The
New York Times published an article last month about long-term prison sentences and the adverse effect they can have on poverty in a community. You can check it out here, and pasted below:
NYT: Long Term Prison Terms Eyed as Contributing to Poverty
Bronx Community Solutions works with misdemeanor cases, providing alternatives to short-term jail sentences. We collaborate with the
Bronx Re-Entry Task Force which works to address the issues faced by individuals who have had prior involvement with the criminal justice system.
Long Prison Terms Eyed as Contributing to Poverty
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: February 19, 2013
WASHINGTON - Why are so many American families trapped in
poverty? Of all the explanations offered by Washington's politicians and
economists, one seems particularly obvious in the low-income
neighborhoods near the Capitol: because there are so many parents like
Carl Harris and Charlene Hamilton.
For most of their
daughters' childhood, Mr. Harris didn't come close to making the minimum
wage. His most lucrative job, as a crack dealer, ended at the age of
24, when he left Washington to serve two decades in prison, leaving his
wife to raise their two young girls while trying to hold their
long-distance marriage together.
His $1.15-per-hour
prison wages didn't even cover the bills for the phone calls and
marathon bus trips to visit him. Struggling to pay rent and buy food,
Ms. Hamilton ended up homeless a couple of times.
"Basically,
I was locked up with him," she said. "My mind was locked up. My life
was locked up. Our daughters grew up without their father."
The
shift to tougher penal policies three decades ago was originally
credited with helping people in poor neighborhoods by reducing crime.
But now that America's incarceration rate has risen to be the world's
highest, many social scientists find the social benefits to be far
outweighed by the costs to those communities.
"Prison
has become the new poverty trap," said Bruce Western, a Harvard
sociologist. "It has become a routine event for poor African-American
men and their families, creating an enduring disadvantage at the very
bottom of American society."
Among African-Americans
who have grown up during the era of mass incarceration, one in four has
had a parent locked up at some point during childhood. For black men in
their 20s and early 30s without a high school diploma, the incarceration
rate is so high - nearly 40 percent nationwide - that they're more
likely to be behind bars than to have a job.
No one
denies that some people belong in prison. Mr. Harris, now 47, and his
wife, 45, agree that in his early 20s he deserved to be there. But they
don't see what good was accomplished by keeping him there for two
decades, and neither do most of the researchers who have been analyzing
the prison boom.
The number of Americans in state and
federal prisons has quintupled since 1980, and a major reason is that
prisoners serve longer terms than before. They remain inmates into
middle age and old age, well beyond the peak age for crime, which is in
the late teenage years - just when Mr. Harris first got into trouble.
'I Just Lost My Cool'
After
dropping out of high school, Mr. Harris ended up working at a carwash
and envying the imports driven by drug dealers. One day in 1983, at the
age of 18, while walking with his girlfriend on a sidewalk in Washington
where drugs were being sold, he watched a high-level dealer pull up in a
Mercedes-Benz and demand money from an underling.
"This
dealer was draped down in jewelry and a nice outfit," Mr. Harris
recalled in an interview in the Woodridge neighborhood of northeast
Washington, where he and his wife now live. "The female with him was
draped down, too, gold and everything, dressed real good.
"I'm
watching the way he carries himself, and I'm standing there looking
like Raggedy Ann. My girl's looking like Raggedy Ann. I said to myself,
'That's what I want to do.' "
Within two years, he was
convicted of illegal gun possession, an occupational hazard of his
street business selling PCP and cocaine. He went to Lorton, the local
prison, in 1985, shortly after he and Ms. Hamilton had their first
daughter. He kept up his drug dealing while in prison - "It was just as
easy to sell inside as outside" - and returned to the streets for the
heyday of the crack market in the late 1980s.
The
Washington police never managed to catch him with the cocaine he was
importing by the kilo from New York, but they arrested him for
assaulting people at a crack den. He says he went into the apartment, in
the Shaw neighborhood, to retrieve $4,000 worth of crack stolen by one
of his customers, and discovered it was already being smoked by a dozen
people in the room.
"I just lost my cool," he said. "I
grabbed a lamp and chair lying around there and started smacking people.
Nobody was hospitalized, but I broke someone's arm and cut another one
in the leg."
An assault like that would have landed Mr.
Harris behind bars in many countries, but not for nearly so long.
Prisoners serve significantly more time in the United States than in
most industrialized countries. Sentences for drug-related offenses and
other crimes have gotten stiffer in recent decades, and prosecutors have
become more aggressive in seeking longer terms - as Mr. Harris
discovered when he saw the multiple charges against him.
For
injuring two people, Mr. Harris was convicted on two counts of assault,
each carrying a minimum three-year sentence. But he received a much
stiffer sentence, of 15 to 45 years, on a charge of armed burglary at
the crack den.
"The cops knew I was selling but
couldn't prove it, so they made up the burglary charge instead," Mr.
Harris contended. He still considers the burglary charge unfair,
insisting that he neither broke into the crack den nor took anything,
but he also acknowledges that long prison terms were a risk for any
American selling drugs: "I knew other dealers who got life without
parole."
As it was, at the age of 24 he was facing
prison until his mid-40s. He urged his wife to move on with her life and
divorce him. Despondent, he began snorting heroin in prison - the first
time, he says, that he had ever used hard drugs himself.
"I
thought I was going to lose my mind," he said. "I felt so bad leaving
my wife alone with our daughters. When they were young, they'd ask on
the phone where I was, and I'd tell them I was away at camp."
His
wife went on welfare and turned to relatives to care for their
daughters while she visited him at prisons in Tennessee, Texas, Arizona
and New Mexico.
"I wanted to work, but I couldn't have a
job and go visit him," Ms. Hamilton said. "When he was in New Mexico,
it would take me three days to get there on the bus. I'd go out there
and stay for a month in a trailer near the prison."
In
Washington, she and her daughters moved from relative to relative, not
always together. During one homeless spell, Ms. Hamilton slept by
herself for a month in her car. She eventually found a federally
subsidized apartment of her own, and once the children were in school
she took part-time jobs. But the scrimping never stopped. "We had a lot
of Oodles of Noodles," she recalled.
Eleven years after
her husband went to prison, Ms. Hamilton followed his advice to
divorce, but she didn't remarry. Like other women in communities with
high rates of incarceration, she faced a shortage of potential mates.
Because more than 90 percent of prisoners are men, their absence skews
the gender ratio. In some neighborhoods in Washington, there are 6 men
for every 10 women.
"With so many men locked up, the
ones left think they can do whatever they want," Ms. Hamilton said. "A
man will have three mistresses, and they'll each put up with it because
there are no other men around."
Epidemiologists have
found that when the incarceration rate rises in a county, there tends to
be a subsequent increase in the rates of sexually transmitted diseases
and teenage pregnancy, possibly because women have less power to require
their partners to practice protected sex or remain monogamous.
When
researchers try to explain why AIDS is much more prevalent among blacks
than whites, they point to the consequences of incarceration, which
disrupts steady relationships and can lead to high-risk sexual behavior.
When sociologists look for causes of child poverty and juvenile
delinquency, they link these problems to the incarceration of parents
and the resulting economic and emotional strains on families.
Some
families, of course, benefit after an abusive parent or spouse is
locked up. But Christopher Wildeman, a Yale sociologist, has found that
children are generally more likely to suffer academically and socially
after the incarceration of a parent. Boys left fatherless become more
physically aggressive. Spouses of prisoners become more prone to
depression and other mental and physical problems.
"Education,
income, housing, health - incarceration affects everyone and everything
in the nation's low-income neighborhoods," said Megan Comfort, a
sociologist at the nonprofit research organization RTI International who
has analyzed what she calls the "secondary prisonization" of women with
partners serving time in San Quentin State Prison.
Before
the era of mass incarceration, there was already evidence linking
problems in poor neighborhoods to the high number of single-parent
households and also to the high rate of mobility: the continual turnover
on many blocks as transients moved in and out.
Now
those trends have been amplified by the prison boom's "coercive
mobility," as it is termed by Todd R. Clear, the dean of the School of
Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. In some low-income
neighborhoods, he notes, virtually everyone has at least one relative
currently or recently behind bars, so families and communities are
continually disrupted by people going in and out of prison.
A Perverse Effect
This
social disorder may ultimately have the perverse effect of raising the
crime rate in some communities, Dr. Clear and some other scholars say.
Robert DeFina and Lance Hannon, both at Villanova University, have found
that while crime may initially decline in places that lock up more
people, within a few years the rate rebounds and is even higher than
before.
New York City's continuing drop in crime in the
past two decades may have occurred partly because it reduced its prison
population in the 1990s and thereby avoided a subsequent rebound
effect.
Raymond V. Liedka, of Oakland University in
Michigan, and colleagues have found that the crime-fighting effects of
prison disappear once the incarceration rate gets too high. "If the
buildup goes beyond a tipping point, then additional incarceration is
not going to gain our society any reduction in crime, and may lead to
increased crime," Dr. Liedka said.
The benefits of
incarceration are especially questionable for men serving long sentences
into middle age. The likelihood of committing a crime drops steeply
once a man enters his 30s. This was the case with Mr. Harris, who turned
his life around shortly after hitting 30.
"I said, 'I
wasn't born in no jail, and I'm not going to die here,' " he recalled,
describing how he gave up heroin and other drugs, converted to Islam and
went to work on his high school equivalency degree.
But
he still had 14 more years to spend in prison. During that time, he
stayed in touch with his family, talking to his children daily. When he
was released in 2009, he reunited with them and Ms. Hamilton.
"I
was like a man coming out of a cave after 20 years," Mr. Harris said.
"The streets were the same, but everything else had changed. My kids
were grown. They had to teach me how to use a cellphone and pay for the
bus."
The only job he could find was at a laundry,
where he sorted soiled linens for $8.25 an hour, less than half the
typical wage for a man his age but not unusual for someone just out of
prison. Even though the District of Columbia has made special efforts to
find jobs for ex-prisoners and to destigmatize their records - they are
officially known as "returning citizens" - many have a hard time
finding any kind of work.
This is partly because of
employers' well-documented reluctance to hire anyone with a record,
partly because of former prisoners' lack of work experience and
contacts, and partly because of their difficulties adapting to life
after prison.
"You spend long enough in prison being
constantly treated like a dog or a parrot, you can get so
institutionalized you can't function outside," Mr. Harris said. "That
was my biggest challenge, telling myself that I'm not going to forget
how to take care of myself or think for myself. I saw that happen to too
many guys."
'Crippled by Incarceration'
The
Rev. Kelly Wilkins sees men like that every day during her work at the
Covenant Baptist Church in Washington, which serves the low-income
neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River.
"A lot of
the men have been away so long that they're been crippled by
incarceration," she said. "They don't how to survive in the community
anymore, and they figure it's too late for someone in their 40s to start
life over."
A stint behind bars tends to worsen job
prospects that weren't good to begin with. "People who go to prison
would have very low wages even without incarceration," said Dr. Western,
the Harvard sociologist and author of "Punishment and Inequality in
America." "They have very little education, on average, and they live in
communities with poor job opportunities, and so on. For all this, the
balance of the social science evidence shows that prison makes things
worse."
Dr. Western and Becky Pettit, a sociologist at
the University of Washington, estimate, after controlling for various
socioeconomic factors, that incarceration typically reduces annual
earnings by 40 percent for the typical male former prisoner.
The
precise financial loss is debatable. Other social scientists have come
up with lower estimates for lost wages after incarceration, but everyone
agrees it's only part of the cost. For starters, it doesn't include
wages lost while a man is behind bars.
Nor does it
include all the burdens borne by the prisoner's family and community
during incarceration - the greatest cost of all, says Donald Braman, an
anthropologist at George Washington University Law School who wrote
"Doing Time on the Outside" after studying families of prisoners in
Washington.
"The social deprivation and draining of
capital from these communities may well be the greatest contribution our
state makes to income inequality," Dr. Braman said. "There is no social
institution I can think of that comes close to matching it."
Drs.
DeFina and Hannon, the Villanova sociologists, calculate that if the
mass incarceration trend had not occurred in recent decades, the poverty
rate would be 20 percent lower today, and that five million fewer
people would have fallen below the poverty line.
Ms.
Hamilton and Mr. Harris have now risen above that poverty line, and they
consider their family luckier than many others. Their two daughters
finished high school; one went to college; both are employed. Ms.
Hamilton is working as an aide at a hospital. Mr. Harris has a job as a
security guard and a different outlook on life.
"I
don't worry about buying clothes anymore," he said. He and his wife are
scrimping to save enough so they can finally, in their late 40s, buy a
home together.
"It's like our life is finally
beginning," Ms. Hamilton said. "If he hadn't been away so long, we could
own a house by now. We would probably have more kids. I try not to
think about all the things we lost."
Accentuating the Positive
She
and her husband prefer to accentuate the positive, even when it comes
to the police and prison. They appreciate that some neighborhoods in
Washington are much safer now that drug dealers aren't fighting on
street corners and in crack dens anymore. They figure the crackdown on
open-air drug markets helped both the city and Mr. Harris.
"If I hadn't been locked up, I probably would have ended up getting killed on the streets," Mr. Harris said. His wife agreed.
"Prison was good for him in some ways," Ms. Hamilton said. "He finally grew up there. He's a man now."
But 20 years?
"They overdid it," she said. "It didn't have to take that long at all."
