Rutgers Law School faculty and students were invited by the White House to recount their efforts to halt pandemic evictions in Newark through pro bono work and an inventive outreach collaboration with community organizers and local artists.
Housing the Decarcerated
The title of this post is the title of this new paper authored by Norrinda Hayat now available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:
The coronavirus pandemic exposed an issue at the intersection of the public health, carceral and housing crises the lack of housing for the recently decarcerated. Early in the pandemic calls came to release incarcerated persons and cease arrests in light of the risks posed by failing to be able to socially distance while incarcerated. At the same time, the pandemic forced a national conversation about the sheer number of unhoused persons in our country. The pandemic created an emergent argument for both broad scale decarceration and publicly funded housing. The practical process of securing housing for the recently decarcerated, however, is fraught because of what is described in this article as the “culture of exclusion” that has long pervaded subsidized housing policy, enabled by a patchwork of federal laws, includ