Prison the New Public Housing
Published August 10, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
Affordable housing advocates, esp. pro-public housing folks like myself, spend a lot of time comparing the various subsidized housing options out there: public housing, Section 8 vouchers for renting in the private market, tax-credit funded housing built by non-profit developers. Turns out, we've been miscalculating by half the 4-6M or so units these different options provide, because we've been leaving out a major new source of publicly subsidized housing for the poor: Prison!
Yep, according to Ehrenreich's latest missive in the NYT (see our previous coverage of her series here and here), "the same number of Americans — 2.3 million — reside in prison as in public housing."
Ehrenreich wonders if the collision of rising extreme poverty and excess criminalization and incarceration policies will lead us to descalate both - resorting instead to humane treatment of the poor and a move away from criminalizing low-income people as, she fears, disgustedly, a revenue source in this extreme recession. I'd add the masses find it morally uplifting to torment the poor during tough economic times, as it reassures us with a strong "us" vs. "them" dichotomy and gives us a sense of control of the more chaotic zones of life, given we can't seem to stop the corporate pillaging going on above us.
I too wonder if sheer economic necessity will work in our favor differently, by leading to de-crowding of prisons and cessation of expensive housing demolition and development programs. Of course, our desire to clamp down on "concentrated poverty" and its alleged ills bodes differently for prisons versus public housing. Dispersal strategies suddenly seem a lot more worrisome when we're casting offenders into the winds.
Most importantly, reversing these punitive, cruel, expensive cycles really requires to see the poor as human beings like us, our brethren, locked in a similar struggle for economic stability and justice. It requires a framework that focuses less on poverty alleviation and more on poverty eradication. It requires a common framework that embraces all of us. Gee, I wonder what that could be...
(Photo of Fremantle Prison, a decommissioned prison in Australia, by amandabhslater)
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Author
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Leigh is a PhD candidate in urban planning at MIT, and a consultant on U.S. Gulf Coast recovery. She sits on the Board of the Allston-Brighton Community Development Corporation in Boston, and has worked with non-profits, foundations and local governments on policies and programs aimed at reducing urban poverty and inequality.
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Repeal the Hyde Amendment!
88 People
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Repeal the Hyde Amendment!
The increasing imprisonment/warehousing of poor Americans is due to a spiritual poverty that exists in the middle and upper classes of Amerikan society that have freely chosen to criminalized poverty that is based on knee-jerk reactionary bigotry, hatred, and mean-spirittedness.
The CRIMINAL JUST US system is accommodating the ever-increasing number of law school graduates, which exploded after the 1960's civil rights era, with career opportunities, and that is being done by criminalizing more and more things and requiring mandatory imprisonment. "Innocence is no defense", and that is especially true among Republican "law & order" hypocrites who are conservative activist "judges" like the ones in the majority on the U.S. Supreme kourt who recently ruled that inmates have no right to DNA testing to prove their innocence and wrongful imprisonment. Prisons are big business, and that's why their privatization was so enthusiastically pushed by greedmongering conservatives ("judges and prosecutors are major investors, a blatantly unethical and incestuous situation guaranteeing corruption fueled by financial self-interest as evidenced by the recent scandal in Luzerne County, Wilkes-Barre, Pa where 2 county "judges", president "judge Mark A. Ciavarella, Jr. and "judge" Michael T. Conahan, copped 87 month federal prison sentence plea deals each for taking $2.6 million in bribes to keep 2 juvenile prisons filled to capacity after the county closed its juvenile prison.).
Wrongful imprisonment of innocent (mostly poor) people happens because of police and prosecutorial perjury, felonious falsification of evidence, withholding and destruction of exculpatory evidence, "judicial" casefixing and political grandstanding, and deliberate "court"-appointed attorney legal malpractice, all perpetrated to advance corrupt legal careers, and the public doesn't demand the criminal prosecutions of those who subvert the Constitutional Rule of Law (Treason) and perpetrate this criminally-obscene, predatory behavior that clearly illustrates the spiritual poverty in Amerika. "The authorities don't rule by superior morality or superior intellect, they rule by superior brute force", according to Alex DeTocqueville's book Democracy in America. The poor are easy prey for the predatory animals in corrupt legal profession/CRIMINAL JUST US system.
Posted by Jeffrey Hill on 08/14/2009 @ 03:21AM PT
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