Junious Ricardo Stanton ;
Criminalizing the Poor
“If anything, the criminalization of poverty has accelerated since the recession, with growing numbers of states drug testing applicants for temporary assistance, imposing steep fines for school truancy, and imprisoning people for debt. Such measures constitute a cruel inversion of the Johnson-era principle that it is the responsibility of government to extend a helping hand to the poor. Sadly, this has become the means by which the wealthiest country in the world manages to remain complacent in the face of alarmingly high levels of poverty: by continuing to blame poverty not on the economy or inadequate social supports, but on the poor themselves.” It is Expensive to Be Poor Barbara Ehrenreich http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/it-is-expensive-to-be-poor/282979/ The veneer of the Untied States as the bastion of opportunity and the fanciful Horatio Alger rags to riches narrative is being replaced by an increasingly rigid system based upon wealth and color. The U.S. economy despite what the corporate mind control apparatus says is stagnant at least for working class folks and more and more working class people are falling into poverty and they can’t get up. Today in America it is devastating to be poor. Not only are the poor denigrated and stigmatized, they are being criminalized in such a way it will make it even more difficult to get back on their feet and move out of their impoverished circumstances into a better and possibly higher socio-economic state and status. A report by the Institute for Policy Studies called The Poor Get Prison The Alarming Spread of the Criminalization of Poverty by Karen Dolan and Jodi L. Carr http://www.ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/IPS-The-Poor-Get-Prison-Final.pdf concluded by saying, “We are a nation that has turned its welfare system into a criminal system. We criminalize life-sustaining activities of people too poor to afford shelter. We incarcerate more people than any other nation in the world. And we institute policies that virtually bar them for life from participating in society once they have done their time. We have allowed the resurgence of debtors’ prisons. We’ve created a second tier public education system for poor children and black and Latino children that disproportionally criminalizes their behavior and sets them early onto the path of incarceration and lack of access to assistance and opportunity.” A study by the National Poverty Center called the Colors of Poverty: Why Racial and Ethnic Disparities Persist concluded that poverty was the result of systemic disparities over a period of time and that one metric of poverty often impacted others creating a cyclical effect which made it difficult for a person living in poverty to extricate him or herself from being poor. Some of their findings were: “Racial disparities in poverty result from cumulative disadvantage over the life course, as the effects of hardship in one domain spill over into other domains. In the U.S., one of every three African American children and one of every four Latino children live in poverty— two times higher than the rate for white children. Whites report better overall health than blacks, Latinos, and Asians, even after controlling for poverty, education, and unemployment. The collateral consequences of felony conviction—such as bans on entering many occupations, on voting, jury service, and receiving federal college loans and grants—harm both ex-offenders and their communities. Residents of a predominately black or Hispanic neighborhood have access to roughly half as many social services as those in predominately white neighborhoods.” http://www.npc.umich.edu/publications/policy_briefs/brief16/PolicyBrief16.pdf
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