Inside the “Most Incarcerated” Zip Code in the Country
Inside the “Most Incarcerated” Zip Code in the Country
53206, a heavily African American neighborhood north of downtown Milwaukee, suffers from all manner of ills—not least of which are the myths of criminality that continue to surround it.
By Caleb Gayle
October 15, 2019
Photographs by Danielle Scruggs
Keisha Robinson’s family came to Milwaukee from Chicago in the 1980s because, as Robinson put it, “Chicago was getting out of pocket.” With crime rising and jobs disappearing in the Windy City, she told me, “my mom wanted a better place for us to live.” But Robinson’s mother could never have anticipated the crucibles awaiting her daughter in Wisconsin—the array of social and political deficits associated with the five numbers that came at the end of her listed address: 53206, now notoriously known as the most incarcerated zip code in the country.
The neighborhood’s rectangular outline sits like a brick just north of the Fiserv Forum, home of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks in downtown Milwaukee, where the 2020 Democratic National Convention will be held next summer. In addition to its high incarceration rates, 53206, a heavily African American district, suffers from every manner of social ill, from socioeconomic stagnation to poor health. The Democratic primary field is teeming with proposals to address these ingrained injustices, and the party’s eventual candidate will also have a personal incentive to pay attention to what is happening in 53206: Its residents, among others in Milwaukee, may well prove to be the key to Democrats’ hopes of winning the battleground state of Wisconsin and unseating Donald Trump in the presidential election.
As long as those residents can gain access to the ballot, that is.
African Americans represent nearly 40 percent of Milwaukee’s population, but their political clout has been diminished by laws that suppress the black vote. There is also the problem of African Americans choosing not to vote: Black turnout in Wisconsin dropped nearly 19 percent between the 2012 to the 2016 elections—a clear sign that, despite their historic need to mobilize black voters, Democrats haven’t been meeting the challenge especially well of late.
Robinson, 42, is one of the city’s most engaged community activists, fighting to ensure that voters in 53206 will be able to have full and free ballot access in 2020. In the run-up to the election, she will be knocking on doors, attending community meetings, and vying to bring resources and hope to a neighborhood that hasn’t had much of either in recent years. The area’s woes can be traced back to its federal classification as a “Negro and Slum Area” some 80 years ago—part of the practice of “redlining” African American districts across urban areas in the North in order to deny their residents access to home loans.
Keisha Robinson with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren at her house in Borchert Field, Milwaukee.
But many of 53206’s troubles are of a more recent vintage. A cratered industrial economic base; a tough-on-crime judicial system that preys on black citizens; and, now, a concerted effort by lawmakers to deprive those citizens of the vote—all have contributed to the longstanding sense that 53206’s uphill challenges may be too steep to surmount. Or to put it a different way: These conditions have contributed to a pervasive myth that places like 53206 are beyond any genuine rehabilitation—that they are, as the federal government once deemed them, too negro and too slum to be saved.
No aspect of that myth is more damaging than 53206’s claim to infamy: that it is the nation’s most incarcerated plot of land. Who would establish a long-term political organizing effort in such a community? How many businesses will go on writing off this zip code as a crime-ridden wasteland, unworthy of investment? Even though this damaging image is something of a fiction, its stubborn endurance shows that lifting up places like 53206 will require more than policy proposals to reform the criminal justice system or raise the minimum wage. It will mean that we set about dismantling all the myths that have kept places like 53206 down.
Like other Northern cities that hosted a major influx of African Americans fleeing from the South during the Great Migration and onward, Milwaukee did not exactly turn out to be the promised land. Redlining—the racist classification of many black-majority neighborhoods as unsound investments on the basis of what was euphemistically termed “residential security”—was one reason. Analysts had long categorized 53206 as the major part of a “D5” district—i.e., a high-risk area. Its residents were deemed “laborers” and “ne’er-do-wells.” On a practical level, this meant that the ability to get a home loan in 53206 was more fiction than fact, at least in the decades between the creation of the Federal Housing Administration in 1934 and Congress’s ratification of the Fair Housing Act in 1968. As Reggie Jackson, the head griot of America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, told me, “Redlining prevented people from gaining generational wealth which would allow them upgrade their house and move to a bigger house.”
On another, less tangible level, redlining is how the myth of 53206’s inherent criminality began.
As if redlining were not enough, Milwaukee’s surrounding counties implemented restrictive covenants preventing black tenants equal access to the housing market. This practice confined most blacks to the northwestern portion of the city, where 53206 lies. While the Supreme Court ruled such covenants to be unconstitutional in 1948, they remained on the books until Congress passed the Fair Housing Act.
And the legacy of the covenants, along with redlining, continued well into the twenty-first century. According to a 2016 report, in Milwaukee “whites represent 70 percent of the population, yet received 81 percent of the loans. African Americans are 16 percent of the population yet only received 4 percent of the loans.” In 2010, a sign that read “****** lover” was placed in the yard of a mayor in a 95 percent white county after he approved a 180-unit public housing project there, according to a housing complaint filed by the U.S. Department of Justice. And the city’s segregation is stark: To this day, black people, for the most part, live on Milwaukee’s north side, while whites live on the south side.
Reggie Jackson’s family moved to Milwaukee from Mississippi in the early 1970s in search of jobs. He says 53206 is “really one of the most difficult areas in Milwaukee.”
For all those government-ordained hardships, Jackson’s family moved from Mississippi to Milwaukee in 1973 because of the city’s job opportunities. “43 percent of blacks in the city of Milwaukee in 1970 worked in industrial jobs,” Jackson, wearing a green Milwaukee Bucks shirt, told me earlier this year as we stood on the border of 53206. “That was the highest rate of any city in the country, even higher than Detroit.” Thanks to these industrial jobs, the median income for Milwaukee’s black population was the seventh-highest in the country. In 1970, the portion of black people living in poverty in the United States was 35 percent. In Milwaukee, it was significantly lower, at 27 percent.
But by the time Jackson’s family arrived, the implosion of Milwaukee’s economy had already begun. “From 1963 to 2015, the city of Milwaukee lost 91,000 manufacturing jobs,” Jackson told me. As Alec MacGillis reported in his 2014 article in The New Republic about former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, “Not long after a substantial African American community took shape, Milwaukee’s industrial base began to collapse and its manufacturing jobs disappeared. This left almost no time for the city to develop a black middle class or a leadership elite. Within short order, Milwaukee had some of the most glaring racial disparities in the country.”
As recently as 2018, Milwaukee ranked second in USA Today’s “15 worst cities for black Americans,” primarily because the median income of black families is 42.5 percent of white families. The black unemployment rate is roughly four times that of white unemployment. Home ownership among black Milwaukeeans stands at 28.2 percent, while white Milwaukeeans enjoy a home ownership rate of 69.5 percent.
Much of Milwaukee’s formerly robust workforce was employed at factories along Milwaukee Road, a train line that carried goods to the factories alongside it. Allis-Chalmers employed 11,500 people; American Motors, 4,000; Schlitz Brewing, 2,800; Pabst Brewing, 2,600. Meanwhile, “dozens and dozens and dozens of businesses grew up along the rail line,” according to Jackson, to serve the factories’ workers. The 30th Street Corridor, which now sits squarely in 53206, was once home to “a lot of small factories.”
That same corridor now looks like a “bomb hit” it, Jackson says. Perhaps the largest anchor employer in this area was the manufacturer AO Smith, hiring nearly 8,000 people on its own. The company was once the largest car frame manufacturer in the United States, servicing frames for the majority of American-made cars and trucks. Its buildings occupied the 30th Street Corridor, which is now “really one of the most difficult areas in Milwaukee,” Jackson, who grew up in the area, says. “Drive down 30th Street, you will see a trail—a trail of destruction.” It is indeed a sobering sight: hollowed-out buildings, abandoned train tracks. I was twice warned that, even as a large black man, that “you might not want to be here.”
Khalif Rainey, an alderman on the Milwaukee Common Council who represents parts of 53206, told me that the district is distressed “due to these losses in job opportunities.” By 2004, AO Smith employed only 575 people. During its industrial heyday, the ten largest employers in Milwaukee were either in manufacturing or brewing, and they offered their often minimally educated workers healthy salaries and benefits; in 2004, the ten biggest employers either paid comparatively low wages (like the grocery store chain Roundy’s and the retailer Kohl’s), or had higher barriers of entry, via job requirements of advanced degrees or long periods of intensive, expensive training.
This lack of economic opportunity is borne out in the data. Marc Levine, founder and director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for Economic Development, has shown that black males born in 53206 into households in the 25th percentile of the national income distribution in the late 1970s and early 1980s remained in the twenty-fifth percentile in adulthood (over the years 2014-15). By contrast, white males in Milwaukee born into the same twenty-fifth percentile some 30 years ago rose to the forty-fifth percentile by adulthood. Between 2013 and 2017, only 46 percent of adults in 53206 held full-times jobs, compared to 75 percent in Milwaukee’s suburbs and 69 percent in the city of Milwaukee.
Inside the “Most Incarcerated” Zip Code in the Country
53206, a heavily African American neighborhood north of downtown Milwaukee, suffers from all manner of ills—not least of which are the myths of criminality that continue to surround it.
By Caleb Gayle
October 15, 2019
Photographs by Danielle Scruggs
Keisha Robinson’s family came to Milwaukee from Chicago in the 1980s because, as Robinson put it, “Chicago was getting out of pocket.” With crime rising and jobs disappearing in the Windy City, she told me, “my mom wanted a better place for us to live.” But Robinson’s mother could never have anticipated the crucibles awaiting her daughter in Wisconsin—the array of social and political deficits associated with the five numbers that came at the end of her listed address: 53206, now notoriously known as the most incarcerated zip code in the country.
The neighborhood’s rectangular outline sits like a brick just north of the Fiserv Forum, home of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks in downtown Milwaukee, where the 2020 Democratic National Convention will be held next summer. In addition to its high incarceration rates, 53206, a heavily African American district, suffers from every manner of social ill, from socioeconomic stagnation to poor health. The Democratic primary field is teeming with proposals to address these ingrained injustices, and the party’s eventual candidate will also have a personal incentive to pay attention to what is happening in 53206: Its residents, among others in Milwaukee, may well prove to be the key to Democrats’ hopes of winning the battleground state of Wisconsin and unseating Donald Trump in the presidential election.
As long as those residents can gain access to the ballot, that is.
African Americans represent nearly 40 percent of Milwaukee’s population, but their political clout has been diminished by laws that suppress the black vote. There is also the problem of African Americans choosing not to vote: Black turnout in Wisconsin dropped nearly 19 percent between the 2012 to the 2016 elections—a clear sign that, despite their historic need to mobilize black voters, Democrats haven’t been meeting the challenge especially well of late.
Robinson, 42, is one of the city’s most engaged community activists, fighting to ensure that voters in 53206 will be able to have full and free ballot access in 2020. In the run-up to the election, she will be knocking on doors, attending community meetings, and vying to bring resources and hope to a neighborhood that hasn’t had much of either in recent years. The area’s woes can be traced back to its federal classification as a “Negro and Slum Area” some 80 years ago—part of the practice of “redlining” African American districts across urban areas in the North in order to deny their residents access to home loans.
Keisha Robinson with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren at her house in Borchert Field, Milwaukee.
But many of 53206’s troubles are of a more recent vintage. A cratered industrial economic base; a tough-on-crime judicial system that preys on black citizens; and, now, a concerted effort by lawmakers to deprive those citizens of the vote—all have contributed to the longstanding sense that 53206’s uphill challenges may be too steep to surmount. Or to put it a different way: These conditions have contributed to a pervasive myth that places like 53206 are beyond any genuine rehabilitation—that they are, as the federal government once deemed them, too negro and too slum to be saved.
No aspect of that myth is more damaging than 53206’s claim to infamy: that it is the nation’s most incarcerated plot of land. Who would establish a long-term political organizing effort in such a community? How many businesses will go on writing off this zip code as a crime-ridden wasteland, unworthy of investment? Even though this damaging image is something of a fiction, its stubborn endurance shows that lifting up places like 53206 will require more than policy proposals to reform the criminal justice system or raise the minimum wage. It will mean that we set about dismantling all the myths that have kept places like 53206 down.
Like other Northern cities that hosted a major influx of African Americans fleeing from the South during the Great Migration and onward, Milwaukee did not exactly turn out to be the promised land. Redlining—the racist classification of many black-majority neighborhoods as unsound investments on the basis of what was euphemistically termed “residential security”—was one reason. Analysts had long categorized 53206 as the major part of a “D5” district—i.e., a high-risk area. Its residents were deemed “laborers” and “ne’er-do-wells.” On a practical level, this meant that the ability to get a home loan in 53206 was more fiction than fact, at least in the decades between the creation of the Federal Housing Administration in 1934 and Congress’s ratification of the Fair Housing Act in 1968. As Reggie Jackson, the head griot of America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, told me, “Redlining prevented people from gaining generational wealth which would allow them upgrade their house and move to a bigger house.”
On another, less tangible level, redlining is how the myth of 53206’s inherent criminality began.
As if redlining were not enough, Milwaukee’s surrounding counties implemented restrictive covenants preventing black tenants equal access to the housing market. This practice confined most blacks to the northwestern portion of the city, where 53206 lies. While the Supreme Court ruled such covenants to be unconstitutional in 1948, they remained on the books until Congress passed the Fair Housing Act.
And the legacy of the covenants, along with redlining, continued well into the twenty-first century. According to a 2016 report, in Milwaukee “whites represent 70 percent of the population, yet received 81 percent of the loans. African Americans are 16 percent of the population yet only received 4 percent of the loans.” In 2010, a sign that read “****** lover” was placed in the yard of a mayor in a 95 percent white county after he approved a 180-unit public housing project there, according to a housing complaint filed by the U.S. Department of Justice. And the city’s segregation is stark: To this day, black people, for the most part, live on Milwaukee’s north side, while whites live on the south side.
Reggie Jackson’s family moved to Milwaukee from Mississippi in the early 1970s in search of jobs. He says 53206 is “really one of the most difficult areas in Milwaukee.”
For all those government-ordained hardships, Jackson’s family moved from Mississippi to Milwaukee in 1973 because of the city’s job opportunities. “43 percent of blacks in the city of Milwaukee in 1970 worked in industrial jobs,” Jackson, wearing a green Milwaukee Bucks shirt, told me earlier this year as we stood on the border of 53206. “That was the highest rate of any city in the country, even higher than Detroit.” Thanks to these industrial jobs, the median income for Milwaukee’s black population was the seventh-highest in the country. In 1970, the portion of black people living in poverty in the United States was 35 percent. In Milwaukee, it was significantly lower, at 27 percent.
But by the time Jackson’s family arrived, the implosion of Milwaukee’s economy had already begun. “From 1963 to 2015, the city of Milwaukee lost 91,000 manufacturing jobs,” Jackson told me. As Alec MacGillis reported in his 2014 article in The New Republic about former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, “Not long after a substantial African American community took shape, Milwaukee’s industrial base began to collapse and its manufacturing jobs disappeared. This left almost no time for the city to develop a black middle class or a leadership elite. Within short order, Milwaukee had some of the most glaring racial disparities in the country.”
As recently as 2018, Milwaukee ranked second in USA Today’s “15 worst cities for black Americans,” primarily because the median income of black families is 42.5 percent of white families. The black unemployment rate is roughly four times that of white unemployment. Home ownership among black Milwaukeeans stands at 28.2 percent, while white Milwaukeeans enjoy a home ownership rate of 69.5 percent.
Much of Milwaukee’s formerly robust workforce was employed at factories along Milwaukee Road, a train line that carried goods to the factories alongside it. Allis-Chalmers employed 11,500 people; American Motors, 4,000; Schlitz Brewing, 2,800; Pabst Brewing, 2,600. Meanwhile, “dozens and dozens and dozens of businesses grew up along the rail line,” according to Jackson, to serve the factories’ workers. The 30th Street Corridor, which now sits squarely in 53206, was once home to “a lot of small factories.”
That same corridor now looks like a “bomb hit” it, Jackson says. Perhaps the largest anchor employer in this area was the manufacturer AO Smith, hiring nearly 8,000 people on its own. The company was once the largest car frame manufacturer in the United States, servicing frames for the majority of American-made cars and trucks. Its buildings occupied the 30th Street Corridor, which is now “really one of the most difficult areas in Milwaukee,” Jackson, who grew up in the area, says. “Drive down 30th Street, you will see a trail—a trail of destruction.” It is indeed a sobering sight: hollowed-out buildings, abandoned train tracks. I was twice warned that, even as a large black man, that “you might not want to be here.”
Khalif Rainey, an alderman on the Milwaukee Common Council who represents parts of 53206, told me that the district is distressed “due to these losses in job opportunities.” By 2004, AO Smith employed only 575 people. During its industrial heyday, the ten largest employers in Milwaukee were either in manufacturing or brewing, and they offered their often minimally educated workers healthy salaries and benefits; in 2004, the ten biggest employers either paid comparatively low wages (like the grocery store chain Roundy’s and the retailer Kohl’s), or had higher barriers of entry, via job requirements of advanced degrees or long periods of intensive, expensive training.
This lack of economic opportunity is borne out in the data. Marc Levine, founder and director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for Economic Development, has shown that black males born in 53206 into households in the 25th percentile of the national income distribution in the late 1970s and early 1980s remained in the twenty-fifth percentile in adulthood (over the years 2014-15). By contrast, white males in Milwaukee born into the same twenty-fifth percentile some 30 years ago rose to the forty-fifth percentile by adulthood. Between 2013 and 2017, only 46 percent of adults in 53206 held full-times jobs, compared to 75 percent in Milwaukee’s suburbs and 69 percent in the city of Milwaukee.
