[News] Million-Dollar Blocks: The neighborhood costs of America's prison boom

[News at freedomarchives.org]

The neighborhood costs of America's prison boom
Million-Dollar Blocks
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0446/gonnerman.php
by Jennifer Gonnerman
November 16th, 2004 1:55 PM

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<http://images.villagevoice.com/issues/0446/gonnerman.jpg>View larger map
(Go to "<http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0446/gonnerman2.php>The Making 
of the Map")




One Tenant Leader's Take

Ronald Ward has never heard of a "million-dollar block," but he's lived on 
one for years­in the Howard Houses in Brownsville, Brooklyn. When he talks 
about crime, he doesn't talk about statistics or dollars or maps. He talks 
about what he's seen: young men selling drugs out of his lobby; parole 
officers who have become a regular presence in his project; men who have 
come home from long prison stays, only to end up selling drugs once again.

"Most of the crime is committed against the people who live here­the 
muggings, the burglaries," says Ward, 61, a tenant leader who has been 
living in the Howard Houses for 43 years. "Crime here is really so 
rampant." There is one particular crime that he is less eager to discuss. 
Fourteen years ago, his 20-year-old son was out driving a cab when two men 
got in, pointed a gun at him, then shot him in the head. His son died three 
weeks later. "Losing a child­I had never experienced that kind of trauma," 
he says.

When Ward learned that he lived on a million-dollar block, he wasn't 
surprised. Many of his project's residents go to work every day, he says, 
but "we've got people with problems." Empty refrigerators, crack addiction, 
illiteracy. If legislators asked him how to stop the cycle of imprisonment, 
he says he'd tell them: "Stop the racism." And he'd advise them to improve 
the schools. "If you don't educate people, you keep them powerless," he 
says. "They need to understand the system they're living in. When people 
become aware of that, then they can get out of it." J.G.

17becb.jpg
he Remeeder Houses make up one of the poorest blocks in Brooklyn. Six-story 
buildings rise from the rectangular patch of land between Sutter and Blake 
avenues, and between Georgia and Alabama avenues in East New York. More 
than 50 percent of the project's residents live below the poverty line. 
Unemploymentis rampant. Run-down, overcrowded apartments are the norm.

By another measure, though, this block is one of the priciest in the city. 
Last year, five residents were sent to state prison, at an annual cost of 
about $30,000 a person. The total price tag for their incarceration will 
exceed $1 million.

Criminal-justice experts have a name for this phenomenon: "million-dollar 
blocks." In Brooklyn last year, there were 35 blocks that fit this 
category­ones where so many residents were sent to state prison that the 
total cost of their incarceration will be more than $1 million.

In at least one case, the price tag will actually surpass $5 million. These 
blocks are largely concentrated in the poorest pockets of the borough's 
poorest neighborhoods, including East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and 
Brownsville.

In recent years, as the U.S. prison population has soared, million-dollar 
blocks have popped up in cities across the country. Maps of prison spending 
(like the one on the left) suggest a new way of looking at this phenomenon, 
illustrating the oft ignored reality that most prisoners come from just a 
handfulof urban neighborhoods. These maps invite numerous questions: How is 
the community benefiting from all the money being spent? And might there be 
another, better way to spend those same criminal-justice dollars?

These maps have attracted attention nationwide from state legislators 
struggling to balance their budgets. In a few state capitols, 
prison-spending maps have begun to influence the dynamics of the political 
debate, suggesting new ways to think about crime and punishment, recidivism 
and reform. One state, Connecticut, has even gone so far as to change its 
spending priorities, taking dollars out of the prison budget and steering 
them toward the neighborhoods with the highest rates of incarceration.

Prison-spending maps highlight the fact that money spent on million-dollar 
blocks winds up in another part of the state­far from the scene of the 
crime. In New York State, about 60 percent of prisoners come from New York 
City, but virtually every prison is located upstate, in rural towns and 
villages, places like Attica, Dannemora, and Malone. As Todd Clear, a 
professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, puts it: "People who 
live on Park Avenue give a lot of money to people who live in Auburn, New 
York, in order to watch people who live in Brooklyn for a couple of 
years­and send them back damaged."


Most likely, nobody would now be mulling over the concept of million-dollar 
blocks if not for a 42-year-old Brooklynite named Eric Cadora. Back in 
1998, Cadora was working at a nonprofit agency in Manhattan called the 
Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services, or CASES. He 
taught himself mapping software and studied the various ways mapping was 
used, including by the New York City Police Department to identify crime 
hot spots.

About crime mapping, Cadora says, "People weren't coming at it from a 
policy reform perspective­and the whole idea of [prisoner] re-entry and 
community wasn't part of the issue. Most of the issue was about getting 
tough." Cadora wanted to try a different approach. He decided to create a 
new set of maps, which he hoped "would help people envision solutions 
rather than just critiques."

With criminal-justice data he obtained from a state agency, he embarked on 
his first mapping project: Brooklyn. Colleague Charles Swartz helped, and 
together they made a series of maps illustrating where inmates come from 
and how much money is spent to imprison them.

"The reasons we did the money maps weren't to say, 'Gee, we spent too much 
money on criminal justice,' " Cadora explains. "Because what's too much? 
The question was to say, 'Look, you can now think of the money you're 
spending on incarceration and criminal justice as a pool of funds' "­that 
is, funds that could be spent in a different way. He adds, "What struck me, 
looking back at a year's worth of prison admissions, was that these were 
the results of a bunch of individual decisions, but it turns out to amount 
to enough financial investment to be thought of as an actual spending policy."

In 1999, Cadora began sharing his maps with criminal-justice agencies and 
nonprofit organizations. Word spread. Soon other states were calling. Five 
years later, Cadora's maps are well-known in criminal-justice circles. He 
now works at the After-Prison Initiative, a program of the George 
Soros-funded Open Society Institute, and demand for his maps continues to 
grow. By now, he and Swartz have made maps for agencies in Rhode Island, 
Florida, Arizona, Connecticut, Louisiana, Kentucky, and New Jersey.


The money that taxpayers spend on prisons pays for the incarceration of 
some very violent people­the sorts of criminals who neighbors are eager to 
see go away. These dollars are also used to lock up individuals who commit 
nonviolent crimes­possession of a few vials of crack, for example. Soon 
these individuals will be released from prison, and they'll go back to the 
same neighborhoods. Statistics show there is a strong likelihood they will 
be locked up again.

Professor Clear, who has worked closely with Cadora, says the maps suggest 
a different sort of solution: "Use some of that money to improve the places 
those people came from in the first place, so that they are not 
crime-production neighborhoods." This might sound like a fantasy 
scenario­and a few years ago, that's all it really was. Just a radical 
idea, to which Cadora and a colleague gave a wonkish name: "justice 
reinvestment."

But budget shortfalls have a way of encouraging politicians to re-evaluate 
even the most popular policies, and many states have concluded that they 
simply cannot afford to keep so many people in prison.

For the most part, states that have shrunk their inmate populations have 
then steered the savings into a general fund. One state, however, has 
reinvested in the neighborhoods that are home to the bulk of its prisoners.

Until recently, Connecticut had a $500 million budget deficit and more 
prisoners than it could house. State Representative Michael P. Lawlor, a 
Democrat from East Haven, joined with fellow legislators in 2003 to 
introduce a bill that would scale down the inmate population and funnel the 
savings into social programs. To win over their colleagues, the legislators 
invited Cadora to present his maps.

"A picture is worth a thousand words," says Lawlor, a former prosecutor who 
chairs the Judiciary Committee. "I think Eric is able to graphically depict 
the insanity of our current system for preventing crimes in certain 
neighborhoods. We're spending all of this money and not getting very good 
results. I think when you look at it the way Eric is able to depict it in 
those neighborhood graphs, you can see how crazy this all is."

Connecticut legislators passed the bill this spring. To shrink the prison 
population, they adopted several strategies, including reducing the number 
of people sent to prison for violating probation rules. And they steered 
the savings into services designed to curb recidivism, including 
mental-health care and drug treatment. Programs in New Haven­which has many 
high-incarceration neighborhoods­will receive $2.5 million.

"It's a huge precedent, even though it's a small state," says Michael 
Jacobson, former commissioner of the New York City Department of 
Correction, who worked as a consultant for the Connecticut legislature and 
wrote about the experience in his forthcoming book, Downsizing Prisons: How 
to Reduce Crime and End Mass Incarceration. "It's the first state that 
through legislation has simultaneously done a bunch of things that will 
intelligently lower its prison population, and then reinvest a significant 
portion of that savings in the kind of things that will keep lowering its 
prison population. No other state has done anything like that."


The idea may be starting to catch on. In Louisiana, three state senators 
introduced a bill earlier this year that proposed to trim the prison 
population, save more than $3 million a year, and then spend that savings 
on helping ex-prisoners find jobs. The bill did not pass, but the idea 
caught the attention of Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a Democrat, 
whose state has the highest rate of incarceration in the country. She 
invited representatives of three foundations, including Cadora, to a 
luncheon at the governor's mansion. At the request of her office, Cadora 
will be creating many more detailed maps of Louisiana.

New York's situation is slightly different from those of Louisiana and 
Connecticut. While the national prison population continues to rise, New 
York's inmate population has actually been dropping, from a high of 71,538 
inmates in December 1999 to fewer than 65,000 today. Without overcrowded 
prisons­and without a budget crisis like the one Connecticut was 
facing­there isn't the same sense of urgency in the state legislature.

This past spring, State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, a Brooklyn Democrat, 
introduced a bill to establish the New York State Justice Reinvestment 
Fund, a $10 million pilot program to finance organizations that assist 
ex-prisoners. Though the bill has 10 co-sponsors, its prospects of passing 
in the Republican-controlled senate are slim. The state assembly included a 
provision in its drug-law reform bill this year to commission more 
prison-spending maps, but that bill didn't pass the senate either.

A map of million-dollar blocks, with stark concentrations of color, can 
quickly convey a sense of how self-defeating many criminal-justice policies 
have become­how, for example, spending exorbitant amounts of money locking 
people up means there's far less money available for programs that decrease 
crime, like education, drug treatment, mental-health care, and job 
training. But these maps don't tell the whole story, since they don't show 
what happens after inmates are set free.

New York's state prisons release around 28,000 people a year. Nearly 
two-thirds of them return to New York City. They arrive wearing 
state-issued clothes­a plain sweatshirt and stiff denim pants­and they come 
back to the same streets they left. They bring home all the memories and 
lessons of prison life, plus the system's parting gift, $40. Usually, they 
discover that the neighborhoods they left behind have not changed, and that 
life on the outside can be incredibly difficult. If the past is any 
predictor, 40 percent of them will be back upstate within three years.


The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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