A Dilemma: Overpopulation in Southern Prisons

Bob Powell

Vol. 1, No. 1, 1978, pp. 16-17

“A free, democratic society cannot cage inmates like animals or stack them like cattle in a warehouse and expect them to emerge as decent, law-abiding, contributing members of the community. In the end, society is the loser.”

Judge Charles R. Scott

With these words and the stroke of a pen, in 1976 Judge Scott, a Federal Judge in Florida, found the Florida prison system in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution barring cruel and unusual punishment.

It is not an uncommon thing these days for Southern prison systems to be in this predicament. Across the South since 1975, five states have been told to stop overcrowding their prisons and a sixth, Tennessee, is currently a defendant in an undecided case. Chan Kendrick, the former director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Tennessee, who filed suit against the facility said the overcrowded conditions at the Transit Building, a converted warehouse made into a makeshift prison, were “simply unbelievable.”

The main cause of the Eighth Amendment violations in regard to prison conditions centers on overcrowding. The South’s prison systems are the most crowded in the nation. Overcrowding not only means an excess of bodies, but also overused medical facilities and overworked personnel. Funds that could be used for rehabilitation are often used elsewhere.

And despite popular opinion to the contrary, overcrowded prisons are not solving any crime problems. If anything at all, they are creating more. The crime rate continues to go up and recidivism soars.

Five of the top six states with high prison populations in ratio to the general population are in the South. These states, ranked in order from second to sixth, are North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Texas.

The source of this data, the March 1978 issue of Corrections Magazine, lists four other Southern states as being in the Top Twenty. They are Virginia (12th), Louisiana (16th), Tennessee (17th) and Arkansas (20th).

And who is to blame for this wonderful state of affairs in Southern prisons? Even the administrators, the usual heavies of the correctional system foul-ups, cannot be held responsible for this condition. Prison administrators may be accountable for a lot of the defects of the system, but failing to warn the public about overcrowded conditions in the prisons is not one of them.

According to a New York Times article dated January 24,1976, the prison administrators were trying to warn the Southern Governor’s Conference about the overcrowding crunch at that time.

The front page Times article said, “Southern prison officials are recommending a broad program of liberal reform to relieve prison overcrowding that they agree has reached crisis proportions.”

The Governors had all sent representatives to that gathering. Surely, at least one Southern Governor heard the ringing words that the Secretary of the Department of Corrections for South Carolina, William Leeke, told his colleagues: “I feel personally we are going way beyond locking up the dangerous offender. It would appear, and I believe most of my colleagues would agree, that in many cases we are locking up people where it is totally counterproductive to our purpose.”

Leeke also warned that, “Increased tension and possible violence is the result of all this overcrowding. I know in my jurisdiction we are seeing more assaults of inmates on inmates and inmates on personnel.”

“The first thing that overcrowding does is create tension,” said Leroi X (Mason), an inmate at the Virginia State Penitentiary.

Mason, a recipient of ACLU’s award for defense of the Bill of Rights, said overcrowding also produces crime and theft inside the prison. In Virginia where inmates get paid for the work they do, overcrowding causes unemployment and unemployment causes those inmates without jobs to steal from other inmates.

Despite the warnings, the politicians have found it productive in getting reelected to push for tougher crime laws, longer sentences and mandatory sentencing. In the United States, prisoners are given from two to three times longer sentences than European offenders for the same offense. Plus, they serve up to half or two-thirds of the term, a period considerably greater than the one European prisoners serve for the same offense.

But being rational does not always get the votes. When Federal Judge Frank Johnson of the Middle District of Alabama declared the Alabama prison system in violation of the Eighth Amendment in 1976, Wallace got into his favorite form denouncing liberal, soft-headed judges.

While one expects that from a man who stands in school house doors to block the desegregation of schools, Wallace’s next door neighbor, Governor George Busbee, an alleged moderate, pulled one from the same bag of tricks.

In March of 1978, James Moss, a prisoner at the Georgia State Penitentiary in Reidsville was killed in an interracial scuffle. Sixteen others were wounded in the disturbance.

Prisoners blamed the death and injuries on overcrowded conditions. After all, prisoners pointed out, Reidsville was built for 1,500 and now houses, 2,700.

Busbee blamed the killing on that all time favorite Southern bogey man, race. The Atlanta Journal on April 7, 1978 reports Busbee as saying, “The problem at Reidsville is caused by the integration of the sleeping quarters.”

In Virginia, a state that ranks relatively low in overcrowded prison conditions, one can still see the headaches that overcrowding is causing for that state.

In the early 1970’s, Virginia made plans to close the State Penitentiary in Richmond. Called by its occupants, “the Walls,” the ominous structure, partially designed by Thomas Jefferson, was supposed to be closed by 1978. It is still in operation today and its supposed replacement, the Meckleburg Correctional Center, is already filled to capacity.

In nearby Powhatan County, Virginia, which has numerous minimum security prisons, the state is putting prisoners in old surplus house trailers. Local jails have become so overcrowded that the state refuses to take any new prisoners.

Powhatan County residents are upset about Virginia’s new plans for more prisons there. The residents argued that more jails would turn their county into a “penal colony” where prisoners outnumbered residents.

If that was not enough in Virginia for one year, the Federal District Court for the Western part of the state declared that the Bland, Virginia Correctional Center was in violation of the Eighth Amendment for its overcrowded conditions.

Further South, Alabama was still trying to get around Judge Johnson’s court order and reduce overcrowding. But Alabama was

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finding the going rough.

In 1978, attorneys for the Alabama Board of Corrections admitted that, prison construction “planned or currently underway won’t keep pace with the number of new inmates.”

“The sad thing about prison reformers,” says Gene Guerrero, director of the ACLU of Georgia, “is that they know about the direct relationship between jobs and imprisonment. Yet, they tell legislators that through some new gimmick or new prison, they can deal with the criminal problem, while at the same time researchers are finding in Georgia that 75% of the state’s sharp increase in prison population is directly attributable to unemployment. Despite knowing this, what they propose is building a new prison.”

There were other voices that were warning against locking up prisoners and throwing away the key. One of these was William G. Nagel of the American Foundation, Institute of Corrections, a research group.

On February 9, 1976, Nagel wrote the following letter to Richard Kwartler of Corrections Magazine:

“Any attempt to understand the increase in prison population should start with a study of practices in the South. On December 31, 1965, ten Southern states held 49,435 prisoners. According to your tabulations, the same ten states now hold 86,380 prisoners. That is an increase of 75.5%.”

Nagel also pointed out that the other forty states had prison population increases of just 3.1%, but that the crime rate had increased in the South faster than in the North.

Another study by Nagel’s American Foundation concluded that a state’s rating on conservatism or liberalism had nothing to do with its success in fighting crime.

In a 1977 meeting of the American Correction’s Association (ACA), Nagel and the American Foundation said, “There is no significant relationship between a state’s rating on liberalism or conservatism and its reported rate of crime. However, conservative states have more people incarcerated.”

The key culprit seems to be the law and order philosophy of heavier sentencing, less parole and probation and more time served in jail.

Added to this are stingy legislators who don’t want to give the image to the folks down home that they are coddling criminals or putting up money for country club prisons.

On top of all this is the fact that nobody wants a prison near his home, even if the general populace does favor putting all the crooks away.

The most extreme example of this syndrome of wanting more prisons but not in my neighborhood occurred in Morristown, Tennessee where irate citizens tried to dynamite a 40% completed prison.

Depending on your degree of political realism, some may be shocked to know that New South racism has a lot to do with prison overcrowding. To a pessimist, that overcrowding in prisons might be the new wave to fill the void of what to do with Black folks.

There is a disproportionate number of Blacks in prison as compared to their proportions in the general population. For instance, the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond has a 70% Black population but Blacks constitute only 25% of the general population. Reidsville, Georgia has a 70% Black prison population and only a 30% Black general population. Black prison population proportions in the South are usually double their proportions in the general population.

What comedian Richard Pryor called ‘justus” often passes for justice: Various studies, including one by the ACA, show that Blacks tend to get longer sentences for the same offense and have more encounters with police. “Those who say prison camps are concentration camps for the Blacks and the poor are quite correct,” Guerrero said, “because it is Blacks and the poor who are pushed out of the economy when hard times come.”

Perhaps using something of an overstatement, a Black Virginia mother whose son is serving 75 years in a prison there for the alleged rape of a white woman accurately described this kind of Southern prison: “I look around my church and wonder where all the young Black men are. All I see is women and old men. But now I know. They are all in prison.”

The extreme insult, after locking all these folks up for years, is that study after study indicates that incarceration is a huge failure.

At the 18th annual Southern Conference on Corrections, back in the Stone Ages of 1973, it was noted in a report that “students of prison subculture have long understood that habitual forms of incarceration will increase the likelihood that convicted offenders will persist in criminal activities after their release from prison.”

It’s a social merry-go-round. We put people in jail for corrections and punishment and they come out crazier than when they went in.

At the same conference, so called alternatives to incarceration, even “alternatives to court exposure” were called an “obvious future trend.”

These alternatives have hit upon hard times. Court room alternatives are now overshadowed by plea bargaining and overloaded court dockets.

Alternatives to incarceration such as half-way houses, work release centers, community work sentences, etc. could be utilized to cut down on the prison population. But the percentage of prisoners in these type of facilities has not increased significantly in the last four years or so.

The choices are clear. Just like the man in the Sunoco commercial says about services to automobiles, “You can pay me now, or pay me later.” The same holds true for the prison overpopulation problem. Either society can make a real effort to reduce overcrowding and its root causes, or it can pay later when expensive Federal court cases roll around and when the soaring crime rate and increased recidivism requires more and more of your tax dollars to build more and more caging facilities.

Texas Prisoners Rights on Trial

By Bob Powell

Vol. 1, No. 4, 1979, pp. 11-13, 24

“When I die, I may not go to heaven
I don’t know if they let cowboys in
If they don’t, let me go to Texas
Texas is as close as I have been.”

From Song, “Texas When I Die” by Tanya Tucker

From cantaloupes to oilfields, Texans have always been known for things that are big. A recent prison rights case, the largest to date, is no exception to the rule. The case, Ruiz v. Estelle, now on trial in Houston, is wild and wooly in the best Texas tradition. The U.S. Justice Department alone, who has intervened on behalf of the prisoners, is expected to call 150 witnesses.

In essence, Texas is the tip of the iceberg in a ten-year period in which Southern prison systems have come under greater federal court scrutiny. Interestingly enough, in an historic sense, Ruiz is being fought exactly 10 years after the Virginia State Penitentiary strike in 1968. In that year, the strike led to an investigation by Congress and the FBI and to an offer from the Southern Regional Council to mediate the strike and provide national publicity on the Virginia system.

From this strike came the lawsuit, Landman v. Royster, settled in 1971. It has been the basis for many of the other Southern prisoner rights cases. “Without Landman,” says Salvatore Gonzalez, an ex-convict and an outspoken member of the Prisoner’s Solidarity Committee (PSC) of Texas, “there would be no Ruiz v. Estelle.In Landman the state penal codes began to expand convict’s procedural rights. The federal district court forbade the Virginia state penitentiary system from any longer imposing a bread and water diet, from using chains or tape or tear gas except in an immediate emergency, from using physical force as a punishment, and it also demanded minimum due process protections before a convict lost “good time” (that would shorten his sentence), or suffered any deprivation of his normal prison privileges (such as loss of exercise or communication with other inmates).

The Texas suit used tactics developed over 10 years ago on a larger scale. These tactics include two stages. The first is lawsuits by jailhouse lawyers coupled with strikes and the use of the media. The second tactic is the cultivation of outside activists and gaining their support for actions inside. From Landman in Virginia in 1968 to Ruiz in Texas in 1978, the cases form a pattern.

The roots of the Ruiz case go back eight years. At that time, there were almost a hundred suits filed against the prison system, charging various cruel and unusual practices offensive to the Constitution. A year ago, Federal Judge William Justice consolidated the cases into one class action suit that would affect all similarly situated prisoners in the Texas system. William Bennett Turner of the California NAACP was appointed chief counsel for the

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plaintiffs and the U.S. Justice Department intervened on behalf of the prisoners.

On October 2, 1978, the first stage of the trial began with the plaintiffs, represented by Turner and the Texas ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), presenting their case. Witnesses alleged that prisoners operated on prisoners in surgery and that dissidents such as jailhouse lawyers were ordered killed by convict guards.

A few days ‘later, on October 5, Texas prisoners went on strike. The strike began in Darrington, Texas at a corrections unit there. It spread to other units in the system. The strike apparently fueled emotions between the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC), and the prisoners. Three prisoners were wounded in a melee between guards and prisoners.

At the trial, Edward Idar, assistant attorney general for the state of Texas, compared the situation to Attica in its potential for violence.

Judge Justice, considered a liberal, said “The violence and disruption by inmates may impede the legal proceedings now taking place before my court.” But at a rally in Austin, Texas, Early Bennett of Citizen’s United to Rehabilitate Errands (CURE), a prison reform group, defended the strike action. “We don’t need to be talking about another Attica,” said the CURE leader, “when what we have is a peaceful, legal strike by prisoners.”

Another group that has been heavily involved in the strike support work is the Prisoner’s Solidarity Committee (PSC) of Texas. Gonzalez of the PSC said, “The biggest problem in TDC is the convict guard system,” where convicts are made into guards over other inmates, a system that has vanished from most other prison systems.

At the head of the convict guard system is the tier boss. This is an inmate who makes work assignments and functions like an inmate Army sergeant in that he has subordinates to carry out his orders.

At first glance, it appears to be a rewarding system where inmates take responsibility for each other, but critics of it say that it turns inmate against inmate and allows the stronger inmates to physically, sexually and economically exploit the weaker ones.

“It produces a huge snitch system (network of informers),” says Gonzalez, “whose work is even used in parole hearings. Many inmates have been denied parole on the word of another inmate.”

In disciplinary hearings, Gonzalez says that inmate snitchers and correctional officers are given more weight in testimony than prisoners. Gonzalez also charges that officers who charge inmates with prison violations, often end on panels judging the same offense.

Gonzalez insists the inmate guard system is real and existing. But public information officer Ronald Taylor of the TDC denies its existence entirely.

“We don’t have such a system,” Taylor told Southern Changes, “It does not exist.” However, in the trial, a former TDC official testified that TDC passed a memo

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banning the term “convict guard” and substituted “floor boy.”

Conditions in solitary confinement are another point in the litigation. Gonzalez charges that the solitary confinement is often used to contain troublesome writ writers. Another major point in the suit is that prison officials have systematically denied prisoner’s access to the courts.

Gonzalez, who has spent 12 years in TDC, tells of one alleged incident that seems to be out of the pages of the book Clockwork Orange where the hero, a violent criminal, was conditioned out of his violent behavior by prison authorities and reconditioned to become nauseous at the sound of his favorite composer, Ludwig Von Beethoven.

According to Gonzalez, guards at TDC once placed him and other Black and Chicano prisoners in cells and piped in country music at full blast.

“One guy cracked up,” Gonzalez reported. “He yelled, ‘I can’t stand it anymore.”‘ After being subjected to this rather bizarre incident, Gonzalez however says, “But I like country music now.”

The suit alleges that far more serious abuses, like beatings, near starvation of prisoners and other similar incidents also occur in Texas solitary units. As a result Texas supporters have lodged complaints with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland.

It was a big thing,” said Gonzalez, “to count beans in your soup while in solitary. It was a big deal to get up to twelve beans.”

Soon after the trial began, prisoners who were witnesses began to send letters to their attorneys claiming harassment and intimidation by prison authorities. The letters allege that everything from death threats, to reassignments, to lock up in solitary have been used as punishment against prisoners who testified.

Ron Taylor of the TDC dismisses the charges.

“They are spurious charges,” said Taylor, “You might add that the defendant David Ruiz has been indicted for sexual assault by a Harris County Grand Jury. He tried to rape another inmate.”

In response to the indictment Gloria Rodriguez, Prisoner Solidarity Committee member, said “The charges are absurd and a frameup as far as we are concerned. David told us several weeks ago of the investigation. The FBI investigated it and found nothing. At that time it was a Federal charge and they dropped it. Apparently, the sheriff involved took the information and gave it to the state Grand Jury. We received affidavits from a prisoner who overheard the sheriff saying to a TDC official, ‘Now Ruiz will know how the shoe feels on the other foot.'”

One prisoner, Allen Lamar, who has filed over 100 suits with the courts, alleged in a letter to Gloria Rodriguez, that he had been threatened with death for his role in the trial. When a call was made to the Texas unit where Lamar is apparently being held, the assistant warden said, “You have to call Huntsville.”

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“Don’t you know who is in your prison?” this reporter asked.

He replied again, “You have to call Huntsville. We have a bad connection.”

Interestingly enough, an anonymous source in the unit had confirmed that Lamar was in lock up the night before. No other details were available.

Supporters of the suit such as Rodriquez are optimistic of its outcome. She insists that public support is on their side. “There are a lot of working people in Texas,” Rodriquez says, “who have friends or relatives in prisons. We even got two petitions supporting us from prisoners in Virginia and Florida. It meant a lot to us.”

To Salvatore Gonzalez, the suit has Southwide implications.

“Northern prison systems are very advanced compared to Southern prisons,” says Rodriquez. “Southern prisons are still fighting to get out of slavery.”

On the TDC side, Ron Taylor expressed a wait and see attitude that was vague and ambiguous in nature.

“They put on the case much as we expected them to,” said Taylor, “It’s too early to tell how things are going.”

If other Southern states are any gauge of how things are going, then the TDC is in for some changes. In state after state in the South, among the defeats have been major victories in court battles. Even the state courts are bending a little in recognizing prisoner rights as witnessed by the Tennessee Supreme Court who ruled parts of the Tennessee system unconstitutional.

Not only is the Ruiz case a test of what is unconstitutional, but also a test of what is enforceable. Considering that even a state court in Tennessee (given the historic reluctance of state courts to intervene positively in the face of constitutional abuses) recently ruled a part of its state’s system unconstitutional, it is not a question of whether there are really abuses going on in prisons. The questions, after 10 years of prison litigation fromLandman to Ruiz, are whether the rulings will be enforced.

Bob Powell is a free-lance writer who resides in Atlanta.

The Making of a Ghetto

By Bob Powell

Vol. 2, No. 2., 1979, pp. 17-20

For Southerners who weren’t raised in them, federal housing projects are often visualized as inner city creatures of high crime with vandalized shells where rats and cockroaches populate among the left behinds of the Great Society. While they are generally thought of as exclusively a downtown, big city problem, public housing projects are creeping into the suburbs where new problems create old, disappointing results.

The move towards the suburbs began in the early 1970s when the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and local housing authorities around the country came under fire for allegedly perpetuating housing segregation in the nation’s cities. Critics claimed that placing new projects in predominantly inner city neighborhoods perpetuated residential segregation.

The Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 mandated that “large concentrations” of poor people be avoided in the selection of new project sites. With lawsuits later filed against some major urban housing authorities for failure to comply with the Act and with charges of violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1974 and due process, the move of housing projects to the suburbs began.

In 1975, the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) acquired two suburban sites, called Red Oak and Boatrock. Originally built as middle class apartments, the projects went to the city authority when the original developers went broke.

With 15,000 apartment units serving 51,000 tenants, AHA became involved in disputes with the county housing authority over who owned the projects. The courts finally awarded control to the county authority which is slated to take over this year.

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Until the court battle with AHA, Fulton county had no projects that it owned or ran directly and had dealt only with rental subsidies of private landlords on behalf of the tenants. Based on Atlanta’s experience with Boatrock and Red Oak, the county may find some unique problems with suburbia housing.

A root problem is physical isolation. At Boatrock in Southwest Atlanta the nearest physical structure, a hugh Western Electric plant, is a quarter of a mile away. The closest store – just a country store – is about three miles and the nearest shopping district, Ben Hill, is 7 miles away. The project is 17 miles from downtown Atlanta.

The Red Oak project is better off. It is located 5 miles from the suburban town of College Park and only a mile from the nearest chain grocery store.

While these may not be great distances to a middle class commuter they are terrific barriers for the poor dependent on second hand gas guzzlers and public tranportation. Even the AHA management agrees that transportation is a problem for outer city projects. Margaret Ross, information officer of AHA, says of Boatrock, “Boatrock had transportation problems but they were cleared up.”

According to residents of the projects the transportation woes still exist. In its first year Boatrock had no bus service at all. Now, buses are available at Boatrock and Red Oak but only during business hours. It also takes at least 45 minutes for the one-way trip to downtown Atlanta. The last bus from downtown to the outer reaches of the projects leaves at 6 o’clock p.m. and only Red Oak has weekend bus service to downtown.

Annie Morrison, president of the Boatrock Tenant’s Association is not only critical of the buses’ timing but also of their destination points. The buses to Boatrock run only between the project and downtown, 17 miles away. To travel to the nearby shopping center of Ben Hill, a resident must go 17 miles downtown and then 10 miles back to the shopping area. A direct bus route to Ben Hill would allow easier access for Boatrock tenants to grocery stores, commercial enterprises, the post office and to the local public health clinic.

The outer limit projects have other distinct disadvantages.

The bulk of doctors and clinics who treat the poor are located downtown. Grady Memorial Hospital, which accepts large numbers of welfare/Medicaid clients and pro-rates service costs for the working poor ineligible for Medicaid assistance is downtown close to the inner city projects. Scottish Rite Hospital, which serves many handicapped poor people at little or no cost, is 30 minutes from downtown housing projects. A bus ride from Red Oak or Boatrock takes as long as two hours one way.

The suburban projects are also separated from the centers of power that shape their lives. A former Boatrock tenant, who had previously lived in Techwood, a downtown project, contrasted the affects on activism. “At Techwood, we had a strong community group,” said Betty Thompson, “but at Boatrock, we are isolated from everything.”

While the seats of power (the mayor’s office, the City Council chambers, housing authority officers, the major media, and the state capitol) are all within a stone’s throw of most projects in Atlanta, “it’s a little hard to make those nighttime council meetings when the buses don’t run after 6:00 p.m. or you have to depend on your beat-up car,” one suburban project dweller pointed out.

The Boatrock Tenant’s Association has sent representatives to meetings of coalitions of citywide housing residents. One activist in the local welfare right’s organization sees the projects’ move to the suburbs not so much aimed at breaking down segregated housing patterns as breaking up poor people’s concentration of political power.

Another activist in the downtown Bedford-Pines area, Joe Boone recently accused a

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White developer of trying to drive the poor out of the city when plans for luxury condominiums next to poorer Bedford-Pines were announced.

Boone and other activists fear that the gas crunch will increasingly encourage White middleclass suburbanites to opt for city life. Already, Whites are beginning to trickle back into Atlanta’s inner city neighborhoods to renovate houses that were once left in disrepair.

As they trickle into neighborhoods like Grant and Inman Park, and Midtown, real estate prices skyrocket. The neighborhoods get better but moderate and low income private housing is forced out due to higher prices of real estate. If the trickle of Whites turns to a snowball, more public housing will be necessary and suburban projects may be more in demand.

For the present, the suburb is still the place of the American Dream for the many of the middle class and housing for the poor is not often welcomed.

Where the mountains of North Georgia meet the urban sprawl of Atlanta, North Fulton County is an idyllic area of station wagons, dogs, children, PTA meetings and homes ranging from $50,000 to $100,000.

The Fulton County Housing Authority announced early this year plans to build small projects in two suburban enclaves in North Fulton, Aipharetta and Sandy Springs. The suburbanites were not happy to hear the news and several hundred of them jammed hearings on the proposed projects. They held high banners that told how projects will bring crime and undesirables, welfare deadbeats and folks with dark skins. As one man said, “I moved out here to get away from those people”.

However, one North Fulton resident took a

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more mocking view in private of her neighbor’s fears. “They should be happy about the projects. Now they won’t have to send all the way to downtown Atlanta for their maids.” HUD tried to allay fears by issuing a report denying that rising crime and the pillage of the suburbia would occur.

Because the county housing authority can give priority to residents living outside Atlanta, the North Fulton residents probably would not face any influx of Black inner city residents. They can hardly escape the poor Whites, however.

Down the dirt road away from the new suburban neighborhoods, live the poor Whites of North Fulton in wretched housing, worse than many of the inner city housing projects.

Many shacks of these poor Whites are without running water or electricity and some have no indoor plumbing or heating except for wood burning stoves.

With political sophistication and economic advantage, the middle class residents of North Fulton may be able to use the problems of inner city projects and the fear of Black migration to the suburbs to consolidate support and block any federally funded project in their area. If so, the poor Whites of the area – the most likely beneficiaries – will have lost the opportunity for better housing.

At the same time, the problems of residents in suburban Boatrock and Red Oak remain overshadowed by the controversy over additional housing projects outside downtown. Frustrated and hampered, these residents wish for a return to the old projects or become disillusioned and disrespectful of their present housing. The makings of a ghetto are thus laid.

HUD appears incapable of avoiding the political decisions and unwilling to help residents of the suburban projects solve their problems. The bureaucracy is apparently much better at identifying project sites than nurturing the projects to become livable, convenient housing.

While inner city residents may face the blight of everyday deterioration and crime, the housing projects of the suburbs may be subject to the same forces, as they slowly take hold, without the political influence and downtown services that at least make life bearable.

Bob Powell is a free-lance writer living in Atlanta, Georgia.