Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?

[balantz]

Published on Sunday, August 9, 2009 by The New York Times
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/09-4

Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?

by Barbara Ehrenreich


It's too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it’s almost illegal to be poor. You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. City officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about the ordinances that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the ’80s and ’90s. “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a city attorney in St. Petersburg, Fla., said in June, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”

In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty. So concludes a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which found that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with ticketing and arrests for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering or carrying an open container of alcohol.

The report lists America’s 10 “meanest” cities — the largest of which are Honolulu, Los Angeles and San Francisco — but new contestants are springing up every day. The City Council in Grand Junction, Colo., has been considering a ban on begging, and at the end of June, Tempe, Ariz., carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent. How do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, “An indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance.

That could be me before the blow-drying and eyeliner, and it’s definitely Al Szekely at any time of day. A grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington — the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Fu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972. He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until last December, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants.

It turned out that Mr. Szekely, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs or curse in front of ladies, did indeed have a warrant — for not appearing in court to face a charge of “criminal trespassing” (for sleeping on a sidewalk in a Washington suburb). So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail. “Can you imagine?” asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Mr. Szekely. “They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless.”

The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, and several members of the group were arrested. A federal judge just overturned the anti-sharing law in Orlando, Fla., but the city is appealing. And now Middletown, Conn., is cracking down on food sharing.

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For Al Szekely, the arrest for trespassing meant a further descent down the circles of hell. While in jail, he lost his slot in the shelter and now sleeps outside the Verizon Center sports arena, where the big problem, in addition to the security guards, is mosquitoes. His stick-thin arms are covered with pink crusty sores, which he treats with a regimen of frantic scratching.

For the not-yet-homeless, there are two main paths to criminalization — one involving debt, and the other skin color. Anyone of any color or pre-recession financial status can fall into debt, and although we pride ourselves on the abolition of debtors’ prison, in at least one state, Texas, people who can’t afford to pay their traffic fines may be made to “sit out their tickets” in jail.

Often the path to legal trouble begins when one of your creditors has a court issue a summons for you, which you fail to honor for one reason or another. (Maybe your address has changed or you never received it.) Now you’re in contempt of court. Or suppose you miss a payment and, before you realize it, your car insurance lapses; then you’re stopped for something like a broken headlight. Depending on the state, you may have your car impounded or face a steep fine — again, exposing you to a possible summons. “There’s just no end to it once the cycle starts,” said Robert Solomon of Yale Law School. “It just keeps accelerating.”

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There’s no minimum age for being sucked into what the Children’s Defense Fund calls “the cradle-to-prison pipeline.” In New York City, a teenager caught in public housing without an ID — say, while visiting a friend or relative — can be charged with criminal trespassing and wind up in juvenile detention, Mishi Faruqee, the director of youth justice programs for the Children’s Defense Fund of New York, told me. In just the past few months, a growing number of cities have taken to ticketing and sometimes handcuffing teenagers found on the streets during school hours.

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The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks.

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Meanwhile, the public housing that remains has become ever more prisonlike, with residents subjected to drug testing and random police sweeps. The safety net, or what’s left of it, has been transformed into a dragnet.

Some of the community organizers I’ve talked to around the country think they know why “zero tolerance” policing has ratcheted up since the recession began. Leonardo Vilchis of the Union de Vecinos, a community organization in Los Angeles, suspects that “poor people have become a source of revenue” for recession-starved cities, and that the police can always find a violation leading to a fine. If so, this is a singularly demented fund-raising strategy. At a Congressional hearing in June, the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers testified about the pervasive “overcriminalization of crimes that are not a risk to public safety,” like sleeping in a cardboard box or jumping turnstiles, which leads to expensively clogged courts and prisons.

A Pew Center study released in March found states spending a record $51.7 billion on corrections, an amount that the center judged, with an excess of moderation, to be “too much.”

But will it be enough — the collision of rising prison populations that we can’t afford and the criminalization of poverty — to force us to break the mad cycle of poverty and punishment? With the number of people in poverty increasing (some estimates suggest it’s up to 45 million to 50 million, from 37 million in 2007) several states are beginning to ease up on the criminalization of poverty — for example, by sending drug offenders to treatment rather than jail, shortening probation and reducing the number of people locked up for technical violations like missed court appointments. But others are tightening the screws: not only increasing the number of “crimes” but also charging prisoners for their room and board — assuring that they’ll be released with potentially criminalizing levels of debt.

Maybe we can’t afford the measures that would begin to alleviate America’s growing poverty — affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation and so forth. I would argue otherwise, but for now I’d be content with a consensus that, if we can’t afford to truly help the poor, neither can we afford to go on tormenting them.

[balantz]

1. This is where the real line is drawn. Not in the fabricated, media driven battles of division. n/t

[Hugin]

2. As soon as it's a legal mandate to pay some rich guy to decline you Health Care it will be...

Illegal in fact and practice.

[create.peace]

3. yes

but that isn't new....

we came back to our toyota chinook which was parked legally on a non-restricted street (by time or size) in palm desert ca, to find the police about to tow it off after an anonymous phone call that it had been there for a week. it had been about 12 hours. the police had opened up the car somehow, and already been inside. we had current tags, no tickets, and were staying in a condo with my dad, about 100 feet away. driving while poor is against the law in many places. this was about 6 years ago.

[silverweb]

4. It always has been.

[waiting for hope]

5. If more jobs are not created and soon,

There are going to be people who never thought in a million years that they might become homeless. Don't forget that most of the prison systems in this country are now "for profit" ... :tinfoilhat: perhaps they are herding new customers.

[dotymed]

6. THE SICKENING THING ABOUT MORE JOBS

is that currently most potential employers run a "credit
check" on perspective employees. Until 3 years ago, I
earned $30.00 an hour as a Union Carpenter. After 3 heart
attacks and 5 (now recalled) heart stents, I lost my home, was
divorced (my choice), was turned down for Social Security
Disability and I have been waiting 3 years to get a disability
hearing. I have joint custody of my son (13) and I am battling
to get food stamps. Luckily I worked enough Union hours to
still have insurance and a $200.00 weekly stipend as long as I
get the Dr.'s to sign off on it. My "banked hours"
will run out though. I am 48 years old, I rent a small house
where I am constantly late on rent because I have to purchase
24 medicines each month to survive. I have a "schedule
A" disability that supposedly allows me to be hired
"non-competitively" in a government job. I have a
B.S. in English (2007)but all I get are rejection letters. I
was arrested for some misdemeanors in my younger years (I
would never steal but I did fight a few times). My FICA score
is non existent since all of these surgeries......a brave new
world... I don't want pity but justice would be nice.

[Wednesdays]

7. Don't worry, the government has always wanted to destroy poverty...

[undergroundpanther]

8. Sometimes

I really wish people that made over 50,000 a year were BARRED from any public office positions,forever. And anyone desiring to run for a political position would be forced to be dirt poor and homeless for 3 years before they even run for office. I am so sick of fucking rich assholes,scared of poor people,the homeless,black people,punks,goths,and anything else that isn't white and status quo crap.
One day the oil will be gone.Cars will be made too expensive or useless. Very few suburbs have bothered to invest anything into public transport and many of these places treat the poor like criminals.


All around in suburban
sprawling,the slowly stranded people there will be forced to see how the other half lives, like the poor they'll lose status,they'll have to walk through tick infested grass,and walk on all sorts of unfriendly terrains for a long distance to survive,if a grocery store is even in walking distance ,Imagine Soccer mommy and khaki polo shirt daddy used to have a well paying job,and their three disaffected kids with issues all carrying rather heavy bags of groceries all the way to their Cull de sac home,or if even more strapped their tent. I bet suddenly the city they ran away from to feel so elite in the suburbs will look better than it ever did when they had the car,a house..and money..

[mudplanet]

9. It has always been illegal to be poor in this country

but people are just becoming more aware of it (for example, you have always been able to get as much justice when charged with a crime as you can afford).

The main difference I see is that now it's impossible to be poor and have any dignity. If you're poor you can't travel or vacation (the only transport you can afford is a bus and it doesn't go anywhere you want to vacation, and once you're there you can't afford a hotel, except the ones that are habituated by prostitutes and drug addicts) and all the cultural messages you get are that, if you don't have money you don't count.

I was a teacher for over a decade and my neighbors were an "upper-lower-class" family with one child and two working parents. One day I got into a discussion with the father about his work and he told me that he'd thought of becoming a teacher but everyone knew what they made. I realized that paying me so little for teaching their kids was their way of telling me exactly what they thought about me. It used to be that teaching was an honorable profession - what you didn't get monetarily you got in prestige. Those days are over. The only thing this culture values or respects is money.

Who can blame so many kids for getting into drugs - it doesn't matter how you make your money, as long as you have it. What's the difference between people with stock in the tobacco companies, defense contractors, private correction corporation, and people that sell drugs - the drug dealers aren't hypocrites.

[CrispyQ]

10. Municipalities are passing ordinances to ban food sharing?

What have we become? :cry:

America is one of the harshest of the developed nations.

[create.peace]

11. and dangerous, too, especially for children

http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-national/20090809/US.Police.Chase.Deaths/

these folks probably would have loved to have one of the clunkers that's been junked. they would have had safety belts for the kids, and the cars are under 25 yo. i feel like i am driving a late model- 1992 plymouth voyager, qualifies for the program, but we can get high twenties gas mileage the way we drive.

[bemildred]

12. the majestic quality of the law which prohibits the wealthy as well as the poor from sleeping under

bridges, from begging in the streets, and from stealing bread."