Download or read book Punishing Poverty written by Christine S. Scott-Hayward and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people in jail have not been convicted of a crime. Instead, they have been accused of a crime and cannot afford to post the bail amount to guarantee their freedom until trial. Punishing Poverty examines how the current system of pretrial release detains hundreds of thousands of defendants awaiting trial. Tracing the historical antecedents of the US bail system, with particular attention to the failures of bail reform efforts in the mid to late twentieth century, the authors describe the painful social and economic impact of contemporary bail decisions. The first book-length treatment to analyze how bail reproduces racial and economic inequality throughout the criminal justice system, Punishing Poverty explores reform efforts, as jurisdictions begin to move away from money bail systems, and the attempts of the bail bond industry to push back against such reforms. This accessibly written book gives a succinct overview of the role of pretrial detention in fueling mass incarceration and is essential reading for researchers and reformers alike.

Download or read book Profit and Punishment written by Tony Messenger and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Profit and Punishment, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist exposes the tragedy of modern-day debtors prisons, and how they destroy the lives of poor Americans swept up in a system designed to penalize the most impoverished. “Intimate, raw, and utterly scathing” — Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water “Crucial evidence that the justice system is broken and has to be fixed. Please read this book.” —James Patterson, #1 New York Times bestselling author As a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Tony Messenger has spent years in county and municipal courthouses documenting how poor Americans are convicted of minor crimes and then saddled with exorbitant fines and fees. If they are unable to pay, they are often sent to prison, where they are then charged a pay-to-stay bill, in a cycle that soon creates a mountain of debt that can take years to pay off. These insidious penalties are used to raise money for broken local and state budgets, often overseen by for-profit companies, and it is one of the central issues of the criminal justice reform movement. In the tradition of Evicted and The New Jim Crow, Messenger has written a call to arms, shining a light on a two-tiered system invisible to most Americans. He introduces readers to three single mothers caught up in this system: living in poverty in Missouri, Oklahoma, and South Carolina, whose lives are upended when minor offenses become monumental financial and personal catastrophes. As these women struggle to clear their debt and move on with their lives, readers meet the dogged civil rights advocates and lawmakers fighting by their side to create a more equitable and fair court of justice. In this remarkable feat of reporting, Tony Messenger exposes injustice that is agonizing and infuriating in its mundane cruelty, as he champions the rights and dignity of some of the most vulnerable Americans.

Download or read book Prosecuting Poverty Criminalizing Care written by Wendy A. Bach and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-09 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book details how, in poor communities, access to healthcare and social support is linked to punishment systems.

Download or read book Punishing the Poor written by Loïc Wacquant and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-22 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation and to impose precarious employment on the postindustrial proletariat. It also erects a garish theater of civic morality on whose stage political elites can orchestrate the public vituperation of deviant figures—the teenage “welfare mother,” the ghetto “street thug,” and the roaming “sex predator”—and close the legitimacy deficit they suffer when they discard the established government mission of social and economic protection. By bringing developments in welfare and criminal justice into a single analytic framework attentive to both the instrumental and communicative moments of public policy, Punishing the Poor shows that the prison is not a mere technical implement for law enforcement but a core political institution. And it reveals that the capitalist revolution from above called neoliberalism entails not the advent of “small government” but the building of an overgrown and intrusive penal state deeply injurious to the ideals of democratic citizenship. Visit the author’s website.

Download or read book Not a Crime to Be Poor written by Peter Edelman and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awarded "Special Recognition" by the 2018 Robert F. Kennedy Book & Journalism Awards Finalist for the American Bar Association's 2018 Silver Gavel Book Award Named one of the "10 books to read after you've read Evicted" by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "Essential reading for anyone trying to understand the demands of social justice in America."—Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy Winner of a special Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the book that Evicted author Matthew Desmond calls "a powerful investigation into the ways the United States has addressed poverty . . . lucid and troubling" In one of the richest countries on Earth it has effectively become a crime to be poor. For example, in Ferguson, Missouri, the U.S. Department of Justice didn't just expose racially biased policing; it also exposed exorbitant fines and fees for minor crimes that mainly hit the city's poor, African American population, resulting in jail by the thousands. As Peter Edelman explains in Not a Crime to Be Poor, in fact Ferguson is everywhere: the debtors' prisons of the twenty-first century. The anti-tax revolution that began with the Reagan era led state and local governments, starved for revenues, to squeeze ordinary people, collect fines and fees to the tune of 10 million people who now owe $50 billion. Nor is the criminalization of poverty confined to money. Schoolchildren are sent to court for playground skirmishes that previously sent them to the principal's office. Women are evicted from their homes for calling the police too often to ask for protection from domestic violence. The homeless are arrested for sleeping in the park or urinating in public. A former aide to Robert F. Kennedy and senior official in the Clinton administration, Peter Edelman has devoted his life to understanding the causes of poverty. As Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy has said, "No one has been more committed to struggles against impoverishment and its cruel consequences than Peter Edelman." And former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes, "If there is one essential book on the great tragedy of poverty and inequality in America, this is it."

Download or read book Penalizing Poverty written by Helen A. Anderson and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 59 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over 30 years ago the United States Supreme Court upheld an Oregon statute that allowed sentencing courts, with a number of important procedural safeguards, to impose on indigent criminal defendants the obligation to repay the cost of their court appointed attorneys. The practice of ordering recoupment or contribution (application fees or co-pays) of public defender attorney fees is widespread, although collection rates are unsurprisingly low. Developments since the Court's decision in Fuller v. Oregon show that not only is recoupment not cost-effective, but it too easily becomes an aspect of punishment, rather than legitimate cost-recovery. In a number of jurisdictions, defendants are ordered to repay the cost of their attorney regardless of their ability to pay and without any notice or opportunity to be heard. Many are ordered to pay as a condition of probation or parole, which means they pay under threat of incarceration. In these jurisdictions, recoupment violates the Sixth Amendment, as well as the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. Constitutional problems are exacerbated by the potential for ethical violations: public defenders may have conflicts of interest when they are required to both submit bills to the court and object to those bills on behalf of their clients. And too often defendants are not warned at the outset that they may be responsible for attorney fees or how those fees will be calculated. In any other context, a client is entitled under the ethical rules to a clear statement of the basis for the fee at the time the lawyer is engaged. In addition, the thirty years since Fuller have verified that recoupment is bad policy because it imposes punishing debt without real fiscal benefit. It is time to abandon practices that penalize defendants for being poor and exercising their right to counsel.

Download or read book A Pound of Flesh written by Alexes Harris and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2016-06-08 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over seven million Americans are either incarcerated, on probation, or on parole, with their criminal records often following them for life and affecting access to higher education, jobs, and housing. Court-ordered monetary sanctions that compel criminal defendants to pay fines, fees, surcharges, and restitution further inhibit their ability to reenter society. In A Pound of Flesh, sociologist Alexes Harris analyzes the rise of monetary sanctions in the criminal justice system and shows how they permanently penalize and marginalize the poor. She exposes the damaging effects of a little-understood component of criminal sentencing and shows how it further perpetuates racial and economic inequality. Harris draws from extensive sentencing data, legal documents, observations of court hearings, and interviews with defendants, judges, prosecutors, and other court officials. She documents how low-income defendants are affected by monetary sanctions, which include fees for public defenders and a variety of processing charges. Until these debts are paid in full, individuals remain under judicial supervision, subject to court summons, warrants, and jail stays. As a result of interest and surcharges that accumulate on unpaid financial penalties, these monetary sanctions often become insurmountable legal debts which many offenders carry for the remainder of their lives. Harris finds that such fiscal sentences, which are imposed disproportionately on low-income minorities, help create a permanent economic underclass and deepen social stratification. A Pound of Flesh delves into the court practices of five counties in Washington State to illustrate the ways in which subjective sentencing shapes the practice of monetary sanctions. Judges and court clerks hold a considerable degree of discretion in the sentencing and monitoring of monetary sanctions and rely on individual values—such as personal responsibility, meritocracy, and paternalism—to determine how much and when offenders should pay. Harris shows that monetary sanctions are imposed at different rates across jurisdictions, with little or no state government oversight. Local officials’ reliance on their own values and beliefs can also push offenders further into debt—for example, when judges charge defendants who lack the means to pay their fines with contempt of court and penalize them with additional fines or jail time. A Pound of Flesh provides a timely examination of how monetary sanctions permanently bind poor offenders to the judicial system. Harris concludes that in letting monetary sanctions go unchecked, we have created a two-tiered legal system that imposes additional burdens on already-marginalized groups.

Download or read book Poverty Law Policy and Practice written by Juliet Brodie and published by Aspen Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-14 with total page 1083 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poverty Law, Policy, and Practice is organized around an overview and history of federal policies, significant poverty law cases, and major government antipoverty programs—welfare, housing, health, legal aid, etc.--which map onto important theoretical, doctrinal, policy, and practice questions. The book includes academic debates about the nature and causes of poverty as well as various texts that help illuminate the struggles faced by poor people. Throughout, it contains reading selections highlighting different perspectives on whether poverty is primarily caused by individual actions, structural constraints, or a mix of both. Readers will come away from the book with both a sense of the legal and policy challenges that confront antipoverty efforts, and with an understanding of the trade-offs inherent in different government approaches to dealing with poverty. New to the Second Edition: Updated coverage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) Updated coverage of criminalization of poverty and efforts to decriminalize poverty Additional content for every chapter, with an emphasis on new cases, data, and sources Professors and students will benefit from: Three beginning chapters of general background on poverty numbers (data), social welfare (policy) and constitutional law (doctrine), followed by substantive chapters that can be selected based on professor interest, which makes the book easy to use even for 2-credit classes Emerging topics at the intersection of criminal law and poverty, markets and poverty, and human rights and poverty, in addition to traditional poverty law topics An author team with a combined experience of more than 100 years of teaching and practicing poverty law Highlights throughout the text to the racial and gendered history and nature of poverty in America An emphasis on presenting the most important topics accessibly, with careful editing and selection of excerpts to make the most of student and professor time A mix in every chapter of theory, program details, advocacy strategies, and the experiences of poor people

Download or read book Poverty Regulation Social Justice written by Diane Crocker and published by Fernwood Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-10T00:00:00Z with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerging from a public colloquium on the criminalization of poverty, this volume critically interrogates how state and private practices have increasingly come to over-regulate people with severely limited economic resources, and understands this regulation as part of the dynamics of liberal capitalism. Exploring issues such as homelessness, social assistance and single mothers, and written from a diversity of perspectives from academics to frontline workers, policy-makers and those affected first hand by these practices, this book aims to help readers imagine a more compassionate future.

Download or read book Punishing the Poor written by James Goldston and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 7 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Criminal Justice in Ireland written by Paul O'Mahony and published by Institute of Public Administration. This book was released on 2002 with total page 852 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprehensive overview of the Irish criminal justice system, its current problems and its vision for the future. Collection of essays by major office-holders, experienced practitioners, leading academics, legal scholars, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers and educationalists.

Download or read book Punishing the Poor written by Kay Andrews and published by Macmillan Children's Books. This book was released on 1990 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reveals that the Conservatives' attack on the Welfare State is not only unjust but inefficient. It shows how the caring professionals who run our social services have been put in the untenable position where the policies they administer are punitive, discriminatory and inegalitarian.

Download or read book Poor People s Politics written by Javier Auyero and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVExamines how Argentina's urban poor use political networks and informal webs of reciprocal help to solve their everyday survival needs/div

Download or read book Poverty Regulation and Social Justice written by Val Marie Johnson and published by Fernwood Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "By 2004, Ontario and British Columbia implemented "safe streets" legislation, laws that criminalize the economic activities, such as panhandling and squeegeeing, of people living in poverty. Concerned that Nova Scotia would do the same, the editors of this volume partnered with community groups to organize a public colloquium on the criminalization of poverty. Contributors to the colloquium from across Canada included a diversity of voices, from academics, policy makers and frontline workers to those affected first hand by these policies. This book, emerging from that conference, critically interrogates how state and private practices have increasingly come to over-regulate people with severely limited economic resources, and argues that the criminalization of our society's most vulnerable, the poor, women, the racialized, the disabled, youth, is materially and symbolically central to neoliberal politics and economics. The essays here also point to new ways of moving forward, approaches to poverty that minimize the use of law and regulation and have the potential to create a more compassionate future"--Back cover.

Download or read book Punishment Without Crime written by Alexandra Natapoff and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-12-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory account of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals. Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted; it punishes the innocent; and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans -- most of them poor and people of color -- are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of drivers' licenses, jobs, and housing. For too long, misdemeanors have been ignored. But they are crucial to understanding our punitive criminal system and our widening economic and racial divides. A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018

Download or read book Cases and Materials on Poverty Law written by Julie A. Nice and published by West Academic Publishing. This book was released on 1997 with total page 908 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This law school casebook examines how society uses law to impact the realities of existence for poor people. It explores an emerging orthodoxy ; that government welfare programs harm more than they help. The first section focuses on conceptualizing poverty law theory through exploring current poverty, the historical legacies influencing welfare policy, and competing public policy perspectives on welfare. The second section examines poverty law practice, including challenges for poverty lawyers and the constitutional issues related to due process, equal protection, and the unconstitutional conditions dilemma. The third section discusses welfare reform and its focus on family and work.

Download or read book A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 619 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The strengths and abilities children develop from infancy through adolescence are crucial for their physical, emotional, and cognitive growth, which in turn help them to achieve success in school and to become responsible, economically self-sufficient, and healthy adults. Capable, responsible, and healthy adults are clearly the foundation of a well-functioning and prosperous society, yet America's future is not as secure as it could be because millions of American children live in families with incomes below the poverty line. A wealth of evidence suggests that a lack of adequate economic resources for families with children compromises these children's ability to grow and achieve adult success, hurting them and the broader society. A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty reviews the research on linkages between child poverty and child well-being, and analyzes the poverty-reducing effects of major assistance programs directed at children and families. This report also provides policy and program recommendations for reducing the number of children living in poverty in the United States by half within 10 years.