WELCOME TO THE FUTURE!

Prospects have never been good for ex-cons. Even during good economic times they hover between 50 and 75 percent unemployment, and generally take home about nine grand a year. No wonder 70 percent of them wind up violating their parole and back in the slammer. Now, with unemployment rates hitting levels unseen since the Great Depression, we might just make it to 100 percent recidivism. So criminals stay in jail, you say. Easy come easy go, right? Well, consider the recent federal court ruling forcing California to release 40,000 prisoners—a quarter of its total prison population—in the next two years because the state can no longer afford to properly house its inmates. Out here they are packed so tightly you'd think they were packed into a Thai jail for sardines. The overcrowding is so bad that it's responsible for at least one death a day. But California isn't alone in this. States all across the nation are starting to purge their warehouses by the tens of thousands, adding to the 700,000 people already being regularly released from state and federal penitentiaries every year. So we're talking about millions of dudes flooding the job market and almost assuredly striking out. Forget about integrating into society, how the hell are they going to get food? Short answer: By murdering you and your family and eating your pets (also murdered). The whole situation is a bubbling, pustuous neck boil just waiting to explode all over our country's nice bed linens. States are slashing prison populations because they have no money, only to find prisoners being sent right back because they, too, are broke. It is an intractable problem. And it throws a whole different light on the dumb thugs and petty criminals I read about in the local paper every day. Like this one:

Now the question is this: Did Sanders beat up on his girlfriend and hold her family hostage just because he thought she was fucking his buddy? And if he did beat her up, did Sanders really mean it? Or did he assault her as a way to get back on prison welfare? It's an important legal distinction. Because, if he didn't really mean it, he probably shouldn't be eligible for the program. Last week, I acted on a tip from a friend of mine and cruised over to the dry banks of the Mojave River on the edge of Victorville, looking for a tent city that had supposedly sprung up there not too long ago. The rumors turned out to be true, although I'd be hard label the handful of raggedy tents sticking out from behind a row of tall bushes a "city." It was more like a tent encampment, which is redundant, but accurate. This was rock bottom, folks. Life in a tent in the shadow of a landfill on the outskirts of a dying subprime suburb on the edge of the Mojave Desert 100 miles east of Los Angeles is maybe about as far down as a man can fall. At least on this continent. Two years ago, Victorville was the second-fastest growing city in America catering to the lowest-income homebuyers that banks could find. Now, two years later, it's quickly turning into a 21st-century ghetto: an isolated outpost of cheap, abandoned housing, no jobs, high school dropout rates of 50 percent and rising, and absolutely nothing at all to do besides speed. I got to the tent town Tuesday at mid-afternoon only to find it all but deserted. Everybody was either out looking for work (depressing) or actually

at

work (depressinger) except for two guys hanging out in a truck. One of them was a Latino guy named Robert with faded prison tats running up his arm. I half-expected him to give me another of those "I had a mortgage, a car, and a job, then I realized I was just a paycheck away from homelessness" sob stories you always read in tent-city stories, but his story was way more simple and stark. Basically, he'd gotten out of jail a few months earlier, couldn't find work, and moved into the desert where the temperature hits subfreezing levels at night this time of year. His only saving grave at this point was a girlfriend with a minimum-wage job who gave him food, a daily ration of cigarettes, and helped keep him warm at night. "I'm not sure how long I'll be able to live like this out in the cold," he told me, "I'll probably be going in soon. At least on the inside I'm not dependant on anyone. There I got a place—food and lodging. Out here, I got nothing." This guy was actually thinking of breaking his parole just so he could be sent back to jail. And don't mistake this for some

Shawshank Redemption

-lite "I can't make it on the outside," poor-poor-me lazytalk. While he was telling me this, Robert was completely level-headed and matter-of-fact. To him it was a completely pragmatic decision, like some middle-class shmoe weighing whether or not to uproot the family in order to take better-paying job. You know we live in an insane, fucked-up country when an ex-convict feels better living in a concrete box under 24-hour surveillance than he does living as a "free" man. I guess freedom isn't all we think it's cracked up when it means you're broke and live out in the freezing desert in a shitty tent. Anyways, that's about it. How was your Thanksgiving? YASHA LEVINE