All content tagged with: Poverty Discrimination

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  • Foreword: Innocent Until Proven Poor

    One of the core tenets of our criminal justice system is the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. As the title of the Symposium recognizes, we have allowed our justice system to ignore that presumption for people living in poverty in a variety of ways. Instead, it often inflicts additional and harsher punishment on individuals because of their poverty.

  • Legal Aid’s Once and Future Role for Impacting the Criminalization of Poverty and the War on the Poor

    Recent media coverage and advocacy efforts on behalf of individuals subjected to criminal sanctions as a result of their poverty status has resulted in increased attention on this nation’s troubled history of oppression and control of the poor and people of color. At the federal, state, and local levels, a growing number of policies create criminal sanctions for poverty-related circumstances. These, in turn, result in collateral consequences that unfairly affect those who lack the means to afford their criminal justice experience (i.e., processing costs, fees, and fines), or affect their ability to access employment, housing, or other basic services. These policies also disproportionately affect people of color, and the origins of many of these policies share a twisted history in decades of racial oppression and discrimination. In many respects, these criminal sanctions and collateral consequences lay on the surface of deep-seated social and economic ills that have been neglected, festering over decades and breaking out now in events over the past two years from Ferguson to Baltimore. Challenging these entrenched social and economic inequities will be necessary in order to produce real change for communities struggling against the criminalization of poverty. Legal challenges must be coordinated with community-based social movements emerging in these communities in order to confront the barriers to opportunity and structures that perpetuate inequities. Legal Aid programs have a historical grounding in this type of community-based impact advocacy work and are uniquely positioned to work together with community groups to bring about meaningful change.

  • Keynote Remarks: How the Criminalization of Poverty has Become Normalized in American Culture and Why You Should Care

    The subject of my talk today is how the criminalization of poverty has become normalized in American culture and why you should care.

  • The Ohio Model for Combatting Debtors’ Prisons

    In 2013, the ACLU of Ohio released a report titled The Outskirts of Hope: How Ohio’s Debtors’ Prisons Are Ruining Lives and Costing Communities. The report exposed the blatantly unconstitutional practice in courts across Ohio of jailing people who were too poor to pay their court fines and fees, and along with our ongoing advocacy efforts, resulted in sweeping change across the state. This Essay looks at the destruction modern debtors’ prisons have on individuals, families, and communities and overviews the research, advocacy, and communications tools the ACLU of Ohio has used to successfully combat debtors’ prisons. The goal is to give an overview of the “Ohio Model” for combatting debtors’ prisons and to relay practical advice on launching similar campaigns in other states.

  • Online Case Resolution Systems: Enhancing Access, Fairness, Accuracy, and Efficiency

    Online case resolution (OCR) systems have the potential to dramatically increase access to our justice system. Part I introduces the concept of an OCR system, how it might work in practice, and its likely impact on courts and citizens. Part II argues that OCR systems can lower many of the barriers to going to court by reducing the need for face-to-face resolution of disputes; cutting the amount of time needed for hearings; mitigating litigant confusion and fear; allowing asynchronous scheduling that can accommodate work and child-care schedules; and offering a more reliable and easier-to-use means for litigants to voice their views. These advantages should especially benefit those of lower socioeconomic status, who often suffer disproportionality under the status quo. Part III contends that OCR systems need not compromise a judge’s or a prosecutor’s decision-making process but can actually enhance both. OCR systems can provide more, better, and easier-to-use information, and by removing a litigant’s appearance (race, gender, weight, etc.) from a judge’s consideration, can render outcomes less subject to implicit biases.

  • Keynote Remarks

    In communities across America today, from Ferguson, Missouri, to Flint, Michigan, too many people—especially young people and people of color—live trapped by the weight of poverty and injustice. They suffer the disparate impact of policies driven by, at best, benign neglect, and at worst, deliberate indifference. And they see how discrimination stacks the deck against them. So today, as we discuss the inequality that pervades our criminal justice system—a defining civil rights challenge of the 21st century—we must also acknowledge the broader inequalities we face in other segments of society. Because discrimination in so many areas—from the classroom, to the workforce, to the marketplace—perpetuates the inequality we see in our justice system. And for those already living paycheck-to-paycheck, a single incident—whether an arrest by the police or a fine by the court—can set off a downward spiral. It can lead to a cycle of profound problems that ruin lives and tear apart families. Problems like losing your health care, your job, your children, or your home. As someone who focuses on civil rights work and criminal justice reform, I see these problems every day. But today in America, I also see a country on the cusp of change. Across a wide range of political perspectives, policymakers and advocates have come together to bridge divides and support meaningful criminal justice reform. And I’m proud to say that this administration—and this Department of Justice—has made criminal justice reform a top priority. We believe that our country needs, and deserves, a criminal justice system that more effectively protects our communities, more fairly treats our people, and more prudently spends our resources. And we believe that no matter how deeply rooted and long-standing the injustices that underlie inequality in our criminal justice system—with clear thinking, hard work and collaboration—we can make real progress.

  • Mainstreaming Equality in Federal Budgeting: Addressing Educational Inequities With Regard to the States

    Great Society reformers targeted poverty as the defining characteristic for a novel federal education policy in the United States in 1965. Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), reincarnated within the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, distributes financial aid to disadvantaged students within public schools solely based upon students’ socioeconomic status. This Article does not dispute that financial resources improve student outcomes, but this Article argues that Title I’s funding formula is ineffective, and a new funding scheme – specifically, a mainstreaming equality funding scheme – must replace it. The implementation of this funding scheme will require Congress to acknowledge that poverty in the United States is not a mere set of behaviors and attitudes but is intricately linked to race and class. Mainstreaming equality schemes require that public bodies assess the impact of their policies on equality of opportunity and monitor any adverse impact on the promotion of equality of opportunity. This Article describes how such a scheme would address disparities among students. Second, this Article argues that Congress should define beneficiary groups based on characteristics additional to socioeconomic status, including measures of cultural isolation and local tax revenue contributed to public education. Third, this Article establishes that a federal mainstreaming school funding scheme based on “layered disadvantage” and its multiplicative effects will both acknowledge and address long-time, covered attitudes about race, poverty and privilege in the United States and the ways in which those attitudes continue to enforce a paralyzed outcome, especially for African American students within public schools. Finally, by examining mainstreaming equality models implemented in the European Union, this Article considers in detail the methodology for conducting mainstreaming equality within a federal school funding scheme as implemented by Congress with respect to the individual states.

  • Eatin’ Good? Not in This Neighborhood: A Legal Analysis of Disparities in Food Availability and Quality at Chain Supermarkets in Poverty-Stricken Areas

    Many Americans-especially the poor-face severe hurdles in their attempts to secure the most basic of human needs-food. One reason for this struggle is the tendency of chain supermarkets to provide a limited selection of goods and a lower quality of goods to patrons in less affluent neighborhoods. Healthier items such as soy milks, fresh fish, and lean meats are not present in these stores, and the produce that is present is typically well past the peak of freshness. Yet, if the same patron were to go to another supermarket owned by the same chain--but located in a wealthier neighborhood-she would find a wide selection of healthy foods and fresh produce. What are the poor people who live in the inner cities--who are disproportionately African American and Latino-to do? How can they obtain healthy food against these odds? This Article argues that the actions of the supermarkets are unconscionable, and therefore proposes a federal law that will prevent chain grocery stores from engaging in such practices. The Article first examines the scope of the problem created by these supermarket practices. The Article then explains why current laws are inadequate to address this issue. Finally, the Article proposes that Congress use its authority under the Commerce Clause to enact legislation that would require supermarket chains to carry the same selection and quality of goods at all stores in the same chain.

  • From Race to Class Struggle: Re-Problematizing Critical Race Theory

    The misconstrual of "class" as a theoretical and analytic concept for defining group or individual identity has led, especially during the Cold War period, to its confusion with status, life-style, and other ideological contingencies. This has vitiated the innovative attempt of CRT to link racism and class oppression. We need to reinstate the Marxist category of class derived from the social division of labor that generates antagonistic class relations. Class conflict becomes the key to grasping the totality of social relations of production, as well as the metabolic process of social reproduction in which racism finds its effectivity. This will help us clarify the changing modes of racist practices, especially in global market operations where immigrant female labor plays a decisive role. This Essay uses the example of Filipina domestics as a global social class actualized in its specific historical particularity as gendered, neocolonized subjects of capital accumulation. CRT can be renewed by adopting class struggle as the means of resolving racial injustice through radical structural transformation.