≡ Menu

Next post:

Previous post:

Day 570: Jindal & New Orleans Public Housing

Bayou Buzz reports:

Congressman Bobby Jindal has authored a motion to a bill that deals with the controversial right to return issue that could have interesting political significance and even legal implications as his race for Governor ramps up. Specifically, his motion denies the right of return to public housing for individuals who have been convicted of dealing drugs, a sex crime, or a crime of domestic violence, or who pose a direct threat to public safety, such as gang members. However, the motion and the bill has passed a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.

Read more about the motion here.

Sure, a recovering New Orleans can ill afford non-contributors and those who tax our burdened criminal justice system. How do we keep them out short of building a wall around New Orleans? What galls me the most, however, is the wording of the bill and the inability of Jindal and those like him to comprehend our current urban situation and America’s history of public housing. Let’s address a few of the bill’s clauses:

[those] who pose a direct threat to public safety, such as gang members”

a) Why are those who pose a direct threat to public safety not in jail, instead of permanent exile or public housing?

b) How does one foretell imminent threats to public safety? Is there a list of behaviors?

c) How does one determine active gang membership?

[those] convicted of dealing drugs, a sex crime, or a crime of domestic violence”

a) How do we help those rehabilitating into society?

b) Again, how do we foretell whether these people will commit similar or different crimes again?

Do potential, current and rehabilitating criminals then simply wander the streets of New Orleans or, worse, make them some other city’s problem? What options do they have that this bill addresses?

Nor does this bill acknowledge the fact that urban housing as it currently exists is a breeding ground of apathy and violence. Research in this city and beyond has shown that violent sub-societies are often created in America’s urban projects simply because they are viewed as dumping grounds, by the dumpers and dumpees. Public housing, in its current incarnation, does not solve more problems than it creates and never will.

Jindal crafted this motion simply to appease party members and to rile up potential voters over an already charged issue that involves New Orleans’s public housing, plagued criminal justice system, broken public schools and overall slow pace of recovery, without offering any solutions. For returning the “good” people to New Orleans and leaving the “bad” in various Texan cities will only increase national goodwill to this city, right?

I’ve got an idea: Let’s give them each a $5000 FEMA tent and printed directions to Jindal’s private backyard.

3 comments… add one
  • liprap March 21, 2007, 10:25 PM

    I finished reading the incredible book “Tulia”, about a Texas panhandle town in which loads of black residents were essentially set up by a wannabe-Texas Ranger narc and put away for twenty-plus years for allegedly dealing teensy amounts of powdered coke. The one thing that encourages large numbers of these narcs to operate in this country? The fact that the feds are willing to throw loads of dough at law enforcement agencies that are showing large numbers of convictions in the name of the war on drugs – and those numbers are apparently waaay more important than checking into the background of a paranoid racist who couldn’t hold down a deputy’s job to save his life and was a pathological liar to boot.

    Pinhead Jindal may well be consigning more of these folks to jail by keeping them in Texas, whether he knows it or not.

  • GentillyGirl March 22, 2007, 2:52 PM

    Jindal is just using old Repug tricks: key words and phrases.

    This is definitely a guy we don’t want as Guv.

Leave A Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.