Putting the Pieces Back Together: Overcoming Fragmentation to ...

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incarceration. But fragmented, as they were, into specialized functions that divided resources and accountability by highly specific categories of need, these systems could only respond in limited way. To be fair, nearly all of these systems did attempt to expand their domains of responsibility to include people incarcerated in and leaving correctional institutions. Both the City and State‘s mental health agencies eventually expanded their missions to include both corrections-based services, as well as ―forensic‖ services for people leaving the criminal justice system. In addition, both the State and City‘s Departments of Health, as well as the City‘s municipal hospital authority, the Health and Hospitals Corporation, extended health care and public health services including reintegration assistance to state and city inmates, if only in the interests of public health and infectious disease control. What resulted from these broadening missions, however, was not a single, comprehensive and flexible approach to re-entry assistance for all persons leaving incarceration, but on the contrary, were a series of disjointed and fragmented forms of re-entry assistance and transition planning that were duplicative and uncoordinated, and that furthermore failed to reach a large number of persons who were not ―lucky‖ enough to fit into one of their defined categories of need. Moreover, contrary to expectations, the discharge planning services created within each of these systems failed to effectively link individuals leaving the correctional facility to community-based models of care. Nor did the growing correctional services divisions within these agencies help to inform the development of new community-based services. Indeed, much of the successes achieved in these systems during recent decades, resulting in highly effective housing-based models of service delivery, were not extended to persons leaving correctional custody, but remained limited to those individuals who luckily remained within on the ―outside.‖ It was almost as if the institutional fragmentation that widened the institutional distance between the prison and the community had triumphed over all. C. Fragmentation as Policy Isolationism in Public and Affordable Housing Policy As the housing needs of people leaving jails and prisons became increasingly apparent, many thought to look to the various agencies governing affordable housing policy for assistance with resources or to respond to these needs. This attempt was met with little success, for the affordable housing sector had moved in its own directions and developed its own sense of priority, characteristic of its own growing isolation from other sectors of public administration. The various efforts and legislation that comprise US housing policy since the 1970s can be characterized as involving three movements, all leading towards further isolation from other public sectors and systems. 22 First, growing concern for the declining condition of and rising crime rates within publicly-owned and subsidized housing led to an increased 22 For an excellent synopsis of federal and local housing policy during the past two decades, see Langley C. Keyes, Alex Schwartz, Avis C. Vidal, and Rachel G. Bratt, ―Networks and Nonprofits: Opportunities and Challenges in an Era of Federal Devolution,‖ in Housing Policy Debate, Vol. 7, Issue 2. 1996. 9
focus on property management, centered around anti-crime efforts directed at the proliferating drug trade within public housing. 23 The most notorious example of this was a series of legislation and acts, culminating in Clinton‘s 1996 ―One Strike and You‘re Out‖ Policy, which accorded local public housing authorities with greater discretion with regard to tenant screening, selection and eviction for both public housing as well as for Section 8 tenant-based rental assistance, particularly with regard to persons with drug-related or violent criminal histories. Later additions to these policies applied more stringent and mandatory bans against people convicted of sexual offenses and methamphetamine production. Save for a few cases, housing authorities across the nation began to exercise the full range of discretionary selections, resulting in the denial and eviction of hundreds of individuals. New York City Housing Authority, renowned as one of the model housing authorities in the country, has opted for the most stringent application of these discretions, denying housing almost automatically to most individuals with recent criminal histories. These exclusionary policies are consistent with the pattern of isolationist policymaking, where little regard is given to the externalities of institutional choices. Indeed, focused on increasing the safety and quality of the ―stock,‖ these recent public housing policies seem little concerned with the housing needs of those who it turns away. Nor do these policies answer the lingering question: where are people who are poor, criminal justice-involved and struggling substance abuse problems, expected to live? And moreover, what will be the public safety impact of turning those individuals away? The second movement in housing policy, spurred by changes in political opinion regarding the federal government‘s proper role in affordable housing provision, led to the devolution of funding and oversight of housing initiatives to the State and local level, and consequently to a) the growing importance of local preference in determining housing priority and b) to decreasing unity and coherence in national housing policy trends and movements. Such is evident today in the wide diversity of priorities pursued by different state housing finance and development agencies, as well as the growing discrepancy in affordable housing availability in different states. It has also led to the fragmentation of the affordable housing movement and the differential shaping of local housing priorities and preferences. In New York City, affordable housing policy has largely been driven by concerns over disinvestment in urban neighborhoods and the declining quality of the housing stock. Driven by considerations of ―market failures‖ and using an economic analysis of neighborhood conditions, affordable housing policy in New York as in many other urban localities concerns itself primarily with meeting supply for demand as it is determined by income categories, not categories of service needs. As such, housing agencies like the City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) may tacitly allow people leaving incarceration to obtain affordable housing, but exercise no preferences, expecting these individuals to join 23 See Langley C. Keyes. Strategies and Saints: Fighting Drugs in Subsidized Housing. Washington: Urban Institute Press. 1992. 10
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Page 15 and 16: It is easy enough to see how such f
Page 17 and 18: The New York City DOC/DHS Collabora
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Page 35 and 36: Lessons for Creating Systems Change
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