The True Cost of Incarceration in Baltimore’s Poorest Neighborhoods

Although, it was good to watch this interview that US has started to look into reforming its prison system, I don't have much hope of something actually happening. Reason being that US prison system, similar to its medical system, is becoming profit-driven, as it is also mentioned in the interview.

Some states have contracted out the prison system to private contractors. Those private contractors benefit from prison population's almost-free / "slave" labour & they also get subsidies / tax breaks from the government (similar to several other companies / industries). Of course, if the contractors are profiting from the labour, they need more of that "free" labour. So, of course, they lobby hard & get the judiciary (judges, attorney generals etc.) on their side of the table.

Result is harsh sentencing laws, e.g. minimum mandatory sentence, are then passed. By the way, there was a good crime drama 2013 movie on this issue, "Snitch," starring Dwayne Johnson, & based on a real story. Anyway, so contractors need to keep a certain level of beds fill in their prisons. They may even be getting tax breaks or subsidies based on prison fill-rate (sort of like how hotels operate their business). On top of that, attorneys' successes are measured based on their conviction rate. So the more they put people behind bars, the more they are considered as making the public safe. That perception comes in very handy if those attorneys are dreaming of getting into government one day.

So who suffers in all of this self-serving agendas, fiasco & corruption? The Public.

1. Taxpayers: As the interviewee explains that millions of taxpayer $$$ are spent in housing these prisoners; some counties are spending almost $10 -15 million a year. Those same millions which could have been spent on improving infrastructure, putting food on the poor family's table (by increasing the budget of food stamp program, instead of cutting it), improving schools in poor, urban areas so kids of disadvantaged families also get the same quality of education as the kid from an elite family.

2. People: Those people who get snared in this prison system. Racism is still existent in the American society; African-Americans, who are usually on the disadvantaged spectrum of the general population, face the brunt of these harsh laws. They get locked up for minor offences, assuming they did commit an offence in the first place.

Once they caught up in that cycle, there is no exit out of that maze. Even when they do get out, they have a hard time securing employment and/or housing. Result is they may not have enough money to pay alimony or provide a suitable place to live for their kids or live in a safe & secure place just by themselves.

So, if, due to unemployment, that person, who was not a violent offender in the first place, but has an "ex-con" label now, doesn't pay child support, then he is put into prison. If that person, due to unemployment, can't secure housing, & starts living on the streets, where he/she can easily become a drug addict, & if he gets caught with a drug, he/she visits the prison, again. What happens with all these prison visits? That person is labelled a multiple offender, & has much longer sentences.

Essentially, that person, who was wrongly / perhaps, harshly convicted of a minor offense, becomes a hardened criminal. Who gets the blame then? That person him/herself.

But, at the end of the day, will things really change for the better? I still say, no. Because, the political will is not there. Mr. Trump thinks that the crime is increasing, even though, it isn't, & Republicans are trying to bring in legislation to become much more tough on crime. That "toughness" will always always ensnare poor people of colour, which will continue the vicious cycle of incarceration, drug addiction, unemployment, homelessness, poverty, & death. Big money is involved in this cycle & after all, who wants to let go money?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mHhuE4IxZY

STEPHEN JANIS, TRNN PRODUCER: America’s reputation as a incarceral nation is well-established. The United States accounts for 25% of the world’s entire prison population, while representing just 5% of the world’s total population.

But a new study reveals a different perspective on the country’s penchant for imprisonment–the price tag–and not just for the country as a whole, but for specific neighborhoods in Baltimore. And what the study found is not just how much we’re spending to keep people locked up, but how much [of what] we’re spending is concentrated in poor minority neighborhoods.

The numbers are stunning. Maryland is spending $50 million to incarcerate residents of roughly five neighborhoods.

One of the things that I found interesting about the study is just why you decided to look at these neighborhoods and look at incarceration from an entirely different perspective. Could you talk about that little bit?

MARC SCHINDLER, EXEC. DIRECTOR, JUSTICE POLICY INSTITUTE: Sure. Well, this is a significant issue for the state of Maryland and for the country as a whole, as you talked about. The amounts that we’re spending to lock people up in our cities and states around the country is extraordinary. In Maryland, we spend nearly $1 billion on the corrections agency–and just in Baltimore City, almost $300 million a year to lock people up.

And so one of the things that we talk about from a policy perspective–and I used to run a corrections agency–is: what are we getting for that investment? Are our communities safer? And, unfortunately, the answer largely is no.

And so what we did when there was some data available here in Baltimore, particularly, was look more closely at the data, particularly where people who are incarcerated live prior to their incarceration and what’s going on in those communities. And are there different ways that we might spend scarce public resources that would get us better outcomes?

JANIS: Now, you found specifically there were five communities where the most was spent. And what you looked at were some of characteristics, some of the outcomes in those committees. What did you find there?

SCHINDLER: So what we found across the cities. So there are about half of Baltimore’s communities, so about 25 of the 50-some odd communities, spend more than $5 million a year on incarceration. And as you pointed out, ten of those communities are spending more than $10 million. And one community in particular is actually spending about $17 million to lock up almost 500 people.

What we saw in common across those communities is that those are communities that are facing a variety of challenges. That includes everything from housing to high levels of substance abuse within those communities, to low education and low earnings in those communities. So we found a range of challenges within those communities.

And what the study really draws people and shows what we need to be asking is what is the link between those things and is spending on incarceration the best way we can spend money to address some of those issues.

JANIS: Now, of course, one of the big issues in criminal justice system is race and the involvement of race in criminal justice and where criminal justice resources are targeted. These neighborhoods, what was the racial composition?

SCHINDLER: So, overwhelmingly the neighborhoods that are sending the most people to prisons in Maryland are overwhelmingly communities of color, particularly African-American. And so you’re absolutely right. It’s virtually impossible to have a responsible discussion about criminal justice policy in this country without talking about the impact of race. And so what we see, whether it’s the juvenile justice system, the adult criminal justice system, is a disparate impact on communities of color, including people of color getting locked up for longer periods for similar types of behavior, as is exhibited in the white community.

JANIS: So why do you think it is that this subject of cost is so often not discussed within the context of criminal justice? I mean, your study is pretty much unique. I mean, there’ve been other studies that have covered this, but not in detail. Why is cost always sort of left out of the conversation?

SCHINDLER: Well, you know, I think it’s complicated, right? And so when we think about systems in government–and, again, I used to run a government agency. It was a juvenile corrections agency. Oftentimes you’re before the council or the state assembly, and you’re siloed into a committee that focuses on your issue. Right? And so, when I would testify about the juvenile justice budget in Washington, D.C., it was before a different set of council members that were talking about housing. Right? That was in a completely separate committee.

These things are related, right? So we know, for example, at the Baltimore City jail, there’s a percentage of people who are there who largely are there because they don’t have housing, right? And so, should we be locking people up essentially because they’re homeless. Right? And so these are issues that are intertwined.

But, unfortunately, the way government works, and sometimes the way the media works, is we don’t have a conversation that brings these issues together. And it is complicated, right? And so we need to make sure that we’re challenging ourselves to prove and say, okay, how exactly are we spending our resources? Where are we spending them? And what are the outcomes we’re getting?

JANIS: Well, that’s a great point you bring up, the efficacy of the criminal justice system. You’re saying that more incarceration doesn’t make us safer. How is that possible? And what aspects of this process make us less safer in your opinion?

SCHINDLER: Sure. There’s little bit of a tipping point here, right? So some level of incarceration clearly does impact public safety. Right? So there are people who are committing very, very dangerous acts, and if they’re incarcerated, they’re not committing those acts, at least on the streets, for the period that they’re incarcerated. But what the students have shown over time–and most recently a major report issued by the Bernard Center for Justice showed that incarceration has a limited impact on public safety. And, in fact, it has diminishing returns the more you get. Right? So, essentially there’s a tipping point.

And there has been research over the years–and I think if we looked at some of these communities in Baltimore, we would see this, in that in fact a high rate of incarceration actually can have a destabilizing impact on a neighborhood. Right? And you think about that, it’s sort of common sense. Right? So here in Baltimore, for example, in these neighborhoods that we’re talking about, we have a disproportionate number of African-American men going to prison. Right? These are men who have sons, who have daughters, who have spouses, who have families. When you’re removing them, right, you may be removing someone who committed a crime, but you’re also removing someone who can be an asset to that community, who most likely was doing some work of some kind, who was caring for a family member. Right? And so when you take a significant portion of those people out of the community, right, that community is stretched even more thin. Right?

And so this destabilizing effect on communities is something that we need to be aware of and look at: what are the other challenges within that community that we can be addressing and be addressing in a more cost-effective way? It’s essentially cheaper to get somebody trained for a job, right, which you can do–for the $37,000 that we pay to lock up an individual for a year in Maryland, you can have five people in a workforce development program. I would argue that if you’re doing a good job and have the right people in that program, it’s a much better investment and a much better use of your tax dollars that just locking up one person.

JANIS: And so I have to ask you to question, because everything you say makes perfectly common sense to me, and yet, even in Annapolis now there is talk of police reform, right? But it’s not going anywhere at the moment. What is the resistance to looking at this in this way, in ... purely economic context? And I’ve kind of asked this question before. And it’s still the more you say, what is preventing us from having a discussion about this, about our incarceration issue?

SCHINDLER: Yeah. I think there’s a number of things that are making this discussion hard, although there’s also some things that are starting to make it a little bit more possible in today’s times. So you mentioned the disproportionate impact on people of color in the criminal justice system. And so we should just call it for what it is, right? Race is a factor, and there is a reluctancy to have that discussion in public forums to acknowledge what is going on in the justice system.

We’re starting to see that in this country–unfortunately, due to tragedies. Right? But we have everyone from the president to the attorney general to leaders in Congress talking about the fact that we lock up too many people in this country not for good law enforcement reasons. So that’s one reason.

The other piece, though, is, quite frankly, we’re spending so much money on this criminal justice system now that we can no longer afford to ignore this conversation. Right? And so you have now fiscal conservatives coming to the table to talk about these issues, because essentially they’ve taken a hard look at this and they said, you know, we’re locking up two-thirds of the people in this country for nonviolent offenses and we’re spending extraordinarily amounts of money. So they’re starting to ask, can we do something differently? So that’s created some opportunity to have a discussion.

There’s also a part of the conservative movement that is libertarian. Right? And they’re concerned about more intrusive government. Right? And so government, through our corrections system, has gotten extraordinarily big. Right? And so it’s very expensive, it’s intrusive, and it’s not fair.

So I think a combination of those things–combined with unfortunate tragedies, quite frankly–is at least providing some opening for this discussion. Whether that will actually result in real reform is another question.

JANIS: Well, you bring up a good point. It’s an industry, too, right? I mean, what you’re talking about the criminal justice system–I’ve read somewhere it’s around $80 billion a year, employs thousands of people. How much does that factor into keeping that discussion on a limited plain?

SCHINDLER: Oh, there’s no question about it. It is a criminal-industrial complex, right? And so there are literally billions of dollars that are at stake. And there are private for-profit prison companies. There are companies that make the food that are served in prisons, that build prisons. And so this is an extraordinarily profitable industry and one that takes up a piece of our economy. So that does make this in some ways more challenging. And, if you will, there are special interests who have a vested interest in the status quo.

But I think we’re starting to see some pushback on that and some realization that this is not getting the outcomes that we’re looking for.

We also just can’t ignore the fact that we are at an all-time record low for crime in this country. That’s not necessarily because of incarceration. But I think that’s also giving us an opportunity to have a discussion where there’s not as much fear within the general public, because crime is relatively low right now.

JANIS: Moving forward, what do you think needs to happen, and what do you think will come with this report? Are you planning on doing any more research? Or moving forward, what will happen?

SCHINDLER: Sure. You know, our hope–and I think we’re starting to see this happen–is that people will start asking tougher questions in terms of how we are spending our scarce public dollars.

One of the things that we point to in the report–and I think there’s some discussion going on here in Maryland and in other places–is let’s really have a cost-benefit analysis when we’re talking about public policy.

So a place that is actually doing this quite well is in Washington state. Some years ago they created the Washington State Institute for Public Policy. And they are charged with actually doing a cost-benefit analysis in terms of looking at the likely outcomes for different changes in law and policy. There’s no reason that Maryland and other states shouldn’t be doing the same thing. So responsible elected officials should be asking, if we pass this law, or if we leave this long sentencing law in effect, what are we getting from that, from a cost-benefit analysis as it relates to public safety?

And so our hope is that people start to ask those questions, ’cause I think when those questions start to get asked and they start to see the answers, that’s a way to shift this discussion and move it forward more effectively.

"The Long Shadow": Race, Class and Privilege in Baltimore (4/5)

This discussion is good enough that I don't have to say much. This should be an eye-opening discussion for those people who think racism & discrimination no longer exist in 21st century North America or anywhere else in the developed world. Racism & discrimination in every sphere of life is alive, & being vigorously practiced, all over the West / Global North / developed world.

As per the discussion, social mobility is restricted, or at least, severely handicapped, due to this discrimination, & the general public incorrectly thinks that African-Americans, or every non-white / non-Caucasian, is poor or destitute because he / she is lazy or does not know how to find jobs. It's not that black & white.

Non-whites / non-Caucasians are hard-working & studious, & want to find gainful employment, but they are being restricted from doing such. But they & their families need that money, too, so they get involved in criminal endeavours, for which, society treats them very harshly. Severe punishment is not going to make the problem of people turning towards crimes, but eliminating the root cause will solve that problem, & the root cause is racism & discrimination in the society.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FBcnrDf_l0

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: Out of the 790 Baltimore children you surveyed in 1982, 33 moved from low-income to high-income brackets. What was different about them? ...

KARL ALEXANDER, JOHN DEWEY PROF. OF SOCIOLOGY, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV.: Well, let me say, just to clarify, that's not income. The way we classify their families and themselves as young adults, it's socioeconomic standing, which is a combination of income, occupational status, and level of education. So it's all three of those things combined. And that movement up, what we do is we classify families as low, medium, and high in terms of their socioeconomic standing, and we do that for the parents and we do it for the children. And then we cross-classify the two so we can see how many children went from low to high, how many children went from high to low, and so forth.

And so, yes, we find that just 33 of the children who grew up in lower socioeconomic status families made it into the higher realm as adults. The number of children who started out in favorable family circumstances and dropped to the lowest level, there's just nine of them. So there is upward mobility, there's downward mobility, but that's relatively infrequent ... .

So there's children who moved up from the lowest, from the bottom category to the highest of our classification. That was 9.5% ... . The ones who dropped down from high to low was just 6.3% of the group that started out high fell to the lowest category. ... But that 9.5% moving from low to high is contrasted with 41% who started low and stayed low, so when there's a fourfold difference in the likelihood of moving up from lower origins to the high destinations. The 6.5% who started out high and dropped low, that's against 50% who started high and stayed high. So that's more than almost a tenfold difference.

So ... that actually does a good job of kind of capturing the whole experience globally over the span of years, 'cause it anchors children in where they started in life in terms of their family conditions and then compares it to where they wound up in life in terms of their own conditions as young adults. And the predominant tendency is to stay where you started. Some people move up, some people drop down, but a predominant tendency is to stay where you started. And that's what really the "long shadow" imagery is intended to convey. Economists that look at these mobility patterns, they call it stickiness at the extreme. You know, you're kind of stuck where you started out.

How did the people move up who did make it out? ... the stories are so different one from the other it's hard to generalize. But some did it by being successful in school, ... , the way your parents probably told you to do it and the way my parents taught me to do it, ... , stay the course, study hard, come to school prepared, and do what your teachers tell you, and you'll be successful. Some of them did that. ... We have others who have moved up by being entrepreneurial, doing well without the advantages of a college degree. ...

So the paths to moving up--now, there are different ways you can do this, and many of our study participants have been quite resourceful and energetic and entrepreneurial and have managed to rise above. But, again, the predominant tendency, the pattern, is to not move up. If you start out in a disadvantaged family, the likelihood is that you're going to be in a disadvantaged family yourself as a young adult. So there's movement up, but there's also stability, and the stability in terms of your position in the stratification, hierarchy ... . Stability is the norm. Most people stay where they start. And the ones who break out and are successful, we applaud them, and it's great to see that, but you'd like to have it from more than just 9.5%. You'd like it to be ... 100% if you could. But short of that, you know, something. You'd like to see greater opportunities for children to get ahead in life who start out kind of behind.

NOOR: ... So, recently Paul Ryan, he said that inner-city men are lazy; and that's why they're not successful, that's why they don't have jobs: they don't want to get jobs. And what has happened since you started this study is that you've had under the Reagan administration a massive amount of cuts in social spending, cuts in social security and welfare in the Clinton years, and the escalation of the war on drugs, mass incarceration. What is your response to Paul Ryan? What are your thoughts? And this is also a common idea throughout society.

ALEXANDER: Yeah, no, it is a common idea. It's widely held. And I think it's just--it's certainly too superficial, and it might be just out-and-out wrong. Certainly as a blanket statement, broadly applicable, it's certainly wrong. We certainly don't see this in the experiences of our group. They try to get ahead by getting additional education, and there are just obstacles that stand in their way, so they're unsuccessful. They try to find jobs, but they don't have family members or neighbors or ins with the boss that can help them get into the door.
...

... I think, as a social social concern, I think much attention is focused on the limited opportunities for African Americans. But it's absolutely wrong about all inner-city people, 'cause one of the things that our book establishes is that the whites of lower background have are much more successful in terms of finding stable and well-paying employment, good-paying employment, much more successful than African-American counterparts and the women of either--, black and white.

... it's clear that they, African-American men in particular, lag behind, and it's challenging for them. And then their challenges kind of trickle down to affect women who are trying to establish lives and take care of families, many of them on their own. The national literature says that African-American men are more likely to apply for jobs than are white men when they need them and are eager to find employment. That much is clear.

It's also clear that the stain of a criminal justice record is a greater impediment for African-American men [than] for white men. We see that in our research, but it's also seen nationally.

So I think there's a relevant history here that we haven't even touched upon. But it has to do with the way opportunities open up in the kind of blue-collar workforce. And it goes back to the World War II industrial era, industrial boom. So what it wasn't too long ago, I think, that Baltimore was the economic engine or powerhouse of the Maryland economy. It's easy to forget, but--because we've been mired in these difficult times for decades now, but in the World War II era, when during the height of the war mobilization--Beth Steel, for example, was the largest steel mill in the world, with 35,000 workers, and now it's being sold off for scrap. That was a time--some of the literature refers to this as the moment of the blue-collar elite, where you could find steady work and high-paying work on the assembly lines, in the steel mills, on the docks. So there was a lot of good, steady work to be found.

But Baltimore was highly segregated during that time, and most of that good, steady work was available to blue-collar whites and not blue-collar African Americans, who were relegated to the least-promising kind of employment. They did all the dirty work and the nonskilled laboring work. And so we're talking three generations back. We're talking about the--our study, youngsters' grandparents.

Also there were restrictive residential covenants. So the white working-class in Baltimore were substantially isolated in residential enclaves. If you know the area locally, the first thing you think about when you--what comes to mind when you think about whites in Baltimore are the upscale neighborhoods that are exclusive--the Roland Parks, the Guilfords, the Homelands. But in point of fact, there are working-class, white working-class neighborhoods scattered throughout the city that also are long-standing and very much insulated by residential segregation--Curtis Bay, Brooklyn, and there's over on the west side (near the B&O Railroad Museum) Pigtown, Sandtown, low-income working-class, white working-class neighborhoods that are insulated in terms of being racially segregated.

So you put these two things together in a historic perspective, you've got really a booming industry of high-skill, high-pay blue-collar work and whites having access, greater access to that kind of employment, and you have segregated residential neighborhoods, where people, blacks and whites, don't mix and mingle. They didn't back then, and they don't do much better today. White parents who have social networks through those in the workplace or in the neighborhood, a lot of employment in the non-college workforce is word-of-mouth, ... recommendation from a friend or a cousin or a neighbor that can help open doors. And working-class whites are much better able to provide those opportunities for their children than are African Americans, than are working-class African-American parents.

So what happens is, in the historic context, you see--in the book, we quote a sociologist by the name of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. He's a sociologist at Duke University. And here's the quote. It says, the racial practices and mechanisms that have kept blacks subordinated have changed from overtly and eminently racist to covert and indirectly racist.

So I think this history is where the overtly and eminently racist practices come into play that excluded African-Americans from high-wage work, blue-collar work, and that excluded them from neighborhoods where they could develop social contacts that would be helpful to their children. That's 50 years ago. But if you fast-forward to today, you still have these same isolated neighborhoods, and you still have word-of-mouth hiring for these kinds of--on the construction sites and whatnot. And so white parents are better able to help their children get this kind of work. And they do it. They do it.

I'm going to kind of in a very roundabout way get back to your Paul Ryan quote. The white guys are working hard and doing rather well, inner-city white guys working hard and doing rather well. Because they have these network advantages through their parents, relatives, and friends, they can get into this kind of work. And they grew up with it. ... if your father was an auto mechanic, you're helping him. If he's an electrician, a small-jobber, you're on the job with him. So you get worked in that way. African Americans by and large don't have those opportunities and that access.

But the African Americans that we know through our project are also highly motivated and willing to work hard. But they have more impediments, maybe more barriers in the way that keep them from finding, realizing the same kinds of success that the lower income background whites realize. And so I'm very dismissive of that kind of attitude about inner-city young people, African-American or white or/and white. It just doesn't ring true. It doesn't resonate with what we've seen in the experiences of our children growing up, and it doesn't resonate in terms of what I know of the broader literature that speaks to these very same kinds of issues.

“The Long Shadow”: Race, Class and Privilege in Baltimore (2/5)

A brief discussion on a social study looking at how racism holds back African-Americans in one city, Baltimore, in regards of education & employment, against their Caucasian / White counterparts. People all over the world think that there's no, or minimal, discrimination in Europe & North America in the areas of employment & education, & merit rules the day. But, this & several other studies will confirm that racism & discrimination very much exist & affects the minorities very much so.

Now, we have to keep in mind that this study is looking at the racism effect on African-Americans & Caucasians / Whites; people whose religious beliefs & social attitudes might not differ so much & the only difference between them will be the colour of their skin. Now, what if we factor in the religious beliefs? Those religious beliefs will show up in the subjects' names, familial & social connections, social attitudes, & perhaps, their outlook (facial hair, dressing style etc.). Per my own observations & experiences, these factors adversely affect the individual & make his / her climb up the social & corporate ladder that much harder.

That's why, 2nd-generation immigrants (children of immigrants) usually shun the habits of their immigrant parents & adopt their host countries' customs & cultures. This adoption helps them in gaining acceptance in the social & corporate arena & seemingly makes their life that much easier. Children who stick to their parental cultures keep suffering. Other people in their family & friend circle start pointing out that how people they know are getting ahead without acknowledging some simple facts that how those children who are getting ahead have forsaken the cultural & religious practices of their immigrant parents, & have adopted their host country's customs & cultures.

The simple reason the general public wants to believe that there's no racism is that it's much easier to lay the blame of a Muslim teenager rebelling against the society with a gun or an African-American man being homeless & broke on their own abilities & competencies, instead of how hard it is to succeed in life when the cards are stacked against you from the time of your birth, simply because of the colour of your skin, or your religious belief, or your family's networks.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8BPTpSQCYY

KARL ALEXANDER, JOHN DEWEY PROF. OF SOCIOLOGY, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV.: 40%of high school dropout rate overall. We all would want better than that for our children, much better. One of the interesting things, because there's a lot of discussion of high school drop out is that that's the end of the story. But 60% of the study youngsters who left school without high school degrees eventually get some kind of high school certification, and most of them do the GED degree, which is an alternative certification, but by the standards of federal government accounting that's high school completion. 10% who dropped out return to high school and finish with regular diplomas.

So what started out as a 40% high school degree at age 28 is down to 25%, which is still really very high, but it's not 40%. So these kids who leave school, many of them realize that this wasn't a very good decision and they regret it and they try to do something about it. When we talked at age 28 to everyone, 80% of the total panel said that they intended to get additional education, 80% at age 28. It was 85% among high school dropouts. We call them permanent high school dropouts because by age 28 they didn't have a GED or a high school diploma. ... it really is quite impressive to see how the success ethos that school is the way to get ahead has permeated through even a very disadvantaged population of urban youth. So these kids want to succeed in life, they want to do well, and they understand, many of them, that school can be the path out, up and out. But there are just so many barriers that stand in the way that for many of them, they're not able to see it through.

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: And there is a racial disparity in high school dropouts between white and black, who found work even though they were high school dropouts.

ALEXANDER: Yes, there ... is a racial disparity, but it's not the one that you might anticipate. So one of the interesting opportunities that we had here, because we did start out with a very diverse sample within the framework of the Baltimore City Public Schools system is that we have a large presence of low-income white children. And there's a vast literature on the problems of the urban poor and concentrated poverty in our big cities, but you very rarely see low-income whites as part of that picture, as part of that story. And that's regrettable, because there are low-income whites in Baltimore and there are low-income white neighborhoods in Baltimore. There have been all along, and there still are. But very rarely do you see them brought into the conversation about the challenges of the urban poor and whatnot.

So we were fortunate in being able to include a large group of these youngsters in our study, and we monitored their experiences over time as well. And what we find is that the lower-income whites, white children, white males specifically, of disadvantaged family background have the highest dropout rate, non-completion. At age 28, their average years of schooling is about 10.2. So the typical lower-income white male growing up is a permanent high school dropout in terms of the way--our coverage of it.

Now, the others--and the comparisons we make are lower income against higher income, or lower socioeconomic standing against higher socioeconomic standing growing up, African American and white, and male and female, men and women. And when I say that the white males of disadvantaged family background have the lowest high school completion rate, had the highest high school dropout rate, I'm not saying that the others are going gangbusters. In fact, for the other three groups, they're all eleven-point-something years. So for all four--lower-income white men, white women, African-American men, and African-American women--at age 28, the typical youngster out of that group, all four of those groups, has not finished high school. But white men, if you look at the numbers, are least successful of all. ... in terms of using the educational system as the vehicle for moving up in life, 'cause they've got the lowest levels of formal schooling on average. ... .

But then to turn the page, ... they are most successful in the world work--so least successful educationally and most successful in the world of work, and across a whole host of particulars when you look at it: they're more likely to have worked full-time; they find jobs fast, more quickly, and they're ready to move on to the next job; their earnings are higher; and they have a very distinctive pattern of successful vocational development--from adolescence on, their employment experience is much better than that of African-American men of like background, and much better also than women of like background, both African-American and white. So these white guys don't use schooling as the vehicle for doing well in life, but they do have employment opportunities that aren't as readily available to the others who grew up in the same kind of circumstances.
...

... what we find, which is really tremendously striking is that at age 28, 45% of these guys are working in the high-skill, high-wage jobs in manufacturing and in the construction trades, 45% are working as either electricians, plumbers, welders, things of that sort. But the kinds of jobs that used to be the backbone of the old Baltimore industrial economy and everyone says that they're gone with deindustrialization ... , but if you look around, people are still building buildings, they're still doing a road repairs to the highways. If you need to upgrade your electricity at home, you call an electrician, or if you need a new hot water heater installed, you call a plumber. So there are people who are still doing this kind of work and working in these trades. And what we see is that it's white men of lower-income background who have the greatest access to these kinds of jobs, 45% of white men. 15% of African-American men are working in this same sector, the way we classify it. ... so the white advantage, just in terms of penetrating into this sector of employment, is threefold advantage. But on top of that, the white men who are working in the sector, their earnings are twice that of African-American men, roughly $44,000 against ... $22,000.

A little bit more than double. And that's at age 28 in terms of 2006, 2007 dollars. So these guys not only have better access to this high-skill, high-wage work in the blue-collar economy, but ... their positions that they find themselves in are much more--they pay a lot more than the positions African-Americans of like background find themselves in.

This is actually longstanding in Baltimore. We see it in the experiences of our study group, but there was a report that was published in the early '60s that looked at the earnings, using Social Security data, ... of the automobile mechanic graduates to Baltimore vocational and technical high schools back in the day. Actually, it was Mergenthaler and Carver. They were segregated at the time. And the white graduates, the white auto mechanics graduates four or five years afterwards were making twice what the African-American graduates were making in the same program, auto mechanics. So this is a longstanding pattern.

And so there is another--there's a second option for how to establish yourself in life and achieve a reasonably comfortable standard of living.
...

... I say men because it is particularly men. There aren't many women, white or are African-American, who are working in these kinds of jobs. When you look at the sex composition of the employments of our study youngsters, there is a high-degree of sex segregation, and it's very traditional. The women are concentrated, African-American and white, in the traditional pink-collar sectors.
...

That's service and clerical work--with some sales, but service and clerical. Service and clerical employment makes up 60-70% of lower-income women's--in terms of family background. ... And they pay less. ... So women and men substantially are finding themselves at different places in the labor market, and men are in more lucrative positions than women.

And that actually--it's interesting. We see the same thing for those who were from more favorable family backgrounds, and most of whom attended college, and many had completed college, but it's at the upper end of the employment hierarchy. So those women are concentrated in the professional fields. And you could name them as well as I, probably, 'cause they are gendered. It's teaching, nursing, social work, the helping professions. Men of like background are more likely to be in executive or managerial positions or to be in the high-level technical positions of today's postindustrial economy. And those jobs pay more than the helping-profession jobs that women access. So we see men being advantaged in terms of employment opportunities--.
...

So what we describe in the book is this pattern where white men of modest background are advantaged in terms of their employment experience over everybody else. Why that happens is a larger question. And there's a historical backdrop to it. There are--in the long shadow, we think there really are two--it's a story about two kinds of family privilege. And the flipside of family privilege is family disadvantage. But there's middle-class family privilege in terms of helping children do well in school. And that's what we see. Children of parents who themselves were college-educated, who have middle-class jobs and whatnot, their children are doing just fine.
...

... this pattern of differential success in school, it's not particular to what we see in Baltimore. It's we see it nationally as well that children from advantaged families are more successful in terms of family income, parental levels of education, and so forth. So that's one success narrative.

This other success narrative involves blue-collar attainment, and where--parents can be helpful there, too, but in a not quite as obvious way, 'cause we know about middle-class parents. Middle-class parents can do all kinds of things to help their children do well in school. They buy expensive educational toys, they do enrichment experiences, and so forth. Blue-colar parents, it's not so obvious, until you step back and think about it, how they can to help their children be successful. And the way it plays out in the experiences of our study group is that blue-collar parents can help open doors to good steady employment through social networks. When we asked at age 22 our study participants how they found the work, white men of modest background much more often said through family and friends, and African-Americans much more often said through themselves. And if you're on your own and you're not well connected, that makes it--that's not an easy thing to do, to find your way to a good opportunity. ... It is white privilege, working-class white privilege specifically.

Another facet of that is we have--the white high school dropouts at age 22, 80% of them were working. ... African-American male high school dropouts at age 22, 40% of them were working. So whites just have these employment advantages all along the way. And what we find is, if you look at those groups specifically, between age 22 at age 28, 5% of the whites acquire a criminal record along the way. I think it's 45% of the African-Americans acquire a criminal record along the way. So they have limited job opportunities, and they're trying to figure out a way to get by, and they get in trouble.

Baltimore Residents & Workers voice outrage over plans to privatize public housing

I liked this piece from The Real News Network about the rising homelessness, & decreasing numbers of affordable public housing, in US. Here, they are discussing homelessness in one of the American cities, Baltimore, Maryland.

As Mr. Singer explains in the piece that American government has been privatizing public housing since 1974 & now, under the Obama administration, "60,000 public housing units around the country are being sold to private developers, most of them for-profit developers, & we the taxpayers are subsidizing their profits." All this is happening when "homelessness is at the highest peak it's been since the Great Depression of the '30s." Is this democracy when the public taxes are subsidizing the rich, & those same poor public are becoming homeless?

Some 40,000 people are homeless in Baltimore. That's just 1 American city & it's not even considered a large American city by any measure. Homelessness has increased multiple folds in large American cities; New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta etc. & this is all happened within the last decade.

Poverty among Baltimore kids are almost 35%; that's almost 1 poor child in 3 children. Poverty is constantly increasing in US. The young generation is moving down south to have some sense of accumulation of wealth through cheaper real estate & taxes. But, the taxes are going up, & wages are going down, overall, & those taxes are not helping the poor public, but the rich keeps getting richer through tax cuts, subsidized public assets being turned private assets, & hence, the inequality keeps increasing.

Where's the democracy in the largest self-anointed "democratic" country in the world where poor can't even get a decent place to call it a home, & keeps becoming poor everyday, while the rich elites become rich at the expense of the poor public?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTL3T0qT6MA

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: In part one of this story, we looked at Baltimore's plans to sell about 40% of its public housing stock to private developers & why some residents, workers, & advocates oppose these plans. But due to declining federal contributions to public housing, many cities face a shortfall in funding. The Department of Housing & Urban Development, HUD, puts the shortfall at $27 billion USD.

Baltimore says it can raise $300 million USD of the $800 million USD it needs by selling some of its properties to private developers.

To understand how America's public housing crisis got so bad in the first place, we spoke to Jeff Singer. He's an instructor at the University of Maryland & a longtime Baltimore public housing advocate.

NOOR: So there's a public housing crisis around the country. How did it get to that point? And start under Bill Clinton to give people a little background in how things got so bad.

JEFF SINGER, CITY ADVOCATES IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE HOMELESS: Well, we can go back even a little farther to 1974, when Richard Nixon created the first privatization of public housing, what we call the Section 8 certificates. And the more money that went to Section 8 certificates, the less money that went to public housing. Section 8 was a way to give private landlords money to house people who were poor. So from 74 until now, we've seen a decline in the amount of federal funds directed toward public housing & an increase in--a small increase in the amount that's directed toward profits.

The program we're talking about here tonight is the efflorescence of that. It's actually privatizing the housing that we built for ourselves & making sure that people can make profits from it. And they don't mix well together. Affordable housing & profits are antithetical.

NOOR: And so what happened starting under the Clinton administration?

SINGER: What happened out of the Clinton administration was a couple of programs & policy changes that are very important. One policy change was that it is now illegal to build additional public housing with federal funds. Can you imagine that? In 1949, Congress declared that it is the goal of the US to make sure that every resident here has safe, decent, affordable housing. But under Bill Clinton, that language was stricken from the law & the number of public housing units was capped by law. So that was one very important issue. Another was that he continued the defunding of public housing. There was a law that required that whenever a public housing unit was demolished, a new unit had to be created. He eliminated that as well. So this has accelerated the demise of public housing.

NOOR: RAD program is happening under the Obama administration, a Democratic administration.

SINGER: Yes. Well, as Huey Long said, they may be Democratic waiters or they may be Republican waiters, but they're serving food from the same Wall Street kitchen. This RAD program was created actually in 2003 by the Bush administration, but they couldn't get it implemented. So now the Obama administration is implementing it with a vengeance, & 60,000 public housing units around the country are being sold to private developers, most of them for-profit developers, & we the taxpayers are subsidizing their profits. At the same time, homelessness is at the highest peak it's been since the Great Depression of the '30s, & the secretary of the federal Department of Housing & Urban Development himself says we're in the worst rental housing crisis in our history.

NOOR: How bad is it here in Baltimore?

SINGER: Well, we don't know how many people experience homelessness every night in Baltimore, but we counted over 4,000 people two years ago per night. Over the course of a year, that's probably 40,000 people. So we know it's pretty bad. There are encampments all around the city, the shelters are full every night, & people have nowhere to go.

NOOR: And there's a lot of people in risk of losing their housing as well.

SINGER: Well, they are. And one of the aspects of this new RAD program is that it's going to use federal tax credits to create profits for these developers in public housing. But that means that those federal tax credits will no longer be available to build new affordable housing. ...

NOOR: Baltimore is a pilot city for the RAD program. Why will it be important for people to be engaged here? What kind of impact will what happens here have on the rest of the country, especially when it comes to tenants & the union workers that are being affected by this being mobilized & getting their voices out?

SINGER: I think we have an opportunity here to do something very important, & that is to combine the forces & the interests of the tenants with the forces & interests of the workers. It is outrageous that the federal government has approved a plan that's going to fire 200 workers, workers who had decent wages, job protections, & benefits. The middle class that--the president is talking about growing the middle class; well, now we're destroying part of the middle class. So by combining the interests of the tenants & the workers & the advocates & the neighborhood folks, we can create a really important force, & that force is devoted toward affordable & fair development policies.

NOOR: And so part of the drive for this you can kind of say comes from the perception that public housing is failing. And so why is it important to talk about the mismanagement & the underfunding of public housing to contextualize that?

SINGER: ... The federal budget for the Department of Housing & Urban Development was the equivalent of $90 billion in 1980, & it is now $42 billion. It's less than half of what it was. So they have purposefully for 40 years underfunded public housing, both the capital costs ... & the operating costs. Now the City of Baltimore gets only about 75% of what they need to run public housing, & they get a hundredth of what they need to maintain it.

NOOR: What else is important for people to know about the future of public housing in America, in Baltimore today?

SINGER: Well, public housing is the sector of housing that keeps housing permanently affordable for the very large number of folks whose income is low. And we have a poverty rate in the US of about 15%. In the City of Baltimore, it's over 20%. Among children in Baltimore it's 35%. None of those folks can afford housing through the market. Public housing is the best way to keep them safe and secure.

In other civilized countries, public housing is a very large part of their housing sector. In most European countries, it's 20% of all the housing. In the city of Vienna it's 60% of all the housing is public housing, meaning it's owned by all the people & it's available to people who need it. In the US, it's 1% of our housing, & that's diminishing.

Baltimore & the media tyranny of non-violence

Although, the protests in Baltimore & Ferguson are long gone, & hopefully, not forgotten, the tyranny of modern media continues unabated & unabashedly.

Journalism used to be, & still is, a very respected profession, but just like several other professions (lawyer, politician, & even religious clergy) is now corrupted & a hollow of its former glory & respect.

Now, the modern media is all about ratings, sales, & marketing. It is only there to spread more chaos & hatred through sensational stories, & going as far as, fabricating stories (like it happened in the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War & once again, before the Iraq war in 2003).

But, then can we really blame the media for further inciting violence & hatred, & stoking the public's anger? Can we really blame the media for not even reporting on those stories, which don't have some kind of "juice" & "drama" in them? As this opinion piece & several other articles said that cameras in Baltimore weren't even rolling until protestors became violent. Peaceful protests weren't even covered & then so-called journalists, news anchors, & media personalities openly questioned why these protestors are so violent, even though, they never saw peaceful protests, which happened for days on end.

Anyway, I'd say that the modern media & the general public are both equally to blame. Why? Because, the media is all about marketing its services to the public. They are a business, after all. So, you need to ask yourself that why do the viewer ratings only go up when media is showing violence & sensational news stories. Because, it's what the general public craves. A TV news story is boring if no drama is happening in it.

Media is a very powerful way to help resolve such heavy issues as justice, peace, equality etc. TV news can very easily either inflame the society & turn people against each other, & hence, stalling any improvement, whatsoever, taking place in terms of justice & equality among the general public, OR, it can solve those same problems the society is suffering from, by starting a deep dialogue & showing how & what people are doing to improve relations & mending differences; be it ethnic, racial, cultural, or regional.

After all, we, humans are not so different from each other. Tyranny of the popular media seems to be creating more rifts in our society for its own profitability at the expense of social harmony.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/04/baltimore-media-tyranny-violence-150430070102282.html

If it were ever in doubt, the protests in Baltimore have shown us once again that only some types of violence are visible, or really matter. As demonstrations in this US city surged following the death in police custody of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, the terrible violence of that death - on top of so many more, at the hands of US police - was sidelined out of the story.
 
Gray was arrested when he fled after "catching the eye" of a police officer & his neck was broken while in police custody, but it was the smashed glass storefronts on Baltimore's streets that became the focus of concern.
 
The US media went into overdrive with its depiction of "chaos, violence & lawlessness" as MSNBC put it. Collective establishment heads were shaken at the looting.
 
The clear racist overtones in the coverage of "black rioters", as news website Breitbart.com headlined it or of "thugs" on a rampage, as so many more news organisations depicted it, was routinely denied, while widespread haranguing using the trump card of "protest violence" took hold.
 
Peaceful protests
 
CNN host Wolf Blitzer demanded that Baltimore community organiser Deray McKesson denounce violence and support only peaceful protests.
 
"You are suggesting broken windows are worse than broken spines," came the response to this attempt to redefine the significant details of the story, in a city that has already paid out nearly $6m to alleged victims of police brutality, including a grandmother and a pregnant woman.
 
And so here it is again: The stealthy tyranny of the "non-violent" proviso demanded of popular protests. Events in Baltimore are symptomatic of & particular to the US & its bloody history of state & social violence, in all its forms, against black Americans from slavery to the streets today. But the unrepresentative & wholly marginal violence of broken windows is invariably invoked against all protests that are struggles against power & its abuses.
 
From the streets of England during its riots of 2011, or back to the anti-capitalists protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1999; the IMF in Prague & the G8 summit in Genoa; from the protests engulfing marginalised French suburbs, to Ferguson in the US, right across to the Palestinian struggle to be free from occupation - all these movements against inequality & injustice are bound by the media depiction of protest as suddenly, senselessly "violent".
 
Such loaded appraisals are wilfully blind to the fact that situations never go from total calm to sudden violence. There is a daily, pervasive state violence that is never spoken of, much less acknowledged: for Palestinians living under a brutal military occupation; for marginalised, disenfranchised young people in British cities or French suburbs; for African Americans disproportionately impoverished, disadvantaged & preyed upon by US police, surviving generation upon generation of institutionalised & violent racism; for the global South diminished & drained by neo-liberal policies imposed upon it by the IMF & the WTO.
 
The violence never starts with protesters on the streets - it's just that this is the moment the cameras decide to start filming. In this context, it takes a special kind of struggle-free, reality-blind sanctimony for media commentators to start preaching about the need for non-violence.
 
Moreover, the disproportionate focus on the violence of broken windows & looted shops ignores the full panorama of these issues: the lengthy, ongoing debates within protest movements over the merits & drawbacks of violence (against property, not people) as a tactic; the attempts within communities to prevent & guard against violence, or dissipate tensions, or take action to clear up in the aftermath; the pressure-cooker conditions created by ramped up, over-militarised, heavy-handed & often provocative policing; the simple fact that movements unite over causes if not always tactics; or just that understanding why a few people might steal trainers during protests is not at all the same as justifying such behaviour.
 
Instead, the "non-violence" theme is rolled out precisely to prevent any such debate over causes, context or history. This media preoccupation is in place to ensure that we stop talk about anything else.
 
We know the Martin Luther King quote: "A riot is the language of the unheard." The question is why, after so long, are these voices still not listened to? And who is it that doesn't want us to hear them?
 

Rachel Shabi is a journalist & author of Not the Enemy: Israel's Jews from Arab Lands.