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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 3:15 am
Time: 3:15 am
Results for poverty (u.s.)
2 results foundAuthor: Dolan, Karen Title: The Poor Get Prison: The Alarming Spread of the Criminalization of Poverty Summary: Poor people, especially people of color, face a far greater risk of being fined, arrested, and even incarcerated for minor offenses than other Americans. A broken taillight, an unpaid parking ticket, a minor drug offense, sitting on a sidewalk, or sleeping in a park can all result in jail time. In this report, we seek to understand the multi-faceted, growing phenomenon of the "criminalization of poverty." In many ways, this phenomenon is not new: The introduction of public assistance programs gave rise to prejudices against beneficiaries and to systemic efforts to obstruct access to the assistance. This form of criminalizing poverty - racial profiling or the targeting of poor black and Latina single mothers trying to access public assistance - is a relatively familiar reality. Less well-known known are the new and growing trends which increase this criminalization of being poor that affect or will affect hundreds of millions of Americans. These troubling trends are eliminating their chances to get out of poverty and access resources that make a safe and decent life possible. In this report we will summarize these realities, filling out the true breadth and depth of this national crisis. The key elements we examine are: - the targeting of poor people with fines and fees for misdemeanors, and the resurgence of debtors' prisons (the imprisonment of people unable to pay debts resulting from the increase in fines and fees); - mass incarceration of poor ethnic minorities for non-violent offenses, and the barriers to employment and re-entry into society once they have served their sentences; - excessive punishment of poor children that creates a "school-to-prison pipeline"; - increase in arrests of homeless people and people feeding the homeless, and criminalizing life-sustaining activities such as sleeping in public when no shelter is available; and - confiscating what little resources and property poor people might have through "civil asset forfeiture." Details: Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 2015. 35p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed April 2, 2015 at: http://www.ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/IPS-The-Poor-Get-Prison-Final.pdf Year: 2015 Country: United States URL: http://www.ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/IPS-The-Poor-Get-Prison-Final.pdf Shelf Number: 135148 Keywords: Disproportionate Minority ContactPoverty (U.S.)Racial DisparitiesRacial Profiling |
Author: Dolan, Karen Title: The Poor Get Prison: The Alarming Spread of the Criminalization of Poverty Summary: Poor people, especially people of color, face a far greater risk of being fined, arrested, and even incarcerated for minor offenses than other Americans. A broken taillight, an unpaid parking ticket, a minor drug offense, sitting on a sidewalk, or sleeping in a park can all result in jail time. In this report, we seek to understand the multi-faceted, growing phenomenon of the "criminalization of poverty." In many ways, this phenomenon is not new. The introduction of public assistance programs gave rise to prejudices against beneficiaries and to systemic efforts to obstruct access to the assistance. As University of California-Irvine professor Kaaryn Gustafson has noted, the intersections of race, income and gender bias were at play in the 1960s and 1970s as black, single mothers were targeted as criminal, lazy, promiscuous welfare cheats.1 The 1980s saw this demographic become the emblem of all that is wrong with government assistance for the poor - the infamous Welfare Queen. Black, single mothers were fictionalized as criminally defrauding the taxpayer, taking in public assistance while driving Cadillacs, eating bon-bons, and presumably getting rich off of drug-dealing boyfriends. Thus the 1990s brought aggressive state attacks on welfare recipients as they were increasingly investigated for fraud and other suspected criminal activities. The welfare system became a system of criminalization and punishment, rather than a program to assist needy families. So-called welfare reform, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, ended federal cash aid programs and replaced them with time-limited, restrictive, state block-grants. New punishable behaviors were mandated and policed, all but erasing the already tenuous line between the welfare and criminal justice systems. Today, when applying for welfare in the United States, many applicants are photographed, finger-printed, drug-tested, interrogated, and asked to prove paternity of children. Similarly, eligibility for public housing is restricted or denied if the applicant has a criminal record, including misdemeanors or a prior lease violation. Further, local Public Housing Authorities can be even more restrictive and evict occupants if a member of their family or another person residing in - or in some cases visiting - commits a crime, such as a misdemeanor drug offense. Poverty, in other words, is too often treated as a criminal offense. Details: Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 2015. 35p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed May 4, 2015 at: http://www.ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/IPS-The-Poor-Get-Prison-Final.pdf Year: 2015 Country: United States URL: http://www.ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/IPS-The-Poor-Get-Prison-Final.pdf Shelf Number: 135492 Keywords: Poverty (U.S.)Racial DisparitiesRacial ProfilingSocioeconomic StatusWelfare |