Did you know that employment gaps because of criminal records cost the U.S. One of my favorite informative reads this week. Through money bail systems, fees and fines, strictly enforced laws and regulations against behavior including trespassing and public urination that largely affect the homeless, and the substitution of prisons and jails for the mental hospitals that have traditionally served the impoverished, in one of the richest countries on Earth we have effectively made it a crime to be poor.Įdelman, who famously resigned from the administration of Bill Clinton over welfare "reform," connects the dots between these policies and others including school discipline in poor communities, child support policies affecting the poor, public housing ordinances, addiction treatment, and the specter of public benefits fraud to paint a picture of a mean-spirited, retributive system that seals whole communities into inescapable cycles of poverty. Kennedy and current Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman explains in Not a Crime to Be Poor, Ferguson is everywhere in America today. In addition to exposing racially biased policing, the Justice Department's Ferguson Report exposed to the world a system of fines and fees levied for minor crimes in Ferguson, Missouri, that, when they proved too expensive for Ferguson's largely poor, African American population, resulted in jail sentences for thousands of people.Īs former staffer to Robert F. Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted, in The Chronicle of Higher EducationĪ nationally known expert on poverty shows how not having money has been criminalized and shines a light on lawyers, activists, and policy makers working for a more humane approach
"A powerful investigation into the ways the United States has addressed poverty. Named one of the "10 books to read after you've read Evicted" by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Kennedy Book & Journalism Awardsįinalist for the American Bar Association's 2018 Silver Gavel Book Award Awarded "Special Recognition" by the 2018 Robert F.
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