On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Bill Bartlett<billbartlett at aapt.net.au> wrote:
>
> The US method of criminalising poverty seems very primitive by Australian
> standards. Here, the process is far more subtle. Quite simply, welfare
> benefits are deliberately inadequate, which is bog standard of course. But
> the sophistication is in the system of ensuring that the unemployed are
> quite unable to improve their income by working to earn any extra.
>
> Such extra earnings are punitively taxed. Not only by the taxation system,
> but by dollar for dollar reductions in welfare over a derisory allowable
> earnings limit. Below the allowable earnings threshold, most earned income
> is penalised by 50% welfare witholding, plus normal taxation, plus taxation
> of an equal amount of welfare income (double taxation + 50% witholding).
>
> Of course the intended outcome is that the poor are forced to cheat the
> income security system. Which has a double benefit to the ruling class.
> First of course, they have to earn their extra income under the table,
> forgoing whatever legal protections exist, such as minimum wages and
> conditions.
>
> Severe criminal penalties are enforced against this heinous crime. Single
> mothers are routinely imprisoned for not declaring income while collecting
> welfare, so most welfare recipients are criminals. Thus unable to protest or
> agitate against the system for fear of coming to the attention of the
> poverty police.
>
> Its a beautiful and sophisticated system of social control. Brilliantly
> cost-effective from the viewpoint of the employing class. The crude system
> in the US that is described in that article seems terribly backward by
> comparison? But maybe she has just overlooked the subtle elements?
>
> Bill Bartlett
> Bracknell Tas
>
> At 3:17 AM -0700 9/8/09, John E. Norem wrote:
>
>> August 9, 2009
>> Op-Ed Contributor
>>
>>
>> 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
>> <http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/crimreport/crimreport_2009.pdf>
>> 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.
>>
>> If poverty tends to criminalize people, it is also true that
>> criminalization inexorably impoverishes them. Scott Lovell, another homeless
>> man I interviewed in Washington, earned his record by committing a
>> significant crime - by participating in the armed robbery of a steakhouse
>> when he was 15. Although Mr. Lovell dresses and speaks more like a summer
>> tourist from Ohio than a felon, his criminal record has made it extremely
>> difficult for him to find a job.
>>
>> 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."
>>
>> By far the most reliable way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the
>> wrong-color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor
>> encounters racial profiling, but for decades whole communities have been
>> effectively "profiled" for the suspicious combination of being both
>> dark-skinned and poor, thanks to the "broken windows" or "zero tolerance"
>> theory of policing popularized by Rudy Giuliani, when he was mayor of New
>> York City, and his police chief William Bratton.
>>
>> Flick a cigarette in a heavily patrolled community of color and you're
>> littering; wear the wrong color T-shirt and you're displaying gang
>> allegiance. Just strolling around in a dodgy neighborhood can mark you as a
>> potential suspect, according to "Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of
>> Justice," an eye-opening new book by Paul Butler, a former federal
>> prosecutor in Washington. If you seem at all evasive, which I suppose is
>> like looking "overly anxious" in an airport, Mr. Butler writes, the police
>> "can force you to stop just to investigate why you don't want to talk to
>> them." And don't get grumpy about it or you could be "resisting arrest."
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> In Los Angeles, the fine for truancy is $250; in Dallas, it can be as much
>> as $500 - crushing amounts for people living near the poverty level.
>> According to the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, an advocacy group, 12,000
>> students were ticketed for truancy in 2008.
>>
>> Why does the Bus Riders Union care? Because it estimates that 80 percent
>> of the "truants," especially those who are black or Latino, are merely late
>> for school, thanks to the way that over-filled buses whiz by them without
>> stopping. I met people in Los Angeles who told me they keep their children
>> home if there's the slightest chance of their being late. It's an ingenious
>> anti-truancy policy that discourages parents from sending their youngsters
>> to school.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> And if you should make the mistake of trying to escape via a brief
>> marijuana-induced high, it's "gotcha" all over again, because that of course
>> is illegal too. One result is our staggering level of incarceration, the
>> highest in the world. Today the same number of Americans - 2.3 million -
>> reside in prison as in public housing.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of "This Land Is Their
>> Land: Reports From a Divided Nation."
>>
>>
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