Dortell Williams' Radio Broadcasts
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Dortell Williams is an inmate at the Los Angeles County California State Prison in Lancaster, California. Dortell has been published in a number of community newspapers, including the San Francisco Bay View, The Final Call and The Los Angeles Sentinel. He mentors at-risk kids through San Francisco's The Beat Within and is an inside correspondent for Families to Amend Three Strikes. You can email Dortell at: dortellwilliams@yahoo.com. For more information about the Honor Yard Program, visit: www.prisonhonorprogram.org
Skid Row Sweeps: The Disappearing of the Homeless
Commentary by Dortell Williams, recorded 11/1/07
1) 3:14 MP3 Radio Essay
Skid Row Sweeps: The Disappearing of the Homeless
Copyright 2007/ Dortell Williams
Recently, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and other dignitaries, lauded themselves for the dramatic decrease in L.A.’s infamous Skid Row population, a one-square-mile area in downtown, where resides the largest concentration of homeless people in the nation. Of course, no one would deny that such a dramatic drop in homelessness, from 88,000 to 73,000, isn’t a good thing.
Fifteen thousand homeless off the street! Alone that makes for quite a happy tale. But within the book, where the devices and methods are spelled out reveals more of a horror story.
Each horrific chapter illustrates that the 15,000 weren’t saved, but disappeared. Snatched from a conspicuous hellhole, and dumped into a dark other: California’s burgeoning prison system.
CHAPTER ONE: August 2006 Los Angeles city leaders initiate what they call the “Safer Cities Initiative.”
By January 2007, 4,800 homeless are off the street. Are they placed in affordable housing, aided and assisted, as we would expect from a humane society?; like New York, Dallas, Boston and others are doing? No! They’re cast into what the courts describe as unconstitutional prison conditions; overcrowded and dangerous.
CHAPTER TWO: New York, in contrast, initiated a successful program called Housing First, in 2004. This program focuses on getting people off the street and into stable homes. The Christian Science Monitor says it’s “less expensive than leaving people on the street or in shelters.” So it’s gotta be far less expensive than a $43,000 a year California prison cell, wouldn’t ya think?
CHAPTER THREE: It just gets uglier in Los Angeles. By September 2007 over 10,000 people had been arrested and imprisoned. Pete White, co-director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, describes Safer Cities as a guise for a setup-to-fail. He says the police initiate sweeps by simple traffic infractions, say for jaywalking or loitering. After these homeless folk predictably fail to pay, they’re arrested. The fines increase, the imprisonment grows in length. It’s all for gentrification. He says.
CHAPTER FOUR: At least 10 public defenders join in the outcry. They told the Los Angeles Daily Journal that the district attorney’s office is focusing “almost exclusively on drug cases from the [Skid Row] area.”
“We’re talking… $2 to $20 worth of crack,” one is cited as saying, and some are getting up to 20 years. They bemoan that the police focus on primarily non-violent, vulnerable people, while neglecting the big fish or L.A.’s infamous violence problem.
In the final chapter, according to the Los Angeles Daily Hournal, anmd other sources, one third of Skid Row’s homeless are mentally ill, 75 percent are black, 10,000 are under age and 24,000 are addicted to drugs or alcohol.
And such are the Skid Row sweeps and the disappearing of the homeless…and the mentally ill, and black men and our most vulnerable youth.
Update:
Senate Bill 299 sailed unscathed through the Senate Public Safety Committee, the Senate Public Safety Commission, Senate Appropriations and the full Senate. The bill is scheduled to go before the Assembly Public Safety Committee, August 31st, where it is expected to hit turbulence. Old fashioned, traditional letters are requested of the public for legislative supporters of the bill to offset expected opposition.
Dortell Williams is an inmate at the Los Angeles County California State Prison in Lancaster, California. Dortell has been published in a number of community newspapers, including the San Francisco Bay View, The Final Call and The Los Angeles Sentinel. He mentors at-risk kids through San Francisco's The Beat Within and is an inside correspondent for Families to Amend Three Strikes. You can email Dortell at: dortellwilliams@yahoo.com. For more information about the Honor Yard Program, visit: www.prisonhonorprogram.org
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