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VI. Public Safety

What you want is a way for housing projects to be safe.  Some restrictions based on real safety make all the sense in the world, but you want those restrictions to be reasonable, and you want people to be able to earn their way back in.¹⁰⁸
—JoAnne Page, executive director, Fortune Society

The right of every person to adequate housing includes the right to housing that is decent and safe.  Human Rights Watch recognizes the responsibility of the U.S., through HUD and local PHAs, to ensure, to the extent possible, that government-assisted housing is safe.  Current public housing policies that automatically exclude individuals with a wide range of criminal histories for long periods of time (for a lifetime, in some cases) are an unreasonable means of furthering that goal.  They reflect widely shared but flawed assumptions about public safety and about people who have broken the law.  First, they reflect the belief that the longer people who have committed crimes are excluded from public housing, the safer other tenants will be.  That mistaken belief is predicated on mostly unexamined beliefs about the character of people who commit crimes.

Criminologists recognize that the longer people with criminal records go without committing a crime, the less likely they are to commit another offense.¹⁰⁹  In fact, Joan Petersilia, noted criminologist and author of a definitive study of reentry, suggests that parole supervision beyond five years is ineffective because recidivism is unlikely after five years of arrest-free behavior.  Periods of exclusion beyond five years, especially lifetime exclusions, make little sense in light of this reality. 

HUD has not attempted to document the relationship between restrictive admissions policies and crime, despite the fact that the agency has its own Office of Policy Development and Research and employs several criminologists.  Many public housing officials say that public safety has improved in their facilities and cite the adoption of exclusionary policies as the reason.  But we are aware of no concrete studies supporting such claims and, despite requests, neither HUD nor PHA officials provided Human Rights Watch with facts that could support this conclusion. 

Human Rights Watch does not doubt that crime rates have decreased in public housing facilities: such rates have decreased nationwide in recent years.  But it is difficult to establish the extent to which exclusionary policies themselves contributed to the decrease.  As one housing official in Cleveland, Ohio told us, looking at crime statistics as support for exclusionary policies is “useless.  Do we know if it is because of ‘one strike’?  It becomes hard to judge whether ‘one strike’ works.”¹¹⁰  Declining crime rates in public housing no doubt reflect many factors.  But surely most of them are the same factors responsible for declining rates in cities and rural areas across the country—factors that have nothing to do with housing policies.  “Crime is down in public housing,” New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA’s) general manager told Human Rights Watch, “but it looks similar to reductions in the city as a whole.”¹¹¹  Moreover, our research indicated that PHA officials with very different exclusionary policies all nonetheless believe their crime rates have dropped.

Despite a lack of evidence that strict exclusionary policies are necessary for public safety, PHAs are reluctant to explore whether they should be changed.  “It’s not a causal relationship I can draw,” said NYCHA’s general manager, “but if we change [the policy], we don’t know what would happen.  . . . I’m not sure I’d want to find out.”¹¹²

Curiously, there has been relatively little discussion among federal or local housing officials as to what, in fact, predicts a good tenant, much less the predictive value of a criminal record.  Pressured by local advocates, housing officials in Portland, Oregon in 2003 agreed to impose a sort of moratorium on the strictest of their exclusion policies and commission a study at Portland State University (PSU) to examine whether someone with a criminal record can be a good tenant.  Annette Jolin, Chair of the PSU Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice told Human Rights Watch:

Before we began designing the study, I had students look for existing studies that had been done on the connection between ex-offenders and public housing.  We wanted to know: do they make good or bad tenants?  They couldn’t find anything, and I thought, well, maybe they’re not looking in the right places.  And I had others look, and there was nothing.  I was surprised.¹¹³ 

While Jolin explained that much has been written about crime in public housing, there was nothing about what, in fact, makes for a good tenant.  “People had always just gone with the assumption that having a criminal record makes someone a bad tenant,” she said, “and that has never been empirically demonstrated.”¹¹⁴

Slated to begin in the summer of 2004, the PSU study will track people with criminal records who were admitted to public housing in Portland in 2000 for a period of four to five years.

Based on interviews with public housing officials, Jolin and her team will operationalize the definition of a “good tenant.”  They will then look at whether tenants in the subject population pay their rent on time, maintain their apartments, create problems for neighbors, or get evicted.  While she plans to look at rates of recidivism, Jolin said, “that’s not really the point.  We really want to focus on whether or not they are good tenants.” 

Although advocates for harsh exclusionary policies argue they are necessary to reduce crime in public housing, the experience of many PHAs suggests otherwise.

For example, neither the New York nor the Los Angeles city housing authorities consider arrest records, and both limit the types of offenses that warrant exclusion, as well as the length of time applicants with criminal records are excluded.  Yet officials at both PHAs told Human Rights Watch that they believe they combat crime just as effectively with their policies as PHAs with far harsher ones. They also have acknowledged the importance of including consideration of prisoner reentry needs in developing public housing policies. “We try to have an enlightened, balanced policy, recognizing that people do have the ability to rehabilitate,” the general manager of the NYCHA told Human Rights Watch. “Understanding the role of probation, parole, and treatment, we try to balance the interests of residents and applicants.”¹¹⁵  

Additional evidence that highly restrictive criminal record policies are not responsible for reduced crime rates in public housing developments comes from comparisons between PHAs located in the same geographic area but with radically different admissions criteria.¹¹⁶ For example, the Salt Lake City Housing Authority uses automatic exclusion policies that restrict access to housing for long periods of time and for minor offenses, while the Housing Authority of the County of Salt Lake undertakes individualized review of each applicant.  Yet officials in both PHAs believe they have achieved increased safety and reduced crime. 

Different housing authorities have different philosophies, legal service representatives and social service providers told us.  The “Williamsport Housing Authority sees itself as a social service agency,” one experienced paralegal told us of a small town housing authority in Pennsylvania, while the county housing authority does not.  “They take a more conservative view.  The [town PHA] says, ‘let them prove themselves;’ [the county PHA] is not willing to make that choice.”¹¹⁷

Ironically, many housing providers told Human Rights Watch that it was not people who had committed crimes in the past that created a risk to safety or presented management problems.¹¹⁸  Such people, they said, were often grateful for a second chance, and were eager to put their lives back together.  One manager of a Single-Room Occupancy (SRO) housing program catering to single homeless people in Austin, Texas described having to persuade the PHA that administers the program to let them admit those with criminal records.  “Some of those we advocated for have been fine,” he told Human Rights Watch.  “They are the ones that want to get their lives back together. Those [who had no criminal records and] went through smoothly, we have problems with.”¹¹⁹

Probation and parole agents told us that some of those that they supervise may be among those least likely to threaten public safety because they fear returning to prison.  “People on my caseload with long records, they do a 360—‘I’m not going back, I’ve learned my lesson.’  A past record alone is not a good predictor for reoffense.  They may have messed up before, but it scared them straight.”¹²⁰

Leslie Steckler, program coordinator for the Women & Children’s Unit at the Birmingham Salvation Army said of two of her clients interviewed by Human Rights Watch:

They are at the tail end of their treatment.  They’ve already paid back their communities.  They resided in the shelter as the judge told them, and they’ve worked through their IOP [Intensive Outcare Program].  . . . They would not be a risk.  They made a mistake, they got in trouble with drugs, they’ve never caused a problem in the shelter.  I’ve never had a problem with these women.  They are a couple of my best clients because they’ve hit that bottom and they’ve dealt with and gotten over their addiction.¹²¹

Human Rights Watch asked a building manager of one of New York’s many private SROs about the difficulties he faced housing people coming out of prison with serious charges—people no one else would house.  “They don’t bother nobody,” he said, “Sometimes they’re even more careful not to bother other people.  Look, they’ve got a place to live, they’ve just gotten out, they don’t want to jeopardize that.  I’ve never had any problems.”¹²²

People with criminal records sometimes saw themselves as assets to housing programs.  “Why are we not given a chance?” asked one woman in a transitional housing program in Baltimore, Maryland.  “Ex-offenders that are really trying to do something, women that’s showing up for the program . . . we’d be a huge asset.  We would work harder because we know the odds are stacked against us—we’d try to prove them wrong.”¹²³

No one argues that exclusionary policies reflect a considered effort to balance the rights of would-be tenants with those of existing tenants.  They were adopted at a time in the United States when public officials—and the public at large—were willing to ignore the rights of criminal offenders because of the putative gains of “tough on crime” policies. 

Many of those we interviewed for this report were living on the streets, in overcrowded shelters, and in squalid transient or SRO hotels.  In the best of circumstances, they were crowded into the homes of family or friends for short periods of time or living in apartments they would not be able to afford the following month.  Many of them had no housing options other than those which, as they themselves recognized, were rife with domestic abuse, violence, crime, and surrounded by harmful drug and alcohol use. 

Indeed, denying people with criminal records some form of affordable housing may create a greater threat to public safety for communities surrounding PHA developments.  Life on the streets can create desperation and incentives to break the law.  “Homeless people are much more likely to collect criminal records just for being there—for living private lives in public places,” explained the director of Baltimore’s Healthcare for the Homeless. “If I want to drink a couple of bottles of wine, no problem.  On a street corner, there are consequences.”¹²⁵ 

The consequences of denying people the only means of securing safe and affordable housing are as obvious as they are tragic:

• Lacking stable housing, parents returning from incarceration are unable to regain custody of their children.¹²⁶  Child welfare officials remove children from families that cannot provide them with stable housing.  Human Rights Watch met families who were forced to choose between staying together or excluding a member of the household with a criminal record, in order to secure affordable housing for the rest of the family.  Policies that so obviously impede the ability of families to reunite or remain together flatly contradict the “family values” espoused in the United States.¹²⁷  They also violate principles of international law.¹²⁸
• Transient living disrupts a child’s education, emotional development, and sense of well-being.  There is no way to know how many children are excluded along with their parents from public housing. But we do know that an estimated 1.5 million minor children have at least one parent in prison on any given day in the United States, and over ten million had a parent in prison at one point in their lives.¹²⁹  Children are “[i]n some ways . . . the unseen victims of the prison boom and war on drugs[,]”¹³⁰ and, hence, the unseen victims of exclusionary housing policies. 
• Women may be forced to consider returning to an abuser to avoid homelessness, where they are particularly vulnerable to rape and violent crime on the streets.  Many women, along with other struggling individuals, find themselves having to exchange sex for protection, money, or a place to stay.

• People who are inadequately housed, especially those living on the streets or in homeless shelters, are at a higher risk for communicable diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis.¹³²  Living in conditions that are unsanitary, without cooking facilities or refrigeration, or not knowing where the night will be spent make it extremely difficult to manage a regimen of treatment for chronic diseases such as diabetes, tuberculosis, and asthma.  Existing mental health conditions are exacerbated by the stress of rejection and housing instability, and depression is common. 
• Struggling with addiction in even the most ideal circumstances is difficult.  But many treatment professionals argue that without stable housing, relapse is almost certain.¹³³ 
• Homelessness itself is a predictor for recidivism, particularly for the commission of minor offenses, as people are forced to, as some have put it, “live private lives in public places.”¹³⁴  For example, most cities and towns in the United States do not have public restrooms, and relieving oneself in a park or a side street is considered a criminal offense. 

Recidivism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when offenders are released from incarceration with scant survival options.  As one substance abuse treatment provider explained, exclusionary policies need to be changed “not just because it’s the humane thing to do, but because it’s the smart, public safety thing to do.”¹³⁵