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safety net
A Simple Safety Net Could Keep People Like Me out of Prison
When those facing the most systemic barriers receive sufficient income support, then economic security, thriving, and freedom are the result.
Aug 13, 2024
I received a 60-year prison sentence for a murder I didn’t commit. After 25 years of fighting this injustice, I was exonerated.
I’ve learned some hard lessons about our criminal justice system. I’ve also learned how simple safety net policies—like a modest guaranteed base income or no-strings-attached child allowance—could have kept millions of struggling young people like me out of trouble.
I had a good childhood in Flint, Michigan, but we were poor and opportunities were few. My parents were loving and supportive, but engaged in illegal activities to make ends meet. It seemed normal to me, but I was in an environment that normalized abnormal things.
I eventually dropped out of high school, moved to Indianapolis, and started a family. But when I got laid off, I turned in desperation to the drug life, trying to do for my family what my parents did for me.
If I’d had a modest child allowance for my own children, I wouldn’t have had to rely on the most accessible path available to me, the drug business.
One fateful night, I heard gunshots near the building where I had my drug business. I didn’t think much of it—shots weren’t unusual in that neighborhood. I finished my business for the day, proud of the money I’d made, and went home to my family.
Later, I learned a young man had been shot—and I was arrested for the murder.
I’d been blamed by someone with a drug-related grudge against me. A bystander had identified a very different man with a different physical description, but the detective buried that evidence. Advocates uncovered this evidence 25 years later, and I was exonerated and released. I’d spent a hellish 11 of those 25 years in solitary confinement.
During my incarceration, I became a teacher and mentor. Now I’m an advocate for people returning to society after incarceration.
I see the systemic barriers they face. Returning citizens are prohibited from hundreds of jobs—from working in education, health, and government to even becoming a barber or Uber driver. They’re barred from public assistance, public housing, and student loans. They face discrimination in housing and employment. They often have significant physical and mental health issues they can’t afford to treat.
These are the very conditions that sometimes lead to offenses and recidivism. Numerous studies have found that when people are securely employed, housed, and allowed to receive an education and meet their health needs, they don’t re-offend.
These people have already been punished and served their time—sometimes for offenses they never committed, like me. We shouldn’t be punished again when reintegrating into our families and societies.
As part of my work, I volunteer with Michigan Liberation, a statewide organization looking to end the criminalization of Black families and communities of color. Recently, they joined a Guaranteed Income Now conference co-hosted by Community Change and the Economic Security Project.
Guaranteed income can take many forms. It can be an expansion of current tax credits like the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit. It can be a no-strings-attached Child Allowance or a monthly payment to qualifying people, families, unpaid caretakers, undocumented immigrants, and returning citizens—all of whom are currently ineligible for assistance.
In Flint, it looks like a new program that offers pregnant people and new parents a monthly check for the first year of the baby’s life.
If my parents had a guaranteed income floor, we wouldn’t have been in danger of falling through into hunger and homelessness. They would have had significantly better chances to pursue well-paying jobs to provide for my security—without relying on illegal activity.
If I’d had a modest child allowance for my own children, I wouldn’t have had to rely on the most accessible path available to me, the drug business. I wouldn’t have been anywhere near the site of that murder—and wouldn’t have lost decades of my life to a false accusation.
It’s worth it to support our families and communities, no matter where we live or what we look like. When those facing the most systemic barriers receive sufficient income support, then economic security, thriving, and freedom are the result.
And I can tell you, there’s nothing sweeter than freedom.
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We Need a Movement to Counter the Supreme Court’s Cruelty to Homeless People
Despite the court’s abhorrent decision, cities and states aren’t required to prosecute the unhoused. Instead, they should double down on proven and humane solutions.
Jul 19, 2024
It’s hard enough not having a safe place to live. Now it’s easier for cities to arrest you for it.
“I am afraid at all times,” testified Debra Blake, who’d been forced to live outside in Grants Pass, Oregon, for eight years after losing her job and housing. Her disability disqualified her from staying in the town’s only shelter. “I could be arrested, ticketed, and prosecuted for sleeping outside or for covering myself with a blanket to stay warm,” she said.
In 2018, after being banished from every park in town and accruing thousands in fines, she sued the city as part of a class action suit for violating homeless residents’ constitutional rights. The Oregon District Court agreed in 2020 that the city’s actions constituted “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Sadly, Blake died before seeing the results.
Today, a person who works full-time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the country.
But Grants Pass appealed the decision all the way to the Supreme Court. The billionaire-backed justices ruled this summer that unhoused people aren’t included in the Constitution’s protections against “cruel and unusual punishment,” overturning a federal appeals court.
But punishing people for our country’s failure to ensure adequate housing for all is inherently “cruel and unusual.” Widespread homelessness directly violates the human right to housing under international law, which must be recognized in the United States.
The court’s ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, “leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested.” Fines and arrests on a person’s record, in turn, make it more difficult to get out of poverty and into stable housing.
The decision comes as housing is increasingly unaffordable in our increasingly unequal nation. Today, a person who works full-time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the country.
With half of all renter households now spending more than 30% of their income on housing, millions are one emergency away from homelessness. According to federal data, last year over 650,000 Americans experienced homelessness on a given night—a 12% increase from 2022. Nearly half sleep outside.
Research confirms what should be obvious: Unaffordable housing and homelessness are intertwined. A lack of adequate health care and social safety net supports further compound the problem.
Hedge funds and private equity firms have also driven up housing costs since gaining control over a greater share of the market. Blackstone alone owns and manages over 300,000 units, making it the nation’s largest landlord. This financialization of housing treats a basic necessity and fundamental human right as just another commodity.
Cities and states face complex challenges in responding to homelessness. But experts have long documented that the real solution is affordable housing and supportive services, not punishment. Housing those in need ultimately costs less than imprisoning them, both financially and morally.
Despite the court’s abhorrent decision, cities and states aren’t required to prosecute the unhoused. Instead, they should double down on proven and humane solutions like Housing First, which provides permanent housing without preconditions, coupled with supportive services.
Guaranteed income programs offer another promising and cost-effective solution. Denver’s innovative, no-strings-attached cash assistance to 807 unhoused participants helped increase their access to housing within one year, while decreasing nights spent unsheltered and reducing reliance on emergency services.
Congress must also do more to invest in all those who call America home.
Currently, only one in four eligible households receive federal rental assistance. Housing rights organizations like the National Homelessness Law Center recommend that Congress invest at least $356 billion on measures like universal rental assistance, expanding the national Housing Trust Fund, and eviction and homelessness prevention.
It will take a broad-based movement to achieve these goals and counter the court’s latest cruelty against everyone who struggles to get by in America. But the impacts of housing are just as wide-ranging and consequential—from our health to education, security, economic mobility, and even our dignity.
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To Stop the Rise of the Far Right, the EU Must Tackle Economic Insecurity
The results of the European Parliament elections actually make progress more urgent than ever—and there is still a democratic majority in place to deliver it.
Jun 10, 2024
“Business as usual” cannot continue—that much is clear from the results of the European elections.
Democratic forces still have a clear majority in the European Parliament. The majority of people who came out voted for a democratic Europe. So there is no need—still less excuse—for backroom deals with any part of the far right. But the rise in support for anti-democratic, anti-worker parties demands a response.
Some politicians, panicked, will try to go even further in imitating the far right, in style and substance. Trade unions, supported by the data, are clear that this tactic will backfire. The obsessions of the far right are far from the main concerns of European citizens, whose priorities are quality jobs and ending poverty.
The E.U. must urgently press forward on a European project of hope that delivers security and safety to workers.
The Hans-Böckler-Stiftung recently conducted a survey of workers in 10 European Union member states. It found that workers who were dissatisfied with their working conditions and pay and who had little say in their job were more likely to have negative attitudes towards democracy and to be more vulnerable to right-wing narratives about “migrants.”
Parties must not normalise the far right’s talking points. Wrong in principle and self-defeating in practice, this strategy—adopted by many during the election campaign—was a failure. It would compound the error to double down on it.
Instead, these results must be the wake-up call that stops Europe sleepwalking toward disaster. All democratic parties must use their combined majority to deliver on the priorities of hard-working people. It is time to stop trying to treat the symptoms and finally address the real cause of the malaise—economic insecurity.
A Project of Hope
The E.U. must urgently press forward on a European project of hope that delivers security and safety to workers. That includes quality jobs in all occupations and regions, real improvement in pay and working conditions, enhanced public services, affordable housing, and social justice.
People want an E.U. that fights against poverty and creates quality jobs—too many lack the most basic elements of a decent life. Renewed austerity would take us in the opposite direction and add to anger in communities across Europe.
Rather than abandoning the Green Deal, we should add a lot of red to it, to ensure that the long-promised just transition becomes a genuine reality.
Uncertainty and insecurity are fuelling the “backlash” against the European Green Deal. Tackling the climate crisis is non-negotiable: There are no jobs on a dead planet. But we must make the transition to a green economy in a way that does not leave workers and their communities behind.
By 2030, around 160,000 jobs in coal could be lost across Central and Eastern Europe, with up to triple that number in the supply chain. Neither the funding nor the legislation is in place to ensure that new opportunities are available for those workers.
It is no wonder there is fear. But rather than abandoning the Green Deal, we should add a lot of red to it, to ensure that the long-promised just transition becomes a genuine reality. We need a dedicated just-transition directive that guarantees workers will benefit from new, quality, green jobs in their region the moment or before old jobs are phased out.
Public Investment
That will require increased public investment in every member state—which means the E.U. needs to have a new investment fund ready to go when the Recovery and Resilience Facility ends in 2026. The incoming European Commission, if it is sensible, will also show a high degree of flexibility over the E.U.’s new fiscal rules, to avoid a return to austerity.
Equally, bringing stability to people’s lives has nothing to do with violating human rights through migration deals with repressive regimes. It means ensuring that every individual has a secure job with an income they can rely on, with enough to provide for themselves and their families—not simply scraping by, week to week, bill to bill. It means ensuring that member states guarantee that workers can unionise and have a real say at work.
Those in power should not however take it for granted that workers’ support for Europe will continue if they do not take this opportunity to change it, delivering on the real priorities of working people.
The last commission made a positive start by recognising that the destruction of collective bargaining during austerity had supercharged insecurity, taking steps to reverse that trend through the minimum-wages directive. The platform-work directive was also a recognition of the negative consequences of growing precarity.
We now need measures of a scale and urgency that matches these election results and the challenges faced by workers. Let’s give working people back more control over their lives by ramping up their ability to bargain collectively. There should be no more public money for companies which do not act in the public interest by paying union wages and reinvesting profits to create jobs and raise productivity—instead siphoning them off in excess bonuses and dividends.
Europe will never be able to compete in the world on the basis of the lowest cost. We need an active industrial policy that shares the benefits of green growth at home and sees our reputation for high standards as a comparative advantage, rather than a drag on “competitiveness.”
Social Progress
During the election campaign, I was repeatedly asked whether results such as these would mean it would be more difficult to achieve social progress in the coming term. These results actually make progress more urgent than ever—and there is still a democratic majority in place to deliver it.
Those in power should not however take it for granted that workers’ support for Europe will continue if they do not take this opportunity to change it, delivering on the real priorities of working people. To paraphrase the former European Commission President Jacques Delors, our aim must be to ensure that—before the next European elections—the person in the street can enjoy the daily experience of a tangible social Europe.
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