Most Americans believe debtors’ prisons are a thing of the past. Yet today, folks are in prison by the thousands for no additional reason than that they are poor. As the Justice Division discovered when it investigated police procedures in Ferguson, Missouri, massive fines and costs are levied for minimal crimes such as for example broken taillights and moving through stop signals, and when the poor cannot pay, the effect can be an epidemic of repeated stays in prison. Bail is routinely set without thought of the about Not really a Crime to become Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America defendant’s ability to pay, resulting in one sort of justice system for individuals who can purchase their way out and another harshly punitive one for individuals who can’t.

In Not really a Crime to become Poor, Georgetown regulation professor Peter Edelman argues that Ferguson is everywhere in the us today. Through money bail systems, fees and fines, motorists license suspensions from the millions, strictly enforced laws against behavior including vagrancy and general public urination that mainly have an effect on the homeless, as well as the substitution of prisons and jails for the mental clinics that have typically offered the impoverished, one of the richest countries on the planet has efficiently criminalized poverty.

Edelman, who famously resigned in the administration of Costs Clinton over welfare “reform,” connects the dots between disciplinary insurance policies that disproportionately send BLACK and Latino schoolchildren to court for minor misbehavior, child support guidelines that send penniless fathers to jail, public housing guidelines that bar ex-offenders, the eviction of ladies who contact 911 to get safety against domestic assault, and the threat of fraud charges against open public benefit recipients to color a picture of a mean-spirited program that converts daily problems into inescapable poverty. Tracing this pattern back again to the so-called tax revolution when voters insisted that politicians slice taxes significantly, forcing metropolitan areas and states to turn to alternative ways of increasing money, Edelman shows that we still live in a country where, to your great shame, it really is a criminal offense to become poor.