For years and years, the government, and particularly the one in [tag]NYC[/tag], has been throwing money at problems in the hopes of fixing them. Of course, throwing money at them never actually does fix anything, but that doesn’t stop them from doing it because throwing money is a visible reminder of how the cronies who run unopposed really do care about the community.
[tag]Jake Dobkin[/tag], over at [tag]Gothamist[/tag], who I really like, seems to be missing a major point in something. Let me quote:
The [tag]Village Voice[/tag] has a great article this week profiling the work of [tag]Eric Cadora[/tag], a researcher at the [tag]After-Prison Initiative[/tag]. Cadora makes maps that show which communities produce the most prisoners– initially, he mapped Brooklyn, and then expanded his project to other parts of the country. Not surprisingly, his work shows that the poorest neighborhoods in the city tend to produce the most convicts– in the map at the left, blocks that produce more than $1 million in incarceration costs (at $50k per year, that would be about 20 prisoners), show up in dark red. Imagine if the city spent that much money on social services for the block, instead of incarceration– $1m could buy a lot of books for an after-school program, or pay a lot of social workers at a jobs-training initiative.
You have to wonder if Jake actually thought about what he wrote before he wrote it, or if his knee-jerk reaction was just to throw money at the problem. I tend to think it’s the latter, and here’s why.
If you look at the neighborhoods in question, something will immediately stick out to you. While those neighborhoods do indeed produce most of the prisoners in [tag]New York City[/tag], they also receive the largest amount of social services and [tag]welfare[/tag] per capita.
So my question is, why would even more spending on the same folks who are already receiving more spending than elsewhere in the city stop them from going to jail?
This is the eternal question, but it’s not an easy one to answer. I’m sure if someone came up with a reasonable and workable solution, all would be right with the world. But for people like Eric Cadora and Jake Dobkin to suggest that the answer to the problems faced by the poor is throwing more money at people who already receive more from the public dole than anyone else boggles my mind. To put it bluntly, they aren’t becoming criminals because there aren’t enough textbooks or midnight basketball organizations.