Davian Reynolds was four years old when he first got to know his mother, Tina Reynolds. "She was the lady who let me jump on the bed," he remembered. At his foster parents' home he wasn't allowed to jump on the bed.
For the early years of Davian's life Tina was in prison serving time for a parole violation, first at Rikers Island and then at Taconic Correctional Facility in Westchester County. A group there helped her arrange visits with Davian and her other son. Tina says getting to know her son and becoming a mother again allowed her to adjust to life outside of prison.
Over 70 percent of women in prison in New York are mothers, and advocates say most of them had been their children's primary caregivers. As of January 2008, more than 44 percent of women imprisoned in New York State were from New York City. About 11 percent were from its suburbs. Mothers from New York City serving time in upstate prisons have to overcome great distances to maintain a relationship with their children.
Since her time in prison Tina has become involved in social work and founded WORTH (Women on the Rise Telling HerStory), a group of formerly incarcerated women who work on issues facing women who have served time. Davian, now a thoughtful but slightly shy teenager living in Brooklyn, occasionally travels with his mother to advocate for helping imprisoned mothers sustain the bond to their children. Davian also posts a video blog, where he discusses being a child with a parent in prison. On Tuesday the two were in Albany with hundreds of formerly incarcerated women and other advocates to ask legislators to consider bills that they say would help give incarcerated women a better chance to recover their lives.
Tina and Davian's account was just one of hundreds of stories that were presented to legislators in the hope that they might encourage them to pass the legislation. The Coalition for Women Prisoners organized the lobbying event, and Serena Aliferi, the associate director of policy for the Women in Prison Project, said that she and her colleagues are hopeful that this year the legislature finally will act on the bills. In light of the legislature's reform of the Rockefeller drug laws and the Democratic control of the Senate, advocates think this is the year their legislation will finally be signed by the governor.
Those supporting the changes say that, as the number of women in prison in New York has exploded, the state has failed to address issues that destroy the lives of incarcerated women. They point out that in 1973 around 380 women were in correctional facilities in New York State. Today there are more than 2,600, an increase of 580 percent.
Advocates are focusing on three bills pending in the legislature. The first, which is dear to the Reynolds, is the Adoption and Safe Families Act Expanded Discretion bill. It would give local child welfare agencies more discretion before terminating parental rights when a parent is away for an extended term in prison or for drug treatment. That bill has passed the Assembly where it is sponsored by Jeffrion Aubry of Queens and in the Senate by Velmanette Montgomery of Brooklyn. (For more on women prisoners whose children end up in the foster care system, see A Tangle of Problems Links, Prison, Foster Care
The second, the Domestic Violence Merit Time Bill, would allow victims of domestic abuse who have been imprisoned for defending themselves from or lashing out at an abuser to qualify for time off of their sentences. The bill has been sponsored in the Assembly by Helene Weinstein and in the Senate by Montgomery. In previous years, the Domestic Violence Merit Time Bill was sponsored by Republican Sen. <http://www.senatorvolker.com/59/default.aspx>Dale Voelker. Representatives of the Coalition for Women Prisoners say that Voelker has indicated he might co-sponsor the legislation this year.
The third bill, The Department of Health HIV/Hepatitis C Oversight Bill, would ensure that the <http://www.health.state.ny.us/> Department of Health monitors the treatment delivered to prisoners infected with HIV or hepatitis C. Currently, the health department does not oversee health care services provided in prison to make sure they meet the same standards of care required of other providers New York. Advocates say that, while the bill isn’t specific to women, if passed, it would open the door for the health department to monitor other medical services provided in prison, including childbirth.
Approximately 12 percent of women in New York's prisons have HIV. The rate is 80 percent higher than for the general population. And women in New York’s prisons have double the infection rate of male inmates. Twenty-two percent of women in New York's prisons have hepatitis C, a rate twice that for male prisoners and 14 times higher than that for the general public.
Of the hundreds of advocates who traveled to Albany to tell their stories, Russelle (Rusti) Miller-Hill delivered perhaps the most striking account. Miller-Hill began using drugs after she was diagnosed as HIV positive. She was eventually arrested and sent to an upstate prison.
Sen. Thomas Duane said that hearing stories like Miller-Hill's when he traveled to prisons across the state spurred him to work for the prisoner health bill. "I couldn't forget their specific stories. I couldn't forget what they had told me," said Duane.
Erik Kriss, a spokesperson for the state Department of Correctional Services said that his agency is "not in favor of the arrangement," of having the Department of Health monitor the standard of care provided to prisoners. "Inmates have the constitutional right to healthcare and we provide it," said Kriss, "and we do a good job." (For more on health care in prisons, see Barred Medicine: Health Care on Rikers Island.)
The Domestic Violence Merit Time Bill had special significance to a number of women who attended the rally on Tuesday. Sharon White served 11 years in prison for manslaughter. "My ex-husband was an abuser," said White. She believed "the incident that lead to my imprisonment was an indirect result of domestic violence," but said she does not think that was taken into account when she was sentenced.
"Women get all this prison time, yet we fail to acknowledge that the system failed them before they even got to that point," she said. "They didn’t look at the background to see that I was in a horrible relationship that I had to get out of."
White is now remarried and works in social service. She volunteers her time helping women who suffer domestic violence. If the merit time bill was law when she was serving time, White said, "I'd have been given a chance to rebuild my life sooner. I would be a lot further now. But I am very happy with who I am today."
According to the Correctional Association of New York 80 percent of women in prison were physically or sexually abused as children, and 9 out of 10 women in prison have experienced severe physical or sexual abuse in their lifetimes. Sister Mary Nerney, who founded STEPS to End Violence, a program that deals with domestic violence and visits women in prison, said the current system does not serve women well: "It doesn't make sense. We need to look at how we can help families stay together."
Women who have been abused by their spouse say they often do not leave for fear of what could happen to their children or themselves if they call the police. When they strike back, they say, they had finally reached a point where they needed to protect themselves.
Advocates insist women who show remorse and good behavior should be allowed time off their sentences so they can go about repairing their lives and sustaining their families. They note that women sentenced after reacting violently to years of abuse have a zero percent recidivism rate.
"Women who are incarcerated for defending themselves against a batterer or for committing crimes because of domestic abuse pose no threat to public safety," said Assemblymember Weinstein in a statement. "Merit time would allow survivors of domestic violence in prison to return to their children, families and communities and begin to rebuild the healthy and safe lives denied to them before incarceration."
Kriss said the corrections department does not comment on pending legislation but he noted that Commissioner Brian Fischer believes women who were victims of domestic abuse and who were imprisoned for an incident relating to their abuse "should have the opportunity to earn some good time." Kriss pointed to a measure included in the budget that allows well-behaved inmates who are not sex offenders or convicted of first degree murder to earn six-month credits off their sentence. The inmate must also reach a significant milestone like completing two years of college or an apprenticeship.
White said she knows that some legislators and critics see women such as herself as ordinary criminals. "To them a crime is a crime," she said, and they will oppose any move to reduce sentences. "I'm not trying to take away from what I did," said White but she added people just need to better understand how domestic violence affects the battered person and their children. "It"s just not an issue for some people until they are in the situation or they hear about a situation someone went through."
On Tuesday evening advocates gathered in a church on State Street in Albany. Women talked about the experiences they had earlier in the day sharing their stories with legislators. White said she got a pleasant surprise when she turned around to realize that the assistant to one of the legislators was previously her cellmate. "I thought she was just a legislator's assistant but I saw her and realized she was one of my cellmates. I said it just goes to show how far we've come," said White.
In the front of the church speakers congratulated each other and read poetry. At one point a choir took to the microphone and led the room in a chant, clapping and singing, "Ladies, are you ready for a change?"
As jobs disappear and bank accounts dwindle, more and more New Yorkers are relying on food stamps to put a meal on the table. As of February, more than 1.39 million New York City residents -- nearly 800,000 households -- were enrolled in the federal government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, as food stamps are officially called.
These people also will see an increase in the size of their benefits, thanks to the federal economic stimulus package, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced last week.
But even though New Yorkers now will collect more than $200 million in food stamps every month, hundreds of thousands more city residents may be eligible for benefits but not receiving them. Despite the city's efforts to spread the word about food stamps and improvements to the application process, anti-hunger advocates say too many barriers still remain for New Yorkers who need help feeding themselves and their families. Meanwhile, the system is showing signs of strain under the heavier caseload, as some applicants have to wait beyond the legal time limit for their benefits.
According to New York City's Human Resources Administration, the demand for food stamps has grown steadily under the Bloomberg administration. Since 2002, the number of New York City residents on food stamps has grown by 74 percent, even as enrollment in federal welfare programs that pay cash -- like the Family Assistance Program and Safety Net Assistance -- has declined, partly because of more stringent requirements. In 2008 alone, the city enrolled 200,000 new food stamp recipients who did not receive cash assistance.
Anti-poverty advocates say that as many as 700,000 more New Yorkers could be getting food stamps but won't apply because they don't know they are eligible, they fear being stigmatized, or they feel the benefit isn't worth the frustration -- and sometimes humiliation -- of the application process. Advocacy groups report that some workers in the city's food stamp offices routinely dole out shame along with the benefits.
Community-based organizations and advocates have been working with the city to add eligible residents to the food stamp rolls, and the Human Resources Administration last year launched some focused outreach campaigns. The city targeted working families, some of whom may not have realized they were eligible for food stamps, and Medicaid recipients. It also issued multilingual informational brochures in an effort to reach more immigrants.
Despite all that, Leslie Annexstein, director of the Urban Justice Center's Homelessness Outreach and Prevention Project, said the city could do more to get the word out, particularly to immigrants.
"The applications are available in many different languages but the support materials are still just in English and Spanish," Annexstein said. "There's a significant proportion of our clients who speak Chinese, and there's definitely a hole in HRA's ability to communicate with Chinese speakers in this city. That's a big population who need to be getting food stamp benefits."
Food stamp offices employ some new practices designed to make it easier for the city's working poor to enroll and then be recertified when the initial benefit period runs out. In the past, anyone seeking food stamps had to apply in person at one of 20 outlets spread over the five boroughs, and applicants sometimes had to wait for hours before they could see a counselor. Now, according to human resources deputy commissioner Seth Diamond, many people can apply over the telephone and simply mail in the required papers. This saves them from having to take precious time off work and lose a day's wages.
Despite this, advocates still get frequent complaints from applicants about how much time they have to waste at the food stamp office.
"When clients come in, they tell us how frustrated they are with the amount of time that they are required to spend in order to get food stamps, with the amount of documentation they need to bring in and the fact that they need to bring it again when it should be in their file already," Annexstein said.
Applicants who visit certain soup kitchens or food banks can also apply online from computers at those facilities, thanks to a federally funded pilot program by the city and the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. City Councilmember Eric Gioia has called on the Human Resources Administration to speed up its efforts to implement a wider online application system.
Some community groups applaud the city's actions but say they do not go far enough. Community Voices Heard, a grassroots organization of low-income people, recommends putting "help desks" in welfare offices, staffed by volunteers from anti-poverty groups. Such desks, they say, would help answer the myriad questions applicants have about eligibility, work requirements and documentation, and could even provide on-the-spot translations of agency letters and brochures. Such "help desks" existed decades ago, until then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani outlawed them by executive order.
New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum is sponsoring, for the second time, a bill in City Council that would reinstate the help desks, but the Bloomberg administration, which successfully fought the proposal several years ago, is again standing firm against it. Barbara Brancaccio, human resources' deputy commissioner for public information, describes the bill as a "red herring." She said that nothing bars applicants from arranging ahead of time to have an advocate accompany them to a benefits interview, but that permanent help desks might disrupt food stamp offices. Further, Brancaccio said, the city is worried that it could be held responsible for the accuracy of information given out by the volunteers staffing the help desks.
Another bone of contention is the requirement that every applicant -- and every adult in the applicant's household, regardless of employment status -- must show up in person for finger imaging, an anti-fraud procedure that captures the applicant's digital fingerprint.
Joel Berg, head of the Coalition Against Hunger, says there are more effective deterrents to fraud, as evidenced by the 46 states which do not require finger imaging of their food stamp applicants.
"What finger imaging prevents is by far the least frequent kind of food stamp fraud, where people actually create duplicate cases," Berg said. "I mean, it's so hard to get food stamps in the first place. So many people are eligible and not getting them, the notion that people are creating false identities is a little Hollywood."
But the city has not been swayed. "I think there is tremendous public support for food stamps and for making the program easier, and that's very helpful to us, but that public support would erode very quickly if taxpayers thought that there were people getting benefits who were not eligible, " Diamond said.
New technologies also are helping the city handle the growing food stamp caseload. Food stamp offices became fully digital in 2008, Diamond said, with computers and scanners taking the place of paper forms and photocopies. The so-called "paperless office system" is designed to improve accuracy, speed enrollment and recertification, and reduce the agency's workload. Earlier this month, Gotbaum released a report sharply criticizing the system for frequent breakdowns, based on a survey of workers who use the computers and scanners.
Agency officials quickly dismissed the report for its flawed methodology -- fewer than 7 percent of the workers completed the survey. According to Brancaccio, the city's records show that workers used the paperless office system 95 percent of the time during the months covered by the survey, October and November, and only rarely resorted to the old paper-based methods.
"On top of that, we registered something like 52,000 applications in the food stamp program in those two months alone," Brancaccio said. "We could have not absorbed the huge numbers that we have if we didn't have a functioning system."
Those numbers mean that more cash-strapped New Yorkers are able to eat, and more federal dollars are being funneled into the city's economy through the bodegas, corner stores and grocers that take food stamps. The average monthly food stamp benefit for a family of three is now about $150, and every food stamp dollar spent has an economic impact of $1.70, according to the city comptroller's office.
But the increased caseload may have exacerbated delays. Under state and federal law, a person must begin receiving benefits within 30 days after the city receives the application -- within five days in the neediest cases. A year ago, the administration settled a class action lawsuit in federal court brought by food stamp applicants who had not received their benefits on time. The city agreed to comply with the time limits and make periodic reports showing compliance.
Now, attorneys for the plaintiffs in that settlement say that the city's own reports indicate that it still is late in issuing benefits to roughly a quarter of its applicants. They would not say, however, how late the benefits generally were.
"We tend to measure the data as 'late or not late,'" said plaintiffs' attorney Marc Cohan, director of litigation for the National Center for Law and Economic Justice. "Our view, of course, is that when people are hungry, even a day late is one too many."
Diamond said that given the changes in food stamp offices' procedures and the spike in caseloads, the resulting stress on the system is "only natural," but the agency is working to shorten the wait times.
Anat Gerstein, senior advisor to the Public Advocate, said that her office gets calls every day from people who are caught up in bureaucratic red tape at the food stamp office. She and others worry the situation could get worse as the recession continues.
"More people are going to need food stamps to put food on the their table. This is going to put more pressure on HRA to process more people, and they can't process the people who are walking through the door now," she said.
Diamond does not agree with that assessment, but he is aware that the demand for his department's services has increased at a time when all city agencies are scraping for diminishing resources.
"We remain somewhat optimistic that the stimulus bill, or some other changes, will help," Diamond said. "But in the short run, we're looking at continuing the trends."
"It certainly is a challenge."
Just as some of New York's best-paid workers began streaming from humbled investment banks, City Hall made an announcement regarding people at the other end of the economic spectrum. It reported that almost a quarter of New Yorkers live beneath the administration's revised poverty line of $26,138 a year for a family of four. The adjustment, announced in July, increased the city's 2006 poverty rate to 23 percent from the 18.9 percent under existing federal guidelines. The jump wasn't a product of the economic crisis, but of the city government's new way to measure who is poor.
The city's Center for Economic Opportunity developed the new threshold as an alternative to the federal measure, which was introduced in 1969 and is widely considered outdated.
"Since the mid-'60s the economy has vastly changed. So has society and so have government benefits but the poverty formula hasn't adjusted in response," Mayor Michael Bloomberg stated in the city's press release.
The Center for Economic Opportunity hopes the revised measure will aid policymaking by providing a clearer and more nuanced picture of poverty in New York.
The new threshold is based on guidelines developed by the National Academy of Sciences that say poverty measures should reflect the cost of food, clothing, shelter and utilities. The existing federal measure focuses primarily on the cost of food, which, over the last few decades, has since shrunk from one third to one eighth of household spending, according to economic opportunity office. Unlike the federal standard, the new threshold also considers out-of-pocket medical expenses and costs associated with employment, such as transportation and childcare, and counts as income government benefits like food stamps and housing vouchers. The federal measure also fails to account for geographic differences.
The net effect, says Mark Levitan, the Center for Economic Opportunity's director for poverty research, provides a better gauge of the effect of government policy.
"What's been the focus of policy in the last 15 years? It's been single moms and their children," said Levitan. The new measure, by taking government benefits into consideration, reflects the impact of this focus. "We see how nutritional assistance programs and tax credits are benefiting those families," he said. Under the new threshold, the number of children in single parent families living below the poverty line decreases by almost three percentage points.
The new measure also exposes areas where policy is lacking. The poverty rate among New Yorkers 65 years old and up balloons from 18 percent under federal guidelines to 32 percent. And the poverty rate for the working poor -- families with at least one full-time worker -- rises from 28 percent to 36 percent.
While the new measure makes it easier to analyze poverty, for now it won't help alleviate it. The federal government determines eligibility for benefits like food stamps, so the more than 300,000 New Yorkers who are poor by city, but not national, standards will have to wait for change from Capitol Hill.
Levitan believes that the new Congress will address the issue, but he stresses that the city wants a new poverty measure as a policy tool, not a determinant of eligibility. "It would be a little naive to think that New York City engages in a process of measuring poverty, [we] find more poverty, and then we open our pockets expecting billions of new largesse from Washington," he said. "We knew that that wasn't going to happen."
In the meantime, he said, the message to vulnerable New Yorkers is that when the city commits itself to solving a problem, "we don't do these things by the seat of our pants."
It remains to be seen though, whether the poor and the people who work with them have gotten that message.
"This is the first I've heard of it," said Lucia Russett, director of advocacy at Little Sisters of the Assumption, a multi-service community organization in East Harlem.
Her clients are struggling with the rising cost of housing. One woman, married with four children, receives $549 per month in food stamps and another $324 in support from her first child's father. She does not work so she can stay home and take care of her children. Her husband, who has limited use of one arm, receives $660 in Supplemental Security Income and Social Security disability. The family's rent in public housing is $521 per month, leaving little for clothing and other expenses.
"It's great to have another way of getting closer to a more accurate picture of what poverty is in the city, but if it's not effecting any real change at the policy level, that's the next step in this," said Jilly Stephens, executive director of City Harvest, a food rescue nonprofit.
Some also question whether the revised line is generous enough. In 2004, the Women's Center for Education and Career Advancement published a report that calculated "self-sufficiency" standards for New York City families. The report found that households needed incomes of about $50,000 to $78,000 to afford basic expenses for a family of four -- more than twice the city's new poverty line.
While illustrative, these figures don't assist policy making, said Levitan, who estimated that 50 percent of the city lives below such a standard.
"Suppose we had put out a report and we'd said, '50 percent of the city's population is poor,' would that be a guide to policy making? It would be a totally meaningless statement," he said. "Poverty should have a sting to its meaning, and if half the people in the city are poor, then poverty becomes a meaningless concept. Poverty should connote a level of deprivation that is unusual in society."
Even by Levitan's standards, so-called "near poverty" is pervasive. According to the Center for Economic Opportunity, 44 percent of New Yorkers live on less than 150 percent of the revised poverty line, or roughly $39,000 for a family of four.
The new threshold also raises questions about the minimum wage. At the current rate of $7.15 per hour, a full-time employee working year-round earns almost $15,000 annually. If she has one child, her earnings put her above the 2006 federal poverty line for a one-adult, one-child family ($13,895), but leave her beneath the city's figure of $18,280.
"These are the inconsistencies that start coming out as soon as you go down this line, and that's why it's so important that the city begin to dialogue in an official way," said David Jones, president and CEO of the Community Service Society of New York.
He said that the poverty line should be seen only as a first step, but an "extraordinary" one nonetheless.
"The self-sufficiency model is what we think we should move toward, but no one else is proposing even what this mayor and his team have come forward with, so as a first step we can do nothing but applaud," he said.
"It's very good news for people who are advocating for low-income communities, because certainly it could be used to say 'look at how low-income people are living and how this compares to what's possible and what's really livable and dignified,'" said Russett.
Skeptics exist, too. A July New York Post editorial faulted the measure for overlooking income earned in the city's underground economy and suggested that Bloomberg was merely seeking attention.
City Hall's attention to poverty may be prescient. New York City's unemployment rate rose from 5 percent in July to 5.8 percent in August, the biggest monthly increase on record. And overall economic conditions are hampering the work of charitable organizations.
"At a time that organizations like City Harvest are potentially staring down a decrease in donations that fund the types of programs we're providing, we're seeing an increase in the number of people turning to the types of programs that we're supporting," said Stephens of City Harvest. "Our aim is just to do all we can to make sure we can continue delivering the services."
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