John Jay College Of Criminal Justice | The City University of New York

 

By Jennifer Nislow

Rather than spending millions of dollars on criminal justice fixes aimed at bringing down crime, cities would be better served by building economic infrastructures in poor communities, increasing social services for the children who live there, upgrading schools, and improving access to healthcare — in short, maintaining public safety by keeping resources within those neighborhoods.  The concept, called Community Justice, is being embraced by neighborhoods from Brooklyn to San Diego.

Since 1973 — the last year that the nation’s prison population fell — the correctional system has undergone a wholesale shift, explained John Jay College Distinguished Professor Todd R. Clear.  “Where once, one out of every three felons went to prison, now three out of four go,” he said.  “Where the median time served was once 16 months, inmates now serve approximately 32 months.  Drug offenders, who made up just six percent of prisoners in 1973, now account for a third of that population.”

“We have 132,000 people — essentially the 1970 prison population — serving life sentences without parole,” said Clear.  “When you have the 1970 prison population [there] till they die of old age, you can’t do much.  It’s going to take some courageous policymaking.  And courageous policy in this area is rare.”

A leading scholar and expert on incarceration, Clear is a vocal proponent of Community Justice.  He is the author of numerous works on the theory, and on criminal justice policy and corrections.  With the help of research and development grants, Clear has been able to test many of his ideas about social control, and the profound impact that a three-decade long, pro-prison policy has had on the nation’s poor and minority communities.

Clear believes in a “tipping point,” a moment at which the social fabric of a community begins to tear as more of its members are removed to prison.  The loss of fathers, sons, husbands — mothers, daughters, wives — and others who play vital roles in the life of a community outside of their criminality weakens whatever social controls exist in impoverished neighborhoods.  And, as these begin to give way, crime increases — despite the removal of the offender.

He was able to test this hypothesis during the 1990s while serving as associate dean of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University.  Clear and his colleagues interviewed about 100 people from two Tallahassee neighborhoods.  One of the routine questions asked was whether any member of their family had been incarcerated in the past five years.  To their surprise, each person answered “yes.”

Clear reported the findings in “Coercive Mobility and Crime: A Preliminary Examination of Concentrated Incarceration and Social Disorganization,” a paper published in 2003 by Justice Quarterly; the results of that specific study have been replicated in half a dozen other sites.

“The bottom line is that…incarceration damages a lot of aspects of communities when it occurs at these very high levels,” he said.  “It interferes with child rearing, it interferes with interpersonal relationships, it damages social networks, it damages social capital, and it damages the economy.”

Neighborhoods that have a large number of residents cycling through the prison system also have higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases, single-parent households, teenage births, and divorce, according to Clear.  There also appears to be a direct effect on drug arrests and in public school truancy rates for women.

Though each of these disruptions is small in itself, in totality, they begin to add up.  The high volume causes the problems in these communities to multiply and cross each other.  There are other, less obvious effects, too.

A classic work on social networks, “the strength of weak ties,” posits that the most important links one can have are those that extend beyond family and loved ones to others who can provide help, for example, in finding a job.  These kinds of “weak ties,” are already limited in these neighborhoods, Clear noted.  Incarceration further damages the capacity for forming them.  Maintaining relationships with those in prison comes at the cost of developing new ones.

In the long term, contends Clear, the traditional criminal justice focus on making arrests, sending those convicted to prison and then surveilling them when they return are just not good for communities.

“Criminal justice says that justice occurs when a person who has committed a crime is convicted and punished,” he said.  “Community justice says justice occurs when communities are better places to live, work and raise your children — after the criminal justice system is done with its process.”

On a map of Brooklyn that breaks down block-by-block expenditures on incarceration in jails and prisons, he pointed to some areas where in a given year as much as $3.5 million is spent — per street — on these priorities.  In the neighborhood of Cypress Hills, where Clear and another John Jay Professor, David Kennedy, are currently working on a community justice project, up to $600,000 has been invested by criminal justice authorities on individual blocks.  Community justice is about trying to reformulate those investments, explained Clear, and using them to try to change the community’s dynamics.

Research has shown both in New York City and elsewhere, that the relationship between incarceration and the quality of life in a community is a very small one, he said.  The type of quality of life issues that community justice emphasizes include the economic activity of a neighborhood, the level of parental involvement with children, the type of healthcare provided there, and the stock of available homes.

In virtually all of the cities in which the concept has caught on — San Diego, Milwaukee, Hartford — it has come about through partnerships of citizens with the public and private sectors.  “If those who lived on the blocks where $3 million was being spent on incarceration and its aftermath were asked whether they thought that money was well spent, they would say ‘no.’ They’d say they needed other things, ” said Clear.

Clear is working with the Cypress Hills Community Development Corp., an organization that works in partnership with the city and is the main service provider in the neighborhood.

“Their understanding of public safety,” he said, “is not ‘arrest the bad guy and get him out of there.’  Their understanding of public safety is to create a situation in which people don’t engage in crimes.”

Jennifer Nislow is Assistant Publication Director at John Jay College.