Food Stamps

Re “Why Losing Food Stamps Is Now Part of the War on Drugs,” Opinion, June 6: Many thanks to Herman Schwartz for shedding light on this little-known intersection of two major social experiments of our day--the prison system and welfare reform. Shamefully, both systems operate by the same grim logic, with increasingly punitive treatment, racial disparities, insufficient resources for educational and vocational programs and the criminalization all kinds of behavior as their hallmark.

California now has the largest prison population in the U.S., with nonviolent drug offenders accounting for the huge surge in recent years. But what happens when communities already devastated by years of hopelessness and neglect try to reabsorb ex-prisoners who face employers’ skepticism, lack the right to vote and can’t even access government assistance to feed themselves? Welfare policies of such callousness and shortsightedness will only further ensure that prison serves as a gateway to poverty and hunger and will imprison poor communities in a future of greater destitution.

MIA N. JOHNSON

Los Angeles