The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

by George E. Curry
NNPA Columnist
Originally posted 12/1/2004

Even President Bush has come to the realization that ex-offenders need job training and transitional housing. In his State of the Union speech last January, Bush observed, “This year, some 600,000 inmates will be released from prison back into society. We know from long experience that if they can’t find work, or a home, or help, they are much more likely to commit more crimes and return to prison.” In proposing his Prison Re-Entry Initiative, Bush said, “America is a land of the second chance – and when the gates of prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life,”

But more often than not, it doesn’t.

Human Rights Watch, an independent organization that monitors human rights abuses around the world, has issued a recent report that shows that when ex-offenders seek public housing – and even people who have been arrested but never convicted – they are often arbitrarily denied an apartment. The report is titled, “No Second Chance: People with Criminal Records Denied Access to Public Housing.”

“Exclusions based on criminal records ostensibly protect existing tenants,” the report notes. “There is no doubt that some prior offenders still pose a risk and may be unsuitable in many of the presently-available public housing facilities. But U.S. housing policies are so arbitrary, overbroad, and unnecessarily harsh that they exclude even people who have turned their lives around and remain law-abiding as well as others who may never have presented any risk in the first place.”

The report explains, “The tenuous relationship between public housing restrictions and legitimate safety goals is exemplified by policies that, for example, automatically deny housing to a person convicted of a single shoplifting offense four years earlier, or to someone convicted of simple possession of marijuana ten years earlier. But it can cause homelessness or transient living for those excluded – and it can be counterproductive for community safety, as it is difficult to be law-abiding while living on the streets.”

According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are more than 13 million ex-felons in the U.S. – 6.5 percent of the adult population. It noted that if the current trend continues, nearly 1 in 15 persons born in 2001 will go to state or federal prison during their lifetime.

“These stunning numbers are less a reflection of rates of serious crimes in the United States than they are of ‘tough on crime’ sentencing policies that have emphasized harsh punitive policies – mandatory prison sentencing and three strikes policies, for example, -- for even low level and nonviolent crimes,” the Human Rights Watch report concludes. “Arrest rates also reflect the U.S. ‘war on drugs’ which results in over 1.5 million arrests per year, over 80 percent for simple possession.”

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports show that drug abuse arrests far exceed the number of arrests for any other category.

“Racial and ethnic minorities suffer disproportionately from exclusionary housing policies because of their overrepresentation among those who experience arrest and prosecution, those who currently live in poverty, and those who seek public housing,” the report says. “Human Rights Watch is not aware of any other country that deprives people of the right to housing because of their criminal histories.”

Restricting the admission of former offenders in public housing masks the larger problem. The national goal, as articulated in the United States Housing Act of 1937, has been to provide “decent and affordable housing for all citizens.” But that’s not being done.
“Millions of American families [are] unable to afford safe and decent rental housing,” the report finds. “Wages have failed to keep pace with rental costs, rental costs have increased faster than costs of other basic needs, affordable housing is being lost to homeownership and market-rate rentals, and little or no new affordable housing is being built.”

Consequently, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty estimates that between 2.5 million and 3.5 million people will be homeless over the course of a year; 7 million over five years. Approximately 12.5 million, or 6.5 percent of the U.S. population, has been homeless at some point during their lives.

It’s time to end the shell game. We shouldn’t proclaim that we have a national goal of providing decent and affordable housing for all citizens while erecting barriers on the basis of one-strike and you’re out policies. Realizing that demand for affordable housing far exceeds the supply, we should commit ourselves to building more units. Public housing has provided the foundation for millions of poor Americans. I know because I was one of them.