If I Were King ...

Here's a tight interview that ran today on America's Disappeared, a program of the Prisoners Education Network that airs monthly on KSER 90.7 FM in Everett. I go into the links between homelessness and incarceration, talk up the Initiative 100 campaign to stop Seattle's proposed new city jail, and describe what would happen if I were in charge.

I Embrace Socialism

My interview with the Socialist Worker published yesterday, and was a rare opportunity to describe my notions of how homelessness and incarceration link as issues and the overall landscape of our times. They did a really nice job of going to the core of a very long interview and making me sound smart. I'm beginning to get past my innate bias against the silliness of the sectarian left and am learning to love the International Socialists. God help me. Here's an excerpt:

IF SEATTLE continues down this road of criminalizing poverty and decides to go ahead with the new jail, what should we expect in the future?

WHAT'S FUNDAMENTALLY at stake here and everywhere is our vision of the future. We're sliding down a path of a continual increase in the numbers of incarcerated and homeless, continual impoverishment on the lower end of the scale, continual erosion of the middle class and the increased economic vulnerability that comes along with that. More vulnerability to falling over the edge, into that class of people who exist in the land of no return.

There is a lot of mystification around the homelessness issue. You get these complete BS reports out of Washington and the Department of Housing and Urban Development that have all this rosy news about how homelessness is being ended. Anybody who is on the ground dealing with homelessness and seeing the reality knows that there are more people, that the desperation has increased, that things are worse now than they have ever been. This rosy view that things are working is a big smokescreen to placate people.

Homelessness cannot be ended without addressing the root causes that are driving it, that have to do with the economies of labor, and who wins and who loses in this system. The government isn't going to address that, because it can't without threatening itself.

So the response that you see is one of appearing to address homelessness that is really about maintaining their own political legitimacy. They cannot ignore the moral crisis of homelessness without appearing unjust and illegitimate. They cannot address the crisis of homelessness without going to these root causes, which they're institutionally ill-equipped to do anything about.

A theologian named Walter Bruggeman says that situations of cultural acceptance breed accommodating complacency. I think that is the core insight that applies to the times we live in.

As a culture, we have accommodated ourselves to what, at a glance, should be a completely unacceptable reality. There are institutions in place whose primary purpose is to make that accommodation acceptable, to lull us into the sense that things are more or less okay, that the system is functioning normally, and that there is a kind of benign welfare state that is doing its best to take care of people.

That is all an ideological smokescreen. The reality is that about 10 percent of us have been completely written off, thrown to the wolves and have no alternative but to continually cycle through survival systems. Just bare subsistence survival activity--the desperation of which would blow most people's minds if they really understood it--vulnerability to incarceration, and very little prospect of ever escaping that system. That is the core reality of our time, that anybody who has a sense of universal love and concern for their fellow human beings should be completely outraged by.

What we see in the Third World should give us all nightmares. There's been radical growth of urban slums in the Third World over the last two decades--also a response to the global economy, where globalization has driven the rural poor into the containment of the urban slums. The larger ones are 25-40 million people who are living in these shantytowns, where people are living in toxic waste dumps of low-value land, which means floodplains, earthquake-prone slopes, cities built on shit, literally. Smells horrible, no infrastructure, rampant disease. It is a vision of Dante's hell.

The reason we don't have more of that here--although I do think we're starting to see it--is that some of those contested urban spaces are still being contested. And the containment systems are less visible, but are equally horrendous--for instance, the conditions within the prison system, where rape is casually accepted as an unofficial method of dehumanization, of discipline really.

The expansion of maximum-security institutions, in which people are subjected to a form of ongoing torture; the acceptance of dehumanizing conditions within emergency shelter systems--they're different containment systems that dehumanize in different ways.

So one future is continuing along that trajectory. And the economic collapse in the U.S. offers the potential that that curve will again shoot up. In recent years, the rates of growth in incarceration and homelessness have declined slightly--they haven't stopped growing, but they're growing less rapidly.

But our capacity to mitigate this disaster through the provision of human services--which at least offers some sort of a lifeline to those who are most vulnerable--is being reduced, and horrendous cuts are on the table. So we're very likely to see an acceleration in all these trends.

Khalil Osiris

Tonight I went over to Interaction/Transition, an ex-offender re-entry program up in the CD, to hear Khalil Osiris, a man who earned two degrees from Boston University during his twenty years of incarceration in Ohio and went on to be one of the nations leading experts on prisoner re-entry and education. He's an amazing presence. A soul-driven soldier of the dispossessed. Brilliant, charismatic, operating from a place of love, and real as a block of granite.

I didn't go as a reporter, but I reached into my wallet twice to scrawl on the back of a bank slip. The first was in response to a question about compassion fatigue in the helping professions. After the usual advice about self-care, he said something brilliant. Listen to people, he said. Really listen. Listen deeply, listen intuitively, and then ask this. "Given that the situation is exactly as you have described, what is the best thing you can do for yourself, and how can I help you." You could see this hit people around the room like lightening. Powerful..

The other highlight was when he described human dignity as a force against reaction and repression. People who truly possess their own humanity, he said, will win. Then he walked over to a re-entry client standing near the wall, took him by the shoulders, and said "I believe in your worth and capacity for good more than I believe in the system's capacity to treat you with dignity." There's a sentence that you can sit with for awhile.

I/T Director Scott Washington and Osiris have a long history of working together, and he gets to Seattle a lot. Next time, I'm organizing him an audience and getting it on video. It's my damn mission. Anyone this good needs to be seriously seen and heard, and the two brief clips I found on Youtube just don't do him justice. I'm there for this guy, anytime.

The Seattle Crime Of Standing While Black

Speaking of institutional racism, today I spent five minutes on the sidewalk with one of our vendors, and my sense of outrage us up to around a 9.7 on a scale of 1-10. Donald Morehead, a poster child for the screwed, poor, and dark-skinned if ever there was, had the misfortune to be standing while Black last month in one of Seattle’s drug enforcement zones. The arresting officer grabbed him by the face hard enough to extract a molar without anesthetic, but was kind enough to distract our vendor from the tooth pain by slamming his head against the car hood hard enough to leave permanent marks. Donald spent more than two weeks in King County Jail when he failed to accept the plea bargain.

“I’ve spent eight years in the brig,” he told me. “Three months is no big deal. I’m not going to cop to a nothing charge for this BS.”

Donald is one of our more politically involved vendors and is well known and loved around here, yet it was more than two weeks before he was able to get word to us through a lawyer of his problem. By the time we had his bail the next morning, he’d been released because, basically, the city had nothing. He spent two weeks in pain, courtesy of chez King County, where Blacks are represented in the daily average jail population at nearly ten times their numbers in King County. With this sort of targeting going on, it’s easy to see why.

Donald is one of those people who, not to put too fine a point on it, was fucked from birth. Raised Black, male, and poor in the projects of New York, he took his best shot at success by joining the Army just in time for the first Gulf War. When he came back, Donald found that he was still Black and poor, and all his military experience counted for was a case of PTSD.

Since then, most of his time has been spent homeless or in prison. Given that our system seems to delight in nothing more than kicking people when they’re down, I find this sadly unsurprising, and admire him for each and every day that he’s woken up without hating the entire human race

Our vendor was released to the street after 16 days, minus his twenty bucks from Real Change sales. Drug money and “evidence,” the cops said. But Donald got a decent lawyer, and at least got out. Given the math of poor people in jail on bullshit charges and funding for public defense, this was an improbability. Donald, believe it or not, was a lucky man.

“There’s a war going on,” he told me this morning,” and as the economy goes down, it’s only going to get worse.” Word

Living In The Burning Light ...

If I don't start writing more than once or twice a week soon, I'm afraid I'm going to lose all credibility as an obsessive-compulsive attention-seeker. I should at least be able to find an amusing 70s hair band video for you all. I'm not even trying.

An initiative campaign launched last week to shine a little light on the City's freight train approach to building a new jail in Seattle. It's the culmination of about four months of discussion and planning. The effort is much bigger than Real Change, and is fronted by a group of activists calling themselves Citizens for Fairness and Efficiency in Public Safety. I wish we'd discussed a bit less. We have until May to collect the 23,000 or so signatures needed to qualify for November's ballot. The big public launch is on February 19, 7:30-9 am at Town Hall. You're invited.

In my more hopeful moments, I think that this effort, and the opportunity for movement building across race, class, and issue that it represents, is just the kind of organizing that could lead to the new civil rights movement this nation so badly needs. In my less hopeful moments, I think of how overwhelming the odds against our success really are, and how this could be just one more example of institutional power and momentum overwhelming citizen participation.

So, the stakes feel high, and I'm working my ass off, trying to focus on what's important. Today started with a 9 am interview with the Socialist Worker. This arrived far too soon after yesterday's thrilling 1 a.m. conclusion of a 16-hour day. Today, I was at Real Change until 7:30. A mere ten and a half hours. I really should be working right now. No. That's not right. I really should be sleeping.

On the other hand, this is my idea of a really good time. Everyone should be lucky enough to live in the burning light of their passion, surrounded by people they love and respect. I have nothing to complain about.

Above is a two-part video of my speech at our packed forum at Seattle University's Pigott Auditorium last week. I was supposed to speak for 8 minutes. The evidence strongly suggests I went over my time, but at least I wasn't alone in this. This video, if you let it, will lead you to others. All of the panelists were wonderful. The Seattle Channel is showing the forum daily. Sometimes twice. It was that good.

Below is the "Directors Corner" I wrote for Real Change today in the time I had between the initiative steering committee meeting and the meeting of the Real Change board. This issue, in some ways, is about whether we have eyes to see and the courage to change. So, I wrote about that.

As I drove into work this morning, I was thinking of my 9 a.m. interview with the folks from the Socialist Worker newspaper, and what I might say. Here was a rare opportunity to dig a little into the connections between globalization and growing inequality, the war on drugs as a means of criminalizing the black and marginalized, shelters and prisons as containment systems for the surplus and abandoned poor, and how class and race are the unacknowledged third rail in this question of a new Seattle jail that the city is desperately trying to avoid.

This is a time when enormous possibility for change is colliding directly with the prospect of system collapse. This leaves one with a vertiginous feeling of combined hope and dread. As my car made its way down I-5, I drifted to the theologians who have addressed the times in which we live.

Walter Bruggeman, author of The Prophetic Imagination, talks about having courage and conviction, despite the many inducements that exist to just shut the hell up and go along with the program. “Situations of cultural acceptance,” said Bruggeman, “breed accommodating complacency.” When a ten-fold disproportionality exists in King County between Blacks that are jailed and their representation in the community, we are called to actively imagine a different reality

I also thought of Reinhold Niebuhr’s take on Matthew 10:16, “ which reads, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” Niebuhr writes concisely on institutional self-interest as a reflection of the human capacity for evil, and how liberals are often naive on this point. His work was enormously influential during the nation’s last civil rights movement and needs to be revived.

The new city jail is not about how our city handles misdemeanants. It’s about whether Seattle accepts an unacceptable status quo, and commits to a future of deepening race and class inequality as a response to system failure. For the questions behind the questions, the analysts often miss the point. The philosophers, on the other hand, have much to say.

Warning: I-100 Filed, Democracy May Ensue.

When I called Ari Kohn of the Post-Prison Education Project Thursday to say our initiative, run by a group of community activists known as Citizens for Efficiency and Fairness in Public Safety, was about to be filed with the City Clerk, he insisted on capturing the great moment for posterity. So here it is: Real Change organizers Danina Garcia and Natalie Novak, at the City Clerk window, with copy of said petition firmly in hand. We now await a ballot title from Tom Carr for what will be Initiative 100. Here's what it says:

BE IT ORDAINED BY THE CITY OF SEATTLE AS FOLLOWS:

Section One: Title and Subject.
A. This measure shall be titled the “Efficiency and Fairness in Public Safety Act.”
B. For Constitutional purposes, the subject of this Initiative is “public safety.”

Section Two: Preamble and Statement of Facts:
A. Seattle's decision whether to build a municipal jail for the first time represents an expensive commitment during a time of diminishing public resources. This choice for Seattle's future has long-term consequences, and deserves a thorough and public decision-making process.

Through this Initiative, voters exercise their right to be involved in this public safety decision by mandating that the decision consider cost effective alternatives and racial justice. Voters are also to have a final vote on this critical issue.

B. Citizens of Seattle hereby find that in deciding whether to build a new jail, important factors to consider include: public safety, alternatives that may be more cost effective, and issues of racial justice and fairness. Citizens further find that voters should have a final say on whether to build a new municipal jail.

Section Three: Policies and Process for Deciding Whether to Build a Municipal Jail.
A. Prior to deciding whether to build a new municipal jail, the City of Seattle shall take the actions and/or conduct the evaluations described in this section and publicly report on the same. These actions and evaluations and their outcomes shall be fully considered in the City's decision whether to build a new municipal jail, in addition to other considerations that may be deemed appropriate.

1. The City shall negotiate openly, publicly and in good faith with King County to explore alternatives to a municipal jail, including extending the existing City-County contract for jail services. Currently the City contracts with King County for provision of jail services, under a contract that expires in 2012. The City is considering a municipal jail to replace such jail capacity, despite the possibility that such contract may be renewable under State Law, RCW 39.34.180. Continued cooperation with King County may provide the most cost-effective and progressive public safety option. King County offers nationally recognized model programs for decreasing incarceration rates and recidivism, and already has the infrastructure in place to handle a regional justice system.

2. The City shall conduct a rigorous, public analysis of how incarceration rates could be decreased in the short and long term while increasing public safety and positive outcomes. The City shall analyze how a proactive investment in social service programs, including shelter, supportive housing, early childhood education, drug and alcohol treatment and mental health care, will lower crime and arrest rates in the future. Avenues that should be explored include alternatives to incarceration such as treatment and day monitoring, changes in sentencing guidelines at the misdemeanor level, and a commitment to law enforcement diversion programs that provide better outcomes for less public money in drug cases.

3. The City shall develop and make publicly accessible a strategy to address racial disparity issues in arrest and incarceration rates. Disproportionate incarceration rates among certain communities of color deepen inequality and poverty and are a form of structural racism. A new jail may perpetuate and deepen these inequalities.

B. The City shall place the matter of the new municipal jail before the electorate in a public vote. Voters shall have the final decision on whether to build a new municipal jail. Prior to making a final commitment to build a municipal jail, the matter shall be placed before the voters for approval or rejection. Prior to the vote, the City shall inform voters of the outcomes of the actions and evaluations set forth in Subsection A of this Section. This paragraph does not require voters to be consulted on any siting decision relating to such proposed facility.

Section Four: Definitions.
A. “Municipal jail” means a municipal jail facility that is or may be built and/or operated by the City independently or jointly through an interlocal agreement with other cities, but does not include facilities built and/or operated by King County.

B. A “decision whether to build” a municipal jail means a decision by the City on whether to commit moneys towards the construction and/or operation of a municipal jail, either independently or jointly through an interlocal agreement with other cities. Neither that term nor any part of this Initiative addresses decisions and/or commitments of moneys relating to potential sites, environmental review, and/or any component of the site selection process. Such term also excludes any decisions and/or commitments of moneys relating to facilities operated by the County.

Section Five: Construction.
A. This initiative is to be liberally construed to ensure that the City's major public safety decisions are based upon principles of cost-efficiency and fairness and subject to democratic oversight.

B. Nothing in this Initiative shall be construed or interpreted to influence or constrain the City Council's decision on where to site a municipal jail. If the City and its voters decide that a new municipal jail should be built, the City Council shall have the authority delegated to it under State Law to determine the location of such a facility.

Section Six: Severability.
The provisions of this ordinance are declared to be separate and severable. The Citizens of Seattle declare that they support each of the provisions of this Initiative independently, and their support for this Initiative would not be diminished if one or more of its provisions were to be held invalid. Specifically, Citizens would support this initiative even if it did not apply to jails developed through interlocal agreements. Thus, if any one or more of the provisions of this Initiative is declared to be contrary to law, then such provision or provisions shall be null and void and severed from the rest of this ordinance, and all other provisions of this Initiative shall remain valid and enforceable.

So, running an initiative campaign is an enormous amount of work. Why do it? Speaking strictly for myself, here's my take.

Initiatives are the citizen's tool for when other democratic processes fail. Despite the overwhelmingly negative reception this facility has received in community meeting after community meeting, the Mayor's office has consistently characterized the new municipal jail as inevitable, with the only question on the table being one of where to put the thing. The narrow majority that was attained by Councilmember Nick Licata for a review of alternatives that includes community input is a weak brake at best on what has thus far been the Seattle process equivalent of a speeding locomotive.

A challenging economic environment makes prudent use of public resources that much more important. City plans to pay for construction of a $220 million facility with a bond issue is the household equivalent of putting an expensive but unnecessary remodel on the credit card when you're down to eating rice and beans and not sure you can still afford health insurance. A bond issue isn't free money. You pay later, with interest. In addition to construction, the facility will cost $19 million annually to run. That's about half of what Seattle spends each year on homelessness and housing. The economic outlook is bleak. Yesterday, Boeing announced a layoff of 4,500. Today, Microsoft announced a layoff of 3,500. The shit storm is here and no one knows when it will end. Let's use our limited resources where we need them most, and where they'll do good instead of harm.

The existing alternative of continued cooperation with King County is more than viable, but the City has spurned this option. Capacity exists to extend the current contract past 2012. The offer has been made and ignored. The County is a national leader in programs that reduce recidivism and minimize unnecessary incarceration. King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg is an enlightened public servant who gets that locking people up when better alternatives exist is a huge budget suck that does not improve public safety. Seattle City Attorney Tom Carr has turned out to be a punitive law and order dickhead who is on the wrong side of this issue. Who do we want to empower here?

Unnecessary incarceration deepens and further racializes inequality. A black male high school drop-out has a two-in-three chance of being imprisoned by the age of thirtyfive. The Seattle high school graduation rate for Blacks is 52%, and the schools slated for closure right now are mostly in communities of color. The extreme racial disproportionality that exists in incarceration deepens poverty in Black, Latino, and Indian communities by further reducing the economic prospects of those who are already economically disadvantaged. When people who have lousy alternatives sometimes make bad choices, the best way to make a real difference is to invest in creating better alternatives.

Emergency shelters, prisons, and jails are the dumping ground for those who can't make it in this economy, and their numbers are growing. Even a crappy minimum wage service job needs a high school diploma and a relatively clean police record. Those who lack these things, however inconvenient it may be for the rest of us, generally insist on living anyway. Low-level drug dealing and other forms of street crime are the inevitable result, and locking more and more of them up doesn't make the crime go away. There are many, many ways in which public resources can be put to the use of rebuilding lives. During the current budget cycle, King County's one drug and alcohol treatment center for indigents may well be forced to close. General Assistance - Unemployed, the $339 a month benefit for those certified as too disabled to work and having no other income, may well be eliminated. An expensive, unnecessary new jail isn't going to improve anyone's life prospects or make anyone safer, and the money is better spent elsewhere.

Attend the forum next week and find out how to get involved. "Question Inevitability: A Community Perspective on Alternatives to a New Jail" will take place at Seattle University's Pigott Auditorium from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Jan. 28. This forum by the Real Change Organizing Project will include a broad panel of respected and committed activists and experts on incarceration and its effect on communities.

Is Nickels Running This Town As A Police State?

Yesterday, as we are all aware, was ObamaDay. Unicorns with rainbows shooting out their asses grazed on the Whitehouse lawn to herald the new dawn. OK, I'm being facetious. I'm happy. Very, very happy. But my sense of elation is balanced by an competing sense of doom.

Tuesday morning, as I drove to Trinity United Methodist to join my friend Rich's flock in catching the festivities on TV, a dense fog limited visibility to around 200 yards. I was again struck by how the world always seems to offer up the right metaphor at the right time. The economy's gone to hell and local and state governments appear poised to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor. The feds are no better. The Mid-East situation seems perfectly calibrated to the Mayan Calendar, and I just know my transmission's going to go one of these days. I can see about a block in front of me. Beyond that? Who knows? Might be blue skies. Might be a twelve car pile-up with me in the middle.

The good news, I recently read, is that the US prison population only rose by a mere 2.5% last year, which is what passes as progress these days. Crime, by the way, fell by 4%. More good news.

In the afternoon, I made my way to Westlake Center to speak at an Inauguration Day student march and rally that was making its way down from Seattle Community College. I arrived before the march to find the police prepared for virtually any terrorist scenario one might imagine.

A black Command Vehicle, which looked like a cross between a tank and a semi, was parked near the Starbucks. About ten riot-gear clad cops — half of which had ominous black knit gear on their heads that revealed eyes and nose only and made them look like ninja gym rats — stood casually shooting the shit, awaiting The Threat. Plainclothes cops were everywhere as well, and not trying real hard to be inconspicuous. As the march made its way down Pike, a phalanx of police motorcycles came before and after. Bicycle cops diligently hemmed in the sides to ensure public safety. There were maybe 100 marchers. It was a sad spectacle. I estimated the overall student to cop ratio at around 2-1.

Democracy, apparently, scares the shit out of these guys.

I joked about this when I spoke. "What?" I said. "Were they afraid you were going to loot the Starbucks for their herbal teas?"

My speech was about Real Change's campaigns against the homeless sweeps and the new municipal jail. The root issue here, I said, is surplus people in a global economy, and a system that writes off the less skilled and educated as a form of human waste that just can't compete and therefore needs to be dehumanized, criminalized, and eventually imprisoned.

I don't really expect this problem to be on the Obama Top Ten issue list, but then, he's only been in office for the better part of an afternoon.

I congratulated them for "taking it to the streets," but said they needed to up the student to cop ratio to around 10-1 next time to make a more respectable showing. Taking it to the streets matters I said, because poor people only get taken care of when one or two conditions are met.

The first is when there's an expectation that the market will once again need the very poor for their labor. Under these circumstances, their stock rises, and they get to live.

Noone really expects this to happen, I said, so scratch that.

The second is when people are organized to the extent that they actually offer some sort of a threat to the system, which is why we really need better than a 2-1 student cop ratio. It might be ObamaDay, but the cops and the prisons are ready for us nonetheless. We shouldn't kid ourselves. The bar for organizing has been set rather high. Are you up for the challenge?

— Photos by Revel

Homelessness, Incarceration, and the Future

For more than two decades, I’ve struggled with creating an approach to homeless advocacy and organizing that does the issue justice. Over this time, there are four truths that have become more than obvious.

One: Homelessness is about the problem of surplus people in a global economy. The collapse and overseas exportation of most American manufacturing has hit the market for less educated and relatively unskilled labor hard. Communities that face racial discrimination have been hit hardest. This clear fact of our economy goes largely unacknowledged.

Two: The bottom 10-20 percent of those who struggle to survive in our economy have been more or less permanently marginalized. There is little expectation that a demand for their labor will ever return. There is an historic pattern of erosion of government support for those at the bottom. As a result, the past three decades have seen an exponential growth in incarceration and emergency sheltering. In times of growing economic desperation, even the most minimal supports that presently exist will increasingly come under attack.

Three: Homelessness and incarceration are fundamentally dehumanizing. Those who endure life at the outer margins of the economy are stigmatized and rendered invisible. They are a frightening reminder of the systemic failures of capitalism, and our response, all too often, is to distance ourselves through victim-blaming and denial. The conditions of the incarceration industry and mass homelessness erode feelings of self-worth and diminish our own capacity to regard those who endure the conditions of these institutions as beings who are fully human.

Four: Approaches to “ending homelessness” that ignore these realities cannot succeed. Until we acknowledge that America has a growing and largely permanent class of throwaway people, and make the connections between structural unemployment, racism, criminalization, and the erosion of even the most minimal safety net for the poor and disabled, “homeless advocacy” will, at best, continue to win the occasional battle while the war rages on. Despite our well-intentioned best efforts, the casualties will mount.

Since the advent of globalization, inequality in America has radically widened, and the trend is accelerating. Class war is being waged upon the very poor by the very rich, and the frontiers of this conflict are expanding to create new levels of vulnerability for an eroding middle class.

The realities of regressive taxation, unsustainable military spending, and government priorities that reflect the capture of democracy by corporate interests mean that the middle class and those who struggle at the margins have a common interest in systemic reform that places the realities of race and class front and center.

Bureaucratic, siloed approaches to ending homelessness, while necessary, are insufficient. We must look toward the more imaginative and holistic organizing opportunities that, all too often, are hidden in plain sight.

Here in Seattle, city plans for the creation of a new municipal jail brings together issues of race, class, a failed education system, economic marginalization, and misguided government spending priorities in a rather neat package. Thus far, public discussion of this issue has been mostly limited to the problem of where this facility is to be located. The larger question of a renewed civic commitment to a failed policy of expanding incarceration has gone largely unaddressed. This reflects a sad failure of moral and political imagination by Seattle’s homeless advocates and, more importantly, the broader progressive community.

The city’s unwavering commitment to expanded incarceration comes when we can least afford it. During a time of increasing economic uncertainty and large deficits at every level of government, the new facility will cost $220 million to build and $19 million annually to operate. Meanwhile, Seattle schools slated for closure are located mostly in our city’s communities of color.

The Department of Justice’s own statistics on incarceration are a travesty, and speak to the role of incarceration as a form of economic containment. One in 99 Americans are presently behind bars, and one in 33 live under the supervision of the penal system. An African American high school dropout has a two in three chance of winding up behind bars by the age of 35.

The Seattle school system’s high school graduation rate for African Americans is a mere 52 percent.

This reality of incarceration being a rite of passage for males who live in economically disadvantaged communities is a relatively new phenomenon, resulting from 30 years of war on crime and drugs. Incarceration rates bear little apparent relationship to crime rates, and are driven by the politics of fear and race.

Such racialized rates of incarceration feed a downward spiral of economic opportunity within already disadvantaged minority communities.

Meanwhile, according to the city’s own statistics, the demand for incarceration has abated. The jail population has declined by 38 percent while overall population has risen by eight percent.

Why, then, the rush to build?

Real motivations, given the opacity of city planning processes, are unclear. Perhaps the promise of new jobs in construction and incarceration play some role. Perhaps the increasingly repressive approach to immigration and limited Immigrations and Customs Enforcement facility space is in the mix somewhere. Perhaps the projected increase of community emphasis policing in Seattle, which focuses on low-level drug and poverty crime, anticipates new demand for misdemeanant jail beds.

A glance at the current environment offers an ominous look at the future. State level budget cuts threaten the closure of King County’s one drug and alcohol treatment center that serves the very poor. The governor’s budget threatens to zero out General Assistance - Unemployed. The GAU program offers a paltry $339 a month to around 9,000 people who have successfully navigated the challenging process of documenting that they, one way or another, are too disabled to work and have no other sources of income.

This barbaric approach to economic hard times will, unavoidably, create more instances of poverty crime and will undermine public safety for all of us. The primary victims of increased crime will be the very poor.

At the same time, homelessness in Seattle and King County is growing and becoming more racialized. The 2008 One Night Count documented a 15 percent increase in homelessness over the previous year. During this snapshot early morning January 2008 count, 5,800 people were in emergency and transitional shelter, and another 2,300 were found surviving outside on a night when the shelters were full. The count also documents that although Blacks make up just five percent of county residents, they make up 40 percent of King County’s homeless. This number is up four percent from just two years prior.

It’s been said that the definition of insanity is to continue doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. Seattle’s new municipal jail is a bricks and mortar commitment to continued structural racism and the economic marginalization of the most poor. It’s time to stop the insanity. Attend the Real Change forum on the new municipal jail and commit to being part of a new solution to poverty, homelessness, and structural racism in Seattle.

"Question Inevitability: A Community Perspective on Alternatives to a New Jail" will take place at Seattle University's Pigott Auditorium from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Jan. 28. This forum by the Real Change Organizing Project will include a broad panel of respected and committed activists and experts on incarceration and its effect on communities.

Panelists include:
Silja J.A. Talvi , noted essayist and investigative journalist and author of Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System.

Aaron Dixon, co-founder of the Seattle Black Panthers and 2006 Senate candidate for the Green Party.

King County Councilmember Larry Gossett, active on issues of social and economic injustice for over 40 years.

Alexes Harris, who has worked with the highly successful Clean Dreams pre-arrest diversion program, a real alternative to incarceration.

Tim Harris, executive director and founder of Real Change

Jesse Hagopian, a middle school teacher in Seattle Public Schools and a co-founder of Educators, Students, and Parents for a better Vision of the Seattle schools (ESP Vision).

Power Grows From The Pages Of Your Checkbook

Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the golden rule of grassroots fundraising: If you tell the truth, take the risks that the times demand, and operate from a place of integrity, the money will follow. But only if you ask. We asked, and you came through.

Today’s mail brought another $2,925 in support for our work, bringing the total raised in donations since November 1 to $219,046.54. Our $180,000 Winter Fund Drive goal has officially been smashed. An unusually difficult year is at an end, and Real Change is operating from a place of health and strength. Our debt is retired. Our landlord gets his last six months’ rent. You made it happen, and we thank you.

You get that Real Change works; that we engage our vendors, readers, and allies in addressing the issues that directly affect all of us. You get that our capacity to mobilize is based in our fifteen-year history of walking alongside those who have the least, and in the growing web of relationships that is Real Change.

You get that the time to organize is now, and that with your help, a different reality is possible. 2009 brings its own challenges. With your help, we’ll meet those as well.


Race and Poverty in Seattle

Mass homelessness is a structural fact of the economy, and is the visible result of three decades of increasing inequality, combined with social policies that maintain rather than reduce poverty.

Homelessness in Seattle and King County is growing and becoming more racialized. The 2008 One Night Count documented a 15% increase in homelessness over the previous year. During this snapshot early morning January count, 5,800 people were in emergency and transitional shelter, and another 2,300 homeless were found surviving outside on a night when the shelters were full. The count also documents that although Blacks make up just five percent of county residents, they make up 40 percent of King County’s homeless. This number is up four percent from just two years prior.

As the effects of the sub-prime loan collapse continue to ripple through the economy, creating budget deficits at all levels of government, essential survival services are at risk of being cut back or eliminated at the time when they are needed most.

As inequality in Seattle has widened, city policy on homelessness has shifted to the reduction of visible poverty and a focus on criminalization. Sadly, this has brought a zero-tolerance approach to public camping with the provision of few viable alternatives. This policy of homeless sweeps has been promoted by the city through what a team of University of Washington academics has described as “a discourse of filth and contagion.” The Mayor’s focus on proactively identifying and eliminating homeless campsites from public spaces has dramatically increased the stress and desperation of street survival. Protocols designed to assure the public that these policies are humane and responsible offer little real protection to homeless campers.

The past three decades of growing homelessness and incarceration are related to the realities of a global economy that has eliminated most of the opportunities for “unskilled” work and created a largely unrecognized pool of structurally unemployed. This includes the more than five-fold increase in incarceration that has taken place since 1980, an increase that has placed one in ninety-nine Americans behind bars and left an African-American male high school dropout with a two in three chance of being imprisoned by the age of thirty-five. Seattle’s high school graduation rate for African Americans is a mere 52%.

Seattle is moving ahead with plans to build a new municipal jail to accommodate anticipated increases in incarceration. The facility will cost at least $210 million to build and another $19 million annually to operate. Money that could be used to rebuild lives will instead deepen the cycle of poverty for the most disadvantaged in our society

Seattle’s new jail is an expensive commitment to the structural racism that will surely deepen poverty in disadvantaged communities. There are alternatives — but none will happen without a grassroots fight for a better way forward.


Opportunities and Challenges

Real Change is engaged in two related campaigns to defend those who have the least. Since we uncovered the Mayor’s secret homeless sweeps last year, we have been the leading voice for better survival solutions in Seattle. Over the past year, we’ve held four overnight protest encampments at City Hall. We’ve mobilized large numbers of people for public hearings, documented consistent violations of the city’s own policy, and provided major support to the Nickelsville survival encampment that has gained the strong support of Seattle’s faith community.

Our No New Jail Campaign has challenged the Mayor’s assertion of inevitability, and elevated the jail issue from a NIMBY-based discussion of site alternatives to a community-wide debate over the role of incarceration in perpetuating race-based inequality. We are organizing a broad-based and powerful coalition to take action on this issue, and will hold a large public forum on the new jail this January.

Real Change believes that single-issue, siloed approaches to homelessness have only led to structures of mitigation that are inadequate to the obviously growing problem. In the absence of a large, activist constituency to defend the poor and economically vulnerable, human services are subject to reduction during these times of state, county, and city budget deficits.

The Real Change newspaper and Organizing Project addresses root issues of growing inequality, racial income disparity, declining housing affordability, and attacks upon basic civil rights by growing a powerful and vocal base of activists to take action on these issues. We believe that the hope that exists for structural solutions to poverty and inequality can only be realized through a powerful grassroots activism that unites constituencies across issue and class.

Real Change is well positioned for leadership on these issues. More than a thousand annual supporters of our work provide the majority of our financial support. Our independence gives Real Change enormous freedom to pursue our mission in a manner that is uncompromised by funding sources. We accountable to our base, and our base supports what we do.

Yet, Real Change still faces serious capacity issues on three fronts. Large increases in the numbers of vendors we serve, driven by the increased need and desperation on the street, have challenged our ability to adequately respond. In the face of this rising direct need, our grassroots activism is difficult to sustain. Finally, Real Change’s limited administrative capacity reduces our ability to effectively manage the resources we already have, and more aggressively grow our grassroots support.

To meet the challenges of organizing an activist response while meeting the growing direct need, Real Change needs to grow over 2009 in the following areas:

Vendor Staffing: Inadequate vendor staffing limits our ability to effectively serve the more than 350 vendors we now see each month. Real Change works to connect vendors who express a desire for services with providers that can meet their needs. Our ability to do this effectively is limited by staffing and the capacity to effectively engage the many volunteers who support our work. (Cost: $32K)

Equipment and Space: Our fifteen-year location at 2129 Second Avenue meets our needs as an inexpensive, stable location that is friendly to those we serve. The 2,000 square foot space, however, is no longer adequate to our growing staff and clientele, and the resulting pressures limit our effectiveness. Our aging technology — computers, servers, software, phone systems, etc. — need to come into this century. Over the next year, Real Change must redesign the space and upgrade the tech systems. (Cost $30K)

Administrative Infrastructure: Real Change needs an operations manager to coordinate staff management, more effectively measure and track progress toward goals and milestones, and manage the administrative details of a growing organization. This will free up the ED to organize, build community, and grow the grassroots support needed to sustain and grow our work. (Cost $45K).

Production and Online Support: Real Change newspaper staff (2.5 FTE’s) are challenged by the demands of weekly production and lack the capacity to ramp up for the more multi-media approach that a dynamic internet presence requires. A staff position that focuses on newspaper production, maintaining a multi-media website, and producing a coordinated Real Change e-newsletter will grow our readership, increase grassroots support of our work, offer a professional public face to our activism, and enhance the quality of our core service. (Cost: $40K).

At the close of 2008, Real Change is strong and healthy. We are rooted an expanding base of grassroots support and a stable foundation of earned income that grows with our circulation. We are taking the risks, telling the truth, and organizing for power. Your support makes that possible.

2009 is a new year, and many challenges remain. With your continued and growing support, we will rise. Please make your gift to Real Change today. Visit our website at realchangenews.org, or mail your donation to Real Change, 2129 2nd Ave, Seattle, WA 98121.

The Best Fundraising Pitch Ever

I wrote this as a hybrid editorial/fund drive ask for Real Change this week, and think I'll submit it to The Society of Professional Journalists this year just to see if it's possible to get an editorial writing award for a fundraising pitch. That would be so cool.



Hard, Hard Times
Real Change offers direct opportunity while we push for structural change. Don’t make us choose. Support the Winter Fund Drive

This holiday season, the shopping is subdued. We’re all worried for the future. Things are going to be hard and everybody knows it.

During Real Change’s Winter Fund Drive this year, the stakes are unusually high. We need to reach our $180,000 goal to be able to sustain both our organizing and the increased demand we experience from our vendors. In the past year, the number of vendors we serve has risen by more than twenty percent. The sorts of scenes that were once rare in our office — psychotic episodes, suicide attempts, fights and other threatening behavior — have become almost commonplace.

Homelessness is growing, and the conditions have become unbelievably desperate.

Recent federal cuts to Medicare mean that many disabled people on fixed-incomes now pay $200 or more each month for their healthcare out of their meager social security checks. For these, the choice between healthcare and bare survival is no choice at all. For some, this will mean the end. Their precarious hold on some sort of life with dignity will break. And these are the “deserving” poor.

There is a serious possibility that this February, Washington state will eliminate the GAU program (General Assistance – Unemployable) altogether. For 9,000 people — many of who are waiting the two to three years it often takes to qualify for social security disability benefits — this paltry $339 a month is the difference between life and death. But budgets must be balanced and poor people are not a powerful constituency. The machine rolls on.

Here in Seattle, the many homeless who sleep in public — outside of the at-capacity emergency shelter system — are subject to arrest and the seizure and destruction of their property. This has been happening for more than a year and it’s no longer news, but we see it everyday. People who are barely hanging on come into Real Change out of the cold and tell us their gear has been thrown away, again.

Why? They live with the misfortune of having to be somewhere in a city that has administratively legislated that somewhere out of existence.

We are on a very ugly trajectory. The poor haven’t just been abandoned. That was the eighties and nineties. Now, we’re being ground into the dirt.


Up From the Grassroots

And yet, November brought us hope. Things won’t be easy, but there is a political mandate for a new direction. These are hard, hard times, but for the first time in decades, real change is possible.

And not a moment too soon. Inequality in America has grown for three decades to stratospheric highs and unimaginably abysmal lows.

Change is possible, but only if we make it happen.

Over the past century, we have seen movements for economic justice win gains for both the poor and the broad middle class. None of this came easily. The labor movement and the civil rights movement paid for their gains in blood. Progress was made against poverty over the sixties and seventies when the demand was forcefully made. Without protest politics, there are no real gains.

Economic justice rarely happens just because it’s the right thing to do. Economic justice is a matter of power, and it happens when movements form out of necessity; when the pressures in people’s lives build to the breaking point and need for change is so great that the movements they create force concessions from entrenched power and money.

This winter, we face economic crisis on the national level and budget deficits at all local levels of government. If we let them, these budgets will be balanced on the backs of those hurting most: single moms with kids, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, the sick, the addicted.

Change is coming, but it’s not here yet. The stakes are high, and we need your help. Real Change has raised $114,498 toward our goal since November 1 of this year, and we have just three more weeks to raise the rest.


Two Campaigns, One Problem

The problem, simply put, is that inequality in America has become so extreme that the bottom has fallen out of sight. Beyond Seattle’s 5,800 emergency and transitional shelter beds that were available this year, there were at least another 2,300 people who, more or less invisibly, slept outside.

Beyond the official unemployment statistics, which are worse than they’ve been in decades, are the “discouraged” workers who have stopped looking and dropped off the charts. And behind these are those who have been fodder for the more than five-fold increase in incarceration since 1980 — the poor, the black, the brown — an increase that has placed one in ninety-nine Americans behind bars and left an African-American male high school dropout with a two in three chance of being imprisoned by the age of thirty-five. Seattle’s high school graduation rate for African Americans is a mere 52%.

Racial disproportionality in incarceration on this scale leads to the further impoverishment of economically disadvantaged communities. The 2008 homeless One Night Count documents that 58 percent of homeless people in King County are persons of color. Countywide, people of color make up less than 25 percent of the general population. Although Blacks make up just five percent of county residents, they make up 40 percent of King County’s homeless. This number is up four percent from just two years prior.

As inequality widens and urban living becomes the lifestyle choice of the affluent, visible poverty is criminalized. Begging, sitting, lying, sleeping, and even serving free food in public have all been outlawed. City after city has passed laws to drive the unsightly poor out of town and out of sight. When they don’t go, they accumulate citations. These citations are often ignored out of fear and inability to cope, and these become warrants. The warrants turn into jail time.

Eventually, the jails fill and you need more of them. They’re not cheap. The one the Mayor wants will cost $210 million to build and another $19 million annually to operate. Money that could be used to rebuild lives will instead deepen the cycle of poverty for the most disadvantaged in our society

Seattle’s new jail is an expensive commitment to the structural racism that will surely deepen poverty in disadvantaged communities. There are alternatives — but none will happen without a strong and unified struggle for a better way forward.

Real Change is engaged in two related campaigns to defend those who have the least. Since we uncovered the Mayor’s secret homeless sweeps last year, we have been the leading voice for better survival solutions in Seattle. This December 16, our City Hall Campout and Survival Gear Give-away will mark our fourth overnight protest encampment in one year. We’ve mobilized large numbers of people for public hearings, documented consistent violations of the city’s own policy, and backed the Nickelsville survival encampment that has gained the strong support of Seattle’s faith community.

Our No New Jail Campaign has challenged the Mayor’s assertion of inevitability, and elevated the jail issue from a NIMBY-based discussion of site alternatives to a community-wide debate over the role of incarceration in perpetuating race-based inequality. We are organizing a broad-based and powerful coalition to take action on this issue, and will hold a large public forum on the new jail this January.

Real Change is caught between two challenges. On the one hand, we provide a valuable direct service in a time of rising need. On the other, we have a responsibility to push hard for structural change. Both take resources. Real Change needs the capacity to not have to choose one or the other.

Please support the Winter Fund Drive. Our broad and growing base of grassroots support gives us the freedom and clout to play an uncompromised and leading role in demanding the change we all need. Mail your gift to Real Change, 2129 2nd Ave., Seattle, WA 98121, or visit our website at realchangenews.org to make a secure on-line donation. We’re in this together, and we’re playing to win.

A Socialist Perspective on the New City Jail.

Elliot Stoller was videotaping last night when I spoke at the NW Socialists Conference on the city's new jail. Now I know what I look like. You can send an email to City Council supporting a proviso in the City's bond issue to fund the jail siting process that would direct the City to explore alternatives to the jail before being allowed spend the majority of the money they intend to allocate for this process. There is a hearing this Friday in Council Chambers at 9:30 am, and your testimony on this issue is needed.

The Listening Campaign

It’s November. The wet, rainy season is here, and the business of survival for Seattle’s homeless has become that much more grim. November also marks the beginning of the Real Change winter fund drive. We’ve set an ambitious goal of raising $180,000 by the end of December. It’s a lot of money, but we have a lot of friends.

This has been a year of intense activism at Real Change. We’ve seen the level of desperation on the streets rise dramatically. We’ve taken risks and pushed ourselves to nearly the breaking point. We’ve fought hard to defend those who survive outside of Seattle’s over-capacity emergency shelter system against the Mayor’s brutal policy of homeless sweeps. We’ve built alliances across issues, linking Seattle’s new jail to homelessness, growing inequality, poverty, and race.

We’ve taken strong stands, and we’ve made a few enemies, but we’ve made a lot more friends. This month, for example, we were honored by Jobs with Justice for our work in "leading the movement for social justice." The winter fund drive is an opportunity to learn from you. How can we deepen our grassroots support and be even more effective? How can we broaden our allies?

Is our organizing, our newspaper, and the caring community that we help create worth your support? What would make it better?


A Brief Parable

Last week, a number of us here at Real Change went to court to deal with last June’s Civil Disobedience demonstration at City Hall. There was an overnight encampment to protest the Mayor’s homeless sweeps policy — our third in nine months — followed by fifteen homeless people and advocates going into the street.

The event was a media grand slam, and marked a decided turning point in press coverage of the issue. Three months later, we received our sentences of 24-hours community service.

When Rev. Liljenstolpe, one of the fifteen arrested, spoke to the city employee who handles such things, he explained how we’d been allowed to choose any non-profit we wanted, except for Real Change.

“Oh, Real Change,” she said without irony. “They’re bad.” How so, he asked?

“They do a lot more than they say they do.”


Building for Power

Real Change has always been an activist organization. Our mission is to provide opportunity and a voice to low-income people while taking action to end poverty and homelessness. Over the past year, however, the stakes have been higher, and the organizing has been different.

The Real Change Organizing Project, launched in November of last year, leverages our strongest assets — our vendors and readers and our institutional capacity to engage and mobilize — into a valuable resource for economic justice organizing.

We agree with the Mayor on one thing: no one should have to live in a tent. Yet, the shelters are full, and everyone knows it. Affordable housing has grown increasingly scarce, the economy is tanking, and those at the bottom — those who will seldom find work and even then only at a poverty wage — have been relegated to a distant, invisible netherworld of misery and pain.

We have organized relentlessly. While Seattle has hurtled down the path of growing inequality, we have defended those who have nothing. We understand that the growing economic vulnerability of the middle class and the abandonment of the poor are, at bottom, the same issue.


Making the Connections

In a time of declining economic opportunity, our newly launched No New Jail campaign makes the links between the disproportionality of people of color in our homeless shelters and prisons and the growing trend toward the criminalization of the poor.

The $220 million the city plans to spend on the construction of a new jail, and the $19 million or more that will be spent to operate this facility, is better spent upstream on programs that rebuild lives. According to the Department of Justice’s own statistics, one in ninety-nine Americans is already behind bars.

We don’t see these people. They are the wreckage of a system that abandons and punishes its most vulnerable and least privileged, and relegates them to lives of reduced economic opportunity.

The No New Jail campaign builds an economic justice movement across race and class. We recognize that homelessness, incarceration, reduced economic opportunity, declining social services, and the growing racialization of poverty are all linked. When the Mayor criminalizes outdoor survival, cuts programs that offer support to those most at risk, and says a new jail for misdemeanor criminals is inevitable, we clearly see the connections.

We envision a movement for economic justice that places the needs of the most vulnerable at the center and builds for power based on mutual self-interest. None of Seattle’s neighborhoods wants a new jail. We understand that increased incarceration is and expensive and ineffective solution to the problems in our streets. There is a better way forward.


We’re Listening

We believe that those of us who work for economic and racial justice can unite with the Seattle neighborhoods to elevate this issue and force the city to consider more enlightened alternatives.

Over the next year, here’s what you can expect from Real Change:

• We will continue to aggressively fight the Mayor’s cruel policy of homeless sweeps, and demand that the city provide real alternatives to outdoor survival.
• We will build and support a movement for economic justice by engaging new activists, cultivating allies, and building relationships based upon our mutual self-interest.
• We will make the links between declining economic opportunity, the racialization of poverty, reduced social services, and increased incarceration.
• We will help meet the survival needs of Seattle’s most vulnerable by providing opportunity to more than 350 Real Change vendors each month.
• We will engage those vendors and their customers in the important work of building a united movement for economic and racial justice.

The work is happening. We need your support, and we want to know how we can be more effective. Over the two months of our winter fund drive, my first priority as Real Change Executive Director is to hear from you. Our grassroots base of readers, vendors, and other allies is our life’s blood. We need to know what you think.

Call me at 441-3247 x202. We can talk on the phone, or if you’d rather, meet in person. Email me at director@realchangenews.org with your ideas and feedback. Go to realchangeorganizingproject.blogspot.com to find out when our next meeting is and come see our work for yourself.

Real Change needs three things to be at our most effective over 2009: an effective strategy, the resources to organize, and a whole lot of friends. All of this depends on you. Real Change is an enormous asset in the fight for economic justice. Help us make the most of what we have.

It’s not to late to join Real Change and Sherman Alexie for breakfast this November 12th at the UW Husky Ballroom. Tickets are $50. Help us make this event the show of grassroots support that we need. Email development@realchangenews.org for details.

Dharmonic Convergence

While I’m not usually given to seeing political events through a mystical lens, I’m thinking the convergence of circumstances surrounding this week’s Nickelsville encampment can only be attributed to a perfect alignment of the stars. We’re just not clever or powerful enough to plan this one.

The encampment, named to recall the Hoovervilles of the thirties, happened to occur the same week of a proposed financial industry bailout that, combined with other recent Hail Mary maneuvers to rescue the economy, may run to over a trillion dollars. The coming depression has led to lowered revenue projections at all levels of government that will put already tenuous human service programs at great risk during the upcoming budget session.

The land upon which Nickelsville sits is one of the four sites proposed by the city for a new 7-acre jail facility. While Real Change is building a No New Jail campaign to challenge the idea that more cops, more arrests of people who are poor and disproportionately black, and ever-expanding numbers of those behind bars is an effective or moral use of resources, the siting of Nickelsville on the Marginal Way land parcel was a happy accident. For security reasons, we didn’t know where the site would be until an hour before we arrived at 4 am Monday morning.

Last night, the Highland Park Action Committee voted to support the encampment until other use can be found for the land.

The Mayor has chosen to pretend that this survival effort — organized by a loose but potent grouping of homeless people and advocates — is just another homeless encampment to be posted for clearance and dismantled in three days. Nickelsville is much more than that. It’s a sign of the times.

God-ray photo by Revel.

Fear The Poor

The trend toward criminalizing the poor has recently picked up momentum in Seattle, and we should all be very concerned.

Seattle’s support for the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness — which holds that housing is the answer, and any new shelter is a step backwards — is routinely held up to justify the criminalization of survival. The city’s homeless sweeps, which label all homeless campers with the lowest common denominator assumption of criminality and addiction, have aggressively targeted those who resist Seattle’s overcrowded shelter system.

2,631 people were counted outside a past-capacity shelter system last January. 35 new beds have been added to offset the removal of public sleeping options at night. Most campers will remain outside of Seattle’s overcrowded shelters, chased from sweep to sweep until they are ticketed, fined, and bench warranted into jail or out of town.

Seattle Councilmember Tim Burgess has recently released a new plan to attack “social disorder” through more aggressive policing. Seattle, by the standards of any major urban area, is not a threatening city. In fact, crime rates are down. This is Seattle’s newest iteration of Giuliani’s broken windows theory, which defines the urban poor as indicators of social decay and treats them accordingly.

Tim recently had the unfortunate experience of witnessing a crack deal in Belltown at 7 am.

Last Friday morning I stopped at First Avenue and Battery Street (Belltown neighborhood) to drop off my laundry. It was just after 7 a.m. A group of eight people - six men and two women - were standing near the door of the laundry.

One man had wads of cash in both hands. He was dickering with one of the women over price. She protested, "too much," and "more than last time." Here was an open-air drug market, unfortunately a less than desired yet frequent example of commerce in our city.

You know, if you think it sucks having to deal with crack addicts while dropping off your laundry, try being a crack addict. Having worked in Belltown for fourteen years, I've learned that the crackheads that roam the streets in packs until around 7:30 rarely notice civilians. They exist in a world apart, usually typified by desperate poverty, a near complete absence of opportunity, soul-devastating addiction, and a truly shitty circle of friends. Unless you're part of their world, you can pass through large groups of them like a ghost. If you're not of their crowd, you don't exist. It's like being on the Borg ship before one is noticed.

Blogging Georgetown analyzes Burgess' Safe Cities Initiative and concludes that the new council member is using the language of fear to expand police power, primarily that which targets the poor. Being the self-involved sort of guy I am, when I read something like this, I go, "Damn. I wish I'd written that."

On a related topic, the Mayor wants a new jail for misdimeanants, at a cost of $110 million to build and about $19 million to operate. Never mind that upstream alternatives to incarceration have reduced the jail population by thirty-eight percent. The City seems to anticipate a crime wave, and I doubt it has to do with the DUIs and domestic violence perps they keep talking about.

One in ninety-nine Americans are behind bars. Most of them are poor. This fact is still invisible to many of us, but at the rate we’re going, it won’t stay that way for long. Now there's something to be afraid of.

Question Inevitability

Over the past two decades, the nation’s prison population has more than doubled. According to a recent Pew Center report on incarceration, one in ninety-nine Americans is behind bars. This is 30 percent more people per capita than in China, our closest rival for the title of gulag state. The closer one looks, the uglier it gets. One in thirty men between age 20 and 34 are imprisoned. For African-Americans, the number rises to one in nine.

While Washington State incarceration rates over 1960-1980 remained largely even, since 1980, they have more than doubled. Over the last two decades, county jail incarceration rate grew across Washington by 184%. Similar trends have occurred across the nation.

The good news is that King County has bucked that trend. While U.S. incarceration rates rose more than 25% since 1995, the numbers here have remained roughly the same. Numbers in Seattle Municipal Jail have dropped by 38 percent over the past decade, even as overall population rose by eight percent.

This Seattle/King County success story is a direct result of programs like mental health and drug diversion court and housing vouchers for released prisoners, which have reduced recidivism by 30 to 40 percent.

As a result, the county jail system has roughly 1,500 beds to spare. A continued focus on upstream alternatives to local incarceration — recently expanded with the passage of the Veterans and Human Services Levy — are likely to continue this enlightened trend.

So, why is the City of Seattle hell-bent on building a new jail?

Four neighborhoods have been selected as potential sites for a sprawling 7-acre facility that will cost an estimated $110 million to build and about $19 million annually to operate.

Community meetings have drawn large and angry crowds of potential neighbors. While a unified position has begun to emerge that favors a downtown high-rise facility on city-owned land, most would settle for Anywhere But Here.

Few, however, have argued that no jail should be built at all.


The City is Lying

The proposed city jail is a response to 1999 King County projections that county capacity to house misdemeanor criminals would end in 2012. These projections have not held. By 2008, we were supposed to have 3,800 inmates. The April average was just 2,380. Things have changed.

And yet, the City of Seattle says a new jail is inevitable. Plans have been in motion for nearly a decade. Institutional momentum exists. Big contracts are involved. Jobs are at stake. Budgets will expand. They say we have no choice.

They’re lying.

The city’s talking points are transparently false. While the city concedes that numbers of people in jail are decreasing, city policy analyst Catherine Cornwall says the new facility is needed because “we’ll never get that number down to zero.”

Zero? Why zero? Because, says the official City of Seattle website, the “nonrenewable contract” with King County lapses in 2012, leaving Seattle without a single misdemeanant jail bed.

So, without a new jail, the city implies, we’ll have to release domestic violence perpetrators, drunk drivers, and homeless people charged under the City’s newly tightened public property trespass laws to the street. We’re looking at chaos here.

Again, they’re lying. And apparently they think we’re stupid. The County Council unanimously voted on June 30 to extend current contract terms to 2014 as a first step to renegotiating a regional solution to incarceration.


Homelessness, Race, and Politics

One would think, given that the Committee to End Homelessness in King County's own Color of Homelessness report documents the links between rising incarceration rates, the racialization of poverty, and the disproportionality of people of color among those who are homeless, that CEHKC might have something to say on this issue.

One would be wrong. Both County Executive Ron Sims and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels are on the CEHKC governing board. Despite the clear links to the issue of homelessness, CEHKC is politically hamstrung and — as is the case on the city’s policy of homeless sweeps — likely to remain silent.

The report discusses the overrepresentation of people of color in the criminal justice system, and how the absence of services, onerous restitution laws, and discrimination against ex-offenders creates a difficult downward spiral, especially for those who are Black, brown, red, and poor.

The 2008 homeless One Night Count documents that 58 percent of homeless people in King County are persons of color. Countywide, people of color make up less than 25 percent of the general population. Although Blacks make up just five percent of county residents, they make up 40 percent of King County’s homeless. This number is up four percent from just two years ago.

Bruce Western, a leading researcher on the links between incarceration and poverty, describes the downward cycle that prevails in economically devastated communities of color. High incarceration rates lead to reduced wage and employment opportunity. These reduced prospects can often lead to crime, which leads back to incarceration.

Drugs, which offer oblivion and economic opportunity in one convenient package, become very tempting. Drug felons — who have fed the prison boom that began in 1980 and are disproportionately people of color — are subject to a lifetime bar from public housing, education assistance, TANF, food stamps, and veteran’s benefits.

Is it any wonder that people become homeless?

There is a Choice

Seattle’s decision to build a new jail assumes that the numbers of those in jail and prison will continue to grow, just as they have for nearly three decades. Scarce resources will be diverted from the positive business of rebuilding lives to the dead-end logic of ever-expanding incarceration. King County has shown us that there is another way.

For some reason, progressives have largely failed to recognize that Seattle’s jail expansion is an economic justice issue. Homeless advocates have failed to recognize that the facts that exist in their reports also exist in the real world. Even Seattle’s small handful of anti-prison activists seems to be asleep on this one.

The City of Seattle wants a new jail. They say it’s inevitable. It’s not. The only question is whether poor people matter enough for us to care.

Jails Aren't The Answer, But Where's CEHKC?

Last Saturday morning, I drove my tired ass out to North Seattle Community College to see the City's new jail dog and pony show. This would be the facility that King County says we no longer need, and that Seattle, out of sheer institutional momentum, will force upon the neighborhoods anyway.

I sat at a table next to some guy who looked maybe twenty-five who'd just bought a house near the proposed site. "I want to participate in the civic dialogue," he said, "and understand how these decisions are made."

"Cool," I said. "Let me simplify the process for you. The ... City ... doesn't ... care ... what ... you ... think." I don't think he believed me. He'll learn.

Back in 1999, King County projected that limited jail capacity would necessitate cities having their own facilities for misdemeanor criminals. Planning has been underway for a Seattle jail ever since. Four neighborhoods have arrived as finalists for the $110 million facility that would cost around $19 million annually to run, and, hold your breath: nobody wants it.

Now, however, the county says they were wrong. There's plenty of capacity. Among the primary reasons are jail diversion courts, work release, and housing programs that cut recidivism. The chart below, posted in The Stranger's SLOG as overflow from an excellent piece on this by Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, shows the radical decrease of the actual jail population in relation to former projections.



Things are working, but are in serious danger of moving backwards. Spangenthal-Lee writes:

As it turns out, King County's 1999 study was flat-out wrong about its projected inmate population. Neither KCJ nor RJC are operating anywhere close to capacity. By now, the county was supposed to have roughly 2,600 inmates. Instead, the county has about 2,200 and, if operating at maximum capacity—which would require an expansion at RJC—room for nearly 1,500 more between its two facilities.

According to Major William Hayes, a spokesman for KCJ, the county's projections for its jail populations have changed drastically in the last decade because of diversion programs such as drug court and work release. "We could handle quite a few more [inmates]... if we needed to," says Hayes, who adds that he's never seen a jail reach capacity in the 24 years he's been with the county.

On the other hand, several other factors could mean King County does need a new jail sooner rather than later. Because of a $68 million county budget deficit, drug court and mental-health court could soon disappear, as could the county's homeless inmate housing-voucher program, which has reportedly reduced recidivism rates between 30 and 40 percent. The loss of both programs could lead to a spike in the prison population.

And yet, no one cares. The assumption seems to be that prison populations will rise forever. According to a report from the Washington State Institute on Public Policy. Washington State incarceration rates over 1960-1980 remained largely even. Since 1980, they have more than doubled. The county jail incarceration rate grew by 184%. Similar trends have occurred across the nation. We just love, love, love, locking people up.

So much so that programs that actually work to reduce the prison population and cut costly incarceration expenses are first on the chopping block when times get tough.

The City handily dismisses all of this by deploying their favorite tactic: the straw man. Despite the fact that the city's jail population has dropped by 38% over the last decade while overall population has risen by 8%, they say, we still need a new jail. Why? Because, as City policy analyst Catherine Cornwall stated at Saturday's North Seattle forum, while diversion works "we still can't get it down to zero."

Zero? That seems a rather unrealistic goal. Why zero?

Well, because, "at this moment, no county jail beds will be available for misdemeanants by 2012." This is true, I suppose, if the county were still saying this, but they're not. They're saying the capacity is there. The City is lying. They cherry pick their facts to pretend the new jail is inevitable when nothing of the sort is true.

One would think, given that the Committee to End Homelessness in King County's own Color of Homelessness report documents the link between rising incarceration rates, the racialization of poverty, and the disproportionality of people of color among those who are homeless, that CEHKC might have something to say on this issue. One would be wrong.

The report discusses the overrepresentation of people of color in the criminal justice system, and how the absence of services, onerous restitution laws, and discrimination against ex-offenders creates a difficult downward spiral for those who are black, brown, red, and poor.

With over two million persons in prison, the United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. While some might think that the reasons for such a massive prison population stem from a need to control crime and violence, no clear relationship is present between these matters. Instead, much of the growth in the U.S. prison population over the last three decades is due to the use of mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes. For instance, between 1980 and 1999 the number of state prisoners incarcerated for drug crimes increased twelve fold from 19,000 to 251,200 inmates. With respect to federal prisons this percentage increase was fourteen fold during this time period. Due to a multitude of factors, persons of color have suffered the brunt of this buildup in the U.S. prison population. For instance, over half of all persons in prison and/or jail are Black.
Also, one out of three Black men is currently under some form of correctional supervision (in jail, prison, or under parole).

With respect to other persons of color racial groups, the situation is equally disturbing. For instance, Latinos are twice as likely as Whites to be incarcerated. In addition, together with Blacks they make up 80% of all state prisoners sentenced for drug crimes.

Although Native Americans represent less than two percent of all state prisoners, due to their small population size they make up the largest prison population per capita in the U.S. Primarily assumed to be a problem that affects men of color, women of color are also becoming increasingly represented within the correctional system. For instance, women of color make up two-thirds of all women in jails and State and Federal prisons and comprise the fastest growing segment of the U.S. prison population.

So, let's think a tiny bit out of the box here. Instead of just building more and more prisons and jails, as if this were some completely inevitable law of nature, why don't we instead fix the racist fucking drug laws and support programs that work? If that seems too crazy to contemplate, here's another idea.

The Urban Institute has a new report coming out that applies the logic of Housing First to the problem of recidivism, growing prison populations, and the resource drain this represents as incarceration takes an ever-increasing share of local budgets. Providing housing to those who often inappropriately wind up in jails, they point out, makes fiscal sense and reserves jail capacity for those who actually pose a real threat to society.

A 2006 report by the Urban Institute for the Philadelphia prison system found that nearly four out of five prison releases from 1996 through 2003 were re-releases. Seventy percent of prisoners released in 2003 had "been there, done that" in the previous eight years, and about one in every five prisoners released were coming out for the second, third, even fourth time. If the city can identify the oft-imprisoned and provide services to assist their return to the community, the city will save money and otherwise wasted lives.

Some cities are finding that concentrating on cutting the number who frequent jail and use other services can slow the revolving door, cutting the jail population and saving millions.

In New York, where researchers compared those in homeless shelters with those in jail, at least 900 people had been in jail four or more times and in shelters that many times over a five-year period ending in 2006. Early results from a city initiative to place these high-cost nomads in permanent supportive housing halved their jail stays. In Seattle, 125 mentally ill people who bounced in and out of jail and averaged 21 emergency-room visits a year cost taxpayers more than $3.2 million in hospital bills alone.

Corrections systems may balk at spending money for community-based pre-release programs. But it's just too expensive to define public safety narrowly. Given economic pressures to cut the jail population and political pressures to improve public safety, the choice is between which approach to programs aimed at frequent users is best, not whether to launch or expand them.

So, where the hell is CEHKC in this issue? The same place they are on the homeless sweeps: stone silent with their heads in the sand. It's not hard to see why. Both King County Executive Ron Sims and Seattle Mayor Nickels sit on their Governing Board. These two are at odds on the jail issue, and, once again, CEHKC has a fatal institutional conflict on a problem that radically affects homeless people.

Where we need leadership, what we get from CEHKC is hamstrung, unimaginative, brain-dead bureaucracy that sells out the poor and homeless in the name of preserving relationships among the high and mighty. Poor people deserve better, and the people of Seattle deserve better.