One of the books I haven't quite finished reading yet is Barbara Ehrenreich's This Land Is Their Land: Reports From A Divided Nation. Ehrenreich's collection of essays focus upon the ever widening gulf between the rich and the poor in the United States, something which has long characterized the third world, but which has been increasingly becoming true of the U.S.. The topic has long been of interest to me, particularly as it impacts democratic institutions and social civility. What I see in much of the polarized third world is lip service at best to these concepts which I consider so essential to the American character. In recent years, however, finding myself in a state of near poverty from having once been firmly bourgeois, these essays have a particularly sharp prick to them.
Besides which, she's an excellent writer. For all I care, she could be discussing sewage systems and I would be enthralled (but wait, that's actually the topic of another book I just got, more on that in a future blog). Here is one of her short essays which illustrates her appeal to me.
"Pension or Penitentiary?"
Talk about a cry for help. On May 1, 2006, Timothy J. Bowers robbed a Columbus, Ohio, bank of $80, handed the money over to a security guard, and waited for the police to come and arrest him. In court, he pleaded guilty and told the judge he would like a three-year sentence - just enough time to get him to the age of eligibility for Social Security benefits. The judge graciously obliged, demonstrating compassionate conservativism at its warmhearted best.
Bowers, almost sixty-five years old, is no wacko. He passed a court-ordered psychiatric exam and explained that he had not been able to find a new job since his old one ended when his employer's company closed in 2003. "At my age," he said, "the jobs available to me are minimum-wage jobs," adding that "there is age discrimination out there."
Bowers had hit a "doughnut hole" like the one that plagues Medicare recipients: he was "too old" for the above-minimum-wage workforce and too young for Social Security. Given the labor market's fixation on youth, too old can mean as young as forty-five and a twenty-year gap before Social Security kicks in.
Leaving aside the obvious disadvantages of incarceration -- having to pee in public, eat gross institutional food, etc. -- Bowers made a perfectly rational choice. The minimum wage in Ohio is $5.15 an hour, or $824 a month before taxes, which won't get you much of a dwelling space in Columbus, at least not if you intend to maintain a regular schedule of meals. Prison, on the other hand, offers a free bed, free food, and, however inadequate, free health care. We can expect a rash of similar bank robberies as the middle-aged seek ways to wait out the years between the onset of age discrimination and the arrival of their first Social Security check.
There's nothing new about using prison as a solution to poverty. Over 2 million Americans are presently incarcerated, the majority of them from the lowest income brackets. In fact, incarceration is expanding as the welfare state shrinks: while the United States offers 2 million prison beds, it provides public housing to only 1.3 million households, and that number is dropping rapidly. Bowers could have applied for a Section 8 housing voucher, but the waiting list for one exceeds, in some cities, his three-year prison term.
In short, we are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.
If Bower's choice was rational, the same cannot be said of our social policies. The cost of incarcerating an older inmate is about $69,000 a year. A compassionate -- or merely rational -- state would give Bowers a stipend to live on and save its prison beds for actual bad guys.
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