Obama’s Task Force on Policing: Will It Be Different This Time?

Blog by Tony Platt*

An incident at 133rd Street and Seventh Avenue during the Harlem riot of 1964. From Wikipedia.

An incident at 133rd St and 7th Ave during the Harlem riot of 1964. From Wikipedia.

“There have been commissions before, there have been task forces, there have been conversations, and nothing happens,” said President Obama when he announced in December the creation of a blue-ribbon Task Force on 21st Century Policing to come up with solutions to the “simmering distrust that exists between too many police departments and too many communities of color.” This time, he promised, it “will be different,” not just “an endless report collecting dust on the shelf.”

The Task Force is expected to complete its work in March. I’ll be looking for two indicators of whether or not it has something new to contribute: recognition that police antagonism to impoverished communities of color, especially African-American communities, is longstanding and institutionalized; and grappling with why a century of investigations has produced endless reports and no significant changes. I speak from personal experience as the associate director of a 1969 task force in the United States whose recommendations to a national commission about how to understand and stop police violence are caked in dust.

Racial violence is in the life-blood of the United States, and the police are usually its enforcers. As James Baldwin observed in 1960, “the only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive.” Official investigations into white violence against Black communities during the 1910s disclosed that the police typically “shared the lust of the mob for Negro blood,” as a congressional committee noted in its report on the bloody East St Louis pogrom of 1917. Following a day of protests and property destruction in Harlem in 1935, a commission appointed by the mayor found that the police had a reputation for being “persecutors and oppressors” in the community, and were responsible for “aggressions and brutalities upon the Harlem citizens not only because they are Negroes but because they are poor and therefore defenseless.”

In An American Dilemma, a comprehensive investigation of American race relations during the 1940s, Gunnar Myrdal described the “average Southern policeman” as “a promoted poor white with a legal sanction to use a weapon” against “Negroes whom he conceives of as dangerous or as ‘getting out of their place.’” A few years later, the Civil Rights Congress petitioned the United Nations for relief against “acts of genocide against the Negro people,” asserting that “once the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it’s the policeman’s bullet.”

And it wasn’t only a problem of the South, as Gunnar Myrdal suggested. In his ethnographic study of Chicago police in the late 1940s, William Westley noted that it was routine “to mock the Negro and use some type of stereotyped categorization.” Richard Wright was more blunt in his assessment: “When they see six of us, they become downright apprehensive and alarmed. And because they are afraid of us, we are afraid of them. Life for us is daily warfare and we live hard, like soldiers.” In one of the first sociological textbooks that focused on African American culture and institutions, published in 1949, E. Franklin Frazier observed matter-of-factly: “The police, who generally use brute force on Negroes, have little respect for the rights of Negroes as citizens or human beings.”

Urban protests and riots in the 1960s generated an unprecedented flurry of investigations and reports, all of which paid attention to the role of the police in enforcing inequality. The police “come into the neighborhood aggravated and mad,” a 33-year-old resident told researchers for Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited in 1964; “they start more violence than any other people start.” James Baldwin hardly knew anybody in Harlem, “from the most circumspect church member to the most shiftless adolescent, who does not have a long tale to tell of police incompetence, injustice, or brutality.”

“In city slums and ghettos,” reported President Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice in 1967, “there is much distrust of the police”—which is not surprising given that “the use of racial epithets, such as ‘nigger,’ ‘coon,’ ‘boy,’ and ‘Pancho’ appears to be widespread.” Racist insults were so common in Oakland, California, in the mid-1960s that the police chief had to issue a written directive banning the use of these terms, plus “coon, spook, head hunter, jungle bunny, burr head, ape, spick, and mau mau.”

There is a “widespread belief among Negroes,” concluded the 1968 Kerner Commission, “in the existence of police brutality and in a double standard of justice.” The “deep hostility between police and ghetto communities” was confirmed in sociological studies sponsored by the Commission. Surveys in 15 cities found that the majority of African Americans stopped and frisked on the street “are innocent of any wrong doing”; one in three African Americans said the police “rough up people unnecessarily”; and the majority of police believed that African Americans were moving “too fast” in their demand for equality and were opposed to “Negroes socializing with whites.”

The study that I coauthored in 1969 for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence similarly reported that “the majority of rank and file policemen are hostile toward Black people.” Bold political solutions were required. “If communities are to be policed adequately,” we argued, “the principle of community control of the police seems inescapable”—but not to the commissioners, who called instead for doubling down on “our investment in the administration of justice.”

Despite endless recommendations by national and local commissions to reform police abuse through recruitment of Black officers, training in multicultural sensitivity, technological innovations, and creation of citizens’ advisory committees, nothing much has changed. In the words of James Baldwin, it’s the “same old piano, playing the same blues.”

Twenty years after the Kerner report, Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, a leading social work professor, lamented that “several Black males are killed each week in America in lethal encounters with police officers.” In December 2014, 46 years after the Kerner report, in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, we still need to confront what Eric Adams, cofounder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, calls “a legacy of inequity,” exemplified “in the nightstick and quick-trigger-finger justice” that has been “carved into the culture of law enforcement over decades.”

Hopefully, Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing will ponder the troubling history of racial violence and not simply recycle a century of cosmetic panaceas. It needs to keep in mind that the modern police system was designed to keep the marginalized in their place and to warn the poor of a fate worse than poverty. The fundamental problem with US policing is neither personal nor professional deficiencies, but rather how they are structured and organized.

A good place for the 2015 Task Force to begin might be dusting off the 1969 Task Force on which I worked, and paying close attention to its conclusion: “This nation cannot have it both ways: either it will carry through a firm commitment to massive and widespread political and social reform, or it will develop into a society of garrison cities where order is enforced without due process of law and without the consent of the governed.”

• • •

References
Adams, Eric L. 2014. “We Must Stop Police Abuse of Black Men.” New York Times, December 5.
Baldwin, James. 1961 “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem.” In Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York: Dial Press. Originally published in Esquire, July 1960.
Baldwin, James. 1967. Preface to The Negro in New York, edited by Roi Ottley and William J. Weatherby. New York: The New York Public Library.
Civil Rights Congress. 1951. We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations. New York: Civil Rights Congress.
Frazier, E. Franklin. 1949. The Negro in the United States. New York: Macmillan.
Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited. 1964.  Youth in the Ghetto. New York: HARYOU.
Mayor’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem. 1935. The Negro in Harlem. Reprinted in The Politics of Riot Commissions, edited by Tony Platt. New York: Macmillan, 1971.
Myrdal, Gunnar. 1944. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper.
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. 1968. Report; and Supplemental Studies for the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.  Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. 1969.  To Establish Justice, To Insure Domestic Tranquility. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. 1967. The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society; and The Police. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Report of the Special Committee Authorized by Congress to Investigate the St. Louis Riots. July 1918. Reprinted in The Politics of Riot Commissions, edited by Tony Platt. New York: Macmillan, 1971.
Skolnick, Jerome. 1968. “The Police and The Urban Ghetto.” Research Contributions of the American Bar Foundation 3.
Task Force on Violent Aspects of Protest and Confrontation. 1969. The Politics of Protest. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Printing Office.
Taylor Gibbs, Jewelle. 1988. “The New Morbidity: Homicide, Suicide, Accidents, and Life-Threatening Behaviors.” In Gibbs et al., Young, Black, and Male in America: An Endangered Species. New York: Auburn House.
Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. New York: Viking Press.

Tony Platt is a Distinguished Affiliated Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley. In 1969, he was Associate Director of the Task Force on Violent Aspects of Protest and Confrontation for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.

 

The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement

by Ruth Wilson Gilmore*

Gilmore imageAfter declining for three consecutive years, the US prison and jail population increased in 2013. The widely declared victory over mass incarceration was premature at best. Below I raise four areas of particular concern about the state of the anti-prison movement.

(1) A tendency to cozy up to the right wing, as though a superficial overlap in viewpoint meant a unified structural analysis for action.

Nearly 40 years ago, Tony Platt and Paul Takagi (1977) identified as “new realists” the law-and-order intellectuals who purveyed across all media and disciplines the necessity of being hard on the (especially Black) working class. Today’s new “new realists”—the correct name for the “emerging bipartisan consensus”—exude the same stench. However differently calibrated, the mainstream merger depends on shoddy analysis and historical amnesia—most notably the fact that bipartisan consensus built the prison-industrial complex (PIC). The PIC isn’t just the barred building, but the many ways in which un-freedom is enforced and continues to proliferate throughout urban and rural communities: injunction zones and intensive policing, felony jackets and outstanding warrants, as well as school expulsions and job exclusions. Racial justice and economic democracy demand different paths from the one the new “new realists” blazed. Their top-down technocratic tinkering with the system renovates and aggrandizes it for the next generation.

The left-liberal side of the bipartisan consensus co-opts vocabulary and rhetorical flourishes developed for different purposes by organizations engaged in bottom-up, antiracist struggle. Slogans such as “education, not incarceration” willfully obscure the vital distinctions between the new “new realists” and the grassroots organizations whose work they distort. Unfortunately, many who point out the cynical appropriation of tactical principles or highlight underlying strategic differences find themselves accused of obstructionism or worse.

Even before the eponymous book appeared, grassroots organizations knew that “the revolution will not be funded” (Incite 2007). That said, organizations rightly decided to take available money and run in order to popularize constructively radical remedies for fundamental social problems. Not surprisingly, the very few sources that once funded innovative work have abandoned it and they now wrap system-reinforcing work in phrases lifted from the thought and creativity of left and abolition grassroots struggle. Indeed, foundations cut loose the very organizations that came together in the 1998 Critical Resistance conference and consolidated the contemporary anti-prison movement. As a consequence, understanding and energy have taken a detour into reform for a few, while there is no change for the many.

Why the withdrawal of resources? From the perspective of the deep-pocket new “new realists,” the organizations that built the movement over the past two decades are profoundly unrealistic: their politics are too radical, their grassroots constituents too unprofessional or too uneducated or too young or too formerly incarcerated, and their goals are too opposed to the status quo.

What is the status quo? Put simply, capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it. Thus, criminalization and mass incarceration are class war, as Platt and Takagi explained in 1977. Therefore, the struggle against group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death is waged in every milieu—environmental degradation, public-goods withdrawal, attacks on wages and unions, divide-and-conquer tactics among precarious workers, war, etc. Police killings are the most dramatic events in a contemporary landscape thick with preventable, premature deaths.

Although it has become mildly mainstream to decry outrages against poor people of color, the new “new realists” achieve their dominance by defining the problem as narrowly as possible in order to produce solutions that on closer examination will change little.

(2) A tendency to aim substantial rhetorical and organizational resources at the tiny role of private prison firms in the prison-industrial complex, while minimizing the fact that 92 percent of the vast money-sloshing public system is central to how capitalism’s racial inequality works.

The long-standing campaign against private prisons is based on the fictitious claim that revenues raked in from outsourced contracts explain the origin and growth of mass incarceration. In any encounter about mass incarceration, live or on the Internet, print or video, sooner rather than later somebody will insist that to end racism in criminal justice the first step is to challenge the use of private prisons.

Let us look at the numbers. Private prisons hold about 8 percent of the prison population and a barely measurable number (5 percent) of those in jails. Overall, about 5 percent of the people locked up are doing time in private prisons. What kind of future will prison divestment campaigns produce if they pay no attention to the money that flows through and is extracted from the public prisons and jails, where 95 percent of inmates are held? Jurisdiction by jurisdiction, we can see that contracts come and go, without a corresponding change in the number or the demographic identity of people in custody. In addition, many contracts are not even held by private firms, but by rather municipalities to whom custody has been delegated by state corrections departments.

(3) A tendency to pretend that systematic criminalization will rust and crumble if some of those caught in its iron grip are extricated under the aegis of relative innocence.

One of the most troubling moves by the new “new realists” is to insist on foregrounding the relatively innocent: the third-striker in for stealing pizza or people in prison on drug possession convictions. The danger of this approach should be clear: by campaigning for the relatively innocent, advocates reinforce the assumption that others are relatively or absolutely guilty and do not deserve political or policy intervention. For example, most campaigns to decrease sentences for nonviolent convictions simultaneously decrease pressure to revise—indeed often explicitly promise never to change—sentences for serious, violent, or sexual felonies. Such advocacy adds to the legitimation of mass incarceration and ignores how police and district attorneys produce serious or violent felony charges, indictments, and convictions. It helps to obscure the fact that categories such as “serious” or “violent” felonies are not natural or self-evident, and more important, that their use is part of a racial apparatus for determining “dangerousness.”

For example, campaigners for California’s Proposition 47 placed a widely touted “bipartisan” op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, coauthored by Newt Gingrich and B. Wayne Hughes Jr., in which the authors argued that “California has been overusing incarceration. Prisons are for people we are afraid of, but we have been filling them with many folks we are just mad at.”

Note the use of the word “afraid.” The new “new realists,” with their top-down reforms, are trying to determine who constitutes “we”; worse, they also reinforce a criminal justice system, ideology, and image bank that justified Darren Wilson’s grand jury testimony—just as it justified Bernard Goetz’s actions three decades ago. #BlackLivesMatter is an absolute statement, watered down to #sometimes by the opportunistic relativism of the new “new realists.”

(4) A tendency to virulently oppose critique from the Left, as though the work of thinking hard about how and what we do interferes with the work of reform.

Opportunists beguile audiences and divert attention and resources from people and organizations that have been fighting for decades to change the foundations on which mass incarceration has been built: structural racism, structural poverty, and capitalism devouring the planet. And they succeed in part because it has become unhip to subject the decisions, rhetoric, and goals of reform campaigns to any kind of thoughtful scrutiny. At stake is not only how we fight to win, but also how prepared we are for victories. Prepare to win means be ready for the morning after. If, for example, Proposition 47 actually releases savings that can be spent by school districts, who can ensure that the money goes to real educational programs, and not to school cops, school discipline, and school exclusion programs?

Fight to win.

References
Platt, Tony and Paul Takagi. 1977. “Intellectuals for Law and Order: A Critique of the New ‘Realists.’” Crime and Social Justice 8: 1–16. Reprinted in Social Justice 40(1–2): 192–215.
Incite, eds. 2007. The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

* Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, and Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is a cofounder of many social justice organizations, including California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network.

 

Reentry to Nothing #3 — Home, Sweet Home

by Alessandro De Giorgi*

The materials presented in this blog series draw from an ethnographic study on prisoner reentry I have been conducting between March 2011 and March 2014 in a neighborhood of West Oakland, California, plagued by chronically high levels of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction, and street crime. In 2011, with the agreement of a local community health clinic that provides free basic health care and other basic services to marginalized populations in the area, I have been conducting participant observation among several returning prisoners, mostly African American and Latino men between the ages of 25 and 50. In this series of blog entries, I will be presenting ethnographic snapshots of some of these men (and often their partners) as they struggle for survival after prison in a postindustrial ghetto. For more detailed information on this project, please read here. Other episodes in this series:
#1 – Get a Job, Any Job 
#2 – The Working Poor
#4 – In the Shadow of the Jailhouse

• • •

Rico1_PIX

Alessandro and Rico make the move to Rico’s new apartment.

From now on, the rule for residents who commit crime
and peddle drugs should be one strike and you’re out.
—President Bill Clinton, State of the Union, January 23, 1996

Finding suitable housing upon release from prison is one of the first priorities and one of the most difficult challenges for ex-offenders. The recent sociological literature has rarely analyzed the nexus between homelessness and incarceration (but see Gowan 2010), despite several surveys showing that a high percentage of homeless people have spent time in prison, and that a significant number of released prisoners face the prospect of homelessness upon release (Roman and Travis 2004, 7). The effects of draconian measures introduced at the height of the war on drugs, such as the “One Strike and You’re Out” rules that deny convicted drug offenders access to subsidized housing, are compounded today by the chronic lack of affordable housing in the urban areas to which most ex-offenders return (Thompson 2008, 68–87). In California, and particularly in large cities such as San Francisco and Oakland, the situation is compounded by two recent developments: the ongoing process of gentrification of residential areas, which is reducing the stock of accessible housing (see Beitel 2013; Smith 1996), and the provisions of Public Safety Realignment, which deprives growing numbers of ex-offenders of the few temporary housing options (e.g., halfway houses, transitional housing, etc.) available to state parolees. Under these circumstances, returning prisoners are increasingly left to fend for themselves in a hostile and often discriminatory housing market. The few who are fortunate enough to have stable families find adequate housing upon release; many, however, face the prospect of becoming homeless or falling prey to slumlords who populate the shadow economy of the streets.

• • •

Rico is a soft-spoken 50-year-old man who was released from state prison in 2010. Born in Puerto Rico, he was raised by his single mother in the infamous Marcy Projects in Brooklyn. During his childhood, which he spent as a hustler in the streets of New York, he was sexually abused by an uncle and suffered constant beatings by his mother’s violent boyfriend. As a young teenager, he started using drugs and dropped out of high school; as soon as he turned 18, he moved to Oakland to be with his biological father, who was dealing drugs. Rico sold drugs for his father, but soon the two were arrested. In jail, his father assured him that they would both be out in no time if Rico, who at the time did not have any convictions, would “take the rap” for the two of them. Young and inexperienced, Rico obeyed, and his father was released after a few days. Rico, however, was sentenced to five years in state prison; during that time, he says that he never received a visit, a call, or even a letter from his father. Rico became addicted to heroin at the age 18 and has been in and out of prison, mostly for drug-related charges, for the past 30 years.

When I first met him, on a warm morning in late September 2012, he had been clean for over a year; he had just graduated from a drug rehabilitation program and was staying in a sober-living house. At the time, he was earning $800 a month at the community clinic in West Oakland that served as the base for my research. This job allowed him to save money each month—something he did methodically with the dream of renting a small apartment. In the following notes, I document Rico’s struggle to achieve housing independence after prison.

December 7, 2012

Rico is about to finish his shift at the community clinic. On the street corner outside the office, we are chatting and smoking cigarettes. He tells me enthusiastically that, since he has diligently saved a few dollars each month, he now has enough to put down the first month and deposit and is ready to move into his new place in East Oakland. After work, he plans to pick up a sofa and two couches from a used furniture warehouse downtown. For the job, he has borrowed an old white Toyota pickup truck that is literally falling apart. Because Rico has been without a driver’s license since 1981, he asks me to drive the pickup. At the warehouse, which looks more like a dumpsite beneath the freeway, we laboriously squeeze the oversized sofa and the two couches onto the truck. We then drive to East Oakland through a spectral sprawl of abandoned warehouses and factories. Liquor stores dot the landscape, in front of which congregate hustlers, drug dealers, and homeless people with carts in tow.

Rico’s new one-bedroom apartment, although in desolate surroundings, looks decent. A modest ground-floor unit of a duplex, it is surrounded by a metal fence. The small front yard is unkempt, with tattered furniture and old car parts scattered across the sidewalk. The apartment sits across from the parking lot of an elementary school, which is now bursting with people—most of them Latinos—as the children are getting out.

After bringing the sofa and couches inside, we begin to turn the empty space into Rico’s first living room in years. Shuffling the bulky furniture around takes a good hour. Meanwhile, Rico has been jumping excitedly from one seat to the next, in anticipation of the great times we will have playing games on his PlayStation and chilling together. As he gives me a tour of the other rooms, he repeats that for the first time in years, he feels happy. In the kitchen, he opens the fridge to show me the fresh groceries he bought. Unlocking the kitchen window facing a small backyard, he points to the corner where his grill will go. Then he invites me to the first BBQ he will host to celebrate the new house. 

February 15, 2014 

Last January, the community clinic suddenly dismissed Rico for “lack of funds.” Now out of work and without any source of income, he will be forced to leave the apartment at the end of the month. I drive to his place around noon, but he is just getting out of bed. He is depressed over losing the apartment and looks thinner than the last time I saw him. He stresses that he had done everything he could to do good. While looking for another place to live, he has to find a place to store his recently acquired furniture.

I agree to drive him around East Oakland to find a place to stay. There’s a dilapidated building on Front Avenue, where Rico says rooms rent for $500 a month. A rusted metal gate opens into a messy communal lobby: bags of trash and old furniture are amassed in each corner, cigarette butts litter the carpet, and debris is scattered everywhere. Black plastic bags covering all the windows prevent natural light from entering the building, even during daytime. The 12 single rooms are arrayed along both sides of a long, trash-filled hallway. A large white pit bull with a plastic bottle in its mouth runs back and forth.

I follow Rico to the last room on the left, which is occupied by one of his old friends. Peering through the open doors, I see only decrepit rooms with littered floors. In some, people are sitting on their beds eating, smoking, watching TV, and arguing loudly. All residents of the premises share two bathrooms and showers.  Like the rest of the building, they are filthy. Hip-hop music blasts from the surrounding rooms, including the one we enter. There, two middle-aged white men, whose teeth are mostly missing, are smoking crystal meth. They become nervous at the sight of me, but when Rico reassures them that I’m not a cop, they intently inhale the vaporizing crystals again. After a few minutes of silence, Rico explains that the building was formerly the site of a transitional housing program for recovering drug addicts. Now it is just a ghetto building with cheap rooms for rent. Since Rico is no longer on parole, he cannot go back to the halfway house; moving here may be his only option, because the landlord does not require a deposit or credit report.

Rico3_COMP

The hallway and Rico’s room inside the burned-down building.

October 10, 2014 

Rico has been living on Front Avenue for almost eight months. He covers his rent with monthly General Assistance checks from the county, along with money from odd jobs, hustling, and gifts from friends. In June, the complex caught fire, likely because a tenant had a malfunctioning hot plate in one of the rooms. Rico said that the sprinklers did not work when the fire erupted. Without emergency exits, the tenants had to jump out of their windows to escape the flames.

I arrive at the building around 10 a.m. With half-burned cars, bags of garbage, abandoned appliances, and carbonized furniture accumulating all along the fence, the front yard now resembles a dumpsite more than ever. On the front door a red notice warns people not to enter the building because it is “seriously damaged and unsafe to occupy.” Several people still live here anyway, paying around $300 per month in rent to stay. If tenants have insufficient cash, the landlord accepts food stamps.

Rico opens the gate and lets me into the dark space. As we hug, I can almost feel his bones. He has been losing weight over the last few months and doesn’t look good: his eyes are sunken and he emanates an aura of affliction and weakness. I wonder if his hepatitis might be getting worse. But he claims the situation is simply stressful, and to prove his strength, he starts doing pushups. “I’m alright, bro… See? Still can do these.”

The building has no electricity or heating. In the former communal area, exposed electrical wires are hooked up to some outside source. The smoke-stained walls support a structure verging on collapse. A pungent post-fire odor dominates three months after the flames. Every window is boarded up, and flashlights are needed to navigate around the debris and charred furniture.

Rico’s room feels claustrophobic in the darkness. The furniture from the old apartment barely fits: a small TV, the sofa with the two couches, a microwave, an old coffee table, and a small cabinet. A huge Puerto Rican flag hangs from the wall facing the door. Rico is on the sofa, watching “The Brady Bunch.” I join him and hand him the lottery scratcher and packs of Newport cigarettes I had picked up at the corner liquor store. He has something for me, he says, and produces a black T-shirt with The Godfather written in Spanish from a nearby pile of clothes.

Then he shares news of his new 2015 license plate sticker. The registration fee came from money earned doing plumbing work with his older son. He paid the fee—despite not having a driver’s license—so the cops won’t have another pretext to “fuck me.” Next, he shows me pictures on his cell phone. There is a video of Rico working with his son, as well as a picture of the $400 check he received for the work. After paying $300 in rent to stay in the building, only $36 in “spending money” remain each month from his $336 GA check.

A skinny young man in his mid-20s ambles into the room while we talk. This is Rico’s younger son, who has spent the last few nights in one of the rooms. About a month ago, Rico explains, the Oakland Police Department, the anti-gang task force, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives raided the building. They stormed the place looking for drugs and weapons and took away a few people, thus vacating some of the rooms. During the police raid, Rico escaped through a window in the back of the building.

Rico says the place has become very dangerous lately. With some of the old residents having left or been arrested, new ones have moved in. Most people in the building have guns, and violent incidents have happened with increasing frequency over the past few weeks. Rico feels so unsafe that he has installed two CCTV cameras—one overlooking the front yard and the other covering the hallway. Both are connected to a small monitor in his room, which he keeps on all the time.

Late one night a month ago, the most significant violent incident occurred. One resident had agreed to hide a bag belonging to a man on the run from the police. However, the resident disappeared with the bag, which contained several ounces of marijuana, three handguns, and $10,000 in cash. So the victim threatened to shoot up the building unless his property was returned immediately. Rico attempted to talk to the man and to prevent him from entering the building. An hour later, the man returned with three other heavies, who forced their way past the main gate and into the building. They kicked down doors and beat an elderly black resident almost to death. When they approached, Rico grabbed the .357 he keeps for “self-protection” and sat on the couch facing the door. Rico’s door started to give way under the pounding. He fired several shots and they returned fire as they retreated down the hallway. Outside his room, Rico showed me the bullet holes that pocked the hallway, the bathroom door, and the ceiling. I counted eight holes, but he assured me that many more shots were fired. The door to his room is now broken in half and has four bullet holes in it.

Inside Rico’s room, he shows me his loaded gun. It’s too dangerous to keep anymore, he says, since he already has two gun charges on his record. Another resident—a Latino man in his 40s—enters and asks Rico for some weed. Rico agrees to give him some, but then he tells the man that he expects $10 from him. The guy promises to bring the money soon. When he leaves, I cannot hide my surprise and ask Rico whether he has started dealing again.

He says no.

• • •

As of January 2015, Rico is still living in the burned-out building. As a felon with multiple drug convictions, he cannot apply for subsidized housing. Without a decent job, he will never be able to afford to move to a better place. His only option is to remain in a decrepit building, exposed to chemical hazards, constantly fearing for his life, and inexorably pulled back into the vortex of destitution, hustles, and petty crimes from which he was trying to escape.

References
Beitel, K. 2013. Local Protests, Global Movements: Capital, Community and State in San Francisco. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Gowan, T. 2010. Hobos, Hustlers and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Roman, C.G. and J. Travis. 2004. Taking Stock: Housing, Homelessness, and Prisoner Reentry. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute.
Smith, N. 1996. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge.
Thompson, K. 2008. Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities. New York: New York University Press.

Alessandro De Giorgi is Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator at the Department of Justice Studies, San José State University, and a member of the Social Justice Editorial Board. He thanks his research assistants Carla Schultz, Eric Griffin, Hilary Jackl, Maria Martinez, Samantha Sinwald, Sarah Matthews, and Sarah Rae-Kerr for their invaluable contribution. For a more detailed description of the project, see here. Read the first entry—“Get a Job, Any Job”—here, and the second one—“The Working Poor”—here.

• • •

Alessandro De Giorgi, “Reentry to Nothing #3 — Home, Sweet Home.” Social Justice blog, 2/9/2015. © Social Justice 2015.