Crime and Economic Disparity in Pre-Katrina New Orleans : NOLA Indymedia

If you read blogs and forums on the internet, you will certainly find countless disparaging words about Katrina evacuees. Even New Orleans locals are posting crude messages regarding their devious desires for many of the poorest victims displaced by the storm. Many writers make a plea for condemning the least fortunate to a permanent existence outside of the city and state.

News articles are posted and reposted, telling of dramatic rises in crime within areas where evacuees have been sheltered. Many of the stories are true, but we could have surmised as much, ourselves, without any outside media interference. New Orleans’ crime rate has been high and rising for many years. We have done nothing to address the root causes of our crime problem, but seem awfully happy to get rid of it the easiest way possible, by sending it to burden someone else.

Prior to Katrina, employment opportunities in New Orleans were rapidly dwindling, as employers were either leaving the city or looking outside the area to fill positions. This decline led to high unemployment rates throughout the parish. One reason for the grand exodus was that we couldn’t offer a large, well-educated workforce. Many of the people in the poorest communities were African Americans who never had a real chance for a quality education. After segregation ended and public schools were integrated, many Caucasians removed their children from these schools in favor of a private education. Before long, the area’s public schools were forgotten and the school board leadership’s interests turned from being educators to becoming greedy swindlers. The system’s surreptitiously depleted finances made it difficult to retain quality, certified teachers. For quite a while, most teachers in the Orleans Parish School System were not qualified to baby sit, let alone educate. Adding to the educational woes for African Americans was the historic lack of a first-rate education for them in the city. Many parents and grandparents found it difficult to reinforce, or even correct, their children’s classroom assignments. Over 70% of the people in Louisiana’s correctional system are African American. The majority can not read or write and most did not even graduate from elementary school. Can you imagine the difficulty of finding employment when you can’t even complete a job application? For many of these unfortunate people, criminal activity was the city’s only economic engine.

Pre-Katrina, drug use and illegal narcotics sales ran rampant throughout New Orleans and the surrounding parishes. Many children grew up in households where marijuana leaves outnumbered tea leaves ninety-nine to one. Apparent hopelessness leads to many negative behaviors. Some drowned their sorrows in alcohol; others tried to visit an induced paradise by snorting, smoking, or injecting illicit substances. For many, this might have been the only way to fathom an escape from roach and rat-infested surroundings. Those living in the worst areas of the city may have found drug dealing as the only way to rise from incessant poverty. One does not have to read instructions to sell drugs. Profits were high, but so were the risks. With luck, one might have wound up in jail, where he or she could have earned a General Equivalency Diploma; without luck, one might have become just another murder statistic for the city’s Uniform Crime Report. Regardless, both provided the potential for escape.

Isn’t it shameful that the Orleans Parish Prison graduated more people with a General Equivalency Diploma than any other provider in the city? In reality, very few places offered the coursework for the G.E.D. prior to Katrina. Not only that, hardly any services were available for poor and uneducated people to improve their lives. Substance abuse clinics were under funded and could not accommodate the numbers that requested treatment. People returning home from prison could find no counseling to help them remain on the straight and narrow and few employment opportunities to assist with their goal. We talk about how awful these people are and how we don’t want them back, but, perhaps, we are the abominations, not them.

Other states have impressive programs geared at helping people who are returning home from jail and more programs for people who never want to see the inside of a prison. Louisiana is thirty years behind the times when it comes to restorative justice. Programs like the Safer Foundation, in Chicago, and Project Rio, in Texas, have shown great promise in reducing the numbers of people returning to jail in those states. Other states have similar and equally successful programs. The only difference between those areas and here is that they have a sincere interest in improving the community. Yes, programs such as these cost money, but the savings at all levels (financial, life, etc.) have been far greater than the expenditures.

http://www.corrections.state.la.us/Statistics/PDF_QSPR/A.pdf
http://saferfoundation.org/
http://www.workforcelink.com/html/rio/servicesrio.html