NEW YORK —The head of a prominent New York City nonprofit is guiding a team of the Big Apple’s most engaged community leaders to redo the way they prevent and address incarceration.
The group that includes faith leaders, criminal justice experts and academics asserts a connection between race, poverty and incarceration and says there is a direct line between being poor and going to prison. The group, called the Ending the Poverty to Prison Pipeline Task Force, has just released a report that advocates that city and nonprofit organizations work better together to make sure that people in New York’s poorest neighborhoods get what they need to avoid prison and live better lives.
“If we support them and do a better job of understanding higher rates and incidences, we can begin to cut this off at its root and not just wait until people are coming out of prison,” Jennifer Jones Austin, CEO and executive director of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, told Diverse in a telephone interview.
The 47-page report, Ending the Poverty to Prison Pipeline, closely examines the intersection of race, poverty and prison “that nobody’s talking about,” said Jones Austin, also a member of New York City’s Board of Corrections.
“We’re bringing the three together and saying, ‘We see what’s going on here. Why not go into these communities and figure out how do we shore up the services to connect the dots?’” she said
The report notes, for instance, that poor neighborhoods are more heavily policed, impoverished people are more likely to be disconnected from family and justice system fees and fines have a greater impact on the poor, the study found.
The report also notes that incarceration rates are highest in neighborhoods with high unemployment, psychiatric hospitalizations and school absences.
