Where is Home?:

Mass Incarceration in the Context of Incessant Displacement

Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Robert E. Fullilove, Rodrick Wallace[1]

Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, is a professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at Columbia University and a research psychiatrist at New York State Psychiatric Institute.  Her research focuses on the links between social organization and mental health.  She is author of "Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It" published in 2004 by Ballantine Books.

Robert E. Fullilove, Ed.D., is the Associate Dean for Community and Minority Affairs and Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Studies at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. He has served on the committees at the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. Dr Fullilove also serves on the editorial boards of the journals Sexually Transmitted Diseases, and the Journal of Public Health Policy.

Rodrick Wallace is a Research Scientist in the Division of Epidemiology of the New York State Psychiatric Institute.  Trained as a physicist, he has applied quantitative methods to understanding the relations between public policy, economic structure, and population patterns of disease and disorder.  In 1995 he received an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Introduction

In the 1980s in the United States, rates of incarceration soared (Golembeski & Fullilove, 2005).  The imprisonment of millions is a story of neighborhoods under stress: There is an often-cited statement that 75% of the people in New York’s prisons come from 7 poor minority neighborhoods in New York City.  Those are also the neighborhoods to which people return upon release from incarceration. 

Criminologists have long studied the relationships between neighborhoods and crime, noting specifically the link to socially disintegrated neighborhoods.  Neighborhood integration denotes strong and functional social bonds that people can use to solve tasks of collective living, including the inhibition of anti-social behavior (in the broadest sense of the term) (Leighton, 1959).  When such bonds are ruptured, local people lose their ability to control crime and law-breaking increases.  Widespread criminal activity feeds on itself, producing more disorder, less control and more law-breaking, in a downward spiral that can last for decades before stabilizing. 

Students of social disintegration have noted that the destabilization of social systems follows on the heels of many factors, including war, economic reorganization, and development.  These are processes that cause upheaval in the population and the rupture of social bonds.  The current wave of mass incarceration in the US has both arisen from such social disintegration and become an engine of it.  Specifically, mass incarceration has followed social disintegration in inner-city neighborhoods.  As people were taken out of the neighborhoods and put in prison, their loss as members of the social structure produced a further rupture of bonds (Johnson and Raphael, 2005).  The burdens of neighborhood and family were shifted to a smaller number of people who were in a greater state of disarray.  The return of people to the neighborhoods requires reintegration into the social order that arose in their absence.  This, too, is destabilizing for the functioning of the social system (Ross & Clear, 2002). 

These facts are well known.  What is less well understood is that all of these ruptures are taking place against an background of incessant displacement.  Serial processes of community displacement have been operating in US urban space over the past 60 years, slowly pushing poor and minority communities from the center city to the edge of the city or its oldest suburbs.  A study of reentry in Chicago found that over half of men returning from prison went to live in 7 of Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods (Visher & Farrell, 2005).  People returning from prison had different reasons for selecting the neighborhood to which they returned.  More than a third said they moved to a different neighborhood than the one they left because of instability: friends and family had moved away (25%) or they had lost their home (11%).   The study reports:

In focus groups we held with residents from four of these seven communities [to which returning people went], participants noted the composition of the neighborhoods had changed over the years.  They described their communities as places that used to be “good areas” before becoming overridden with drugs and gangs following the “white flight” to the suburbs that began in the 1950s.  Now, long-term residents are being forced out by increased rents and property taxes as gentrification occurs, and they feel disenfranchised from the community.  Further they noted a lack of local leadership that could help promote the interests and well-being of their community. (p. 4)

The work that our group, the Community Research Group, has conducted in conjunction with Dr. Rodrick Wallace supports and extends these focus group observations.  Indeed, more policies than white flight and gentrification can be cited as part of the process of neighborhood change, community displacement and social disintegration. These observations are based on our work on urban renewal in 5 US cities (Newark, NJ, Roanoke, VA, St. Louis, MO, Pittsburgh PA, and San Francisco, CA) (Fullilove, 2004), planned shrinkage in New York City (D. Wallace & Wallace, 1998), and displacement in Essex County (R. Wallace & Fullilove, 2007). 

Policies of displacement

Segregation and redlining

Underlying policies of forced displacement are the policies of American Apartheid, that is, the geographic separation by race.  Such policies are rooted in the post-reconstruction era (1876-1910), during which Southern whites used economic, social and physical violence to force African Americans into peonage and debt slavery.  These policies developed into a complex system of physical separation that grew to include public transportation, schools, hospitals and residential neighborhoods.  Some of these features of American Apartheid were instituted in the North as well.  Among them was the practice of confining African Americans to circumscribed ghetto areas.  As used here, “ghetto” refers to place in which members of a group are forced to live and are prevented via legal, social or political processes from moving to other areas.  

The word “ghetto” is not a synonym for slum but policies were put in place to deprive ghetto areas of resources, thus giving them an impoverished air.  Among these was the “redlining” policy introduced in 1937 by the Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC) to protect investment by indicating which urban areas offered the safest opportunities.  According the HOLC algorithm, new buildings with white inhabitants merited an “A” rating, while old buildings with non-white inhabitants received a “D.”  Redlining, which was applied over the existing patterns of segregation, imposed serious hardship on ghetto neighborhoods because it made it difficult to get money for investment. This meant that the built environment deteriorated more rapidly than it might have, given adequate and continuous maintenance.  This had major implications for risk for “blight” status under the urban renewal program that started in 1949. 

Urban renewal

The federal Housing Act of 1949 established a series of programs that are often referred to as “urban renewal.”  This law enabled cities to clear large tracts of land for “higher uses.”  The federal government subsized the acquisition of the land so that it could be sold to developers for a fraction of its worth.  At the heart of setting up an urban renewal plan was a city’s declaration that an area was “blighted.”  We have estimated that 1600 of the programs’ 2500 projects were directed at African American neighborhoods, often clearing tracts of 100 acres or more.  It is estimated that 600,000 black people were displaced by this program, losing not only their financial investments but also their collective accomplishments as communities. 

Deindustrialization

The United States was an industrial power at the time of World War II, but much of its industrial sector has since moved overseas to countries with lower wages and fewer environmental regulations.  This process, which began almost immediately after WWII, has led to factory closings and the elimination of decently-paying unskilled jobs.  Because of the catastrophic effect on local job markets, people have had to move to secure new employment.  Major industrial cities like Pittsburgh have suffered substantial population losses. 

Catastrophic disinvestment

Urban renewal forced displacement of black people, who often resettled into areas that were more intensely segregated by race and by class than the neighborhoods that had been destroyed. Not only was segregation continued but also so was redlining.  In many places, redlining was intensified into policies of disinvestment that actively removed public and private resources like banks, supermarkets and city services from designated areas.  The best studied of these policies is the “planned shrinkage” policy of New York, which closed fire stations in the 1970s and allowed poor, minority neighborhoods to burn down (D. Wallace & Wallace, 1998).  Though not called planned shrinkage elsewhere, disinvestment reached catastrophic levels in many American cities.  Disinvestment undermined the integrity of the housing stock and led to policy-driven contagious urban decay, a devastating process that moves relentlessly across the urban landscape and that can be stopped only by massive investment in every neighborhood.

HOPE VI

Federal housing projects are linked into this process in many ways.  Housing projects were an important social reform when first introduced in the 1930s.  They offered clean, decent housing for poor and working families.  Indeed, housing projects developed in that era were often models of design.  However, by the 1990s the federal government judged many housing projects to be “distressed communities,” a label that was applied to an array of housing types and conditions.  Reminiscent of urban renewal and the appellation of “blight,” “distressed housing communities” were slated for destruction, to be replaced by mixed-income units.  While this was sold to the public as an improvement, the HOPE VI interventions lead to forced displacement in a number of ways: they did not include 1-for-1 replacement of the public housing; they displaced residents before constructing new units; and they excluded people who were deemed “unfit” because of criminal records, drug use or other “strikes” which rendered them ineligible for government assistance for housing. 

Gentrification

Gentrification refers to the transformation of neighborhoods by an influx of wealthier residents who gradually displace the earlier, and poorer, inhabitants.  Gentrification is often thought of as a “natural” process reflecting the inexorable workings of the market.  More accurately, gentrification reflects an inversion of the map of redlining.  In highly schematic form, one can envision that previously “red” areas are now marked “green” for investment, and previously green areas are downgraded to red.  The populations of the areas are then exchanged. 

Mass criminalization

The growth in the prison system in the US since the 1970s has achieved impressive, tragic proportions.  Specifically, in 1970, the number of inmates doing time in state and federal prison systems was estimated to be approximately 200,000.  In 2006, the number held in these facilities grew to slightly less than 1.5 million, with an additional 760,000 or so held in local jails (bringing the total number of inmates in such facilities to approximately 2.2 million). Thus, the US rate of incarceration of its own citizens in 2006 was 750 per 100,000 (The Sentencing Project, 2006). 

Of particular significance is the population that cycles in and out of jails, that is, facilities that house those who have been arrested until they have been either tried, convicted, released from custody, or sent to prison. Jails in the United States are a uniquely urban phenomenon: in 2003, there were 940 jails, but 50 of these facilities that are located in urban areas held 31 percent of all jail inmates that year (Freudenberg, 2007).

As noted earlier, most inmates will leave jail or prison.  The Sentencing Project estimates that since 1998, every year approximately 600,000 are released from these facilities, but more than 100,000 prisoners are being released without any form of community correctional supervision (Sentencing Project, 2007).  Sadly, this failure to provide appropriate supervision results in all too many cases in former inmates committing crimes within the neighborhoods to which they return and in the re-arrest and subsequent incarceration of approximately two-thirds of all re-entering prisoners (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2002).

The costs of forced displacement

There are many costs to forced displacement.  Fullilove (2004) has proposed the term “root shock” to convey the serious of these processes.  Root shock is defined as the traumatic stress reaction to the loss of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem.  Although careful attention and resources could lead to a successful recovery, that has not been the case.  Rather, upheavals have followed one upon the heels of the other, acting synergistically to undermine individual and collective functioning.

Our intent in this analysis was to demonstrate how deeply public policies related to housing and urban development have influenced the social structure of poor communities of color throughout the United States in the latter half of the 20th century.  Policy makers and other professionals who work in the field of prison reform must understand how much the history of  disinvestment, abandonment, and displacement have complicated the tasks of helping people return from prison.  While criminologists have long followed the process of social disorganization, its geography and the relationship of that geography to public policy deserves attention. 

Crime can not be controlled or contained in communities subject to public policies of recurrent forced displacement (R. Wallace & Wallace, 1995).  It is, however, also clear that deterioration in public health and public order caused by such policies cannot and will not be contained within the populations directly subject to them, but will poison the well for all, by a great variety of mechanisms of spatial and social diffusion.  The wealthy suburbs surrounding Newark, Roanoke, St. Louis and Pittsburgh are deeply implicated in the fate of the poor, wherever they reside. 

The incessant displacement of the past 50 years, and the accompanying housing destruction that has been a hallmark of the policies that led to forced relocation, has created the social context of the US policies of mass incarceration.  A serious effort to stop on-going displacement is essential to any efforts to aid people returning from prison.  To that end, we propose 7 tasks for the nation’s neighborhood recovery agenda: 1) help every family by strong; 2) end forced displacement of minority communities; 3) bring manufacturing jobs back to the US; 4) rebuild community networks in devastated neighborhoods; 5) rebuild low-income housing; 6) end mass criminalization of minority and poor people; and 7) enforce anti-discrimination laws. 

References

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Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics Recidivism study accessed  September 7, 2007,  

           http://www.cor.state.pa.us/stats/lib/stats/BJS%20Recidivism%20Study.pdf

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