Housing, Reentry, and Who Benefits From Homelessness
Why I am here
Congratulations if you made it this far and through the summary of my experience. It is mostly the boring stuff you find on LinkedIn (because who really cares about the post on the conference you are attending). For those who know me, I never liked the affordable housing tax credit program (LIHTC) or “the full employment act for lawyers and accountants” where I spent a good part of my professional life. I never thought homeownership would dig people out of poverty (see - The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake, The false Promise of Homeownership ). What we call rental and homeownership policies are really tax codes and tax loopholes for the rich that exacerbate inequality. Community housing land trusts and Catholic Worker values are at my core, and I have been steadfast on this for over 30 years.
I am here trying to bring awareness to the obstacles facing returning citizens coming home from jails and prisons, especially when it comes to securing an affordable place to live. I am here to find practical solutions to the housing piece and to the related economic issues families and their children face when a loved one is incarcerated.
I know a little about the reentry issues because I have lived experience journeying through trauma, mental health challenges, and the addiction that eventually got me arrested and incarcerated. In 2023, I was diagnosed with PTSD and substance use disorder. This happened in the middle of my life. I had privilege, a college education, money, and a social network to get me back on my feet after I was released. Many of my friends inside were not so lucky. They were going back to living on couches or living outside in the woods. (see - Five charts that explain the homelessness-jail cycle—and how to break it )
The U.S. spends $81 billion a year on mass incarceration. Approximately 600,000 people a year are released from correctional facilities, but funding for reentry services including housing is minimal compared to the amount spent on incarceration. “Reentry programs are run on borrowed money with scotch tape and sealing wax” says Jennifer Ortiz, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Indiana University Southeast, interviewed by Casey Kuhn of PBS. Here in Virginia and elsewhere, the reentry system is fundamentally flawed as it relates to housing — former inmates often must fall into literal homelessness before being eligible for assistance.
Adam Gabbatt of the Guardian interviewed Carmen Gutierrez, an assistant professor in the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose research specializes in the connection between punishment and health. Here is what he has to say:
“We have decades of research showing that incarceration does not improve public safety and that it, in fact, harms individuals who themselves are incarcerated. It also harms their families and it harms the communities that they come from. So the damage outweighs any potential benefit.”
According to Gabbatt, 1.8 million people are incarcerated across the country, but the numbers are not evenly distributed. Southern states incarcerate about one in every 100 people in prisons, jails, immigration detention, and juvenile justice facilities.
Mutual Aid and Solidarity
We can do better than this. What amazed me while serving time was how prisoners in my cell block looked after each other. We shared a miserable collective experience, but men who could, shared food, telephone calls and helped other inmates. Grubacic and O’Hearn in their book “Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid” write:
“Both of us have probably learned more from prisoners and ex-prisoners than any other social group.
… they developed trans-ethnic, pluricultural spaces that transcended the racialized gang divisions that the state has promoted in its prisons since at least 1960.
… no matter how much states and capital impose institutions and practices of possessive individualism, no matter how their institutions work toward the separation of individuals from community and from each other, the people themselves will re-create their own institutions and practices of mutual aid. Our highest values are mutuality, sociability, and solidarity.”
