“Essential reading for anyone trying to understand the demands of social justice in America.” – Bryan Stevenson, Author of Just Mercy
The popularity of books, films, and TV shows like Just Mercy, The New Jim Crow, The Innocence Files, and 13th have given many people a better sense of the vast injustices harbored within the American system of mass incarceration. This knowledge is important if we hope to collectively demand better for individuals experiencing incarceration in our nation.
Peter Edelman’s Not a Crime to Be Poor addresses another aspect of our unjust system, one which is perhaps lesser known to the public consciousness: the criminalization of poverty. Edelman is the faculty director of the Center for Poverty and Inequality at Georgetown University Law Center and a former top adviser within the Kennedy and Clinton administrations, before famously resigning after Clinton signed the 1996 welfare reform legislation, among other accolades.
In this book, Edelman addresses a growing trend in the criminal legal system that has resulted in a modern-day debtor’s prison system: the leveraging of exorbitant fines and fees against low-income individuals wrapped up in the legal system. The possibility of fines and fees are endless. Edelman lists instances of individuals paying for their own probation, their own mandatory drug tests, their own imprisonment, even their own public defenders. Here are three things I learned from Not a Crime to Be Poor.
We effectively still have debtor’s prisons in our country.
Many think of debtor’s prisons as concepts of the past, but in Not a Crime to Be Poor, Edelman shows us that they are a present-day reality. Essentially, individuals can be charged a number of fines and fees for their court dates regardless of whether or not they are ultimately convicted of the crime with which they are charged. These fines and fees can include a $100 mandatory DNA database fee, 12% interest rates on amount owed, and a host of other discretionary fees such as cost of serving a warrant, having a jury trial, defense by a public defender, and criminal filing fees (28). If these individuals are unable to pay, they risk being imprisoned until they can.
According to the Supreme Court ruling in Bearden v. Georgia, it is unconstitutional under the equal protection clause to punish someone for their inability to pay (5). However, inability to pay is still often not taken into account, and many of these individuals do not have someone to advocate on their behalf to prove their inability to pay. Judges have cited having expensive-looking shoes, being someone who smokes cigarettes, and having cable television as reasons for why individuals are able to pay, but these reasons are based on stereotypes, not on the real finances and capabilities of the individual. Edelman shares that in Tulsa in 2014, 28% of the 23,000 individuals booked to jail that year were imprisoned due to their inability to pay debt owed to the court system.
This system of jailing people because of their inability to pay further entrenches inequality within our nation by making it even more impossible for these individuals to raise the funds necessary to pay their debts. This is similar to the practice of revoking individual’s licenses for their inability to pay, another common occurrence that increases barriers to finding work. This continues to happen throughout our nation despite many state laws on the books that specifically outlaw debtor’s prisons.
Important checks on injustice are often very limited in these cases.
Though individuals are eligible for court appointed attorneys in cases concerning criminal guilt, attorneys are not appointed in hearings on ability to pay. Even though these individuals face potential deprivation of their liberty (imprisonment), there is often not a third-party present to make sure that ability to pay is correctly taken into account. Even when public defenders are appointed in criminal cases, they are not always free of charge despite the existence of the public defender system stemming from the need to protect individuals who cannot afford to pay for their own defense. According to Edelman, “forty-three states charge for having a public defender.”
Similar occurrences take place within private probation practices which at times charge individuals for the cost of their monitoring regardless of ability to pay. If an individual wants to set up a hearing to discuss ability to pay in this scenario, they will likely be charged even more money. Edelman cites examples where individuals requesting hearings were charged $25 for the hearing itself and then an additional $20 for a required drug test, leaving them in even greater debt (32).
Edelman cites other instances of individuals being required to pay fines and fees regardless of whether or not they committed the crime they were accused of. Sometimes these fees are required before any hearing on guilt or innocence occurs. Other times individuals are forced to pay even after they are found to be innocent.
The criminalization of public benefits appears to be a scare tactic to keep individuals who need welfare from accessing them.
In the chapter titled, “Criminalizing Public Benefits,” Edelman speaks from his own area of policy expertise. He illustrates a number of instances where individuals were accused of non-existent welfare fraud that resulted either from faulty computing or a high level of complexity to the welfare application system that makes it easy to misstep in the filing process, causing even the most careful individuals to be fearful of being accused of fraud. The government considers it “income” if an individual is lent money by a friend to help them make ends meet or if they are given a discount on room and board. If individuals do not report these items, they risk getting docked or losing their Social Security Income altogether. Additionally, individuals can be barred from receiving public services due to criminal convictions, even for very low-level offenses or simply for an arrest without an accompanying conviction. These are just a few examples among many.
“Criminalization is not so much a strategy to actually put people in jail for welfare fraud and other infractions as it is a method to scare them away from even applying for benefits.”
– Peter Edelman, Not A Crime To Be Poor
These are three lessons that stuck out to me, but they do not even begin to cover the vast amount of criminalization that Edelman sheds light on in Not a Crime to Be Poor. Other themes Edelman touches on are the use of money bail, the criminalization of mental illness, the criminalization of poor fathers attempting to pay child support, the criminalization of poor youth of color, and the criminalization of homelessness.
A Broader Solution Than Criminal Justice Reform
Edelman ends the book with a discussion of solutions to the problem of poverty. He addresses holistic programs, such as those that encompass early childhood education and parent education. In the final chapter, he gives in-depth profiles of seven community organizations across the country that are doing hard work within their neighborhoods.
In Tulsa, there is a Community Action Program (CAP) that provides two-generation programs that focus on head starts for children and parenting and job development skills for adults. In Chicago, there is the Logan Square Neighborhood Association which runs a Parent Mentor Program that helps disconnected parents take a more active role in the community and has created a pipeline of empowerment for low-income, often immigrant, mothers to become powerful political advocates. There is the Brownsville Partnership in Brooklyn, which serves as a hub for nonprofits and service groups and actively partners with local businesses and community organizations to bring more jobs to the area. There is the New Haven MOMS Partnership, which provides a support system for moms experiencing mental health problems that often can lead to unhealthy home situations for kids, especially when moms don’t have access to support or means of self-care.
Each organization Edelman profiles paints a beautiful picture of how we can move towards stronger communities and smaller prisons, fixing the root of the problem: the supposed need for imprisonment, instead of the way we go about imprisonment. Though Edelman also suggests more specific avenues of criminal legal reform such as bail and fees reform, decarceration, and expungement, the ultimate force of his argument for solving the mass incarceration problem is this: we must not isolate our focus to the prisons. True reform comes from community empowerment.
Looking for a similar read to Not A Crime to Be Poor? Check out Erika’s post about Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.
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