Students for Criminal Justice Reform at NYU teamed with The Urban Planning Student Association and The Black Student Alliance to present a program that outlined an alternative approach to criminal justice.

Crime in America on the increase, the rate of recidivism is high and it is costing the government millions of dollars to convict and incarcerate people.  Wouldn’t this money be better spent on the neighborhoods where prisoners are from?  Couldn’t the cost of locking people up be reinvested in the neighborhoods where they’re from in civic programs like health and education?  This is the concept of the ‘Million Dollar Block.’

To achieve this, we must be able to identify the neighborhoods that have a high concentration of offenders so that funds can be allocated appropriately.  Eric Cadora has found a way to capture this information through a mapping process.  He explains it to the audience:

Speaker: Eric Cadora, Founder and Director of the Justice Mapping Center.

What’s all this talk about mapping?

Cadora has a history of working with criminal and justice reform, but reached a point where he felt he reached a glass ceiling.  There was a pretty steady rate of incarceration in the 1970s where it reached around 200,000 people.  After that period, it skyrocketed over 2 million today.  This drove him to look at crime mapping in terms of how many people from a certain area have been incarcerated.

Mapping is done at different levels such as community districts, school districts or state senate districts, depending on the ‘audience,’ he says.

There is a difference between crime mapping and mapping where people who have been, or are currently incarcerated live.  Where people live and have been incarcerated is much more concentrated than than the distribution of crime, is the trend they found through mapping.

A map of NYC by census tracts with CD’s layered on top is up on the screen showing number of men admitted to prison. (It examines in terms of how many per 1000).
There are three major areas: the Bronx, upper Manhattan and Brooklyn that have the highest proportion of incarceration.  Together they make up approx 17 of total male population of NYC but account for over 50% of NY males sent to prison.

Prison Expenditure:
How much is being sent to incarcerate and then return people back to a given area?  There are certain areas in Brooklyn, for e.g. where it costs $1million to do this and in some cases up to $50 million.  So, the question is, is it right to spend all this money to send these people to prison only for them to come back after 4 years?  How about we bring these dollars back and reinvest in the neighborhood to  prevent crime and recidivism?

Getting government agencies to collaborate on the neighborhood level to address this is the next goal.   Taking Houston as an example, high rates of incarceration is also reflected by low performing schools in the area.  The idea that more criminal infrastructure is better than investing civil institutions is being challenged and brought in front of government.

To recap, the notion that certain city neighborhoods have a higher rate of incarceration rates than others is a national trend.  Another example given is Detroit which by the way, is “rampant with prison admissions.”

This mapping procedure can show the many hundreds of kids who have lost a parent to prison.  he greatest indicator of future incarceration is parental incarceration.

Again, the monetary cost of incarceration is in the millions.

The number of people being sent back to prison because of revoke of parole, failed drug tests – conditional and technical issues – as opposed to actual crime. Parole and probation is a broken system.  Parole officers are not sure what their role is any more, given that this type of recidivism can reach as high as 80% – are they 2nd class cops?  A type of social worker?  Should they, in future, be put into the neighborhood to manage those released?  Why not integrate them into other community based organizations there?

So, what do the policy makers do with all this information?

Speaker: Marshall Clement, Council of State Governments’ Justice Reinvestment Project.

A national, non -profit that represents all three branches of govnt. They give advice on policy issues.  The government’s three main concerns regarding criminal justice at the moment are: increases in crime, the rising number of the prisons in the U.S. which predicted to keep increasing and the lack of money in the current economic climate.

California’s response to its high crime rate has been to push a giant building program.  Another consideration is early release which is not a popular option.

So, a third possible solution that would include: use mapping to analyze data to look at crime and court corrections, implement policy changes and establish greater accountability at government level.

Some states are interested in implementing this, for e,g Kansas, Texas and Michigan.

Kansas Case Study
In 2007, it’s prisons were reaching capacity so the state was planning to build an extra 2000 beds which would amount to 1/2 a billion dollars over a 10 year period.  By implementing the three elements outlined above, the state has significantly decreased crime and with less demand now for capacity has saved approx $80 million over a 5 year period.

Michigan and Texas were also presented as case studies.

The statistic that one out of every 3 state employees in Michigan are parole officers provoked a gasp from the audience, mostly comprised of urban planning and public policy students from NYU.  About 30 people turned out for the presentation.

A question and answer session followed:

The Children’s Defense Fund’s New York chapter is holding a one-day summit in Central Brooklyn called “Connecting the Neighborhood Dots: Promoting Solutions to Dismantle the Pipeline to Prison.” Hosted by CUNY’s Medgar Evers College in partnership with the Casey Family Programs, the day has been scheduled full of panel discussions and presentations by leaders in the children’s advocacy and juvenile justice organizations.

I will be chronicling the start of the conference and the back-to-back morning sessions that focus on the disproportionate impact of prison and the criminal justice system on specific communities in New York City, mainly in the Bronx and Central Brooklyn, and how community-based strategies can promote healthy children, families and neighborhoods.

Participants examine and help themselves to informational and event pamphlets at the Pipeline to Prison summit.

8:30 a.m.

Arrived with the help of a student on the way to class. The lobby is full of men, women, young adults, nametags and breakfast. The turnout is amazing, especially considering today is a Wednesday, with what looks like around 100-200 community leaders, educators, legal officials and students from around the city. Pamphlets from the various programs and institutions present are on a table for anyone to take. There are people from the Juvenile Justice System, the Administration for Children’s Services, Harlem Children’s Zone, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, religious groups and many local organizations.

8:45 a.m.

Medgar Evers College President, Dr. Edison Jackson, welcomes and thanks everyone for coming on a Wednesday. He sounds extremely proud, excited and serious in anticipation of the day’s discussion.

Zeinab Chahine, the Managing Director of Strategic Consulting Services for the Casey Family Programs, delivers the opening remarks on the need for reducing the racial disparities. She mentions several statistics, including that 200,000 women and men now in prison were once in foster care. She lists a few steps towards fixing this:

1. strategic partnerships with a range of organizations
2. data sharing across agencies
3. family and youth becoming meaningfully engaged in positively productive activities
4. financial strategizing, coordination and communication.
5. getting policy to be more informed before being enacted

9:00 a.m.

Next up, a slideshow entitled “What About the Children?” and a video presentation about the CDF’s Cradle To Prison Pipeline Campaign and highlights from their work with CDF Freedom Schools, a program of summer and after-school programs for children that include activities emphasizing academics, family, civic engagement and social action, leadership and health. The black and white photos of forlorn, lonely and abandoned children was effectively sombering and heartbreaking. The video was full of life and hope. Nice juxtaposition.

9:30 a.m.

Dr. Marian Wright Edelman, president and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, begins explaining that the pipeline is a set of choices – not inevitable or an “act of God” and that we can change the outcome if we work together. She describes the two greatest obstacles as poverty and racial disparity that exists even before birth. Her advice to combating these challenges are:

1. to not be overwhelmed by the cumulative risk; instead, we must come together to keep children at the center of all we do,
2. to have high expectations for ourselves and our children; “those who see [this responsibility] not as a calling, but a job, should find something else,” and
3. to move beyond a desire for credit. “Just get out there and do the work,” Dr. Edelman advises, noting how the different institutions in youth’s lives – education, child welfare, social structure, justice and support systems – don’t collaborate, thus negating or combating each other’s efforts. “Children don’t come in pieces. We’ve got to address the whole need of the whole child.”

Then, referring to the hope brought to Americans and members of the NYC community by President Obama, Dr. Edelman simultaneously chastised and inspired the audience, telling us to “hold all of ourselves accountable” for lack of progress and that “we’ve got to put some meat on the bones of hope and… give a great education,” as well as health care, to our children.

10 a.m.

we’re on to the first session, which is also the only one all day that will directly address the problem at hand (the remaining sessions focusing on the various methods and means available to tackle or solve the problem).

WHAT THE MAP TELLS US: USING A NEIGHBORHOOD’S LENS TO FRAME THE PIPELINE TO PRISON:
Map of residential distribution of Non-White or Hispanics in NYC. The heaviest concentration of this demographic is in the Bronx, Central Brooklyn and Southeast Queens.

Here’s a reaction to these maps from Chris Tan with Advocates for Children:

The executive director of Justice Mapping, Eric Cadora, is using Powerpoint to great effect, displaying the correlation between ethnic demography in NYC with areas with high concentrations of poverty, disconnected youth (youth distanced and disenfranchised from positive social, educational and support networks), foster care and Dept. of Juvenile Justice admissions. It’s stunning in its in-your-face quality.

This map shows poverty level concentration in NYC. It connects poverty to issues of ethnicity and other social problems.

Cadora went on to say that the community needs to help the city understand that we’ve begun relying on the criminal justice system too heavily, a mention that would become a theme throughout the day’s discussions. However, he noted, disadvantage coming from entrenched poverty can bring particular opportunities… he suggests targeting neighborhoods where organizations work as teams and collaborate to merge resources.

A map showing concentration of disconnected youth in Brooklyn.

Cadora also threw in a map of 3rd grade math scores, suspension rates and prison expenditures.

A map showing the levels of admissions of Brooklyn youth to the Dept. of Juvenile Justice system.

Following this theme, attorney Juan Cartagena, general counsel for the Community Service Society, discussed the lack of resources being allocated to actually rehabilitating the youth who have aged out of or otherwise not returned to the JJ system (only 7 percent of those who need it are being addressed). He also rips into the inequities, unfairness and inefficiency of arresting people for trespassing in their own apartment buildings, and notes that arrests for trespassing spike in the weeks and months following the graduation of the NYPD academy. Cartagena questions what exactly is being served by our city’s policies to push kids into a system that is proven to hurt more than it helps.

Finally, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund assistant counsel (and Brooklyn-raised guy), Damon Hewitt, starts his discussion by stating:

“We’ve been told that education is the great equalizer. But it is also used as a means of social stratification. … Some people say that the system is broken. But I’d suggest maybe it’s doing it’s job. … pushing people out [through the criminalization of young people]. Why is the system working for some and not for others?”

Here’s an interview with Mr. Hewitt after the session’s conclusion:

Throughout all the panel speeches, audience members periodically clapped, cheered and nodded in agreement to what was being said. It was a very receptive crowd of educators, students, city workers and community activists who are either involved in advocacy and projects or are interested in finding out more about what can be done. Each panelist’s discussion is followed by a question and answer session. There was one woman, Ethel Andoh Menson, in the audience who was enthusiastically nodding and responding to the panel from her seat.

All in all, an amazing morning. I look forward to following the work and actions of everyone involved in this unique, innovative and significantly relevant campaign.

Heather Jean Chin attends the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where she is pursuing an MA in print and multimedia journalism with a focus on health and medicine reporting. Currently an intern at Parenting magazine and co-founder of InsureMeNYC.com, she has written for The Philadelphia Bulletin, New York Moves, Roam in-flight book, NY Press and NY City News Service. Some of her work can be seen at her webportfolio.

Empowerment and enlightenment were the consistent themes of the NAACP’s 4th Annual Conference on Criminal Justice at York College on Saturday October 25th.

The conference workshops focused on community action and response to the conditions that incarceration creates for society as a whole. Wanda Best DeVeaux, committee chairperson for the prison project, has been heading these conferences in hopes that residents and community activists will have an impact on state legislation.

Co-founder of Citizens Against Recidivism, Mikail DeVeaux opened the event with a workshop entitled “Tear Down the Walls: The Latent Functions of Prisons” where he discussed imprisonment as a form of punishment.  DeVeaux, who had been formerly incarcerated for 25 years, described the experience as “dehumanizing and degrading.”

“Your congressman, your senator, representative, or whoever is establishing these forms of punishment in your name,” he said imploring the audience to make legislators accountable for prisoner treatment and its consequences.

Citing Queens as the third highest borough for children with incarcerated parents, Sheryl Sohn engaged the audience in generating ideas to remedy the negative impact of incarcerations of a loved one on children during the “Left Behind: An Appropriate Response to the Needs of the Families of the Incarcerated.”

“It doesn’t take a whole lot of money, just an investment of your time,” she told audience members asking what they could do individually to help minimize the stress of their absent parent.  Things as simple as  “What children of incarcerated parents need most are consistent, dedicated adults in their life,” she said.

Fellow presenters Kathy Boudin and Jean Coaxum praised the programs available to foster relationships between children and their mothers while in prison, “They [the children] know we did something bad, but they can also see our strengths and that we’re getting better,” said Boudin.

The conference ended with Tiffany Wright and the Violence against Women Committee, Correctional Association of New York.  Wright recited a poem by an unknown author entitled “He Gave Me Flowers Today” detailing the severity of domestic violence on daily life.  Their presentation promoted legislative change on behalf of battered women.  “The purpose is not to focus on the problem of domestic violence but to give you solutions,” she said.

Best DeVeaux was pleased about the crowd the conference drew and urged everyone, especially the community residents to advocate for change, “If you’re a resident of one of the seven neighborhoods that populate over 80 per cent of the prison system, you need to ask your officials about incarceration,” she said.