Sarah Zarba, now a student at Columbia University, wants to do away with criminal background questions on college applications. Photo: Angel Chevrestt
Sitting nervously in the driver’s seat, Sarah Zarba shivered from heroin withdrawal as police sirens pierced the air.
Her eyes frantically searched the Blockbuster Video store in Water Mill, LI, for her boyfriend Dalshawn Artis, but she didn’t see him. Artis was supposed to emerge any minute with cash stolen from the register in the couple’s latest Bonnie-and-Clyde-style stick-up.
But “the next thing I know the cops came at me with guns drawn,” Zarba said.
As she stepped out of the vehicle, handcuffs snapped around her delicate wrists. At 19, she was under arrest — and labeled a felon for the rest of her life.
Now 26, the comely blonde is a graduate student at Columbia University’s School of Social Work. When she looks back at her mug shot from March 2010, the Ivy Leaguer can’t believe it’s the same woman.
Modal TriggerSarah Zarba in a 2010 mug shot with ex-boyfriend Dalshawn Artis.Photo: Handout
“That person was a part of myself that I don’t even know anymore,” she said. “I can barely recognize my face.”
Zarba — along with fellow Columbia student and felon Leyla Martinez — is leading a campaign to have the criminal-background question removed from applications to the Ivy League school. The women are also working to ban words such as “felon” and “ex-convict” from the language.
“A felony conviction is a life sentence,” said Zarba. “It follows you everywhere you go, even though it’s not relevant to who you really are.”
In 2010, Zarba was charged with 11 counts of robbery and convicted on one count after plea bargaining. She spent a year in jail and 18 months in rehab.
Zarba said her journey from high-school freshman to getaway driver in 11 Long Island armed heists started with her getting hooked on drugs in the small suburban town of Bellport, LI.
“I was a rebellious kid and wanted to do my own thing,” she said. “My parents were great, but we had regular family problems. I never felt like they understood where I was coming from and I took it to the extreme.”
Her lifestyle soon grew even more unstable.
‘A felony conviction is a life sentence. It follows you everywhere you go, even though it’s not relevant to who you really are.’
“I started doing drugs when I was 16. First it was weed, and that was a gateway to prescription pills,” she said.
Her opiate habit spiraled out of control. She couldn’t afford to shell out $50 per Oxycontin pill, so she turned to smack.
“Heroin was cheaper,” she said. “It was considered normal to do it. But then everything became about how to get my next fix.”
Desperate to support their $250-a-day habit, she and Artis started knocking off convenience stores and gas stations at night. With Artis brandishing a BB gun, they scored $200 to $1,200 per stickup.
“I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of my actions,” Zarba said of the crime spree.
First the young woman was put in the Suffolk County jail. She was then forced into drug treatment at a Brooklyn facility before being sent to the Nassau County jail.
In 2012, she emerged a free woman — on multiple levels. She soon enrolled at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, knowing she wanted to help others with criminal histories. She earned a bachelor’s in criminal justice there.
This fall, Zarba started her on master’s degree in social work at Columbia. In addition to theory and research classes, she is doing a leadership fellowship, planning conferences and events on the issue of incarceration.
She applied to the fabled Morningside Heights institution because she believed that attending an elite school would help others see beyond her crimes.
“I thought if I got in, people would finally see me for my potential and achievements rather than for my past,” she said.
But when she powered through the school’s lengthy application, the question about having a criminal background nearly put her off.
“I felt very discouraged. But I wrote about what happened and hoped for the best,” she said.
In April, she got her acceptance e-mail.
Modal TriggerSarah Zarba and fellow Columbia student and felon Leyla Martinez.Photo: Angel Chevrestt
Zarba and Martinez, 42, have now drafted a “Beyond the Box” initiative to get the school to nix the box with the crime question on its application. Martinez, a junior at the Columbia School of General Studies, was arrested in 2000 for writing fraudulent checks and spent two years at Rikers Island and Westchester jails.
“Seeing the question knocked the wind out of me,” said Martinez. “Just because I made a mistake when I was younger doesn’t mean I don’t deserve an education. I did my time, why do I have to keep paying for it?”
Both Zarba and Martinez hope their efforts will put college education within closer reach for people like them, who made mistakes in their past and paid for it.
“Getting into Columbia was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Martinez said. “Others deserve that chance, too.”
Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.
The Goals of Communism
(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.
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