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.

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).

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.

Going Down With No Backbone

The thing we've been waiting for is happening. As Seattle City Council prepares for the delivery of Mayor Nickels' big fat gift to for-profit housing developers in the form of an expansion of the Multi-Family Tax Exemption, the economy is contracting, and with it, the capacity to deliver the services that are most needed when budgets go south. This morning's Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports a projected $70 million shortfall on the King County side.

County Executive Ron Sims has asked department directors to prepare 2009 budget proposals that would cut spending by 8.6 percent from a sustaining level of services to close that gap.

In response, several elected officials from the county's criminal justice agencies -- Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, Sheriff Sue Rahr and judges of the district and superior courts -- called a joint news conference June 5 to sound the theme of "Public Safety in Peril," making alarming predictions about the effects of the proposed cuts. The criminal justice agencies' budgets, which account for 70 percent of the $650 million general services total this year, are presented by Sims to the County Council for approval -- but Satterberg, a Republican, and Rahr and the judges, who run as nonpartisan candidates, are independently elected and operate from their own power bases apart from Sims, a Seattle Democrat who is the county's highest-ranking elected official.

The article goes on to describe how the budget process will, despite denials on both sides, become politicized by the upcoming race for the King County Executive position. The Public Safety in Peril frame offers a taste of what is to come. As the criminal justice system eats the county budget alive, a new downtown jail is proposed at a cost of $110 million for construction and $19 million annually to operate. It doesn't take a Norm Stamper to see that this is the wrong direction, and we can count on the politics of fear to drive at least one side of this debate.

Meanwhile, the State picture is looking equally grim. The Washington State Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that, in the face of a projected $2 billion deficit, the legislature needs to look more realistically to the revenue side of the picture to sustain current levels of services. Even these, as anyone who understands how broken things are will sadly confirm, are nowhere near adequate to the need.

The continuing projection of a significant deficit is a matter of public concern and a deliberate conversation about how to close the gap should begin in earnest. It is important to note, the problem is not one of spending; current budget figures are largely in line with past budgets as a share of the economy (see figure above). Instead, changes to our revenue structure must be part of the discussion.

Earth to Olympia: Grow some fucking balls and start taxing the rich. Race to the bottom corporate welfare and weak-kneed anti-taxation policies that favor the most affluent are an unsustainable politics.

Washington State is far from alone in this. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that 29 states face a total shortfall of at least $48 billion for 2009. As Washington State isn't even on their list, this projection surely underestimates the scope of the crisis. While there's an excellent discussion of the complexities of various alternatives at their website, I'll put it in layman's terms: We're screwed, and we're going down, big time.

Looking at the Seattle picture, I'm reminded of a line from Joan Baez' anthem to an asshole:

You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague

Meaning this: Seattle, like everywhere else, is heading toward ugly recession, but recent Office of Finance analyses project mostly blue skies. The June Economic Update admits only to this:

Sales, B&O, and REET taxes are particularly sensitive to recessions (see table) as they are good representations of economic activity. Inflation adjusted sales tax receipts declined on average 6.5% in the first year of the last four recessions. B&O receipts suffered similar fates. If we are in recession the NBER likely won’t identify it until late summer. By then Seattle’s tax receipts should provide some guidance as to where we are and where we’re going.

Meanwhile, if anyone's driving, they're not saying. Compared to last April's economic report to the City Council, which projects a mere 30% probability of recession, this most tentative of admissions to bad news comes 0ff as downright alarmist. But even this, if one scrolls all the way to the last line, foretells budget cuts to come.

So, why are we giving tax breaks away to rich developers so they can create housing at prices that exceed what the market already delivers without the aid of public subsidy? Getting re-elected takes money I guess. Especially when one lacks a backbone.

Lock 'Em Up And Throw Away The Key

This morning I dealt with incarceration and homelessness in my class at UW. The statistics seem too bizarre to be real. One in ninety-nine Americans is behind bars. A Black male high school drop out has a two-in-three chance of being incarcerated by age thirty-five. For white drop outs the rates are around one-in-ten. What is spent on prisons dwarfs the budget for education and other forms of social support.

From 1980 to 1999 state prisoners incarcerated for drug related offenses increased twelve-fold. Federal drug war prisoners went up fourteen fold. In major cities such as LA and San Fransisco the homeless population is 30-50% formerly incarcerated. A prison boom that began in the seventies increased incarceration rates that had remained mostly steady for five decades seven-fold. Fully half of those in prison are Black. In Washington State, Blacks are 3.2% of the general population, but 19.4% of the prison population. Latinos and Native Americans are also disproportionately imprisoned.

Today's paper discussed the great need for a new misdemeanor jail facility in this area by 2012. A 440-bed jail will cost $110 million to build and $18.4 million a year to maintain. That, for you math buffs, is $114.57 per bed night. We keep building and filling these things.

We've been talking about Peter Marcuse's idea that what's different about this period of homelessness is that, due to globalization, most of the people who have been written off in our economy will never be needed again. This, he says, is why federal support for poor people's housing and benefits is so pathetic and dwindling still. When government and industry believe that the unemployed will again be absorbed into the labor market, they are maintained. If not, they are thrown to the wolves.

The restructuring of the economy that has taken place since the seventies, he says, has altered power relations. A huge reservoir of unskilled workers and long-term unemployed ensures that low-wage work remains low-wage. There is a decline in the bargaining power of the civil sector while the power of elites grows. One result is ever widening gaps in inequality.

One of the things that I point out is that the explosion in incarceration rates parallels the modern advent of mass homelessness. They both have their roots in the economic restructuring that took place under globalization. Both started at around the same time and increased at similar trajectories. Both are solutions to the problem of how to contain and even profit from those who are surplus to the workings of capitalism.

Harvard researcher Bruce Western has focused his work on the relationship between incarceration and inequality. Western finds that incarceration lowers ones earning potential by 16% and deflates rates of wage growth by 39%. Due to the disproportionate numbers of blacks incarcerated through the drug war, this has deepened the racialization of poverty by creating a downward spiral of incarceration and reduced economic opportunity. And it's a widening net. Women of color are the fastest growing segment of the prison population.

The Black middle class, however, remains largely untouched by the drug war. This has driven a wedge through the Black community, with those who have the least opportunity being criminalized and those who have the most largely not caring.

I asked my students to speculate on why so many restrictions and barriers are aimed at those convicted of drug offenses. These are restrictions that murderers and rapists don't have. A lifetime ban of TANF, federal student aid, food stamps, veterans benefits and public housing. None of them had developed enough awareness of the nature of evil to go there.

This is about ensuring that a whole class of throw-away people never attain the means to get back up. Or vote.

So long as urban and rural areas with high concentrations of unskilled workers and devastated economies continue to exist, so will the drug trade, which offers both oblivion and economic opportunity in one convenient package. And so long as there are politicians willing to peddle racism and fear as a thirst for law and order, we'll keep packing them off to prison.

The Big Squeeze

Help Us Build a Strong Movement
for Economic Justice in Seattle and Beyond
Since 1973, income disparity in America has steadily grown. The homelessness that began in the seventies and exploded into crisis over the next decade has become a fixture of our economic and civic lives. Over this period, the majority of us have experienced increased economic vulnerability.

Private charity and local government alone are poorly equipped to fix a system that consistently produces greater levels of inequality. Real solutions to economic injustice require us to build alliances across our differences and organize for power.

America has a growing poverty class that is characterized by vulnerability to housing loss. For many, access to this most basic of human needs is out of reach entirely. Recent federal funding priorities have shifted resources away from family and rural homelessness to address the problem of the “chronically homeless,” a population that represents approximately ten percent of those who lack housing. These priorities deflect attention from issues of poverty and inequality by presenting homelessness as mostly a problem of individual dysfunction, as opposed to being the result of deliberate policy decisions that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the majority.

Meanwhile, income and wealth disparity have returned to pre-1930s levels, with wealth inequality leading the way. As government has become more beholden to the corporate interests that operate within a globalized economy, the fortunes of all but the most affluent twenty percent have largely declined.

The richest one percent — who now enjoy one-hundred-ninety times the wealth of the median American household — have done best of all. One in one hundred households hold an average of $14.8 million in assets, while median family wealth stands at just $82,000.

Working and middle class people have been hit hard. As wealth in the United States transfers upward, the very commodities that offer a toehold in the American Dream — healthcare, housing, and quality education — have risen most dramatically in cost.

Low-income people of color have been hit hardest of all. Infant mortality rates and unemployment disparity in minority communities are again on the rise after years of improvement. Incarceration trends that disproportionately target African-Americans have led to reduced economic opportunities and a deepening racialization of poverty. People of color have long been disproportionately at risk of homelessness.

While payday and sub-prime lenders prey upon the most vulnerable, debt is an experience that most of us share. More than fifty million Americans have negative assets. In other words, many of us now owe more than we own.

We are working more jobs and longer hours, and the margin for error has become increasingly thin. While most of us will not become homeless, many will come close.

Homelessness, heightened inequality, and ever-deepening debt are not the inevitable by-product of blind market forces. As corporate interests have largely captured the democratic process, our money-driven politics have ceased to serve the common good.

The divisions that exist within the national economy are easily seen in the new Seattle downtown. Within just a few blocks — near Pike Place Market, Benaroya Hall, and the newly expanded Seattle Art Museum — four luxury towers will add 505 new condos with an average value of $2.2 million each.

As the cost of housing in Seattle and our City’s median income grow further apart, homelessness and economic vulnerability have increased.

A home in Seattle now costs nearly eight times the Seattle median income. This ratio has widened by thirty-nine percent since 2000. Average rent rose by more than ten percent last year to reach an all time high of $1,052.

Rental vacancies are below three percent. Those who have poor credit or other problems are often unable to compete for scarce affordable market-rate apartments. Waiting lists for Seattle’s 20,800 subsidized units — a number that includes federally supported Section 8 housing vouchers — are typically one to three years long.

The new popularity of urban living can be seen in the proliferation of construction cranes throughout the downtown. Forty-nine new condo projects are scheduled for completion in this area by 2010. Drawn by the cultural amenities of the city and the attractions of a short commute, 23,000 people have moved to Seattle since 2000. Condo conversion alone has led to the loss of nearly 5,000 rental units in the past three years. More than two thirds of these were affordable to those at eighty percent of median income or below.

Despite the construction boom, Seattle leads the Puget Sound region in work that doesn’t pay. One in four people in our city earn less than a living wage. This has been defined as pay that “allows families to meet their basic needs, without public assistance, and that provides them some ability to deal with emergencies and plan ahead.” For King County, this has been calculated at $28 an hour for a family of three with a single wage earner, or $12 an hour for a single adult.

Local growth in high wage jobs such as computer programmer or software engineer are more than matched by an expanding low wage sector of clerks, janitors, and sales personnel. Nearly seventy percent of the 240,000 jobs added in Washington State between 2002 and 2006 paid below eighty percent of median income.

Given the failure of wages to keep pace with the cost of housing, it is not surprising to find homelessness on the rise. The 2008 street homeless One Night Count, organized by the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, found 2,631 people surviving outside of an overcrowded system of shelter and transitional housing. This represents a 15% countywide increase over the previous year. A comparison of areas counted in Seattle this year and last yields a sobering 18% increase in street homelessness.

As the demographics of urban living have shifted toward those who can afford it, extreme poverty has become increasingly criminalized. Expanded anti-panhandling legislation, bans on public feeding, a rise in private security forces hired by and accountable to downtown interests, prohibitions on car camping, and sweeps of homeless campsites are all typical strategies to reduce visible homelessness in cities across America.

Despite the clear evidence that the basic survival needs of Seattle’s homeless are not being met, the City has recently defined all camping and storage of personal items on public property as “unauthorized” and illegal. A policy of general tolerance — with campsite clearances triggered by a pattern of neighborhood complaints — has given way to regularly scheduled sweeps of known encampments.

These new policies criminalize survival while offering little to no real assistance to those who are displaced. No Trespass citations bar campers from public property and result in criminal charges when violated. Clearance crews are directed to immediately dispose of all survival gear — tarps, sleeping bags, blankets, and tents — that remain in areas where 48-hour clearance notices are posted.

This has little or nothing to do with Seattle’s commitment to ending homelessness, and merely deepens the misery of those who have the least.

A Seattle economic justice agenda must promote housing affordability and economic opportunity while recognizing the right of homeless people not just to survive, but also to secure the help they desperately need.

Homelessness is the extreme end of a growing continuum of economic vulnerability. It is in our mutual self-interest to protect those who suffer most while we work together to restore economic democracy.

Download the Real Change 2007 Annual Report here. The photo of the Fifteen Twenty-One ("designed exclusively for the confident few") over on Second Ave where the Green Tortoise used to be is Revel Smith

Sources:
The Race for Wages: Livable Wage Jobs in the Current Economy, Northwest Federation of Community Organizations. December, 2007
A Dream Denied: The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities, National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. January 2006.
Skills Required: Preparing Puget Sound for Tomorrow’s Middle Wage Jobs, Seattle Jobs Initiative. March, 2008
The State of Working America 2006/2007, Economic Policy Institute (www.epi.org)
The Squandering of America, Robert Kuttner, Knopf, 2008.
Locked Out, a web only American Prospect interview with Bruce Western, author of Punishment and Inequality in America. December 5, 2006.
Affordable Housing Action Agenda, Seattle Planning Commission Report. Feb., 2008.
Summary of the 2008 Unsheltered Homeless Count in Selected Areas of King County, Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness. January, 2008
United Way King County Community Assessment (www.uwkc.org)

The Prison Hockey Stick

I googled Bruce Western to see what I could find after my friend Silja Talvi mentioned him as one of the leading thinkers on the relationship between prisons and inequality. The chart above, which shows the more than 700% increase in incarceration in the US over the past three decades, comes from this site, which has numerous other depressing graphs and statistics that will shock and appall.

This year, Western left Princeton to join the faculty of Harvard's Kennedy School, where he will direct the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy. Western argues that sky-rocketing rates of incarceration, particularly among African-American males, exacerbate inequality by dramatically reducing the employment prospects and earning potential of the large numbers of those who have been imprisoned, particularly those who have had felonies. With large numbers of poorly educated men, and increasingly women, removed from the labor market, statistics on wages and unemployment are distorted to look much rosier than they actually are.

This is the structural unemployment issue that seems to be the big elephant in the room in American politics. Why doesn't anyone ever see the thing? All we ever do is describe its parts, and just barely at that.

Western says that the "tough on crime" incarceration strategy may well create more problems than it solves by increasing social inequality and thereby feeding the cycle of desperation and crime. Instead of continually feeding a growing prison-industrial complex, we might want to think about investing more in education, or job training.

What I find most interesting is the timing of the prison boom: the mid-seventies, just as the effects of deindustrialization are hitting American cities everywhere. This is also the time frame for the beginnings of mass homelessness and the growth of the shelter industry, the other strategy for managing large numbers of superfluous people. While it's no secret that there is a revolving door between the shelter and prison systems, it's surprising that more hasn't been said about these two populations and their relationship to the structural employment issue.

Maybe Fannie Mae will give the National Alliance to End Homelessness one of their big fat cooptation grants to study this important issue? Not.

Full Employment My Ass

Last night, pathetically enough, I entertained myself by poking around on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. The national unemployment rate in July was just 4.6%. This is what we call full employment.

During the Reagan administration the definition of unemployed was changed to only reflect those who actually receive unemployment benefits. When the benefits run out, you no longer count. So even Flint, Michigan, a city that has become the poster child for economic desolation, has just 8.6% unemployment. Not bad at all.

If you include, says the BLS, the marginally attached (those who say they want work but aren't looking very hard) and discouraged workers (a subset of the marginally attached who give a job market-related reason for not currently seeking work), then the 4.6% national average rockets right on up to 5.5%

These are numbers that seek to hide the obvious, and for the most part they work as intended. Structural unemployment, which is usually defined as the mismatch between available jobs and skills brought about by shifts in markets and economies, isn't something we talk about much.

If you look at unemployment rankings by city, you'll see that in my hometown of Sioux Falls, SD, just 2.3% are looking for work. Sioux Falls is a low-wage town in a right-to-work state that has so many lousy jobs that people can work two or three of them at a time and still have plenty of work for everyone.

Well, almost everyone. Just 265 miles to the west on the Rosebud Reservation, actual unemployment is estimated at 82%. Over at Pine Ridge, things are even worse. Maybe they should all move to Sioux Falls.

Just kidding. They hate Indians there.

Consider this, from a NYT article on unemployment rates among black men, which says that even when the economy does great, some people still fall behind:

¶The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.

¶Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.

¶In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.

But just because people have been disappeared doesn't mean they totally stop looking for work. This helps to explain why, when it comes to low-wage work, the laws of supply and demand are suspended. No matter how low unemployment rates get, wages on the bottom rarely rise. That's how the system works, and it's working perfectly.