To Fight a War at Home: How Government Policies Missed the Mark
Incarceration is not the answer to systematic problems.
There’s dynamite in every city of America.
It’s not hard to find. It’s in the neighborhoods people lock their car doors when driving through. It’s in the schools with no budget for arts programs or healthy school lunches. Find a batch in public housing. Find more outside on the streets.
Social dynamite, a term penned by Steven Spitzer in his book, “Towards a Marxian Theory of Deviance,” is defined as a group of people who have fallen through the cracks of the social system. This group is dissatisfied, rebellious and potentially violent. Youth living in dense urban centers make up this social dynamite. These youths, along with their families and friends, all go day to day living on the edge of a whirlpool of circumstance. One wrong move, and anyone can fall into a cycle of crime that, due to decades of government policies, make it near impossible to escape.
In 1965, the national poverty rate was around nineteen percent. Former President Lyndon B. Johnson started the War on Poverty, aiming “not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it, and above all, prevent it.” This $1 billion-dollar program saw poverty as an individual problem, so programs focused on job corps and work experience.
Spoiler alert: poverty still exists. But the reasons why were much more complicated than the programs addressed. Two other wars against abstract entities, like the War on Crime, which was also by Johnson, and the War on Drugs by Nixon, also play a part in keeping low-income youth in a cycle. The War on Crime increased law enforcement. The War on Drugs responded to the 1980’s crack epidemic with incarceration instead of hospitalization.
Drug users should be treated as patients, not prisoners. In early versions of drug policies, drug users are not arrested, but are given treatment, which was effective in making sure that those patients do not fall back into the cycle. Drug users without such treatment are often arrested after their release and come back to prison due to their addiction. When convicts are released, they are denied housing, educational programs and employment and have trouble getting reintegrated into society.
Campaigns such as Ban the Box are seeking to get rid of questions regarding criminal history on job and housing applications. This encourages former convicts to apply to jobs without worrying about discrimination. Employers who implement this are told to ask about former felonies later in the job application process so that the previously incarcerated have a chance. States like Hawaii, California and Colorado have already changed their hiring practices and banned the box.
Encouraging more states to make the change involves the participation of housing and employment agencies, council people and state representatives who understand that punishment should not extend beyond jail and into the lives of former convicts and their families.
Knowing the true history behind the obstacles that many low-income areas and the people who reside in them face are crucial to truly helping a broken system. Defusing the social dynamite means examining the layers of policies that created the cycle, and truly break them once and for all.
