Prison and the Poverty Trap
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: February 18, 2013
WASHINGTON — Why are so many American families trapped in poverty? Of all the explanations offered by Washington’s politicians and economists, one seems particularly obvious in the low-income neighborhoods near the Capitol: because there are so many parents like Carl Harris and Charlene Hamilton.
For most of their daughters’ childhood, Mr. Harris didn’t come close to making the minimum wage. His most lucrative job, as a crack dealer, ended at the age of 24, when he left Washington to serve two decades in prison, leaving his wife to raise their two young girls while trying to hold their long-distance marriage together.
His $1.15-per-hour prison wages didn’t even cover the bills for the phone calls and marathon bus trips to visit him. Struggling to pay rent and buy food, Ms. Hamilton ended up homeless a couple of times.
“Basically, I was locked up with him,” she said. “My mind was locked up. My life was locked up. Our daughters grew up without their father.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/science/long-prison-terms-eyed-as-contributing-to-poverty.html
“Prison has become the new poverty trap,” said Bruce Western, a Harvard sociologist. “It has become a routine event for poor African-American men and their families, creating an enduring disadvantage at the very bottom of American society.”
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for the racists who couldn't handle the idea of equality. They'll continue to manufacture "conditions" for keeping equality from finding its way into our general social construct. Some may give lip service to the concept but they strive to thwart any efforts to bring it into our collective reality. It's one of the ugly remnants of austerity that the colonial English imposed centuries ago and the powerful in this country chose to maintain ever since.
It's not just the poverty/prison paradigm, it's also the BS we see the RWNJs in Congress playing out in the form of temper tantrums and obstruction posed against our first African American president. They are so beside themselves about it that they will absolutely destroy the country to prove their disdain.
