“Over the past 25 years, we have quadrupled the per capita rate of incarceration in our country,” Jeremy Travis, president of John Jay College in Albany, said last month.
During this year’s annual meeting of the New York State Black and Puerto Rican Black Caucus, legislative and non-profit leaders discussed issues on immigration, unemployment, AIDS, education and disaster preparedness
At the Criminal Justice seminar, Travis spoke about the challenges faced by people involved with the criminal justice system, while attendees discussed effective community supports that improve workforce participation, housing stability, social cohesion and health in an attempt to prevent criminal justice involvement and recidivism.
“New York has the highest rate of incarceration of any place in the world,” said Travis. “It is concentrated, and impacts most acutely a small number of communities of color that are already impoverished, already struggling, already disadvantaged in a lot of ways. We ask them to take on the burden of incarceration and reintegration. They don’t have the resources.”
People are released from prison with a few dollars, a ticket and a guide to return to their county. But those coming out experience what is called a “psuedofreedom – they are out, but they are not truly free. Most are under parole supervision and face legal and extralegal barriers to success.
A 1996 law mandates that those convicted of a drug felony may lose their eligibility for food stamps and other benefits for the rest of their lives. The same change in federal law affected federal housing regulations, which allow public housing facilities to evict any person or member of the families of any person convicted of a drug crime.
Other barriers to employment include inability to use marketable skills. One can imagine that a barber in prison, cutting hair for a demanding clientele, would have the experience to work in shop or possibly start their own business. But he or she cannot do that in certain states, and New York is one of them. It does not promote public safety to have people hungry and unable to work.
The drug provision of the 1998 Higher Education Act delays or denies federal financial aid to anyone convicted of a state or federal drug offense. The Coalition for Higher Education Act Reform (CHEAR) reports, “since taking effect in the fall of 2000, more than 175,000 students have been denied aid. These young people, who have already been punished for their offenses, are now dropping out of school or reducing their course loads because they cannot afford the high cost of tuition.” It does not promote public safety to have young people uneducated and feeling helpless.
Offenders find that the conditions of parole require that they receive treatment and remain in a treatment program; however, they are barred from Medicaid, food stamps and public cash benefits. They are ineligible to receive public money to pay for that mandated treatment.
According to Travis, what is needed is a new look at the challenges that mass incarceration poses, such as the reality of former convicts flooding neighborhoods already stressed. “We have to look at how that challenge is interpreted across the spectrum of society’s practices: be they legal, medical, public health, or ministerial.”
The Urban Institute has developed a mapping project, using data on who is incarcerated and where they come from, to reveal the impact of the criminal justice system and its costs on a block-by-block level.
With East New York as an example, Travis noted, “ If you look at certain blocks you find that every year, one in eight parenting-age males, between 18-45, is in jail or prison. This means that the criminal justice system becomes a way of life for these areas.
“We, the taxpayers of New York, spend over $1 million a year per block to incarcerate people from that block.”
These are called the “million-dollar” blocks. When Travis looks at the cost-per-block at the precinct-area level, he says that the taxpayers spend over $62 million a year for that precinct.
He insisted that politicians must be asked, “Is this the best way they have to respond to this problem? To spend over $62 million a year to take men out of these communities and house them somewhere else, knowing that they will all come back lacking skills and rehabilitation, but burdened with more barriers to life fulfillment than when they went in.”
Travis said that this raises the next question of how do you get people organized at the local level around a new agenda, that is, “How do you organize people to frame an issue with a set of alternatives that will significantly change policy?”
This is the work being done at the Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions at Medgar Evers College, School of Business, under the direction of Board Chair Eddie Ellis and Dr. Divine Pryor, executive director. The center says it is the first and only public policy, research, training, advocacy, and academic center whose staff is comprised exclusively of formerly incarcerated professionals.
Speaking from the perspective of people who have lived and studied the problem, Pryor said, “Every person in America who is convicted of a misdemeanor, felony, or both, receives a life sentence. Every person.” A person may or may not serve time. They may plea-bargain and receive probation in lieu of incarceration or they may be in an alternative-to-incarceration program.
“But whether they’re in the prison or not, it’s the outcomes of that conviction where the problems lie. Because after you’ve served your time in prison, or after you’ve completed your parole or your probation, that is when what we call ‘collateral consequences,’ or what they call 'civil disabilities' or 'conditional punishment,' begin to take over.
"So let's get this straight," said Dr. Pryor. "I can't get employment. I can't get an education. I can't get housing. I can't serve on a jury of my peers. I can't engage in the political process, so basically what is being said is that I am being blocked out and shut out of society. And yet there remains an expectation that I come back into society and become a productive law-abiding citizen. And yet we have every possible restriction directed to make that virtually impossible. So we have 70 percent or seven out of 10 men, returning home from prison going back to prison; within three years, one-third of them go back before the end of their first year. You shouldn't be surprised at all.
"The fact of the matter is that once we understand what those civil disabilities are, once we understand what those final consequences are, once we understand what those invisible punishments are, then we understand that it is inevitable that a large number of individuals will eventually return back to the prison system because there is no way for them to access society in order for them to live up to the ideals that we propose."
Not allowing that access purports to be "tough-on-crime" but does nothing to promote public safety. Pryor said, "Everything we talk about is focused on public safety. It is not only the physical rebuilding of communities, but also the spiritual and moral rebuilding. Crime prevention is not about law enforcement. Crime prevention is about people in society who maintain values and understand that we must protect each other's rights, health and well-being. That's how you preserve public safety. Anything which does not contribute to public safety has to be looked at and re-evaluated. The prison population has quadrupled to over 2 million and we're still no safer."
In the final analysis, the question is what are the true goals of public policy. If they are to promote rehabilitation and public safety, then the system is clearly not working. However, if the goal is to provide guaranteed profits for white-owned corporations, employment for whites in upstate communities and downstate court systems; if it is the removal of the right to vote from African-Americans, transference of federal dollars from the Black and Brown communities of origin to white communities of incarceration to prevent a healthy fulfillment of the human spirit and ensure this peculiar institution is self-perpetuating, then the system is working quite well.
Because the system is a legacy of slavery, it will require a network not unlike the abolitionist movement, crossing race and class and with empathetic understanding, making widespread resistance to what is wrong in the body politics.
