NeighborScapes

America’s primary anti-poverty measure for the last two decades has been the lockup.  Marshaling recidivism statistics that suggest falsely that convicted offenders cannot successfully be rehabilitated, authorities have made prison sentences longer for more and more offenses.  As a result, the prison population — disproportionately poor, black and Latino, but increasingly also female — has exploded during this time period.  For a nation of metropolitan areas that generate 3/4 of the GDP, prison construction and corrections careers started to look like good economic development for economic units seeking in vain for the next new new thing.  The old economic standbys are fading away as the rust belt rusts and manufacturing flees to the global south, and so for communities across the country that may not be the next silicon valley (NoCal) or global financial center (NYC), prisons read as good job creation for construction and facilities maintenance, and corrections looks like an honorable human services career.  I have heard men of color explain becoming a corrections officer out of a desire to “help the community” or “work with people.”  In the olden days (and in the future we should desire), such aspirations would lead to teaching or parks & rec jobs.  But in the “Neo-years” of neoconservatives and neoliberals, we have lost humane impulses to the unconscious reflex of imprisonment. 

But prison leads to poverty, as we should have known from the start.  Prison impoverishes the prisoner, as it literally strips him of assets and income and cripples him with lifetime employability stigmas.  And it also impoverishes the society, as it fails to utilize untold human capital for the good of society.

We will always need prisons.  Sweden and Canada have them, and some people just need to be locked up.  But until we can stand up and tell the honest truth about the failure of a pro-incarceration human capital policy, poverty will continue to live strong in direct proportion to the health of the prison-industrial complex.

10.  We don’t even have the vocabulary for it.  “Poverty alleviation” is a marble-mouthed mess.  The War on Poverty is an outdated concept, relating to a battle that many believe to have been lost rather than ongoing.  “Fighting poverty” itself  is a double-negative, poverty being the absence of income or wealth and fighting being the effort to bring something down.  Not one of these frameworks is inspiring or uplifting, and the inverse — creation of opportunity — is nebulous and applicable to the whole society.  The middle class kid looking to get admitted to college or get her first job afterward is just as interested in the creation of opportunity as poor people — or their advocates — are.  The issue is what our goals are for the 13.2% of Americans presently considered statistically poor.  Is the goal to eradicate poverty?  Linguistically, what would that mean?  The “poor” will always be considered the bottom tail on the bell curve of income and wealth distribution.  Is it just to reduce poverty?  If so, what is an acceptable level of poverty?  And how do we apologize to those folks who remain acceptably poor?

I think the answer has more to do with changing the *nature* of poverty — dispersing it and desegregating it, for one, and making it a temporary state by doing two things: creating enough opportunity ladders to enable people to climb out of poverty for real, and creating a better social safety net to make poverty less painful and hopeless for those who experience it while they’re there.  But how many advocates agree with this formulation, and why don’t we see clear statements of the goals in politics and policy.  Instead we get partial solutions within the realm of political feasibility, like “expand the earned income tax credit.”  Great, that helps but what then?