One Law for the poor (2018)

Book Review from the March 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Not a Crime to Be Poor: the Criminalization of Poverty in America’. By Peter Edelman (The New Press $26.95)

In 2010 sixteen-year-old Kalief Browder was charged with stealing a backpack. The judge set bail at $3000, but his family could not afford this. He refused to plead guilty to a crime he had not committed, and so was sent to the notorious Rikers Island jail in New York City. He spent three years there awaiting trial, eight hundred days of this in solitary confinement. He was eventually released (never having been tried, let alone found guilty), but now had severe mental health problems and committed suicide in 2015.

This horrendous example is one of many discussed in Peter Edelman’s enlightening book. In the US today it is often a crime to be poor, and particularly to be poor and black or homeless or mentally ill. Cuts in government funding since the Reagan era have led to courts relying on ‘users’ to pay for the legal system, which means the accused or just those arrested without being tried. People often plead guilty in order to avoid a long period in jail before a trial; otherwise they may be held in jail for a low-level offence for which the prescribed punishment is a fine. The size of fines has been increased, and people can be fined extra for not paying immediately.

Another consequence of reduced funding was an attempt in some areas to reduce the number of calls to 911 by requiring landlords to evict tenants who call the emergency number too often. This was even applied to women who rang to seek protection from domestic abuse.

At least 300,000 people in US jails and prisons have serious mental illness, and this includes one in three incarcerated women. The penal system has in many ways been used as a substitute for a proper system of mental hospitals and addiction centres. Corizon is a for-profit company that provides mental and medical care in prisons and has an annual revenue of around $1.5bn; but various scandals have led to it losing many of its contracts.

A criminal record can have enormous implications for the whole of a person’s life, and the links between poverty and imprisonment lead Edelman to refer to a ‘cradle-to-coffin pipeline’. People may serve multiple periods in jail for not paying fines and fees to the court. Poverty can be a cause of getting a criminal record, but also a consequence, as such a record can reduce a person’s chances of getting a decent job, and many laws prevent those with a criminal record from, for instance, obtaining a licence to cut hair.

In his final chapter, Edelman examines a number of attempts to reduce poverty and cut the links between poverty and crime. He has to admit, though, that their usefulness is limited: of one project in Minneapolis he notes that it ‘is making an identifiable difference in the lives of many poor people’ but it ‘has not yet been able to affect the overall poverty in the neighborhood as a whole.’

Paul Bennett