dotted line. Defendants are seldom informed about the underlying effects of pleading to a felony--such as losing their right to vote, access to federal student aid, and if they are noncitizens, being deported.

One in four black men have permanently lost the right to vote in seven states. All told, 14 states restrict criminal offenders from voting, and more than 1.4 million black men nationwide cannot vote, according to Human Rights Watch. Some observers argue that if felons had been able to vote in Florida, with its more than 600,000 convicted felons, Bush would have lost the 2000 election.

The racial disproportion in sentencing prompted the Constitutional Rights Foundation to call for a ban on plea-bargaining, in a recent report commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board. The report cited a U.S. Sentencing Commission study in 1990 finding that 25 percent of whites get their sentences reduced through bargaining, compared to 18 percent of blacks and 12 percent of Latinos.

In 1991 the San Jose Mercury News conducted a massive study of 700,000 California legal cases over a 10-year period. The paper reported that "a third of the white adults who were arrested, but had no prior record, were able to get felony charges against them reduced. Only a quarter of the African-Americans and Latinos with no priors were as successful in plea bargaining."

June Terpstra, a criminal justice scholar at Loyola University Chicago, emphasizes that drug laws play a critical role in imprisoning the majority of black convicts. Although African Americans only make up 12 percent of the population, 44 percent are incarcerated, according to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In some states, African American men were convicted of drug charges up to 27 times more often than their white counterparts.

As Tim Jefferson put it, "You don't really have a choice but to cop a plea. The feds start getting pissed if you start talking about a lawyer or trial. You are going to jail. And the prosecutors make you understand that. You might as well go for as little time as possible."

Joe Dafney, a 30-year-old African American, faced criminal charges three years ago for traffic violations after he failed to appear in court for a bench warrant issued in Los Angeles. He got a lawyer, pled guilty to driving under the influence and received no jail time. But in March 2004, a background check for his job as a baggage handler at Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport revealed a felony conviction on his record. Dafney's driver's license was suspended and he subsequently lost his job.

When a defendant is offered a plea bargain with no jail time, he may assume it was not a felony. Take the case of renowned rapper/producer Kanye West. In the May issue of Vibe, West explained how he was urged by his attorney to plead guilty to a crime (stealing printers from OfficeMax) he did not commit. His attorney told him the best thing to do at the time was to accept the plea bargain and have it immediately expunged from his record, which would be easy because of West's status in the music industry. That was in 2002. In 2003, as West and his entourage were trying to cross the border into Canada, he found that the felony was still on his record.

Given the proliferation of background testing by employers, this effect can be devastating for many. Since Sept. 11, private security firms are increasingly conducting criminal background checks that are affecting mostly black and Latino workers with felonies, according to a National Public Radio report.

Alaska is the only state that currently bans plea-bargaining, but the practice has increasingly drawn more criticism.

Carl Person, a New York-based civil rights attorney, has made it his mission to reform plea-bargaining in the United States. "Criminal lawyers are not using the courts to make motions to protect their clients," he says. "Instead, they seem to be saying to virtually all criminal clients that they should consider pleading guilty."

Of course in some cases, plea bargaining means shorter jail terms and reduced charges (assuming it wasn't overcharged in the first place). And for those who are not in a position to fight charges that are unfairly leveled against them, the plea bargain may be their only hope for life beyond prison. Not all plea bargains are harmful, but the lack of concern by prosecutors and defense attorneys, as well as the lack of information available to those without economic or legal resources, can be a recipe for disaster.

Person offers some possible solutions to the plea-bargaining dilemma. "All defense lawyers could get together (hopefully with their clients' consent) and refuse to plea bargain, which would create a nightmare for prosecutors, who would overnight have a trial caseload of more than 20 times the amount they are currently handling. The speedy trial act would wipe out a lot of the indictments."

Rolanda J. West is a freelance writer in Chicago. She teaches disadvantaged youth in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago.