Subject: 5 Ways It's Becoming a Crime To Be Poor in America, Punishable By
Further Impoverishment
5
Ways It's Becoming a Crime To Be Poor in America, Punishable By Further
Impoverishment
Terrell Jermaine Starr
April 22, 2015
AlterNet
New
report details perverse policies that are driving more people into hopeless,
inescapable poverty.
, Institute
for Policy Studies,
The criminalization of America’s poor has been
quietly gaining steam for years, but a recent study, “The
Poor Get Prison,” co-authored by Karen Dolan and Jodi L. Carr, reveals the
startling extent to which American municipalities are fining and jailing the
country’s most vulnerable people, not just punishing them for being poor, but
driving them deeper into poverty.
"In the last ten years," Barbara
Ehrenreich writes in the introduction, "it has become apparent that being poor
is in itself a crime in many cities and countries, and that is a crime punished
by further impoverishment."
A few months ago, the Department of
Justice’s Ferguson
report revealed how that city has disproportionately targeted its majority
minority population with traffic and other minor infractions that heavily
support the municipality's coffers. But Ferguson is far from alone.
Municipalities like New York City have greatly increased the number of minor
offenses that are considered criminal (like putting your feet up in the subway)
or sitting on the sidewalk. Wealthy white people in business attire are rarely
targeted for such summonses, and if they are, they can quickly pay the fine or
hire counsel to get out of it. The over-punishment of minor offenses is just
another way the rich get richer, and as the report says, the “poor get prison.”
They also get poorer and more numerous. In one striking statistic, the Southern
Educational Foundation reports
that 51 percent of America’s public schoolchildren are living in
poverty.
Perversely, it is the poor who, according to Dolan and Carr, are
subsidizing municipalities’ budgets and becoming reliable sources of enrichment
for the private companies contracted by local governments to carry out what used
to be government duties.
Here are five troubling trends from the report
that show us how the government is financially abusing poor people.
1.
Jailing probationers who can’t pay fees and fines. More than four million people
are sentenced to probation in America, according to the report. Because state
funding for probation services is on the decline, more private companies are
talking over the responsibility of managing them. Private probation companies
don’t charge local governments for their services, so there is no fee to the
taxpayer. Probationers, however, are charged a supervision fee, and if they
can’t afford to pay, they face jail time. Despite the fact that it is
unconstitutional to jail people because they can’t pay fines, the reality is
that many probationers are poor and unaware of their rights and they end up in
modern-day debtors’ prisons.
“While indigent people have a right to free
counsel in some cases, more municipalities are requiring an 'application fee' of
at least $50 to pay for a public defender,” Karen Dolan, a co-author of the
study, told AlterNet via email. “Many poor people with misdemeanor charges end
up before a judge without legal representation and do not understand their
rights. Without legal representation, poor people often don't understand that
they ought not to be offered ‘jail or probation’ simply for debt, and they
choose probation. They unwittingly enter into a potential dungeon of debt due to
the huge fees charged by private probation companies and inability to pay those
eventually—illegally—leads to jail anyway.”
At least 13
states allow localities to outsource probation supervision services. In
2012, these companies generated $100 million in revenue.
2. Taking poor
people’s property through asset forfeit seizures. More than $3 billion in cash
and property has been seized by local and state police agencies through a
Department of Justice asset seizure program. Eighty percent of the assets
collected through this program stay with the law enforcement agencies that
collect them, the Washington
Post reported. Under asset forfeit seizure programs, cops can take someone’s
property simply under “reasonable suspicion” it was used to commit a crime; the
burden of proof is on the property owner that the seizure was
unjustified.
Dolan and Carr’s report outlines how this program
disproportionately impacts the poor, especially black and Latino people. Given
that black and Latino working families are
twice as likely as whites to be low-income, they are less likely to have the
financial resources to reclaim property that was, in many cases, wrongfully
taken from them.
3. School-to-prison pipeline. Black students make up
just 16 percent of the population but represent 32-42 percent of students who
are suspended or expelled, according to the “The Poor Get Prison” report. Many
school districts around the country use local police to provide security, which
further increases these students’ chances of arrest.
“When you have zero
tolerance policies, combined with law enforcement officers at the doors and in
the hallways and you have a poor and black student body—both demographics
considered potential criminals from the time they board the bus in the
morning—you have the makings of unnecessarily harsh and punitive actions against
black students,” Dolan told AlterNet.
“Studies show that students with
disabilities are also disproportionately affected by overly harsh punishments at
school," she continued. "The two overriding factors appear to be class and race.
Poverty plays a big role, but overlaying that is what seems only explainable by
a widespread cultural bias against black youth, especially black male youth,
even small children who are black and poor. The presumption that black
schoolchildren are potential criminals seems to play into the disparity in the
levels and severity of discipline when you compare them with white
schoolchildren.”
As previous
studies have shown, people with arrest records find it difficult to find
employment. A 2013 National Institute of Justice report cited a study that was
carried out in New York City that found people with a criminal record are 50
percent less likely to get a call back for a job interview; most of those
affected are black.
What this tells us is that the criminalization of
poor black and Latino children through hyper-disciplinary actions doesn’t end at
the schoolhouse door. It is a poverty-inducing policy that harms these kids'
employability prospects later in life.
4. Hyper criminalization of petty
infractions. The New York City Council isconsidering
proposals to make petty crimes like peeing in public and drinking from an
open container civil instead of criminal offenses. This follows years of
hyper-policing and criminalizing an increasing list of tiny
infractions.
Since 2001, 81 percent of the people fined and punished
under these “broken windows” policing policies have been Latinos or black
Americans, many them from the city's poorest communities.
New York is not
alone in its enforcement of petty violations. In Ferguson, for example, revenue
from its police department enforcing municipal codes were expected
to account for 23 percent of the city’s budget or more than $3 million. In
2013, that figure was $2.46 million.
Loistine Hoskin, a resident of
Ferguson, told
CNN that her car was towed in 2009 because it was missing a tire. She chose
to pay a $1,200 fine rather than try to fight the ticket in court and face the
threat of jail, she said.
"It's definitely a vicious cycle," Hoskin, 64,
a retired airline reservation agent, told CNN. "Unfortunately for most people
who are in this cycle, they continue to be in a downward spiral because they
can't get jobs, they can't do anything, they can't pay the fines."
5.
Fining the homeless for being homeless. If you are homeless in America and have
nowhere to go and are down on your luck, it is increasingly difficult to find a
safe space in which to exist without being fined for loitering. According to the
report, an estimated 600,000 people are homeless on any given night. Though
nearly 13 percent of the nation’s low-income housing has been lost since 2001,
and many people simply cannot afford housing, 34 percent of cities ban public
camping, 18 percent prohibit sleeping in public and 43 percent prevent people
from sleeping in vehicles, according to a study the
report cited.
Often, homeless people who are fined for violating these
laws have no way to pay the fine. Jailtime is on the table for many who can’t
pay up.
One example of how economically devastating these fines are comes
out of Missouri. Edward Brown, 62 and homeless, has
been jailed at least twice since 2009 for failing to pay fines, one of which
stems from his failure to get a rabies vaccination for his dog, Matrix. He was
ticketed $464 and just barely paid it off. Brown's monthly Social Security check
is $484.
The report offers suggestions for addressing some of these
issues. Whether those in power will listen to the solutions is another
matter.
When asked whether race or poverty was the factor driving the
criminalization of the poor, Dolan said the two are intertwined.
“I don't
think we can separate the two,” she said. “It's not an either/or. It's a
both/and. There's no question that poor people of all races are vastly more
impacted by fines, fees, aggressive policing and more vulnerable in court than
people with the ability to pay misdemeanor charges and afford legal
representation. And there is no question that the mandate for police and court
systems to fill in budget deficits by aggressive collection of these fines are
more prevalent in lower-income areas, regardless of race.
"But there is
equally no question that racial profiling has been ever-present in our country
despite civil rights laws designed to address such bias and discrimination. And
black people are disproportionately poor and disproportionately policed and
incarcerated in this country. Police and courts in low-income/high poverty areas
are increasingly in the service of aggressive money collection rather than
public safety. When racist bias is added to this already fraught situation, the
match is thrown on this tinderbox and consequences can be
deadly.”
Terrell Jermaine Starr is a senior editor at AlterNet.
Follow him on Twitter @Russian_Starr.
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