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WORK TITLE: The War on Neighborhoods
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1982
WEBSITE:
CITY: San Antonio
STATE: TX
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1982.
EDUCATION:University of Illinois, Chicago, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Youth development and violence prevention. Worked for YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago, the Center for Urban Economic Development, and Northwestern University.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
With a Ph.D. in urban planning and policy from University of Illinois at Chicago, Ryan Lugalia-Hollon works in youth development, violence prevention, and trauma-informed care. Over his twenty-year career, he has worked for the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago, the Center for Urban Economic Development, and Northwestern University. He currently leads an education network in San Antonio, Texas.
In 2018, Lugalia-Hollon teamed up with Daniel Cooper, executive director of the Center for Equitable Cities at Adler University in Chicago, to publish The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison, and Punishment in a Divided City, which describes the high rate of crime, number of arrests, incarceration rate, and incidents of police abuse in disadvantaged neighborhoods that have faced poverty, crime, and violence over generations. Using Chicago’s Austin community as a case study, the authors argue that these trends are connected, especially when politicians spend billions on policing and prisons but not on sustained measures to improve lives and communities with jobs, education, and mental healthcare.
A “war on neighborhoods” is created and exacerbated by punitive policing, economic divides, and segregation of neighborhoods. In an interview with Nissa Rhee online at Chicago, the authors try to dispel erroneous beliefs: “We still believe that more punishment leads to more safety. That’s simply not true. And over time, the benefits of punishment actually weaken and even reverse. … Chicago has an incredible community of restorative justice leaders and Chicago Public Schools has made great gains to keeping the most vulnerable young people in school, instead of pushing them out. That gives me hope.” According to Toni Nealie online at Newcity Lit, overall the book “is a strong, evidence-based appeal for transformation—the status quo doesn’t make anyone safer.”
Also in the book, Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper offer solutions for revolutionary reform of the public-safety model that addresses trauma and poverty by investing in urban communities and human development. They also “urge policymakers to focus on removing problem situations, rather than problem people,” observed Lesley Williams in Booklist. Many of the authors’ solutions, however, “depend upon major, unlikely readjustments of political priorities as well as massive investments in Austin by government, corporations, and not-for-profit foundations,” noted a Kirkus Reviews writer, who added that the despite the book’s academic jargon, it presents a “worthy plea for change.” On the Tikkun website, Theodore Richards remarked in a review: “Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper point us toward public policies that reflect this interconnectedness, moving from mere individual responsibility to collective responsibility.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 1, 2018, Lesley Williams, review of The War on Neighborhoods, p. 37.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of The War on Neighborhoods.
ONLINE
Chicago, http://www.chicagomag.com/ (April 20, 2018), Nissa Rhee, author interview.
Newcity Lit, https://lit.newcity.com/ (June 9, 2018), Toni Nealie, review of The War on Neighborhoods.
Tikkun, https://www.tikkun.org/ (June 14, 2018), Theodore Richards, review of The War on Neighborhoods.
RYAN LUGALIA-HOLLON
Ryan Lugalia-Hollon has worked in the youth development field for over twenty years, with a focus on restorative justice, violence prevention, and trauma-informed care. In Chicago, he worked for the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago, the Center for Urban Economic Development, and Northwestern University, and received his Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ryan currently leads an education network in San Antonio, Texas.
Ryan Lugalia-Hollon has worked in youth development for over twenty years, including restorative justice, violence prevention, and trauma-informed care efforts in Chicago. He holds a PhD and Masters in Urban Planning and Policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He currently leads an education network in San Antonio, Texas.
Author photo: Katie Funk
Q&A: The High Costs of Incarceration in a Divided City
Ryan Lugalia-Hollon talks about the new book “The War on Neighborhoods,” the yearly costs of locking up the residents of just one neighborhood, and the possible alternatives.
By Nissa Rhee
Published April 20, 2018
0 comments
A mural depicts city life in the Austin neighborhood. Photo: Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune
We commit over $100 million each year to incarcerate adults from Austin, the far West Side neighborhood. What have we gotten from that investment? Very little good, according to researchers Ryan Lugalia-Hollon, formerly of UIC and the University of Chicago and now with the San Antonio-based educational organization P16Plus, and Adler University’s Daniel Cooper.
In their new book released this week, The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison, and Punishment in a Divided City, Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper argue that our approach to public safety has contributed to cycles of violence and poverty in areas like Austin and done nothing to stem the sale of drugs on the West Side.
Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper will speak about their findings on Monday, April 23 at ThoughtWorks, Inc. and the Seminary Co-op bookstore.
Chicago magazine spoke to Lugalia-Hollon about the link between incarceration and violence.
We often think of Chicago as being segregated by race, but you write that we’re also segregated by punishment. What does concentrated punishment look like in Chicago?
Incarceration rates on Chicago’s West Side are ten times that of Russia, which is one of the top jailers on earth. We’ve talked to people from Austin where 60 to 70 percent of everyone they knew from the neighborhood had a felony conviction.
When we label thousands of residents in a neighborhood “criminals,” we no longer have to be concerned about the lack of living wage jobs in their community. We can close their schools, we can close their mental health clinics and we can not give it a second thought because that’s where criminals live. And that’s what concentrated punishment does.
What is driving those high incarceration rates?
There’s very clear research that crime is only one predictor of incarceration rates. The other predictor is disadvantage. So independent of actual criminal behavior, people in a high disadvantaged place are punished more because of over-policing, because they’re more likely to be arrested, prosecuted, and given a harsher sentence. All of those things follow patterns that are based on race, poverty, and geography.
We talked to a white heroin addict who had been arrested over 100 times and never gone to prison. Meanwhile, we talked to an Austin heroin addict who had been to prison four times, because the way that they interacted with the law and the court system was fundamentally different.
I think a lot of people would agree with you that it would be good to have more jobs and better schools. But given the scale of the gun violence problem in Chicago, shouldn’t our focus really be on stopping the violence, increasing our policing, and putting away the people who are taking lives in our city?
That has been the response for the last 35 years in Chicago and clearly it has not solved the problem. In the book we write about the death of Ben Wilson, a nationally high profile basketball player from the South Side who was killed in 1984. And since his death, since our approach to these problems hasn’t changed, there have been 21,000 more homicides.
We still believe that more punishment leads to more safety. That’s simply not true. And over time, the benefits of punishment actually weaken and even reverse. We don’t understand how the effect of taking a father or mother out of a home or taking a neighbor off of a block accumulates and over time that weakens the household and the block.
If we continue to be stuck in short-term thinking that only talks about arrests, incarceration, and suppression, then 20 years from now there’s going to have been another 20,000 homicides and Chicago will be facing the same issue.
What should we be doing differently?
The seeds of a solution are there. Chicago has an incredible community of restorative justice leaders and Chicago Public Schools has made great gains to keeping the most vulnerable young people in school, instead of pushing them out. That gives me hope. But the problem is that those projects get pennies on the dollar compared to what we’re investing into traditional law enforcement.
When you look at the billions of dollars we’ve poured into the West Side in locking people up, that money could have and should have been spent to build people up. We just remove problem people and expect things to get better. But we have to get really good at removing the problems people face.
Warring on Neighborhoods with Mass Incarceration
April 17, 2018
A Q&A with Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper
What happens when the main investment in a community is policing and mass incarceration rather than human and community development? The result is what scholars Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper call a “war on neighborhoods,” which furthers poverty and disadvantage. The neighborhood of Austin, a majority-Black community in Chicago’s West Side, is representative of such neighborhoods where residents have endured decades of the highest rates of arrest, imprisonment, and crime. Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper tell the story of Austin in their book The War on Neighborhoods: Police, Prison, and Punishment in a Divided City. In it, they also call for a profound transformation of our flawed approach to public safety. Our blog editor Christian Coleman caught up with them to chat about their book.
Christian Coleman: What was the inspiration for writing the book?
Ryan Lugalia-Hollon & Daniel Cooper: Both of us worked on Chicago’s West side for years, focusing on several different issues. But all roads eventually led us to mass incarceration. Whether we were working on housing, workforce development or youth development, we began to see how the justice system impacted all these issues. They were inextricably connected.
In the time we spent working on the West Side, we saw just how profoundly mass incarceration affects communities. We saw neighborhood resources disappearing—from grocery stores, to non-profits, to schools—while investment in removing poor people and sending them to prison continued unabated.
While these were not new insights to people living on the West Side, that reality is totally foreign to most Americans living outside of such impacted places. We thought it was urgent that more people were aware.
CC: Tell us a little bit about your backgrounds and how crucial they were to your approach in writing the book.
RLH & DC: We wrote this book as witnesses; as white men who have been immune to the racism of the criminal justice system. We grew up without knowing many people who had been incarcerated. But the more we got to know the city of Chicago, and the more we got involved, the harder it was to ignore the painful reality of one of the greatest injustices of our lifetime—mass incarceration. By writing about the difficult truths we found in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, we hope more people will be informed when they talk about policing and incarceration in our country.
We also approached the book as urban planners. We both have a planning background, which is really important to us. We believe that with the right investments and local decision-making power, neighborhoods can always be strengthened and transformed for the people who live there. That’s what we want to see happen in the Austin neighborhood.
CC: One term you use in the book is “concentrated punishment.” Why is this term important for us to understand the effects of mass incarceration in places like Austin?
RLH & DC: Many people understand that incarceration disproportionately affects people of color, and black people in particluar. But the disproportionality is much more striking when considering the geography at play.
The scale of punishment in Austin, and other West Side neighborhoods, is shocking when compared to white neighborhoods and cities. At any given time, Chicago’s Austin area has more people behind bars than several small countries combined. Incarceration rates on Chicago’s West Side are ten times that of Russia (442 per 100,000), which is among the other top imprisoners on earth. Meanwhile, the incarceration rates of even the most impacted white areas are nothing extraordinary. The rate of Chicago’s most affected white neighborhood is roughly the same as South Korea’s (104 per 100,000), which is very close to the global average (100 per 100,000).
Because our urban areas are so segregated, many people have managed to avoid the realities of areas like Austin. Our book attempts to put those realities front and center so they can’t be avoided.
CC: Why is it commonly believed that increased aggressive policing and imprisonment in neighborhoods will curb crimes when studies show they actually lead to increased disadvantage?
RLH & DC: Many people still believe that more punishment leads to more safety, which is one of the greatest myths of the last forty years. This wasn’t always the case. At one time, we saw poverty as the root cause of crime and public safety challenges.
Starting with Nixon, there was a concerted effort to flip this order, for largely political purposes. When society labels crime as the root cause of poverty, then we can justify locking up people at alarming rates, and we don’t have to invest in alleviating poverty. Successive adminstrations campained on law enforcement solutions, which play to people’s fear of “the other.”
The reality is that the benefits of punishment weaken over time and even start to reverse, especially in places where punishment is concentrated. In just one five-year period, there were 6,700 residents incarcerated from a West Side Chicago zip code. That’s thousands of parents and neighbors taken away. Now, what are the cumulative effects of those removals?
Those absences affect the next generation of residents. They impact everything from parenting, to school performance, to household stability. As a society, we frequently talk about how important families are to the lives of both young people and neighborhoods. Yet we destroy families when we remove a parent frome the household, and then we wonder why youth are disconnected and community violence is high. If we keep seeing law enforcement solutions as answers to this problem, we will never solve the deeply rooted issues of poverty and youth violence.
CC: In what ways are urban and rural communities linked by mass incarceration?
RLH & DC: Across the United States, prison construction in rural places has served as an economic development strategy, with prisoners as the commodity that provides corrections jobs as well as some related service jobs in rural areas—everything from hotels for visiting families, to health and legal services.
As it turns out, this is largely a false promise of economic development. Prisons are not actually a strong foundation for new rural economies. The boost to employment is minimal, though in some places that minimal boost may be the only existing economic stimulus.
This has pitted rural communities against urban communities of color in a perverse, zero-sum competition for increasingly scarce resources. Rural communities are more and more dependent on Chicago’s West Side being treated as prisoners to keep their jobs secure. A reduction in prison sentences is a real threat to job security.
Both places have been similarly abandoned by outside capital. State investments into human, community, and economic development could potentially help both disadvantaged urban and rural areas. That would be a much better model.
CC: What would you like readers to take away from your book, especially in light of the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death and where civil rights stands today for urban communities like Austin?
RLH & DC: Dr. King knew that you have to address root causes to change the conditions for communities. And he knew that racism stood in that way of doing that. Today, when we condemn people for their poverty, their race, their homelessness, and their mental illness, and their home address, we are ensuring continued suffering.
To fix our flawed approach to public safety, we have to do more than just change broken laws. We have to reinvest in the communities that have been most affected. We have to address the problems that people in those communities are facing; from unemployment, to mental illness, to housing instability.
Thus, our book calls for shifting resources away from prisons and investing in the human, community, and economic development potential of our most marginalized urban communities. This is congruent with what Dr. King was fighting for in the final months of his life—an economic justice agenda for communities like Chicago’s West Side. It is also aligned with key aspects of the Vision for Black Lives.
The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison, and Punishment in a Divided City
Lesley Williams
Booklist. 114.15 (Apr. 1, 2018): p37.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison, and Punishment in a Divided City. By Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper. Apr. 2018. 240p. Beacon, $28.95 (9780807084656). 363.2.
Researchers Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper take the work of civil-rights lawyer and legal scholar Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow, 2010) a step further by looking at how punitive policing and austerity measures have exacerbated (and often created) social breakdown in Chicago's Austin community. Tracking the social divide along the Eisenhower Expressway, the authors note the stark racial and economic divides between robust downtown areas flush with city resources and the African American Austin neighborhood, "where living wage jobs are all but an urban legend" and life expectancy is 30 years lower than in the bordering white suburb of Oak Park. Rather than blame black residents for crime and addiction, the authors denounce the "crime of austerity measures" and the "addiction to punishment" that "ensures disparate outcomes by condemning individuals for their poverty, their race, their homelessness, their mental illness and their home address." Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper call for a domestic Marshall Plan to boost employment, health, and education, and urge policymakers to focus on removing problem situations, rather than problem people.--Lesley Williams
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Williams, Lesley. "The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison, and Punishment in a Divided City." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2018, p. 37. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534956806/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b23f30c5. Accessed 7 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534956806
Lugalia-Hollon, Ryan: THE WAR ON NEIGHBORHOODS
Kirkus Reviews. (Feb. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lugalia-Hollon, Ryan THE WAR ON NEIGHBORHOODS Beacon (Adult Nonfiction) $28.95 4, 17 ISBN: 978-0-8070-8465-6
A research-heavy, advocacy-grounded study of urban blight and incarceration, in which the authors "argue that efforts to end mass incarceration must go beyond reforming legislation or police practices."
San Antonio-based youth-development director Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper (Co-Director, Institute on Social Exclusion/Adler Univ.) focus on Austin, one of Chicago's most economically depressed, high-crime neighborhoods. Throughout the book, the authors use the existence of the Eisenhower Expressway, which runs through the city into the suburbs, as a touchstone for inequality. Though the expressway exits are separated by only a few miles, what drivers find depending on the exit varies dramatically. The exit to Austin leads to shuttered businesses, inadequately funded schools, deteriorated housing, easily located drug dealers, a huge percentage of families below the poverty line, a brutal police presence, and alarming incarceration rates for African-American males. One more exit west leads to the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, a thriving, pleasant community populated by a low contingent of minority residents. Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper recognize that individual responsibility accounts for at least some of the massive economic and opportunity gaps, especially with regard to the need for more involvement by parents in community reform efforts. Mostly, however, they blame an uncaring, racially biased set of government agencies and businesses that actively avoid investment in Austin. The most blameworthy actors, it seems, are the police who arrest residents on the slimmest of pretexts, the prosecutors and judges who treat arrestees as cattle to be sent to prison, and the prison officials who encourage such behaviors to keep the cells filled. The authors offer possible solutions to most of the problems they document. Almost all of those solutions, however, depend upon major, unlikely readjustments of political priorities as well as massive investments in Austin by government, corporations, and not-for-profit foundations.
At times bedeviled by academic jargon and repetition of obvious problems, but essentially a worthy plea for change.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Lugalia-Hollon, Ryan: THE WAR ON NEIGHBORHOODS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248118/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b3965846. Accessed 7 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527248118
Time for Change: Review of “The War on Neighborhoods” by Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper
JUNE 9, 2018 AT 10:05 PM BY TONI NEALIE
Chicagoans are used to being told that they live in a murderous city, by presidents and media. People who live in specific parts of Chicago don’t need to be told—they risk their lives just by going about their daily lives, walking to the store, playing in parks or even driving their kids to school. But presidents thundering about sending in “the feds” to sort things out would be well-served to read “The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison and Punishment in a Divided City,” by Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper. They, along with this reader, would conclude that an unjust criminal justice system is broken, causes untold misery and death—and fails to make anyone safer.
The authors examine the outcomes of a racial and economic divide, high arrest rates, incarceration, disadvantage, police abuse, lack of development, homelessness and mental illness, centered on the West Side. They explain why crime and violence cause poverty, rather than the other way around, and how aggressive policing contributes rather than solves marginalization. In fueling “the punishment of disadvantage,” the authors argue, “the efforts of even the best community leaders are like a pail of water thrown against a wave. They cannot stem the tide.” After years of neglect and punitive policies (6,700 Austin residents were convicted and sentenced to prison between 2005 and 2009, compared to 311 in mainly white Oak Park, one exit further along the Eisenhower Expressway, also known as the “Heroin Highway”), there are deep inequities in how close communities are resourced and function. It should be no surprise that “babies born into neighboring Oak Park homes have a significantly longer life expectancy than babies born into Austin homes”—thirty years—but it makes it nonetheless shocking to read.
The authors ask that readers question their assumptions about presumed criminality and “law and order,” and focus urgently on bringing about change. To save future generations, the authors recommend substantial investment, in the way the United States poured millions of dollars to rebuild Europe after World War II, along with criminal justice reform through ongoing partnerships between residents, government and business. It is a strong, evidence-based appeal for transformation—the status quo doesn’t make anyone safer. (Toni Nealie)
“The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison and Punishment in a Divided City”
By Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper
Beacon Press, 234 pages, $28.95
The War on Neighborhoods
June 14, 2018
by Theodore Richards
I’ve spent a lot of my life in urban America, from the inner city high school I attended to the work I’ve done with youth in the south Bronx, Oakland, and Chicago. And everywhere I’ve been, I’ve heard the same refrain: “Personal Responsibility!”
I used to hear it shouted in the hallways of my high school, and later heard it aimed at traumatized and impoverished single mothers and formerly incarcerated young men. It has become one of the core mantras of the neoliberal age—the application of the Wall Street values of competition and individualism upon the poor and the oppressed. The idea is that the problems of Black America and with the urban poor are due to the choices made by individuals rather than in political, historical, or legal injustices. In fact, the message of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is one in which everyone is indoctrinated beginning in childhood. The message is that we live in a meritocracy and if you have not “succeeded” it is somehow your own fault.
In their recent book, The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison, and Punishment in a Divided City (Beacon, 2018), Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper challenge this ideology, rooted in the individualistic worldview of American capitalism, as it is played out in Austin, one of the poorest neighborhoods on Chicago’s west side.
While it focuses its research on a specific neighborhood, The War on Neighborhoods is really about a more general attitude toward punishment, poverty, and the narrative of individualism that dominates the public discourse and policy around poor urban communities. Since Nixon declared a “war on drugs”—the policies of which really were put in to place during the Reagan years—communities like Austin have seen a massive divestment in any kind of community support. It is the logic of neoliberalism and austerity that has brought about the closing of community centers, health (including mental health) clinics, and schools.
And it is the narrative of individual responsibility that has led our society on this path. We have been told, again and again, that crime is the product of bad decisions and failing families. We have seen the images on the news of black men committing crimes, heard the stereotypes of the absent father and the “Welfare Queen” single mother. But Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper show that not only are these stereotypes false—research shows, for example, that black fathers are just as present and attentive as white ones—but that the dysfunction of neighborhoods like Austin are also in no small part created by the policies that come out of these narratives. In other words, because Americans believe that black men are “criminals,” policies have been created that disproportionately send them to jail, and these policies are the cause, not the effect, of the destruction of these communities.
As scholars and urban planners, Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper unpack the actual impact of funding cuts in social programs vs. money invested in prisons. In one example, a group from Austin comes to the Illinois capital to protest cuts in social programs, but they are drowned out by the larger and better organized voices from a downstate town that is protesting the proposed closing of a prison, the primary source of jobs in their community. The prison stayed, but no money was found for schools or clinics in Austin. This is a story not so much about a white, rural community with an agenda to lock up Black men from Chicago; rather, it shows that both communities fall victim to the same economic forces—the small town has become dependent on the prison for jobs, while Austin, its factories gone, is impoverished. As this example demonstrates, neoliberalism pits the rural white working class and the poor urban black communities against one another.
Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper are not only scholars, but also organizers and activists who have worked for years on the West side. The power of their arguments comes from the personal connections they can draw from and the local voices they include in the book. Particularly powerful are the interviews with residents about their encounters with violence, police, and the justice system. These are stories with obvious economic impacts, stories of individuals unable to care for their families after being locked up for years behind bars, stories of communities with little opportunities due to investment almost exclusively focused on punishment rather than on community development. But there is also a deeper impact—the war on neighborhoods has been traumatizing. Imprisonment traumatizes the person who is locked up; it traumatizes the children, wives, and parents of the incarcerated. And an entire community of epidemic trauma results only in deeper trauma and violence, spreading across generations.
Not only did the so-called “war on drugs” take money that could have been invested in education or jobs and pour it into punishment, it also completely failed to actually impact drug use, its stated purpose. Drug use is up, and drugs continue to be cheap and plentiful. Again, this speaks to the failure to understand the reasons for drug use and to address the core issue of trauma. Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper cite the work of Gabor Mate, who teaches that only in dealing with childhood trauma can we prevent the self-medicating of drug use. And in a community without jobs, where children witness and suffer from violence and sexual abuse routinely—often the result of parents being frequently removed from homes—trauma is epidemic. This points to issues that can only partly, if at all, be addressed through public policy within a capitalist framework. Whereas capitalism values human beings according to economic status, a “new bottom line”—to borrow Michael Lerner’s language—understands all life as sacred and understands our purpose to transcend economic productivity and competition. We are in this together. And we are here to create meaning, not merely to make money and to be consumers.
All this leads us to the link between policy and the human spirit. The point isn’t that there is no individual role in solving the problems of a community; it is that there is a false dichotomy between individual and community. Genuine healing can happen only through an integration of the soul and the cosmos, of the individual and the community. Of course this requires some personal responsibility, but it also requires all of us in a society to recognize our interconnectedness and to take responsibility for each other. Lugalia-Hollon and Cooper point us toward public policies that reflect this interconnectedness, moving from mere individual responsibility to collective responsibility.
Moreover, it requires us to ask what it is we truly want from a society—do we merely want a bigger piece of the pie, or do we want a system that allows for us to truly care for one another? As The War on Neighborhoods shows, this requires public policies that can allow us to in cultivate healing from our shared traumas and compassion for those who have been labeled as “other”. What might such policies look like? First, rather than merely redistribute resources, policies must challenge the values of the capitalist system. Second, programs must address not only economic injustice, but also offer a way to deal with trauma. Third—and this is the core of the message that The War on Neighborhoods offers—we must begin to challenge the narratives that have marginalized communities like Austin and that falsely pit communities against one another. The pathway to safe, vibrant, and just communities is not more punishment or alienation and separation, but the realization that the fate of Austin, and communities like it, is shared among us all.