DEINDUSTRIALIZATION AND CRIMINALIZATION

BY STUDENT

Deindustrialization is the reduction or destruction of a nation’s or region’s industrial capacity._[1]The United States has been impacted by deindustrialization for many years. In this post, I will be going into depth about deindustrialization in my city of Brooklyn, NY and its effects on the Latina/o and black population. The question I pose is how does deindustrialization relate to the criminalization of black and Latina/o communities in Brooklyn?

In the early twentieth century Brooklyn was the leading manufacturer of processed goods and offered employment opportunities for long time New Yorkers and new immigrants. As deindustrialization came to Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Navy Yard closed and unemployed approximately nine thousand employees._[2]This affected the working class but made the rich even richer with the increase in city land value. New York started their new initiative of office buildings, with this many of the working class had no job opportunities

and were getting moved out. Former housing and development administration chief Roger Starr stated_[3]:

“We should not encourage people to stay where their job possibilities are daily becoming more remote. Stop the Puerto Ricans and the rural blacks from living in the city … reverse the role of the city … it can no longer be a place of opportunity… Our urban system is based on the theory of taking the peasant and turning him into an industrial worker. Now there are no industrial jobs. Why not keep him a peasant?”

-exert from The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis

William K Tabb

Latina/os and blacks were getting pushed out, with the downfall of their industry many were unemployed as stated before, with the hike in unemployment there was an increase in crime. In the class reading The Criminalization of African American Places, the author talks about the 1930s in Chicago, where it saw a hike in crime in African American youth. The explanation for this was the lack of jobs available to African Americans at this time. Nothing was done by Chicago and crimes continued to increase, this later became what the author called “writing crime into class”, this is the author’s way of emphasizing structural inequality during this time. Fredrick Hoffman considered this to be “the condition of life” since there was no actions being mad to stop the increase of criminalization of blacks. This was the same for Brooklyn, with the lack of employment and the addition of pushing Latina/os and black residents out of the city, there communities were unable to flourish as much as the upper-class communities, the crime rates were increasing, the education and health systems were not in their benefit. Thiscreated a never-ending cycle, the poor continued to be poor, and the rich stayed rich. As years passed Williamsburg was once dominated by Puerto Rican was now decreasing, with the climb of gentrification (talked about later this semester), deindustrialization had taken not only jobs away from these groups but later their communities to be occupied by the wealthy. Deindustrialization is just a case that lead to the increase of unemployment which lead to the increase in criminalization within the Latina/o and black population. 

Work  Cited:

[1] “Deindustrialization.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deindustrialization. 

[2] Day, Megan. “The Purge Of New York.” Jacobinmag, Jacobin, www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/new-york-gentrification-real-estate-deindustrialization.

[3] Tabb, William K. The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis. Monthly Review, 1982.