We're happy to launch our first ever report, Mapping Inequity: Understanding Concentrated Disadvantage in Oklahoma.
Even with an enormous investment in state prisons - totaling around half a billion annually, Oklahoma contains some of the most violent cities in the country. The data tells a clear story. Lengthy prison sentences are an ineffective strategy to deter crime. Oklahoma incarcerates its citizens at one of the highest rates on Earth, but the state maintains a crime rate far higher than the national average. Instead, Oklahoma’s response to crime is worsening poverty and making communities less safe. Struggling neighborhoods desperately need more public investment and policy innovation to address the root causes of crime. New data and analysis around “areas of concentrated disadvantage” show that one of the most worrisome impacts of persistent community poverty is violent crime. There are areas of some of our cities that are so systematically excluded from wealth and the ability to develop human capital that the informal social control and trust in institutions that keep most of us safe from violence begins to break down. Instead of applying a band-aid on the problem through predictive policing, the heavy use of incarceration, or increased surveillance, we can attempt to ensure that these neighborhoods have equal access to resources like mental health and addiction treatment, quality jobs, and affordable housing.
The economic deficits many of these neighborhoods face can be traced back to bad Government policy. Jim Crow and the lasting effects of residential segregation helped concentrate disadvantage within urban communities of color. Meanwhile, the continuing public divestment from rural economies and the geographic stratification of the digital age have helped concentrate disadvantage within low-income rural communities as well. Individual areas of deep poverty consistently show higher rates of violent crime than regions of lower disadvantage, and can create a feedback loop where violence creates more poverty and poverty creates more violence.
Using a formula that includes the percentage of residents below the poverty line, the percentage of residents who are unemployed, the percentage of residents with a female household head, the percentage of residents receiving government assistance, and the percentage of residents who are renting - we were able to boil down all these factors into a single index. Comparing this index number in all census tracts within the State will give us an idea of the cities with neighborhoods that are suffering from this phenomenon.
There are many more cities in Oklahoma with particularly high levels of concentrated disadvantage or high CDI. This can, at least partially, explain why Oklahoma’s violent crime rate is about 15% higher than the national average. Areas with a low concentration of disadvantage exist almost exclusively in the suburbs of Oklahoma City and Tulsa - while the high CDI neighborhoods are much more varied - going from mid-sized cities in Lawton to small rural towns like Hugo and Seminole. Over-incarceration and over-policing compound the issues in these underinvested neighborhoods by removing prime-age breadwinners from distressed communities to be locked up and then returning them to their families with new barriers to housing, employment, and education. The methods of our criminal legal system are worsening the geographic clustering of poverty and ensuring that people can’t escape cycles of arrest, incarceration, and intergenerational decline. Examining the difference between these two types of neighborhoods - areas of historically low public investment and well-resourced suburbs reveals a path towards a safer and more prosperous Oklahoma.
Oklahoma needs a new approach
80 percent of criminal defendants are indigent. So it’s difficult to imagine you could improve community safety by taxing low-income families with court fines and fees or making it harder to keep a license, find a job, buy a home in a nice school district, or even simply keep food on the table. The system is making it harder for Oklahomans to escape both poverty and crime.
Oklahoma needs a criminal legal system approach that follows the evidence. That approach would lead policymakers toward community resources to undo decades of underinvestment. Policymakers must work to get the Government out of the way of economic opportunity for system-impacted Oklahomans living in neighborhoods of highly concentrated poverty.
Policy Recommendations
- Tax Credits For Second Chance Hiring And Reforms To Support Housing Access
A tax credit designed for employers who hire system-impacted Oklahomans would go a long way towards ensuring that these individuals can get a quality job, which in turn, will lessen the impact of concentrated disadvantage. States as diverse as Iowa, Louisiana, Illinois, and California all have a tax credit designed for this exact purpose. Tax credits have proven successful at the federal level with a tax credit for hiring disabled veterans producing 32,000 more jobs annually. Getting those from concentrated disadvantaged areas with repeated criminal justice contact a quality job will reduce the overall crime in our cities. Research conducted by the Vera Institute For Justice shows that more than 230,000 Oklahomans with conviction histories would benefit from expanding access to federal housing benefits. Reducing barriers to housing benefits for Oklahomans with criminal convictions would fundamentally alter housing security statewide. Allowing formerly incarcerated individuals to experience economic mobility will ensure that our communities can escape the intergenerational effects of poverty while keeping everyone safer.
- Sentencing Reform
Currently, Oklahoma’s median sentence length for common property crimes is nearly double that of Kansas. Oklahoma is unnecessarily imprisoning individuals into old age past the point where they likely pose a risk to society. Studies on deterrence have shown that there are three distinct facets of prison as a deterrent. These are the (1) severity of punishment, the (2) likelihood of punishment, and the (3) speed at which punishment is imposed. The crux of the problem is that, as one researcher put it, “punishment certainty is far more consistently found to deter crime than punishment severity.” Meanwhile, the effect of long prison sentences is felt most acutely by the family of the incarcerated individual. Families with a loved one in prison are more likely to go into debt and lose an average of $27,637 per year, which accelerates and deepens the intergenerational impacts of poverty.
- Fines & Fees Reform
The systematic extraction of wealth from disadvantaged areas through fines and fees collection deepens poverty in these areas. It worsens racial disparities in police violence and forces rural families to pay court fees at an even higher rate than the big economically advantaged cities. The fact that this wealth transfer occurs to fund courts and executive agencies from which all Oklahomans benefit makes little policy sense. These fines and fees ultimately create more crime by deepening the economic divide within our State. Oklahoma’s leaders could end this drain on the state’s workforce and families by simply funding state courts as an essential service of state government.
- Equal Access To Justice for Rural Oklahoma
Rural Oklahomans are under-resourced and have limited access to treatment. State government supplies counties with enough funding for $150,000 per treatment court, and four Oklahoma Counties do not have access to treatment courts at all. The solution is better investments in treatment, diversion, and care for rura Oklahomans, and by enacting evidence-based best practices in treatment courts. Most Oklahoma counties have no misdemeanor diversion program and many counties do not have a dedicated treatment court and share with neighboring counties. Building these systems by increased SQ 781 funding and other investments would significantly reduce the state’s addiction and mental health crisis. Too many rural Oklahomans are in jail pre-trial simply because the state has failed to invest in better alternatives to keep families together and strengthen neighborhoods.
- Family and Community Centered Reentry
Justice-involved Oklahomans returning home from state prisons are 10 times more likely to experience homelessness and 5 times more likely to be unemployed than the state average. Oklahoma can continue to invest in the resources to ensure that no one is discharged from prison to homelessness without basic aid and with treatment, housing, and employment options. Oklahoma has made progress in this regard in recent years, but the reentry system is relatively ad hoc. It needs integration and the deployment of more consistent practice statewide. Enabling economic mobility by ensuring that Oklahomans returning from prison are economically able to exit a lower-poverty neighborhood significantly improves college attendance rates and earnings for children; by their mid-20s, this group had an average annual income that is 31 percent higher.
Conclusion
In the quest for a safer and more prosperous Oklahoma, it's clear that the worn-out metaphor of pulling oneself up by the bootstraps doesn't tell the whole story. The criminal justice system, with its uneven and heavy-handed approach, is limiting the opportunities of formerly incarcerated individuals and their families, in essence stripping even the bootstraps themselves from those seeking a second chance. This analysis underscores the urgent need for a new approach. It's time for policymakers to heed the evidence, and invest in community resources, promoting second chance hiring and reimagining the purpose of the criminal legal system. By focusing on equal access to justice, especially in rural areas, and embracing family and community-centered reentry, we can break the cycle of crime and poverty that has plagued Oklahoma for far too long. It's time to empower individuals, rebuild communities, and ensure that everyone has a fair shot at a brighter future.
Read our full Concentrated Disadvantage Index Report here.
