For two years, I commuted to a ground-level room in a building in the Bronx a few days a week to teach GED preparation courses. My students were 17-to 24-year-olds with some sort of criminal record. We used to make jokes about the mice running across the ceiling tiles above us to lighten the mood. But we were hidden under an apartment building. I was teaching and my students were learning in a shithole. The clouded windows were covered by cracked venetian blinds and there was a poster on the wall with a handsome young man holding a baby that read, “Today’s a good day to be a dad.”margin-ad-right
I taught in one of the many social-service organizations known in the nonprofit industrial complex as “re-entry.” Re-entry’s primary goal is to induct people back into the workforce once they are released from prison or are mired in the bureaucracy of one of the state’s “community supervision” programs, which include jails, probation, parole, or ATIs (alternatives to incarceration). In practical terms, re-entry provides “services,” broadly construed, to economically disenfranchised people who are targeted by the police and as a result are under some form of surveillance by the carceral network.