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 Two
by Joe Paul Jr.
June 7, 2018
Above: August 12, 1986. "About 500 men, women and children carrying signs and shouting "No prison in L.A." march up and down Olympic Boulevard, protesting the proposed site of a 1,700-bed, medium security state prison. L.A. Councilman Richard Alatorre, carrying a sign that read "No jail. Protect our children."
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 two of an ongoing conversation between frank and Joe Paul Jr.
What do you think about the rise in female incarceration we’re currently experiencing?
I read a Million Dollar Hoods article that spoke about this bail reform issue – it talked about how there's $13 billion in set bail amounts. The predominant quote-unquote victims in this are black women and Latino women because they're generally the ones that post the collateral and put the bail money up to get these guys out of jail. It's such an alarming rate of disproportionality. That's one of the factors pushing around we have to find a different process. You create this financially based justice system. If you have money you get a different justice system; if you don't have money you get a different justice system. That's a different story.
This institution was established as a result of the crack epidemic and babies being exposed prenatally to crack cocaine.
Now you have a whole generation of kids that were labeled as crack babies that are suffering from all of the physical and mental illness that was a result of the exposure. SHIELDS for Families has grown its proportionality to service as a result of adapting the initial services of substance abuse to all of the other systems that are attached to that – the child welfare system, the mental health system, the criminal system, and all of these other roles that we saw, if we don't get into this, we're going to fall behind, and if we don't have access to that we're going to fall behind. We're not going to adequately provide services if we don't tap into this.
It was only a matter of time before you started seeing this spike in female based increases in the criminal justice system because it's become such a norm for men, that those same cultural behaviors in impoverished communities — you know, if a soldier falls down and his rifle still works, then the one who's still standing has to pick it up. The women are picking up the proverbial rifle. Then you think about the other issues around HIV, AIDS, Hepatitis, and other communicable disease or sexually transmitted diseases that are spiking in women, particularly black women. It's all the same effect.
The process is like gravity – once you fall into this realm you're going to get those outcomes.
A person told me a long time ago – she said Joe Paul, you're going to burn out in this business. You're going to burn out. You just go too hard. I was like, you can't go too hard. There's a lot of work to do. She said, let me paint a picture for you – you see a person in the water and you swim out with a life-vest and you put it on the person and you swim back to shore, you see another person in the water and you swim out you put a life-vest on him. You can do that individually, but you're not looking at the big picture that there are thousands and thousands of people out here drowning. Are you going to swim to all of them? She said, why don't you just fix the hole in the ship that they're jumping out of? You could salvage those who are in the water, but prevent the rest from even needing to jump out of the ship.
And that was policy and legislation: fix the hole in the ship. That opened my eyes. I share this example to say, we won't stop this trend – where women are now becoming a greater part of the system, and all of the elements that make it what it is, until we really reform the practices of the system itself.
The intentionality is overwhelming. We’re just coming out of Urban Planning that spoke to a lot of systemic issues.
Gentrification is huge. Gentrification is a bitch.
I saw–no disrespect–a gay white man walking his dog on Slauson and Western! I wouldn't have walked on Slauson and Western — but gentrification is real.
No one can afford anything.
Absolutely. You can't afford it. Go live in Apple Valley. Go live in Paris. Find somewhere else to live. Here's the bottom line, if I may: There's nothing new under the sun. America was predicated and based off of slavery. The system itself is working the way it was designed to work. There always had to be an underclass, there always had to be a subservient group of people for this capitalist society to work. Blacks were just convenient.
I just had this conversation with Alex Padilla, our Secretary of State. That's the context no one wants to have a conversation about. Trump made it quite apparent that this mentality and culture still exists. He just brought it from the back to the front. We're going to make our country great again just meant that "you guys are going to fall back into this subservient role that you always played, stop acting like you fit in. Even though the last guy in here did a better job than me and he looked like you guys, we're going to erase all of that".
Without being angry and without being retaliatory, accepting the facts of the matter as they are and finding healthy solutions to make sure our posture is presented in a way where we eliminate the stereotypes that make middle class and upper middle class white Americans subscribe to this idea that blacks are violent or that Mexicans kill people – we can't reinforce that. We don't have to accept it either.
I used to ask all the time, how does a community stay in this plight seven generations? How does this happen? We've met guys who say "we've been here 17 years," proudly. No problem. But they’re in low income housing, it's a stepping stone. It's not supposed to be perpetual. I see firsthand how that happens now.
There's a handful of people in the community that are stakeholders of the community that only have the intention of managing the flow of their piece of the money as it comes through. That's what's been the consistent thing: opportunity after opportunity, in every decade, a situation like this arises, a small group of people control all of the opportunities and impose their will on everybody else.