SOCIAL ACTION LINKING TOGETHER (SALT)---2019

Candidate Survey – 2019

THIS QUESTIONAIRE REQUESTS YOUR POSITIONS ON SALT’S TOP LEGISLATIVE ISSUES FOR 2020.  Your responses will be shared with our members and others via mailings and our website (www.s‑a‑l‑t.org) as a helpful guide in their choice of candidates.  Your answers will not be abbreviated or taken out of context.  Please return your answers by May 15th  e-mail at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Thank you for your commitment to public service and for your willingness to share your opinions with SALT.

Candidate:   Vivian Watts

District:        House of Delegates 39

Social Action Linking Together urges you to support the following:

1. Solitary confinement goes by a variety of labels, but is commonly understood to mean incarceration of a person in a small cell for more than 20 hours a day.  Human rights and mental health experts recognize prolonged solitary confinement as a form of torture.  Scientific studies show that permanent changes in brain chemistry can occur after as few as 15 consecutive days in solitary confinement.  This limit has been incorporated in international human rights standards.  Prolonged solitary confinement is the antithesis of rehabilitation.  It undermines a person's ability to return to society as a healthy and productive citizen.  What measures would you support to limit the use of prolonged solitary confinement? We need to strengthen the legislation passed in the 2019 Session that requires an annual report on the number of persons held in solitary confinement; for how many days; their disciplinary history; and their age, sex, race, ethnicity, mental health and medical status, and security level.  This will only show use.  To judge the effect of solitary and make the case for curtailing its use and funding additional mental health correctional programing, we need to know the number of suicide attempts as well as more detailed mental health information.  In addition, I am not comfortable that the Department of Corrections is applying a definition of solitary that allows relevant comparison with other states.

2. Do you support ending the Federal Life-Time Ban on Food Stamps and TANF for persons with drug felony records? These bans impose a lifetime penalty after prison time is served; It is not part of their sentence!! And, it penalizes the children of persons with drug records. Do you support extending TANF & Food Stamp program eligibility for drug offender persons who return to their families and take responsibility for their families? Please explain. I regret that I was never successful in carrying the legislation or budget amendments.  The House Appropriations Committee sees TANF funds as a way to free up state funding for other programs.  There also is no one on the Committee who is experienced in criminal law because Courts Committee members have too heavy a load to also allow them to also serve on Appropriations.  Therefore, members of Appropriations don’t appreciate how really unfair it is to punish only drug offenders in this way and they are overly influenced by fear of being labeled soft on crime or not being committed to the war on drugs.

3. Do you support a Budget Amendment to Consolidate the two existing locality groupings for (TANF) into a single group, using the Group III benefit rates, with the resulting increase being Funded from the Federal TANF Block Grant? This would help to move Virginia from the lowest toward the middle range, nationally. Yes or No? Yes

4. SALT supports Governor Northam’s proposal to make the Virginia EITC “Refundable,” in order to help low-income families; because the federal tax changes, mainly, have already helped the high income filers and corporations. Do you support Yes/No.  Please explain.  Working with the majority party leaders in the House and Senate, I was able to get all but two of the components in my bill HB2086 into the final bill.  One was a refundable EITC.  As demonstrated in the Reconvened Session vote on the Governor’s budget amendment to at least include EITC recipients in the refund, some in the House majority leadership did come to understand the long-standing wisdom of the EITC targeting assistance to where it is needed most – EITC is 3^rd only to Medicaid and Social Security.  The Senate does deserve credit for insisting on increasing Virginia’s standard deduction to make the state income tax more progressive and rejecting the House bill that would have made Virginia’s income tax more regressive by expanding intemization.  However, unfortunately, the Senate majority leadership refused to recognize the importance of a refundable EITC to counter the overall regressivity of Virginia’s total taxes structure.  As the ranking House Finance committee member, I am committed to using any excess funds that accrue to the Taxpayer Relief Fund to enact a refundable EITC.

5. Housing Trust Fund:Virginia remains the most expensive state for renters in the southeast and the 10th most expensive state in the nation and is identified as one of the least affordable states in the nation according to the “NLIHC  Out of Reach Report.“  This is based on actual wages and rents in the Commonwealth. Do you support a designated/ongoing source of revenue for the state housing trust fund that would be used to address subsidized housing for the most vulnerable families as well as for workforce housing?    However, it is extremely important that state funding to meet local housing needs have a realistic cost of living factor, given that the housing is the highest component of NoVa’s cost of living index.

6. We should care about what happens behind prison walls. Prison pay to prisoners for prison mandated jobs vary from “not paid by DOC” and range from .23 cents per hour to $2.00 per day to $6.00 per week in Virginia. The inability to make a real wage harms the chances of success after release. Would you support a prison Minimum Wage bill to recognize the labor, goods and considerable revenues incarcerated people contribute and to respect the dignity of their work?  What hourly wage would you support?  In coordination with raising wages, I would strongly support the approach I was introduced to in Israel in the late 1980s.  All prison wages for an inmate were divided equally between a saving account available upon release, money sent back to the prisoner’s family, and money that the prisoner controlled.  These are important components for long-term rehabilitation.  In addition, prison wages for all jobs were supported significantly by Israel’s aggressive pursuit of the private sector use of prison labor at market rates, based on units of production since security issues could limit hourly productivity.  Determining an appropriate wage for all jobs (construction, maintenance, food preparation, etc.) also needs to factor-in the conflicting goals of using the most skilled inmates versus training inmates with skills that could make them employable upon release.  

YOUR ISSUES:  What are some issues you feel strongly about that you would like to share with your SALT constituents?  In addition to tax reform, I am most concerned that we stay focused on mental health services.  The Deeds Commission has brought long-needed focus on lack of immediately available services for people in crisis; the totally inappropriate use of jails as the way we now “institutionalize” the mentally ill; the alarming growth in suicides among our youth and the need fund a 250:1 ratio for school counselors at all grade levels; and the need to expand and coordinate Community Services Board services with jails, courts, schools, senior citizen, and veteran programs.  In addition, the Deeds Commission needs to be permanently established so that, as has happened repeatedly in the past, the mental health initiatives it has fostered do not gradually become un-funded until the next public tragedy.

Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions!