The city of Seattle is planning to construct a new municipal jail at a cost of more than $200 million. At the same time, five public schools are slated for closure, and budgets for social services, including effective pre-arrest diversion programs, are being slashed.
A coalition of groups spearheaded by the city’s homeless newspaper Real Change and the Real Change Organizing Project are uniting to oppose this decision. Activists are gathering signatures for Initiative 100, which would pose the issue to voters on the November ballot.
Chris Mobley and Leela Yellesetty spoke with Real Change Executive Director Tim Harris about what’s at stake in this struggle
WHY IS the city trying to build a new jail? What is their argument for it, and what do you think are the real reasons behind it?
THE CITY’S talking point is pretty simple. They say they would rather not, but they’re between a rock and a hard place. In 1999, the county told them that by 2012, they’d run out of space, and the city would have to find its own solution.
That changed. The projections for those incarcerated came in significantly lower because of programs that reduced the number of people in jail. But there was already a lot of investment in planning and institutional commitment to going down this path.
There is also potential financial self-interest. Rather than contract beds out to the county, which is a budgetary drain, here’s the possibility for the city to have its own facility, which they could subcontract to Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), for instance. There’s some evidence that there have been discussions about subletting jail space for detaining immigrants, which would be positive cash flow.
There is a pattern of privatization with municipal jails that have been funded through bond issues that is very predictable. There’s a huge interest in filling the beds because, if you don’t, it goes from a positive to a negative cash flow. It’s a “build it, and they will fill it” situation.
IF THEY build it, who will they fill it with?
WHENEVER THEY talk about who is going to be in this jail, they talk about perpetrators of domestic violence and drunk drivers, for which the law mandates incarceration. Those are a couple of fairly unsympathetic groups of people, but this is a classic city of Seattle straw-man argument. They set up this extreme version of what reality is, which is more or less wholly fabricated.
There is this third rail inherent in the issue, of race and class, that the city has studiously avoided. The largest category of crime represented in the daily jail population are drug crimes, and the war on drugs disproportionately targets the African American community and people who are economically marginalized, and turn to street activity as a survival tactic.
Seattle disproportionately incarcerates African Americans at a rate of 10 times their representation in the population at large. You have a population that has been left behind by globalization, left behind by the civil rights movement, and left behind by the education system increasingly targeted for incarceration.
There is also a criminalization of the homeless that the shelter system doesn’t have capacity for. We’ve consistently documented about one-third more homeless people in Seattle than there is capacity for in the emergency shelter system. There literally is no place for these people to go. Yet we have to blame the victim. Those people will also be in this new facility.
DOES THE push to build a jail have anything to do with the discussion lately in city government about cracking down on minor offenses like public urination and panhandling–the so-called quality-of-life argument?
IT ABSOLUTELY has everything to do with the [former New York Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani “broken windows theory” of how to respond to the deepening contradictions brought on by extreme inequality. Cities everywhere are dealing with this problem. The nature of cities has changed in response to globalization.
The nearly complete collapse of manufacturing in this country has had an impact on urban economies, where suddenly, the source of employment for less-skilled, less-educated people has largely been shifted overseas. You have a much more challenging situation for the less advantaged in urban economies and much higher rates of unemployment–and this has hit the African American community harder than ever.
On the other hand, you have cities becoming islands of affluence. Urban living is the option of choice for those who can afford it. The relation between the city and the suburbs has shifted, so that the suburbs are now places for people who can’t afford to live in the city.
There’s been gentrification, a rise in land values and an increase in density of urban areas driven by condo booms in every major city. Cities have become centers of upscale consumption, cultural consumption and employment for the professional middle class who now prefer to live in urban areas.
On the other side of that, you have increased poverty that is a result of a whole class of people being written off. And there’s visible poverty that makes the affluent class uneasy and nervous.
So there’s a contradiction to manage. The broken windows theory identifies those who are visibly poor in the urban environment as an “other,” as a problem on a par with a broken window or graffiti that needs to be removed from public view, because it creates a downward spiral that erodes quality of living, leads to more crime and consequently reduced land values.
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