Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Forward Together and Research Action Design presented WHO Pays? at the Impact Hub in Oakland last night with their study. This study began with the question of how families were dealing with the cost of loved ones incarcerated. The study shows the conditions-beyond the statistics the human beings around mass incarceration with 2.4 million in jails and prisons at a cost of $80 billion. If that weren't enough of a cost, their research shows the extra costs to families- court even with a public defender can be as high as $13,607; they don't show that on the many tv shows on crime. The study shows that 83% of those costs are left to the women in their families, in addition to the loss of income from that person.
On the panel and in the room were people who have benefited from freeing themselves and their families from being incarcerated, and having family contact was a predominant factor in those who remained free and those who returned to prison. What was needed to shift the conditions that have produced mass incarceration and the loss of human potential driven by the high racial rate of jail and prison? One person on the panel said: Hard conversations about how to not build jails, but invest in human beings to bring them back to a life they and their families want.
The population in the study made up of 712 formerly incarcerated people, 368 family members, 28 employees and 34 focus groups with family members and girlfriends impacted by incarceration. 1 in 2 black women have family incarcerated and 1-4 women represent the 83%.
NY Times Timothy Williamshad a second in the series on Who Pays today describing the hardships that families dealing with incarcerations have that leave them further behind and in poverty.
This is the issue that presidential candidates Republican or Democrat have not taken on, but must is the message from these results. Want to know what those women are talking about in Black Lives Matter, read up on what they are dealing with?
Black Lives Matter has made it clear they are not supporting any presidential candidate who does not take into account the stark reality of the failure of the statistics and human lives over represented by black human beings suffering under a criminal justice system that we are all paying for.
