Law & Order Politicians Don’t Care About Your Programmatic Silos

Law & Order Politicians Don’t Care About Your Programmatic Silos
By Shiza Pasha, Philanthropy New York Public Policy Fellow

Despite falling crime rates, too many of our politicians are obsessed with keeping America “safe from crime.” In partnership with the private prison industry and countless rural governments that survive off of bail, bonds and fees and prison employment for their constituents, this Law & Order conspiracy has exploded in size and cost, at the expense of black and brown families. In New York and across the nation, young people who should be learning in schools, receiving treatment or expressing themselves through the arts are instead targeted and caught up in the system’s dragnet.

The prison-industrial-complex yanks away from families young people who need education, treatment or just plain love and understanding, and incarcerates them as a first and usually only solution for problems that should be addressed by other social systems. We have created a system that continues to use the poor, mentally-ill, homeless and the undocumented as raw material.

Driven by member interests and input, Philanthropy New York’s “Ending the Criminalization of Poverty” series is examining initiatives that cut across program silos that could, even in the current political environment, have a huge impact.

In my call to action for members to register, what I truly want to drive home is how rampant incarceration threatens the work all funders do –in health, education, democracy, youth, gender equity, and all of the important spaces in between.

To understand these intersections, look no further than my two years of teaching high school math in Charleston, South Carolina and the resilient kids that filled my classroom (and classrooms like it across the country). What you’ll see are children forced to grow up too fast -- because of entanglement within the juvenile justice system themselves or from losing family members to the criminal justice system. This is often a result of disproportionate policing in their neighborhoods. What you’ll see is how these circumstances forced them to shuffle between shelters, foster homes, and undocumented shadows, and consequently robbed them of their health, their academic opportunity, and their peace of mind. I witnessed teachers struggling to balance between providing the necessary academic curriculum but also the comfort and support needed for what’s going on beyond the classroom -- all within a 1 hour block of time. Our justice system has failed and it is taking our education, health, workforce, democratic, and other systems down with it.  

The repercussions of mass incarceration are far-reaching and intergenerational. As a philanthropic community, we have an opportunity to examine these intersections, recognize the connections to our program areas and call out the Trojan Horse laws and policies that ostensibly claim to fight crime, but disproportionately drive through communities of color, disenfranchising the very people they claim to help.

At the federal level, the Trump/Sessions era isn’t likely to move justice reform in the direction most funders would want. It is likely that much of the progress made by the entire sector -including philanthropy, nonprofits, and grassroots organizers on the frontlines- in combatting systems of oppression will be under threat. President Trump ran his campaign on “reinstating law and order” and his first few days in office and his Attorney General nominee have shown that he is committed to rolling back Obama Administration efforts to reform the justice system. We already know what happens with law and order rhetoric. We saw it in 1967, in 1968, in the 1970’s, the 1980’s, and in 1994.

But philanthropy is well-positioned to challenge law and order rhetoric, champion federal level discussion and nurture local reforms.Throughout the development of this series (the work that has consumed much of my first six months as a PNY Public Policy Fellow and given me great pride!), I’ve met and been inspired by members who are leading the way in this change.

Will Cordery, Program Officer at the Surdna Foundation discusses how his foundation is being intentional with integrating a criminal justice lens across funding areas. He says, “should someone serve time incarcerated, it absolutely impacts their ability to secure a stable and thriving employment, their freedom of movement, their access to quality education, and access to affordable healthcare, and so on. Our sister fund, the Andrus Family Fund, directly supports efforts to transition young people from the juvenile justice system into better education and economic opportunities. Although Surdna does not have a line of work focused on criminal justice reform, it absolutely comes up in the conversation around strategy and many of our grantees are working to protect their communities against criminalization.”

I hope that you will join us for the first program of the four-part series on February 9^th, which seeks to answer the question: Is Immigration Detention the New Incarceration Boom?. This exceptionally timely program will explore why approximately 40,000 immigrants sleep in prisons every night because of policies that prey on their undocumented status, and also how the president’s recent immigration ban threatens American values at the core.

The next program in the series, Prison is the Most Unaffordable Housing on February 28, will examine how evictions and homelessness are both inputs and outputs in the mass incarceration formula, and our third program will examine the bail, bonds and fees that are keeping so many local governments afloat and so many families locked in a cycle of poverty. Intertwined into all of these programs, and specifically the focus of the fourth and final program, will be what philanthropy can do to move the needle.

With leaders in academia, government, and nonprofit as the panelists, and members of Philanthropy New York as the audience, I am confident that we can work together towards emptying our prisons, and filling our classrooms and homes.

If you would like join the growing group of funders connecting to each other on these interrelated issues, please email me at spasha@philanthropynewyork.org.