Humane Exposures on Homelessness, Criminal Justice, Juvenile Justice, At-Risk populations + Women\'s Studies

Alan Waldman | November 15, 2013

In Canada, the Government’s Highly Successful Five-year Housing-first Strategy for the Homeless Has Just Been Extended Until 2019

Homeless person in a bus shelter at York and Wellington Streets, downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Experts on homelessness are giving the Canadian federal government credit for utilizing the right approach to helping some of the most vulnerable people in Canada. Ottawa just extended its Homelessness Partnering Strategy (HPS) until 2019 with $119 million per year in new funding.

Dr. Stephen Hwang, a scientist and homelessness researcher at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital, said:

They are to be applauded for moving to a housing-first approach, which is evidence-based. It’s wonderful that the federal government decided to renew the federal homelessness initiative for another five years.

For the next half-decade, Employment and Social Development Canada will concentrate funding on programs that take the housing-first approach to mentally ill and addicted people living on the street. A $110 million, 2008 to 2013 research project led by the Mental Health Commission of Canada showed how getting the most visible and notorious homeless people into permanent housing first leads to greater success down the road treating addictions and mental illness and keeping people off the streets.

Toronto’s Streets to Homes program has moved about 4,000 people into their own apartments since 2005 using a housing-first model. Eighty% of Streets to Homes’ clients remained in their new homes at least 12 months. Edmonton’s housing-first initiatives cut that city’s street population by 20% between 2008 and 2010.

The government expects that 65% of funding to Canada’s 10 largest cities will be spent on housing-first projects. Smaller cities will have to come up with housing-first initiatives for about 40% of their funding and tural communities will have no housing-first requirement.

Since the launch of the HPS in 2007, the government has approved more than $745 million for projects to prevent and reduce homelessness across Canada.

A 2009 poll found that approximately one in nine Canadian adults, or close to three million people, reported that they have either experienced or come close to experiencing homelessness Rates were highest among respondents with income levels less than $40,000 a year (20%) and those 45 to 55 years of age (16%).

In 2010, the number of households on affordable-housing waiting lists was at an all-time high of 141,635 across Ontario, up almost 10% in a year.

Between 2007 and 2011, almost $55 million in federal homelessness funding was invested in 317 projects which directly focused on youth and young adults between 15 and 30 years of age.

Saskatoon Housing Initiatives Partnership is helping reduce, prevent and end youth homelessness in Saskatoon by administering HPS and investing more than $1 million per year into projects targeting street youngsters.

Covenant House Vancouver’s Crisis Shelter program provides street youth a safe place to stay, food, medical attention and the opportunity to develop a plan to move away from the streets and into a better life. In January 2010, 32 new beds opened, bringing shelter capacity to 54 beds. The expansion was funded in part by an $800,000 contribution from the Canadian government through HPS.

However, Catholic agencies that deal directly with mentally ill and addicted street people warn that HPS is no silver bullet, and that federal focus on it may neglect other useful tools in fighting homelessness.

At Good Shepherd Ministries in downtown Toronto, assistant executive director Aklilu Wendaferew looks forward to applying for HPS funding and believes that approach can work, but he warns against thinking we now have a cure for homelessness.

Wendaferew said:

Just relying on one single approach to the problem wouldn’t be wise. Depending on the circumstances, you may have to adopt a number of approaches. Mental health is an issue. Addiction is an issue. And poverty in general is a serious problem.

When the huge North American recession hit at the end of 2008, the numbers of people sleeping in Canadian shelters and dropping in for meals both spiked. This was not a mental health problem but was due mainly to loss of income and poverty.

Category: Homelessness, Humane Exposures | Tags: Canada, homelessness, Housing First, HPS, mental health, Ottawa, Saskatoon, Toronto

Alan Waldman | November 8, 2013

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Broward County Agencies Agree to Reform School Punishments

StateLibQld 1 113036 Cartoon of students receiving the cane, 1888 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A groundbreaking agreement was reached this week in South Florida to end the so-called school-to-prison pipeline. In a remarkable show of cooperation involving 10 county agencies and community organizations, the Broward County Collaborative Agreement of School Discipline was signed on Tuesday.

The new policy at the heart of the agreement creates a procedure for district officials and school resource officers to follow when a student misbehaves. For non-violent misdemeanors such as harassment, trespassing, incidents related to alcohol, possession of a misdemeanor amount of marijuana or drug paraphernalia, administrators will now try to resolve the situation without an arrest. Several alternatives such as participation in a week-long counseling program will be used to deal with such behavior.

The agreement places the responsibility on principals to determine the appropriate disciplinary action for student misbehavior, rather than delegating it to school resource officers. The procedure makes police involvement a last resort.

Marsha Ellison, chairwoman, Fort Lauderdale/Broward Branch of the NAACP and chairwoman of the Juvenile Justice Advisory Board said:

Silly behavior is not criminal behavior, and we have led an effort to make sure the administrators take control of the schools, rather than law enforcement.

Ellison forged a coalition among several agencies to work towards a change in the “zero-tolerance” policy. They include the School Board of Broward County, the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit, the State Attorney’s Office, the Public Defender, the Broward Sheriff’s Office, the Fort Lauderdale Police Department, the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, the NAACP and the Juvenile Justice Advisory Board.

In the late 1990s, school districts across the country began to bypass other forms of discipline, such as counseling and detention, and opted for more extreme punishment alternatives, such as suspension, expulsion and law enforcement involvement. As a result, hundreds of thousands of students were removed from schools or arrested for minor infractions such as tardiness or throwing candy in class.

Broward County sheriff Scott Israel, who earlier this year unilaterally directed his deputies to invoke a little used state law allowing for “Civil Citation” as a means of reducing the number of juvenile arrests, said: “We’ve done away with the phrase ‘zero-tolerance.’ Kids will now get second, third and fourth chances. Students will not become collateral damage of the way things used to be.”

The agreement signed Tuesday will have a significant impact on black and other minority students, who have been disproportionately affected by the “zero-tolerance” policy, resulting in mass incarceration and creating a vicious cycle for students and their families. This has come to be known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

Broward County Schools, which is the nation’s sixth largest school district, is now a leader in the discipline reform movement. About 100,000 of Broward’s 260,000 students are black, but they have been suspended at more than twice the rate of white students. According to the U.S. Department of Education, Broward Schools imposed in-school suspensions on 11,810 black students in 2009, or about 12% of the black student population. Black students were given 5,135 out-of-school suspensions. In 2010 and 2011, there were more than 1,000 school-related arrests—and nearly three-quarters of them were for non-violent misdemeanors.

Kim Keenan, NAACP general counsel, said:

Broward County has set an example we can use as a template that we can take across the country. Without an agreement like this today, what we have is a world that, instead of focusing on educating our students, we are focused on shipping them off to juvenile detention centers. That’s not what we send kids to school for. We are not training them to be criminals; we are training them to be productive citizens in Florida.

As part of the agreement, Broward schools will continue to establish and implement guidelines for the handling of school-based student misbehavior. The district reported that it has already seen positive results, including a decrease in suspensions by 66.2%, compared to the same time period in 2012. Expulsion is down by 51.4% and school-related arrests have fallen by 40.7%.

“We are going to take this model and run with it,” said Adora Obi Nweze, president of the NAACP Florida State Conference and also the Miami-Dade branch. “The NAACP can take this model in all of our branches and make it their own. We now have the foundation to save a generation of youth of color from the criminal justice system. This would not be possible without the leadership of our Fort Lauderdale/ Broward Branch.”

Category: Humane Exposures | Tags: Broward, Corporal punishment, Florida, Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, Fort Lauderdale Police Department, North Carolina, School discipline, U.S Department of Education

Alan Waldman | November 1, 2013

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Montana ACLU and Department of Corrections Settle Women’s Prison Lawsuit

Idaho State Penitentiary Womens Ward (Photo credit: Thomas Hawk)

Under a settlement announced recently in a discrimination lawsuit Montana’s Department of Corrections will offer boot camp for female prisoners and cancel a mandatory treatment program that was criticized as being degrading. The state also agreed to pay $50,000 in legal costs and a combined $12,000 to the seven current and former prisoners named in the case.

Montana’s Department of Corrections will offer boot camp for female prisoners and cancel a mandatory treatment program that was criticized as being degrading. The state also agreed to pay $50,000 in legal costs and a combined $12,000 to the seven current and former prisoners named in the case.

The lawsuit began last year with a complaint filed in federal court by one of the plaintiffs, Susan Fish, who initially represented herself in the case. It targeted the prison’s six-year-old “Right Living Community” program and the lack of a boot camp for women as an alternative to prison.

Fish and the others alleged they received little training and were forced to sing and participate in children’s games such as “Duck Duck Goose.” The plaintiffs also said the program established a prison hierarchy in which high-ranking inmates could take away privileges of lower-ranked fellow inmates.

ACLU attorney Anna Conley said:

It ended up being degrading, non-rehabilitative and served no purpose at all but to create problems among prisoners They had to participate in this whether they wanted to or not. If you refused to participate in this model, you would go to solitary confinement.

Regarding Right Living, Corrections attorney Ira Eakin said a review of the program undertaken after a new warden was hired at the Women’s Prison in the spring determined it was not as effective as more “traditional” rehabilitation programs. Whereas the discontinued program awarded privileges to prisoners based on their participation, the traditional approach offers privileges based on prisoner behavior.

The settlement calls for the department to offer boot camp for women prisoners beginning Nov. 1 at Deer Lodge. Such a program is already available to male defendants and is based on a military-discipline format.

Completion of boot camp can mean a chance for a reduced sentence, an option that had been denied women prisoners since the cancellation of female boot camp last decade.

One of the plaintiffs, Tasha Rainey, remains incarcerated at a pre-release center in Billings two years after a male co-defendant convicted of similar crimes was released on probation after successfully completing boot camp.

“In order to give female offenders who wanted to participate in boot camp the same opportunity, we agreed to bring back the boot camp for females,” said Eakin, who helped negotiate the settlement. He said up to four slots for women were planned, with the possibility of expanding that number in the future if demand is sufficient and the Legislature is willing to pay for it.

The prior cancellation of boot camp for women followed low participation and logistical problems stemming from having both males and females at the same facility in Deer Lodge.

At one point, The Corrections department sought to have Fish’s case dismissed on the grounds that she had not followed proper legal procedures, but the move was denied by U.S. Magistrate Judge Carolyn Ostby.

The settlement releases the state from any future liability in the case.

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Category: Humane Exposures |

Alan Waldman | October 29, 2013

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The War Against the Homeless (Infographic)

Source: War Against the Homeless

Category: Humane Exposures | Tags: homeless, homelessness, Housing First, South Carolina, unsheltered homeless

Alan Waldman | October 25, 2013

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South Dakota, Which Used to Lock up Youths at the Highest Rate, is Now Rolling Out Statewide a Successful Juvenile Detention Alternatives Program

Map of USA with South Dakota highlighted (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A program in two South Dakota counties to help juvenile offenders stay out of detention is poised to expand statewide. South Dakota’s two-year-old Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) provides substitutes for detention. Rather than being locked up for offenders who qualify can opt for such measures as daily reporting or electronic monitoring.

Since JDAI was introduced in them, Pennington and Minehaha counties have enjoyed reductions in the average number of youngsters in their county detention centers by more than half.

Recently the state court system accepted a $100,000 grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation to fund a statewide program coordinator, and the agency intends to ask legislators to make the position permanent. Gov. Dennis Daugaard’s administration and the state court system support the shift in thinking on juvenile justice, and expansion of JDAI statewide.

Jim Seward, the governor’s attorney and an architect of the adult criminal justice reform passed by lawmakers earlier this year said:

We support the concept of detention alternatives, and we’ve cooperated with the transition, knowing this would be going statewide.

Officials say the program’s goals of trimming the number of youths in lockup and reducing incidents of juvenile crime through the use of less-restrictive alternatives is a model that can be valuable throughout the state.

South Dakota state court administrator Greg Sattizahn said:

We’re going to use this grant to take it statewide, because the successes in Minnehaha and Pennington counties have been significant.

The shift toward alternatives to juvenile incarceration is particularly significant in light of the state’s history. South Dakota has been re-evaluating its juvenile programs for years, since the death of 14-year-old Gina Score at a Department of Corrections boot camp prompted the creation of a corrections monitor for the state.

Change has not come quickly, however. In 2006, the Casey foundation said that South Dakota locked up youth at a higher rate than any other US state.

The JDAI concept turns on the evidence-based theory that detention can be reduced without increasing juvenile crime. Now that Minnehaha and Pennington counties have seen that happen, prosecutors statewide are more likely to accept the program.

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Category: Humane Exposures | Tags: Annie E. Casey Foundation, crime, Dennis Daugaard, JDAI, Juvenile court, Juvenile delinquency, Prison, rehabilitation, South Dakota

Alan Waldman | October 18, 2013

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Performance-Improvement Clinics Help Communities Better Serve the Homeless by Coordinating Efforts of All the Area’s Homelessness Entities

English: Homeless man in New York 2008, Credit Crises. On any given night in USA, anywhere from 700,000 to 2 million people are homeless, according to estimates of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today, in too many communities, a welter of well-intentioned public and nonprofit programs designed to reduce homeless function with competing services and fundraising. This results in unnecessary and unproductive duplication of activities and everyone fighting for the same diminishing dollars.

The National Alliance to End Homelessness (NAEH) offers performance-improvement clinics focused on creating a coordinated plan to reduce homelessness and determine the most appropriate governance structure to implement it.

Too often there is uncoordinated competition among a community’s agencies working in the areas of homelessness prevention, law enforcement, criminal justice, mental health, chemical dependency, hospitals, schools, veterans’ assistance, Medicaid and welfare. When they can all sit down together and work out an overall plan to engage the totality of their services for the same goal, they can save a lot of money and be much more effective, considerable experience has shown,

NAEH’s Center for Capacity Building offers 1.5-day clinics to help communities reduce homelessness and produce better outcomes. The clinics include group discussions, system design and modification planning sessions and presentations on best practices. Participants also receive hands-on technical assistance with data analysis and system assessment before the clinics, as well as follow-up support afterwards.

Jill Fox, Director of Programs and Evaluation for the Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness attended one of these Performance-Improvement Clinics in Richmond and reported:

The room was filled with leaders from private, public, and faith organizations from across the homeless-assistance spectrum. Leaders from local government, Departments of Social Services, mental health and substance abuse services, school-based service organizations, housing developers and homeless service providers all came ready to discuss homelessness in the region. Organizations specializing in populations including victims of domestic violence, veterans, children and families all had a seat at the table.

“When we recognize that no one organization can end a person’s homelessness, we understand that achieving our organizational missions depends on how effectively we work together.

“The data presented for the Richmond region suggested that programs with a ‘housing-first’ approach achieved better permanent housing outcomes and cost less than traditional shelter.

Next month, in the area surrounding Olympia, WA, the housing division of the state Department of Commerce is gathering a number of area agencies in an attempt to replicate the successes realized in other communities that have used these clinics to save money and greatly boost results.

In addition to conducting these clinics, NAEH is working with Congress on a number of pieces of legislation that will help the federal government meet it’s goals of significantly reducing homelessness and completely eliminating veterans’ homelessness within five years.

It wants Congress to provide $2.381 billion for the Homeless Assistance Grants program within HUD in fiscal year 2014 to further invest in proven “housing first’ programs. It also seeks $1.4 billion in the same fiscal year to end veterans’ homelessness by 2019. NAEC wants Congress to invest $75 million for new HUD-VA-supported housing vouchers for 11,000 chronically homeless veterans. Today, nearly half of all homeless veterans reside in California, Texas, New York or Florida.

NAEH also wants the feds to increase access to permanent, affordable housing for extremely low-income individuals and families by modernizing the Mortgage Interest Deduction and using savings to capitalize and fund the National Housing Trust Fund.

It also seeks to:

1) expand the use of innovative and evidence-based family intervention models to support family reunification;

2) build on existing investments in programs serving runaway and homeless youth;

3) improve crisis-response and early intervention approaches;

4) expand the reach and availability of transitional living programs to provide more youth with a stable housing foundation to act as a basis for achieving economic independence; and

5) expand data and research on the nature and extent of homelessness among unaccompanied youth, to improve outcomes for these vulnerable young people.

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Category: Homelessness | Tags: Congress, homelessness, Housing First, mental health, NAEH, National Alliance to End Homelessness, United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, Virginia Coalition

Alan Waldman | October 11, 2013

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Oklahoma’s Cruel Drug Laws and Outdated Sentencing Guidelines Help Make it the U.S. Leader in Female Incarceration

Oklahoma State Capitol (Photo credit: StevenM_61)

At a recent forum, University of Oklahoma sociology professor Susan Sharp charged that her state’s drug laws are “mean,” and that its tough-on-crime sentencing guidelines are to blame for nearly all of the women serving lengthy prison terms there. Oklahoma’s backwards prison system provides little help to addicts and the mentally ill, and the state is full of “lock ‘em all up” politicians who are unconcerned with rehabilitating criminals.

In recent years, Oklahoma has been the state that imprisons women at the highest rate in the nation. Oklahoma locks up 128 women per 100,000—nearly twice the national average. At the end of the last fiscal year, roughly 2,600 women were incarcerated in Oklahoma prisons, a figure that has remained relatively flat since 2005. A disproportionate percentage of them are black, and 85% of all female prisoners in Oklahoma are mothers.

Sharp declared:

Women usually end up in prison due to three factors: coming from poverty-stricken backgrounds, being in relationships with men who engage in criminal behavior, and suffering from a long history of abuse. As girls growing up in these environments become women, they usually fall into a criminal lifestyle due to one of these three pathways. Yet we’ve ignored these families for generations.

Sharp complained that too many women are being sentenced to lengthy prison terms for having quantities of drugs that would bring little to no punishment in other states. She also spoke out against drug traffickers being forced to serve 85% of their sentences when drug rehabilitation would do more good at a considerably lower cost to the state.

The way Oklahoma defines drug trafficking is the root-cause of the problem. Someone arrested with five grams of crack cocaine can be charged with trafficking and face a sentence up to 25 years. Yousef Khanfar, an award-winning photographer who has spent years photographing and interviewing women in Oklahoma’s prison system, said at the same forum: “In Chicago and other places, if they found you had only five grams of crack cocaine, they would flush it down the toilet. Putting someone in prison for 25 years costs $2 million or $3 million, whereas a year in rehab costs about $50,000.

Sharp charged that Oklahoma doesn’t invest enough money in mental health facilities and drug-treatment programs. She also criticized the state’s participation in a new Justice Reinvestment Initiative program that sends men and women on parole back to prison for the slightest infraction—even missing an appointment or failing to pay a monthly fine. ““We have set up debtors’ prisons in Oklahoma,” Sharp laments.

Jane Nelson, chair of the Oklahoma Women’s Coalition, said:

We hope to see legislation enacted in the next legislative session that will find alternatives to prison for women convicted of nonviolent offenses. Too many women are going to prison, destroying their families, because of addictions.

One study reported that while 40% of Oklahoma women sent to prison were black, only 29.6% of black women were placed on probation, whereas 53% of Oklahoma white women were sentenced to prison (versus 29.4% of women nationally), and a whopping 63.7% of white gals got probation.

Another study revealed that only 9.2% of Oklahoma female prisoner were found guilty of violent offenses, versus 34.6% for drug offenses and 15% for simple drug possession. Oklahoma’s female incarceration rate for drug offenders is higher than the national average. This speaks to the need for effective drug abuse programs both inside the institutions and in the communities.

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Category: Criminal Justice, Prison, Prison Reform, Women's Issues | Tags: Chicago, Crack cocaine, crime, female incarceration, Incarceration of women, Jane Nelson, Oklahoma, Prison, woman in prison, Yousef Khanfar

Alan Waldman | October 4, 2013

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Illinois Badly Needs Further Juvenile Justice Reform

Seal of Illinois. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Illinois has some of the harshest youth-sentencing laws in the United States, under which a child as young as 13 can be automatically sentenced to life in prison, with no discretion for a judge to consider age or individual circumstances.

Abner J. Mikva, a former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and Peter Bensinger, a former administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, urge Illinois lawmakers to pass HB1348/SB1858, which would allow judges to consider a “youth’s unique circumstances, such as age, maturity and role in the crime.” The legislation follows the Supreme Court ruling last year in Miller v. Alabama banning mandatory sentences of life without parole for juveniles.

On May 14, 2013, the Illinois Senate voted to raise the age of juvenile court jurisdiction to 18, so that 17-year-olds charged with misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies would be tried and sentenced in juvenile court rather than adult court. The bill, which was approved by the Illinois House last April, heads next to Gov. Pat Quinn for signature. Thirty-eight states have already set 18 as the age for prosecution in adult court.

Moreover, Illinois received compelling evidence last week that incarcerating young people doesn’t rehabilitate them. Independent experts told a federal court that Illinois’ juvenile prison system has many inadequacies, including that it operates an education program far below minimally accepted standards, does not meet the basic mental health needs of incarcerated youth and uses solitary confinement too often and for too long, with potentially damaging effects on youngsters who return to their communities.

In the past three years the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice (IDJJ) has brought significant improvements in some conditions and delivery of rehabilitative services to kids held in state prisons. IDJJ has established a new aftercare program to transition youth back to their homes after leaving prison. Over the past seven years, new state programs and policies have reduced the number of youth in state prisons from more than 1,400 to around 900, which is good news for those youth who can be held accountable for their actions at the local level, don’t have to leave home to receive treatment for mental illnesses or addictions and don’t need to have their educations interrupted.

But the experts’ reports, which are part of a class-action lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Illinois, describe shocking conditions that still exist in the state: little schooling, inadequate mental health care even for youth in severe crisis, squalid conditions in the “confinement” units and youth languishing in prison far beyond their release date due to a lack of community-based placements. To its credit, IDJJ allowed the three experts inside and is attempting to resolve the suit without costly litigation. Gov.Quinn and all Illinois legislators and policymakers need to read these reports and pay careful attention to their findings.

A close examination of what’s going on in Illinois could be instructive to other states with youth prisons, because there is considerable evidence that mass incarceration of youngsters in large prison facilities is a fatally flawed concept.

Retired Judge Georgr W. Timberlake says:

The ACLU lawsuit could produce great change, especially if the federal court can demolish whatever bureaucratic barriers have prevented IDJJ from delivering a quality education and from diagnosing and treating mental illnesses that brought so many into prison. However, the best way to ‘fix’ the terrible conditions the reports describe is a dramatic reduction in the number of youth incarcerated. We must keep more youth in their homes, receiving the kind of supervision and services proven to reduce reoffending much more effectively and at a fraction of the cost of sending a youth to prison.

The three experts have these recommendations for Illinois, which would benefit other states too.

1) Cook County fills many state prison beds with 18-21-year-old men awaiting trial on a new adult charge. They are held for months at state expense due to a violation of parole connected to an earlier action as a juvenile. But if they’re going to trial on a more serious adult charge in Cook County, they should be held there, where they have better access to attorneys and where local taxpayers can pay the bill. IDJJ should refuse to accept them and should put the dollars saved into better rehabilitative services. Illinois has helped lower youth prison numbers in 28 counties which agreed to send 25 percent fewer young people to state prison in exchange for financial assistance.

2) The Redeploy Illinois prison-diversion program, which began in 2006, has been a huge success. This year, Gov. Quinn signed legislation tailor-made to ease Cook County into the program, but officials have dragged their feet. Cook County and others that commit large numbers of juveniles should be given a choice of participating in Redeploy Illinois or paying the state the nearly $100,000 annual cost of incarcerating each juvenile.

3) Today, 10 percent of the kids in Illinois prisons have been approved for release, but they remain behind bars because they aren’t welcome home: either because the state places restrictions on where they can live or because they need substance abuse or mental health treatment and none is readily available. Illinois needs to step up the search for approved living arrangements and help create them when none are available.

4) About one half of the youngsters entering Illinois prisons last year were re-incarcerated for violating the terms of their parole. Often, these were “technical violations,” like failing to attend school or obey a curfew. Illinois needs to shorten the length of parole, which can last up to five years for some, and require technical parole violations to be addressed with more effective interventions than re-incarceration.

Judge Timberlake concludes:

The ‘important strides’ Illinois has made in juvenile justice reform should be the first steps in a marathon of wide-reaching reforms. We cannot afford to run in place.

Category: Criminal Justice, Juvenile Justice | Tags: Abner J. Mikva, ACLU, IDJJ, Illinois, Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice, Pat Quinn, United States, Youth detention center

Alan Waldman | September 27, 2013

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“Housing First” Approach is Saving Money and Providing Homes for the Most Vulnerable Homeless People

A homeless man in New York with the American flag in the background. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the early 1990s New York University School of Medicine prof Sam Tsemberis and the Gotham organization Pathways to Housing pioneered the “Housing First concept” which focuses on the chronically homeless, without requiring them to first give up alcohol or substance abuse.

Housing First is an alternative to a system of emergency shelter/transitional housing progression. Rather than moving homeless individuals from the streets to a public shelter, from a public shelter to a transitional housing program, and then to their own apartment in the community, Housing First moves the homeless individual or household immediately from the streets or homeless shelter into their own apartments.

Housing First, when supported by HUD, does not only offer housing but also provides wraparound case management services to the tenants. This provides stability for homeless individuals, increasing their success, accountability and self-sufficiency. The housing provided through government supported Housing First programs is permanent and “affordable,” meaning that tenants pay only 30% of their income towards rent.

With Obama Administration support (and 30% of HUD homelessness funds), Housing First resulted in an unprecedented 29.6% drop in the number of chronically homeless living on the streets (175,914 to 123,833 people)—from 2005 to 2007 alone. Today, Housing First programs successfully operate in New York City, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Denver, Seattle, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles and smaller cities, such as Anchorage AK, Plattsburgh NY and Quincy MA.

Housing First is currently endorsed by the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) as a “best practice” for governments and service-agencies to use in their fight to end chronic homelessness. These programs are all parts of the communities’10-year plans to end chronic homelessness, as advocated by USICH.

In Los Angeles County, the Home For Good project hopes to house all the area’s chronic homeless by 2016. Robert Harper and Charles Miller of Americorps make daily rounds of LA’s Skid Row seeking the most vulnerable homeless and working with other agencies to find them housing fast.

Harper declares:

A person is out here about to die and you tell them ‘Sign a waiting list and wait for a year? Come on, now. We’re known as the 90-day people.

When Home For Good case managers meet someone on the street, they create a vulnerability score from items like income, medical history, substance abuse and usual whereabouts. That info is computerized and made available to all participating agencies.

Considerable research has shown that the Housing First approach can save lots of money by keeping the chronically homeless out of jails, shelters and emergency rooms.

Housing First is now growing in popularity in Canada and is in many communities’ ten year plans to end homelessness. In Calgary, fewer than 1% of existing clients return to shelters or rough sleeping, there are 76% fewer days in jail and there is a 35% decline in police interactions This demonstrates improved quality of lives for those in the program, along with a huge cost savings on police, corrections and shelters

The Denver Housing First Collaborative, serving 200 chronically homeless, found a drop of 34.3% in emergency room visits, a 66% decline in inpatient costs, an 82% plummet in detox visits and a 76% reduction in incarceration days. Two years after entering the program, 77% of participants were still housed through it.

In Seattle, the Housing First program for alcoholics saved taxpayers more than $4 million in its first year. Thanks to Housing First, Boston was able to close some homeless shelters and reduce the number of beds in others.

The US Congress appropriated $25 million in the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Grants for 2008 to show the effectiveness of Rapid Re-housing programs in reducing family homelessness. On May 20, 2009, President Obama signed the Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing Act, which allows for the prevention of homelessness, rapid re-housing, consolidation of housing programs and new homeless categories.

The Housing First methodology is also being adapted to decreasing the larger segment of the homeless population, family homelessness, such as in the LA-based program Housing First for Homeless Families, which was established in 1988.

Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania homeless researcher, says:

There’s a lot of policy innovation going on around family homelessness, and it’s borrowing a page from the chronic handbook—the focus is on permanent housing and housing-first strategies.

Category: Homelessness, Poverty, Shelter, Substance Abuse | Tags: Chicago, homelessness, Housing First, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Supportive housing, United States Interagency Council on Homelessness

Alan Waldman | September 20, 2013

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Netflix’s 13-hour Series “Orange is the New Black” and Britain’s 106-episode “Bad Girls” Dramatically Focus on the Plight of Incarcerated Women

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I recently watched and thoroughly enjoyed all 13 episodes of Netflix’s new women-in-prison drama, Orange is the New Black based on Piper Kerman’s book about her time in federal prison. I thought the many characters were richly portrayed, the well-written episodes were compelling and dramatic, and the series focused on many of the issues that plague incarcerated females.

I also greatly enjoyed the first two seasons of the excellent British incarcerated women series Bad Girls. You can see the powerful 10-episode first season on Netflix, and many scenes are free on YouTube. There have been 106 episodes broadcast in Britain from 1999 to 2006. The series features 50 disparate female characters. A stage musical version ran briefly in 2007 and is available on DVD. Bad Girls won 10 major British awards, including Most Popular Drama, Best Loved Drama, three Best Actresses and a Best Actor. In Britain, population 60 million, several episodes attracted more than 9 million viewers. It has aired in many countries, including Montenegro, Finland, New Zealand and Georgia. It has been reported that Oscar winner Alan Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under) is adapting an American version of Bad Girls for HBO.

In the American series, Orange is the New Black, there were many minority and lesbian characters, an elderly prisoner and even a transgendered inmate. Both series dealt with mental illness, drug abuse, chronic disease, prison rape, sex for favors, abusive and manipulative guards and other pressing issues. Bad Girls dramatized prison pregnancy and childbirth. Both series have mother and daughter prisoners.

In the first harrowing season of Bad Girls, a pregnant prisoner miscarries in her cell, an inmate is viciously strip-searched by fellow prisoners for concealed drugs, and bullying drives another prisoner to suicide.

Both series dramatize that women’s prisons are terrible, often inhuman places. In 37 U.S. states, today, women can still be shackled during labor and delivery.

According to the Women’s Prison Association

The female prison population has soared by 835 percent over the last 30 years, while the male prison population rose by 416 percent. More than two-thirds of women in prison are convicted of nonviolent offences, such as drug-related crimes.
In 2008, 93 of every 100,000 white women were incarcerated, while 349 of every 100,000 black women and 147 of every 100,000 Hispanic women were. Fifty-one percent of women in prison are aged 30 to 44.

Women in prison face challenges different than those faced by men in prison, and female incarceration tends to treat the sentence inflexibly. For women, sentence is a sentence, whether or not there are children waiting for the mother outside.

According to The Sentencing Project, Oklahoma incarcerates more women per capita than any other state, with 130 out of every 100,000 women in prison, whereas Maine locks up only 21.

Women in prison (59 percent) are more likely than are men (43 percent) to have chronic and/or communicable medical problems (including HIV, Hepatitis C and sexually transmitted diseases). Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of women in state prisons in 2004 had symptoms of a current mental health problem.

Finally, Carole Seligman, office manager of Prison Radio, a production studio aiming to challenge unjust incarceration practices, said:

This country is notorious for not granting compassionate release to prisoners with terminal illnesses who are elderly and are dying and denied to die at home.