The Community Impact of Increasing Prison Populations

The Wall Street Journal offers a disturbing take on the trends in increasing poverty in the western United States, which is resulting from the success of law enforcement efforts in crime prevention and increased rates of imprisonment (non-subscriber links here and here).

Academic analysts and social policy professionals argue that high incarceration rates are causing increased poverty, an analytical perspective that reverses the traditional explanatory arrows in theories on poverty and crime:

When she hit 60, Sarah Coleman thought she was done raising children. But today she is among the millions of Americans left to fill the void for family members gone to jail.

Now 66 years old, Ms. Coleman has three youngsters at home -- ages 5, 3 and 1. She doesn't know the whereabouts of her granddaughter, who is their mother. As for the children's fathers, they have both been in trouble with the law. One is in prison serving a 10-year term for second-degree murder. The other has been in and out of jail on drug charges.

"I didn't intend to raise my great-grandkids," says Ms. Coleman, who relies on supplies of diapers and baby wipes from a local social-services center. "There are so many things I can't do for them because of money, but I have to try."

Here in South Mountain, a district in south Phoenix, more than 3,800 residents are displaced, serving time in prison or the county jail. For every 100 adults, 6.1 are behind bars. That's more than five times the national average of 1.09 per 100, according to a report by the Pew Center, a nonpartisan research group. Arizona has the fastest-growing prison population of the Western states, having increased 5.3% in 2007 to more than 38,000.

Behind those figures are many hidden, related costs -- financial burdens that communities are often left to manage. For every person who goes to jail, businesses lose either a potential employee or customer. Inmates' children often depend on extended families, rather than a parent, to raise them. With only so many government resources to go around, churches, volunteer programs and other groups must often step in to help.

In one nine-block stretch of central South Mountain, nearly 500 out of 16,000 residents are in the state system either as prisoners or as probationers who return regularly to jail. Prison costs associated with this nine-block area amount to roughly $11 million annually, according to an estimate from the Justice Mapping Center, a New York organization that examines crime patterns.

But the state spends more than half that amount -- an additional $6.5 million -- on social programs for the residents who remain. In that nine-block span, 2,000 people receive cash payments under the federal government's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Nearly 5,000 are on food stamps. Almost one-third of the residents live below the poverty level. The total cost of prison and social services combined: approximately $2 million per block.

South Mountain may seem like just another desert town, yet its demographics are complicated. While a crackdown on crime has produced a high incarceration rate, it has also made the area attractive to new pockets of middle-class residents. Shopping malls, restaurants and grocery stores dot the area; there's a Target and a Wal-Mart. Gated communities and golf courses abound.

Most notable is what's missing: men of a certain age. "It's sad but we have men who are over 35 and we have young people under 17," says Faye Gray, a 71-year-old neighborhood activist. "The ones in between are missing." She quickly recites a half-dozen names, all men serving lengthy drug sentences -- people she watched grow up.

South Mountain's residents are mainly Hispanic and African-American. According to various studies, those two groups are the most overrepresented in the criminal-justice system. The Pew study released earlier this year showed the overall incarceration rate for all whites was one person per 245 adults, compared with one in 41 for blacks and one in 96 for Hispanics.

Arizona officials are worried about the $900 million the state spends annually on corrections. In an attempt to reverse the trend, the Department of Corrections has created several programs to give inmates tools to live successfully on the outside. Many convicts, for instance, can't read, so literacy is a focal point. One project seeks to identify job prospects for inmates, and offers classes in automotive, construction and catering fields. More than an effort to counter recidivism, such initiatives are meant to ease the burden of social-service providers -- programs already helping inmates' families.

The interplay of crime, poverty and race has long been a topic of study among criminologists and sociologists. Whether poverty creates crime or crime begets poverty is "an impossible question" to answer simply, says David Kennedy, director of crime prevention and control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

The longterm decline of today's minority areas -- from drug epidemics and white suburban flight to a gradual rise in prison populations and budgets -- has taken a toll, says Mr. Kennedy. "These things play off each other," he says. "It's not arguable any longer that some of the things we're doing to fight crime are promoting crime and exacerbating poverty."

Read the whole thing, at the link.

What I don't see at the article is a discussion of alternatives. It's not enough to lament increased rates of imprisonment. We need to focus on the collapse of family values in minority communities that has led to the disproportionate number of young people winding up in prison.