As a child, I was told to stay away from my uncle. A schizophrenic who self-medicated with alcohol, my family was frightened of him because at the time, we didn’t comprehend his illness.

The lesson for me, then, was learned young. We avoid those who we fear. We push them away because we fear we cannot help them. We hide them away because we fear they will hurt us. And we do this, mostly, because it’s easier than dealing with the root issues.

Building a jail is easy. Take, for example, the new 2,000-bed Oak Point jail that the city wants to build in the South Bronx. When Commissioner Horn announced the project last April, it was easy. No need to consider whether or not the $375 million needed to build the jail could more effectively be spent elsewhere. No need to engage in real dialogue with residents about what our community might need.

But to those of us who are affected, the jail demonstrates just how skewed the Bloomberg administration’s priorities are. The South Bronx does not need a new jail. The area is already the go-to site for all the facilities the city doesn’t want: two detention centers, a prison barge, and sewage and sludge treatment facilities. Between 2001-2002, crime in the South Bronx dropped by nearly 19 percent, and it has continued to decline since then. What do we need a new jail for?

Our community is tired of being seen as a wasteland, and treated as such. We are tired of being the site of the city’s quick fixes. We want solutions, and we want a say in their creation.

The Oak Point jail does not begin to root out the causes of crime, which are overwhelmingly substance abuse and mental health issues. In 1997—the latest year for which data is available—fully 57 percent of all state prisoners reported using drugs prior to their arrest. Meanwhile according to the former NYPD director of training, the NYPD responds to calls involving persons with mental illness every 6.5 minutes. The Bloomberg administration should be helping to tackle and treat those problems, not building expensive facilities to lock up the people they afflict.

Locking up such people is not only ineffective, but inhumane. According to a 2003 study, among people with mental health issues who are incarcerated in state prisons, nearly 45 percent had attempted suicide at one point or another.

There are better ways to treat these issues. Studies clearly show that communities are better served by drug treatment and job training programs than by new prisons. Hiding away society’s problems may make us feel safer in the short-term, but it obscures the larger issues at hand.

As a mother, I’ve seen the pitfalls of a system that locks people up instead of treating those issues that drive them to commit crime. In the case of my child’s father, drugs and mental health problems have kept him cycling through juvenile detention and prison for years. Abandoned by a 14-year-old drug addict at birth, diagnosed with borderline personality disorder but never treated, what kind of chance did he have in our society? From foster care to juvenile detention to federal prison, the system failed him every step of the way.

I am not making excuses for him. I am saying that there were opportunities along the way for intervention, which he never received. If he had, he would be a better person, and our society would have been a safer place. And my child would have a father and role model he could better count on.

It’s easy for Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Horn to erect jails in someone else’s backyard. And it’s easy for the rest of us to look the other way. But for me, my son is only twelve years old, and already I am scared he is starting down the school-to-jail pipeline. When I look at him, I am reminded that the South Bronx and places like it are in need of better schools, jobs and opportunities for our youth—not more criminalization and band-aids. We have scars enough as it is.

Consider the facts. In 2003, barely one-half of all black men in New York City were employed. Meanwhile last year, the city’s high school graduation rate was an abysmal 43 percent. Looking at such statistics, the truth is clear. Crime is only a symptom of the problems we face. Jails are not the solution.

Lisa Ortega is an organizer with Rights for Incarcerated People with Psychiatric Disabilities (RIPPD) and Te-Ping Chen is an intern with The Bronx Defenders. Both RIPPD and The Bronx Defenders are a part of Community In Unity, the Bronx-based coalition opposing the Oak Point jail.

By Te-Ping Chen and Lisa Ortega