Marc Lumont Hill at the talk ‘End Mass Incarceration’ - Riverside Church, Harlem New York (via icecreamritual)
for real. this is true in Australia, too, and probably most other countries that have experienced neoliberalisation over the past few decades. public housing has been seriously disinvested in, and at the same time, prisons have expanded dramatically.
this has all been happening while prisons have been putting on a kinder, gentler facade; while they have been presented as not for punishment, but for rehabilitation. as a result, many judges now put people in prison or in remand largely because their living situation is considered dangerous, or unstable enough that it makes it hard to track you down. if you are homeless and you are brought up on any form of criminal charges — even very minimal ones that would not normally carry a prison sentence — you are likely to be imprisoned until the end of your trial, which, if you’ve ever been involved in a court case, you know how long that shit gets dragged out. for more info on this, see ‘Homelessness and Criminalisation: The Dangerous Intersections of Gender, Race and Class,’ in Parity: Policing Homelessness: Flat Out/CHRIP (2012) (link opens a pdf). plus, a lot of people with mental illnesses in the Northern Territory facing no charges are imprisoned because there is no long-term housing for them. (more.)
basically this is not just a figure of speech, it’s literally the case.
(via notfuckingaroundcru)
