The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (36 page)

Hugh Espey, the wiry executive director of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, talked of broader popular involvement in key economic decisions. “Much less income inequality. A democracy truly by, of, and for the people, where more people are sharing in the wealth we are creating.”

In Chicago, a few hours’ drive east along the I-80 from Espey’s office, George Goehl of National People’s Action (NPA) had come to pretty much the same conclusions. He’d grown up in a working-class town in southern Indiana, and had ended up in the Windy City after years as an organizer in his home state. “The appetite for rethinking things is much different from anything I’ve experienced,” he said, speaking of the post-2008 environment.

Despite the fact that he was thin as a rake, Goehl’s voice was a baritone; when he talked—a small man in a checked shirt, with short, mussed brown hair—he sounded far larger than he was. His gray eyes locked in on his audience as he spoke. “The themes that keep coming up: be more explicit about race and racial justice; more community control of money.” In a series of meetings NPA had convened in church basements, houses, community centers, and the like, he and his colleagues had held what they called Big Ideas conversations, probing ever deeper on issues such as race relations, corporate power, and the role of government in society. Change, he believed, would “happen at the local level first; we have to figure out how to disband really bad structures, and then build new institutions.” In these conversations, Goehl and the other participants discussed such ideas as worker cooperatives, communally owned homes, and shops in which
low-income people could use government-issued Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards not just to buy food but to purchase a host of other consumer items.

BIG, HAIRY, AUDACIOUS GOALS

There was no shortage of suggestions, and no shortage of issues vying for attention in any national campaign against ingrained poverty.

For JoAnne Page, executive director of the Fortune Society, in New York City, breaking the cycle of poverty involved finding ways to help people with their addictions, their mental illnesses, with diseases such as HIV/AIDS, and with the host of dysfunctions that pushed ever more people toward spells in jail and prison.

Page, the child of Holocaust survivors and a graduate of Yale Law School, had worked with impoverished clients for decades, building up a reputation as one of New York City’s foremost advocates for the poor, the addicted, and the incarcerated. She had set up several large transitional housing centers for men and women returning to the community from prison—and those centers had proven themselves remarkably successful in turning people around, keeping them off of drugs, securing them jobs, and ultimately helping them move into their own apartments. Clients and coworkers described with awe her dedication to their well-being, and her willingness to work with them despite their failings. A short woman, with frizzy hair and an irrepressible smile, Page never failed to stop and talk with her clients, to shake their hands, to hug them—even if the hands she was shaking and the torsos she was hugging belonged to people with a veritable host of contagious diseases. As a result, her clients trusted her; they talked with her and shared their fears with her. Knowing her clients’ stories as she did, Page had come to believe they really weren’t that different from anyone else—except they were poorer. And that, she knew, ended up making all the difference in the world.

“Poverty is when the money that you need isn’t there, and you have to make choices that compromise your health or your future or
your ability to care for your family,” she said, sitting in her ground-floor office at the multimillion-dollar Castle transitional housing center that her organization had built for ex-prisoners, many of them with a history of drug addiction, on a street in northern Manhattan where the Harlem and Washington Heights neighborhoods merge. “Where you don’t eat fresh vegetables, go to the emergency room instead of a doctor, cut your medications in half, make choices between heat and eating, and your kids weigh less during the winter. That’s poverty.”

Given all of this, Page prided herself on thinking outside the box. She supported reducing the staggering amounts of money that twenty-first-century American cities, states, and the federal government spent on locking people up and using the savings to fund an array of other programs: ones that allowed members of economically vulnerable groups to pay lower security deposits and brokers’ fees when renting apartments. That expanded access to public housing—after all, a study in Boston in the early 2000s had found that children in families on waiting lists for public housing lost weight in winter as compared to children who lived in public housing, because parents of the former were having to pay for their heating instead of for food.
¹
That provided structured living arrangements, complete with counseling, drug testing, and job training, for addicts who had run afoul of the criminal justice system, and for the mentally ill who couldn’t make it on their own. “If we hadn’t done what we do here,” she proudly asserted, “they’d be sleeping in a shelter, or prison, or [be] dead. I see somebody whose life my work has made a difference to. I get hugged by lots of people. I work in a warm and caring environment. I work in a place I wish the world would be like. There’s an acronym: BHAG. It means ‘big, hairy, audacious goal.’ I get an enormous kick out of making things happen.”

It was that sense of possibility, that innate belief that most everyone deserves a second chance, that no matter how many times an addict returns to his dope he’s still capable of change, that had saved Bronx resident Francisco Ortega when he arrived at the Castle in his
late forties. Addicted to heroin for more than thirty years, in and out of prison, the little man—five feet four in his shoes, skinny, with a sparse, graying goatee and tattooed arms—finally decided enough was enough. “I used to sell the drug to support my habit. Steal. The more I had, the more I’m using. That monkey on my back, telling me to keep using; it took everything of mine. Family. I just didn’t care. I lost a lot of good jobs. Lost a job as a porter—I was in a union. One day I woke up and was tired of being tired. I decided to start from the bottom. I went to a shelter at Bellevue, and then I went to parole and told parole I was dirty and I needed help. He put me in a methadone program. They took care of me.”

A lady friend of Ortega’s suggested he approach the Fortune Society to see if they would house him. “They accepted me, gave me a room, took me in. I started giving clean urine. Fortune got me here, to the Castle. Everything been working ever since. I work for Fortune, in the kitchen, as a cook. I always volunteer, because I owe Fortune. If it wasn’t for Fortune, I’d be on the street, in jail, perhaps dead somewhere. It
feels
good. I’ve been clean two and a half years.”

Ortega was living in a small studio on the eleventh floor of the Castle. He was touchingly house-proud, nervously wiping down his tabletop with a cloth, making sure the surface of his toaster oven was spotless, pointing out his flat-screen Hitachi TV, quite possibly the first honestly acquired item of worth in his life. “This is the first time I ever had my own apartment,” he explained, his tone one of wonderment. “When I have money, I buy things for the bathroom, curtains. It feels good. Every day you see it. I used to spend it on drugs. Everything’s falling into place right now.”

For David Onek, a whole bunch of good could come out of expanding the network of specialized treatment courts that had emerged in various parts of the country over the previous few years. People charged with low-end crimes were being shifted into specific kinds of
courts. If they had an addiction, they went to drug courts so that caseworkers could link them up with treatment services. If they were living on the streets and needed help getting a roof over their heads, accessing medical treatment, getting a photo ID so that they could apply for work, and so on, they were sent to homeless courts. Some courts met the needs of military veterans who might have committed crimes while suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. Still other courts were peopled with staff trained specifically to deal with mental illness.

Onek was in his early forties, charismatic, self-confident, and quick to break into a smile during an animated conversation. The scion of a political family, he had worked in the San Francisco mayor’s office of criminal justice, gone on to found the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice and had then run as a reform-minded candidate for San Francisco District Attorney. He hadn’t won, but his ideas were, increasingly, sought out by people interested both in criminal justice reforms and in anti-poverty initiatives.

“It’s fascinating that we’re doing things that clearly do not make us safer, and are bankrupting our state and states around the country. We need to reduce recidivism, be smarter on crime. We need to do something differently. We’re at a pivotal moment right now. Let’s come up with a criminal justice system that’s rational, that’s fair, that keeps us safer.”

Onek talked about the importance of stopping people from going to prison in the first place, through more investments in anti-truancy programs so as to help troubled teens stay in school, drug treatment services and the like; and of working with them, if they still did go to prison, to help them navigate their way in the free world once they were released. He urged what reformers were calling “justice reinvestments,” taking money saved by locking fewer people up, and investing it in programs that would lower crime rates through tackling poverty, addiction, mental illness, and other massive societal problems.

Use the criminal justice system to deal merely with the criminal symptoms of a person’s underlying problems, and you solve nothing, Onek understood. Instead, you just spend a ton of money locking people up—money that ends up being diverted from other parts of county and state budgets. And you effectively brand a large pool of people with a modern-day scarlet letter, one they will carry with them when they leave jail or prison, and that will have the effect both of limiting the kinds of work they can do subsequently, and also reducing the amount of money they will earn over the rest of their lives. In 2012, the Department of Justice reported that a spell behind bars can reduce a person’s future earnings by 40 percent.
²

Imprisonment is, quite simply, all too often a response to poverty, and overwhelmingly it serves as a one-way ticket to lifelong penury. It is, for this and many other reasons, a powerful weapon to use against someone, and as such it should be used sparingly.

Of course, when people are dangerous, when they are predatory, when their crimes seriously harm others, and when there is no way to keep society safe from their actions other than by locking them up, then incarceration is entirely appropriate. But when, as is all too often the case in a country that has more than quintupled its incarcerated population since the early 1970s, and that now houses far more nonviolent inmates than any other country on earth, a jail or prison sentence serves mainly to allow society to blow off steam at misfits and miscreants, then, surely, it is better to look for alternatives. After all, to reiterate a point previously stated, in many parts of the country locking someone up costs more, per year, than sending a person to an Ivy League college. And, in the same way as the parents of a Harvard student expect bang for their bucks, so, too, taxpayers have a right to expect criminal justice expenditures to make society safer and reduce the likelihood that people will return to crime once their sentences are completed.

“We’ve embarked on the biggest prison-building binge in history, and we’re paying the price for it now,” Onek explained of California,
a year before the state began, finally, scaling back the size of its prison population. “We have an absolute fiscal crisis. The number-one driver of that crisis is the cost of prisons. Meanwhile, teachers are getting pink-slipped, police are being laid off, social services are being cut. Certainly there are people who need to be locked up for long periods of time. Unfortunately, we have lots of people being locked up who don’t meet that description.” Onek talked of a three-strikes inmate serving life for breaking into a soup kitchen, another serving life for stealing a pair of socks. And he spoke angrily of how it would cost California nearly $5 billion during the following twenty years to keep incarcerated its population of
nonviolent
three strikers. “Obviously, life in prison, any reasonable person would say, is completely exorbitant punishment for the minor crimes they have committed. It is foolish; it is literally bankrupting our state. And we can’t afford it.” Several months after I spoke with Onek, voters in California came to the same conclusion: By a nearly two-to-one margin, they passed Proposition 36, an initiative intended to restrict three strikes for use only against people whose third offenses were serious and violent, and one that allowed for thousands of three-strikes inmates to be resentenced—and released on time served—based on the narrower parameters of the new law.