interviews
The Hidden Subsidies of Rural Prisons
by Dr. Hannah Walker
June 13, 2018
This interview with Dr. Hannah Walker, an assistant professor of Political Science and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University was conducted and condensed by frank news. Her research examines the impact of the criminal justice system on American democracy with special attention to minority and immigrant communities. Previously, she served as a post doctoral fellow with the Prisons and Justice Initiative at Georgetown University, and received her PhD from the University of Washington.
In the article "The Hidden Subsidies of Rural Prisons" by Hannah Walker, Rebecca U Thorpe, Emily K Christensen and JP Anderson we were given insight into the collateral consequences of the prison system in rural communities.
The authors write: "This paper links the rise of a punitive punishment regime that disproportionately targets poor, urban minorities and the increasing use of rural spaces to warehouse prisoners. Preliminary evidence from a unique dataset across three states suggests that housing large, institutionalized prison populations inflates population counts in otherwise shrinking rural areas and operates as a hidden subsidy for rural counties with prison infrastructure. Prisons contribute to the immediate economic viability of predominantly white, lower class rural areas, despite devastating costs borne elsewhere."
How did you find yourself doing this particular research?
It came out of a larger project that I've been working on with Rebecca Thorpe. Rebecca Thorpe is a professor at the University of Washington which is where I finished my graduate studies. She was working on a project that tries to look at how political representatives vote on punitive policy issues depending on whether or not they have a prison located in the district that they represent.
Within the work of Hidden Subsidies what were the specific collateral consequences you focused on?
In Hidden Subsidies we were specifically looking at state fiscal transfers to counties. Looking at how having a prison in your County can actually shape those funding streams, because many of the funding formulas that public officials employ to try to determine how much money is going to be given to various entities, take population into account.
What we also know is that the census counts individuals who are incarcerated in the places where they're incarcerated instead of in the community that they come from. Those prisons can actually artificially inflate the population in rural communities.
In hidden subsidies what we find is that that artificial inflation helps to funnel extra funding to poor rural communities that might go elsewhere. Within that context we are seeing rural communities be advantaged by the placement of a prison within their communities.
Thinking about the collateral damage of prisons and of incarceration it's important to situate the siting of prisons in rural communities within a larger political economic framework.
Rural communities over the last half of the 20th century, have become incredibly neglected, and the businesses, and economic infrastructure that supported those communities originally, for various reasons, began to die in the late 20th century. Those communities needed a way to reinvent themselves to become once again economically viable. Some communities may, because of location, reinvent themselves around tourism. But not all communities have that option.
They become dumping grounds for less desirable types of businesses. Things like nuclear power plants for example, or prison.
They court prisons, they give them tax breaks. They do all kinds of things to be able to have a prison located in the community with the idea that prisons will provide jobs for individuals living in those communities, and for other businesses to rise up around to the prison.
Are these prisons primarily private?
No. They are not all private. Many of them are public.
Still the same courting process?
Yes. Absolutely. They don't always pay out. They often need more skilled labor than the communities can offer, workers come from elsewhere to work in the prison. The type of businesses that rise up around the prison are usually service-based industry, gas stations, restaurants, hotels — that aren’t providing full employment. The other thing that happens in those communities is that because the prison is located there, they become a less desirable site for other types of businesses that might have come in.
It really ends up being a weight around the community's neck.
And once a prison is in, it’s hard to get rid of.
Yes. Another way we might try to understand what the long-term economic effects of a prison are on a rural community is to look towards New York State, which has been on the leading edge of trying to close down many of their rural prisons. What happened in New York State is that first of all, the residents of those communities fought to keep the prison open because they perceive themselves to be very economically dependent on those prisons. And in places where the prison had shut down, nothing came to replace it.
It's not as if the prison has been repurposed into some other type of facility — other economic forces have not come in and replaced whatever meager economic provision that prison was able to provide.
It’s part of the larger move in New York to try to de-escalate their incarcerated population. There's a pretty strong progressive movement in the state. There has also been a movement in the state to try to reform census practices of counting prisoners were they’re housed and to count those individuals as members of the community where they’re from.
If it’s been shown that prisons in rural communities are not lastingly improving the economy — why are they still so appealing?
There are incentives in terms of getting extra funding from the state. I think there’s still a really strong perception that prisons can help those communities. The other part of it is to remember that these communities are in really, really bad shape. They don't have a lot of options, and so prison siting, even if it comes with some negatives attached to it might seem like a good idea for a community that is in very, very poor condition. Those are some of the political incentives I think to initially site a prison and then once the prison is sited those incentives are self reinforcing.
How do you discuss this with people in a way that moves beyond the statistics?
I focus on explaining that the types of jobs that come associated with the prison are really the type of jobs that they wouldn’t necessarily want to have, aren’t the types of jobs that could provide a viable living. They’re part-time jobs that pay very low wages and don't come attached with benefits.
But that can only be part of the story. We also have to be able to offer these communities an alternative model, and alternative source of funding. I'm not totally sure what that alternative model might look like, but we have to be able to talk to them about other ways in which their communities can become economically viable again if they forego a prison site. Then there are actively larger structural changes that try to support economically impoverished communities both rural and urban.
I would like to complicate the racial frame. We talk about mass incarceration and we talk about the collateral consequences of the incarceral State — we often talk about it in terms of the new Jim Crow and we talk about its disparate impact on black and Latino communities, and that disparate impact cannot be understated.
The negative impact of the criminal justice system on urban communities and all communities of color cannot be understated.
It's also important to point out that particularly in the South the rural communities where these prisons are located, are communities that are not predominantly white. They’re diverse, they’re communities where black and brown people live.
The companion phenomenon is that increasingly populations that are incarcerated are coming from the rural communities themselves, particularly with the rise of the opioid epidemic. One of the fastest-growing segments of the incarcerated population is among white rural folks. I want to complicate that racial frame to highlight that the way we manage incarceration in the United States right now isn't to the benefit of anyone. It's not to the benefit of the rural communities where our prisons are located.
The way that we manage incarceration in the United States isn't to the benefit of anyone.
interviews
In Conversation with Joe Paul Jr. Part One
by Joe Paul Jr.
June 6, 2018
This interview with Joe Paul Jr., the Vocational Services Administrator at SHIELDS for Families, was conducted and condensed by frank news. It took place May 23, 2018. This is part one of an ongoing conversation between frank and Joe Paul Jr.
How did you find yourself here, working at SHIELDS for Families?
Alright. I’m a formerly incarcerated person, E-22-8-4-2. I went to California State Prison. Sentenced June 22, 1989 for voluntary manslaughter; it was a drug related murder. I came home December 2, 1992 and that whole experience was the transforming moment of my life. Prison literally saved my life with no cliché. I found myself, I found the initial portion of my identity in that place. I recognized how disenfranchised my people, black men, were at that moment in time, and Latino men too. How blind we were to this deterioration we were in the middle of. I had the moral guilt that somebody died as a result of actions I was involved with. The converging of all these circumstances put me in this place where I said, "every day in my life moving forward I will do something to make a difference in improving the quality of life not only for myself and my family, but for the people around me –my community" – I was 24 years old when I came home. I'm 49 years old now and I've lived up to every single promise in terms of making sure that every day I'm doing something to improve the state and quality of our community.
I've always been involved from the time I came home with some sort of volunteerism. Typically this has been around church, supporting ministries in the African-American communities in South LA; I still do that to this very day. Not only do I work here at SHIELDS For Families as the Vocational Service Administrator for all of our adult programs, in the sidebar we have about 38 programs; we're a 25-million-dollar non-profit operation.
I've been here for the last six years. This is a twenty-seven-year-old organization that evolved out of the crack epidemic and everything subsequent to that.
In that last 10 years, I've been challenged in the field of nonprofit work to take on this issue of mass incarceration. When I first got into this field from a workforce development professionals point of view, I came into it at the precipice of the mortgage meltdown and then the Great Recession. At the same exact time California was in the throes of this three judge panel that told Schwarzenegger, and ultimately Jerry Brown, that you got too many people in prison. This is a constitutional violation, it’s cruel and unusual punishment: You're not providing adequate healthcare, you're not providing adequate mental health, you're not providing adequate housing. You've got to drop the population in prison. The advent of Assembly Bill 109, a reform bill around changing the status of felons from the traditional prison felony to now this county jail felony thing. We went through all of this transition and watched the subsequent reform bills along with it.
We were working in that climate, and now I feel like a veteran because we're in one of the most robust economies we've been in in a long time. There's construction across the whole state. There’s opportunities for people to relatively make living wage jobs with very little skills or education, and we still are at a crisis level when it comes to social dynamic. That's what keeps me moving and thinking about policy and legislation, and really closing the gaps where they've been created. Even with the best intentions we couldn't foresee the collateral consequences as a result of the effort that we saw the need for at that time. That's the front we're working on now.
What were the collateral consequences of that work?
I'll give you an example around a very salient point, and that's "Ban the Box". Ban the Box is the policy and intention to remove the question of: "Have you been convicted of a felony?", from employment applications. It was a foreign notion in L.A. and in California ten years ago; we were fighting for it. Now, we have statewide laws, we have one of the most robust Ban the Box laws in the whole country right here in L.A.
We didn't close the gap on how do you sell yourself and verify your work experience the way everyone else is going to? A very well intended, hard fought victory, to get the boxes removed, but now that the box is removed, these other complications are exposing themselves that we don't have a remedy for. On the CDCR, the Department of Corrections and Parole side, unless you have a very motivated parole agent, they're not going to focus on the employment verification for this dude who just spent 20 years in prison. All of his work experience, although credible, although valuable, although more qualified than someone else, won’t be provable. We’re working on that now.
What about extended and collateral consequences in the community?
2018 is midterms for the feds, it's statewide election, we're electing a governor in California, in L.A. we're electing the sheriff. You have 30 percent of the incarcerated population returning to L.A. County, and a huge percentage of that group coming to the city of L.A. Those who've been formerly incarcerated, and are felons and think that they're disenfranchised still, think they can't go to the polls and vote. If you're already a minority group, where it takes everybody's voice to stand up and say we agree with this piece of legislation, or we want this elected candidate in office, and everybody showed up without any restrictions, we still would have a challenge electing somebody.
You don't even scratch the surface of what change looks like. Those are blind consequences to the effect of mass incarceration on communities of color, and these disenfranchised communities like South Los Angeles.
For the last 20 years let's say, the police department, the DA, all of these different government bureaucratic systems, are more willing to work with you as the voice of the community, but the communities themselves are not so open to them.
What does that relationship look like right now?
It's almost like the community is saying, ‘too little too late’. It's like, ‘we were ready to work with you after the riots. We were ready to engage healthy dialogue after Rodney King’. We go through all of that, and not only do we have to suffer through the consequences of that experience, but then you put gang injunctions on our communities and the police come in and terrorize community members and criminalize innocent people inadvertently, and call them gang members. And then the criminal system puts enhancements on charges because now we label innocent people who weren't gang members as gang members and, yeah they sold drugs, or maybe they got caught with a gun, whatever the case may have been, but now I'm labeled a gang member because I grew up in this community and I get an extra five or six years on top of a sentence? These mothers are saying he's not a gang member, and he’s saying I'm not in it — you create this distrust. To the point where we don't want to deal with you.
The community is not in a place where they have been as forgiving as others. My position is, I wish that we – I hear Rodney King in the back of my head: "Can we all just get along?"
Right now the community is playing the biggest part of the problem in my opinion. A murder may happen in the community and the community itself knows exactly who did it, the detectives are doing this full blown investigation with no leads and nobody is saying anything. If you have individuals who consistently find themselves in a place where there's no consequence to their behavior because of the street code, or the community is intimidated by the perpetrator, whatever the case may be, we only end up hurting ourselves. We have to find a balance between those two extremes right now.
What allows you to trust government institutions after your own experience in the system?
And it doesn't take a whole lot. A few years ago, 2012, we worked closely with the sheriff's department and the county Registrar's office with our inmate voter registration. There were approximately 20,000 folks incarcerated in the county jail system at that time. We registered approximately 1,200, 1,250 folks. We didn't hit 10 percent of the total population for a lot of reasons. I felt we didn't do the best job we could. County Board of Supervisors, City Council people elected from the state touted the effort. "Oh my God, look what you guys did!" About 900 of those folks cast their ballot in custody. I've come to realize 900 additional votes could swing an election. I didn’t know it at the time. What I've learned is that we can mobilize and demonstrate that we can do this with intention, and purpose, and have a lot of weight in the power we bring to the table.
You got the power to say “nah not to you, you, but not you". If we all come together, they have to come to us to have a conversation, to get our opinion on what best practice looks like if they're elected. It's been like herding cats to get people into a place to see this potential power. It's apathy. It's almost too little too late. If you had asked it of us ten years ago, maybe, but we don't hear it now. You hear I don't care. Even if it hurts me to avoid this opportunity
Are you optimistic?
I am. You've got to be! I mean there's a verse of Bible that says a living dog is better than a dead lion. As long as we're alive there's hope.
I'm tired of going to funerals; I'm tired of burying kids. I'm tired of visiting domestic violence programs where women are abused simply because of the residual trauma and anger that community members have that are displaced.
I made a commitment as I said in the beginning, that I'm going to do my best to serve my community as long as I'm alive. I see no victory to believe. I'm a firm believer in the word of God that says a little leaven leavens the whole lump. So we can have a little bit, and sustain that little bit, it has the potential to grow into something bigger. I feel I've got other partners across the state who have a similar idea that we're not done yet. I do have optimism towards it.