Not a Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America Audiobook (Free)

Most Us citizens believe debtors’ prisons are a thing of the past. Yet today, folks are in jail by the thousands for no additional reason than they are poor. As the Justice Department found when it investigated police practices in Ferguson, Missouri, substantial fines and charges are levied for minimal crimes such as for example damaged taillights and moving through stop signs, and when the indegent cannot pay, the result can be an epidemic of repeated stays in prison. Bail is routinely set without account of a about Not a Crime to become Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America defendant’s capability to pay, leading to 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 a Crime to become Poor, Georgetown rules teacher Peter Edelman argues that Ferguson is everywhere in America today. Through money bail systems, charges and fines, drivers license suspensions with the a huge number, strictly enforced laws and regulations against behavior including vagrancy and public urination that largely influence the homeless, and the substitution of prisons and jails for the mental clinics that have traditionally offered the impoverished, among the richest countries on Earth has efficiently criminalized poverty.

Edelman, who famously resigned from the administration of Bill Clinton more than welfare “reform,” connects the dots between disciplinary insurance policies that disproportionately send African American and Latino schoolchildren to court for small misbehavior, kid support plans that send penniless fathers to jail, public housing rules that club ex-offenders, the eviction of women who call 911 to get protection against domestic violence, and the risk of scams charges against community benefit recipients to color a picture of a mean-spirited system that changes daily struggles into inescapable poverty. Tracing this tendency back again to the so-called taxes trend when voters insisted that politicians cut taxes significantly, forcing towns and claims to look to alternative ways of raising money, Edelman demonstrates we still live in a country where, to your great shame, it really is a crime to become poor.