What is the cost of crime and law enforcement? Right now, it’s too dear, argues Mayor Cory Booker, in an essay published in the Perspective section of The Star-Ledger last Sunday. With academic specificity and a reformer’s zeal, the mayor attacks what he calls the absurdity of the war on drugs and urban crime. Of course law enforcement agencies should go after criminals, he says, however some punishments for passive offenses (such as drug possession) are overly harsh. They stretch over decades and end up perpetuating a cycle of disenfranchisement, frustration and repeat offenses in the people that were meant to be reformed.
We all know the often sad sequence of events that play out after a young black man serves a prison sentence. He guy gets out of prison and, unless his family runs a business where he can work and re-establish himself in society, he has a hard time convincing employers to take him on. If his joblessness and other societal needs and privileges are withheld long enough, and if he does not have the fortitude to resist his old practices, he will get frustrated and go right back to what he knows – crime. He’ll run the risk of getting caught for drug dealing, gun trafficking or a host of other crimes, because he’d rather not sit around feeling powerless and useless.
Well, Booker wraps up with a prelude to an announcement, slated for this week, of changes that the City of Newark will undertake to halt the cycle of rehabilitation and recidivism. He expressed his intentions a bit – last year, I think – when he launched that organization of lawyers who volunteer to help former felons re-assimilate into society. This essay (plus a string of comments to newspapers and other media) clearly articulates what is arguably Mayor Booker’s top priority as Newark’s chief policy maker: reforming the reform system. In his mind, at least the essay suggests, the draconian laws that buttress the correction system and the prison industrial sector (and I partially quote) “ … stand in stinging contradiction to whom we claim to be” as a society.
What sorts of changes are afoot? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. If I could be a tad selfish (and as is my nature, silly) I think recruiting a famous bakery to Newark should be a critical element of prisoner re-entry programs. Hear me out: I trust we are all familiar with that wonderful institution up in Yonkers, N.Y., called Greyston Bakery. Founded by a former aerospace engineer and Zen Buddhist, they operate a profitable social enterprise that, among other things provides jobs and job training to individuals who have had trouble finding employment in the past.
So, potentially, a young man who once threatened to bus’ a cap in some punk can promise, in a nice civil way, get your red velvet wedding cake done post haste. Brothers with jobs and yummy desserts — that is the America of which I dream.
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[...] July, the Star-Ledger published an essay from Mayor Cory Booker in which he urgently called for reforms to a correctional system that often does more harm than good to the inner-city youth it intends to serve. On the latest [...]