Opinion: NYC Has a Second Chance to Get the Jails Plan Right
Rendering of the proposed new Bronx jail.
City Limits
By: Arline Parks and A. Mychal Johnson
The recent city budget vote clearly demonstrated that the ongoing debate around racial equity still has a long road ahead in New York. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and too many others have devastated the nation, and they have yet again laid bare the racism that has been embedded in our society for centuries. Systemic institutional racism and decades of neglect and financial disinvestment, coupled with patterns of city-subsidized harm on Black and Latino neighborhoods, make it clear that we must have radical investments in affected communities like Mott Haven if we are to achieve equity and justice in our country.
Which begs the question: Why is City Hall set on spending $1.1 billion to construct a new prison facility in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx? While City Hall postponed the plan to build new jails until next year due to COVID, it remains absurdly committed to implementing a plan that will only exacerbate the inequities lived by generations. The plan continues a disturbing pattern of racist policies that caused the existing conditions—entrenched poverty and crime—in Mott Haven in the first place.
Our city faces deep economic uncertainty, but significant cuts to essential programs in the 2021 budget will once again disproportionately impact low-income communities like ours. We raise our children among the worst-ranked indicators in health, education and economic security. Following decades of disinvestment, 38 percent of South Bronx residents and 49 percent of our children live in poverty, and pre-COVID unemployment rates were at three times the national rate. Top-down development decisions that zoned and subsidized the disproportionate siting of waste transfer stations, fossil fuel power plants and heavy diesel trucking businesses in our community have caused chronic health conditions such as asthma, diabetes, cancer and hypertension; the very conditions that COVID-19 thrives on, resulting in some of the highest COVID-19 infection and death rates.
