Monetary Sanctions in the Criminal Justice System
"Monetary sanctions have always been part of the U.S. criminal justice system. Today they are receiving new attention, as recent social, political, and legal developments have raised questions about how they affect poverty, racial and socioeconomic inequality, and the fair and efficient admininistration of justice. This summary report draws on evidence culled from reviews of statutes and case law in nine states to draw attention to the policies and practices that govern the imposition, enforcement, and implications of legal financial obligations."
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Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Institutional Care and Poverty: Evidence and Policy Review
The general aim of the study was to conduct an international evidence and policy review of "institutional care" and poverty in order to identify effective and costed strategies for reducing the risks in the four countries of the UK.
...Our primary definition of "institutional care" was that the state assumes a full legal responsibility for the residence and daily care of an individual and this care takes place in a designated physical setting....This definition includes: homes, residential schools, and units for children and vulnerable adults in the care of the state, prisons and other places of detention (immigration centres); psychiatric secure hospitals and centres....
The general aim of the study was to conduct an international evidence and policy review of "institutional care" and poverty in order to identify effective and costed strategies for reducing the risks in the four countries of the UK.
...Our primary definition of "institutional care" was that the state assumes a full legal responsibility for the residence and daily care of an individual and this care takes place in a designated physical setting....This definition includes: homes, residential schools, and units for children and vulnerable adults in the care of the state, prisons and other places of detention (immigration centres); psychiatric secure hospitals and centres....
Poverty, Homelessness & the Criminal Justice System
In the Public Eye: Addressing the Negative Impact of Laws Regulating Public Space on People Experiencing Homelessness
"In a new report, In the Public Eye, author Lucy Adams of Australia’s Justice Connect...elevates the conversation and challenges readers to understand and respond to the issue of criminalization using tools and solutions-based approaches." (Amy L. Sawyer, USICH Regional Coordinator)
The Hidden Ways Urban Design Segregates the Poor
"There's a name for uncomfortable benches, hard-to-reach parks, and ubiquitous surveillance: Disciplinary Architecture.
A few weeks ago, news emerged that a New York building was planning a separate entrance for residents of its low-income units--"poor doors." Outrage ensued, but the truth is, urban design that tries to segregate well-off from welfare is nothing new. Before poor doors there were anti-homeless spikes, pay-per-minute benches, public spaces secluded behind private infrastructure, and more."
The Economics of Police Militarism
"...On Thursday, Jelani Cobb filed a powerful account from the sidewalks and homes of Ferguson. Cobb asks about 'the intertwined economic and law-enforcement issues underlying the protests,” including, for instance, the court fees that many people in Ferguson face, which often begin with minor infractions and eventually become “their own, escalating, violations.' 'We have people who have warrants because of traffic tickets and are effectively imprisoned in their homes,” Malik Ahmed, the C.E.O. of an organization called Better Family Life, told Cobb. “They can’t go outside because they’ll be arrested. In some cases, people actually have jobs but decide that the threat of arrest makes it not worth trying to commute outside their neighborhood.'"
Get Out Of Jail, Inc.
"On a cold November afternoon, Harriet Cleveland, a forty-nine-year-old mother of three, waved me over from the steps of her pink cottage in Montgomery, Alabama. She was off to her part-time job as a custodian at a local day-care center.... We’d need to start walking soon, she explained. The job, which paid seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour, was the only one she’d been able to find for some time, and was four and a half miles away. As we set off..., she recounted the events that had led me to her doorstep: her arrest and jailing for a string of traffic tickets that she was unable to pay. It was, in part, a story of poverty and constraint, but it was also a story of the lucrative and fast-growing 'alternatives to incarceration' industry."
In the Public Eye: Addressing the Negative Impact of Laws Regulating Public Space on People Experiencing Homelessness
"In a new report, In the Public Eye, author Lucy Adams of Australia’s Justice Connect...elevates the conversation and challenges readers to understand and respond to the issue of criminalization using tools and solutions-based approaches." (Amy L. Sawyer, USICH Regional Coordinator)
The Hidden Ways Urban Design Segregates the Poor
"There's a name for uncomfortable benches, hard-to-reach parks, and ubiquitous surveillance: Disciplinary Architecture.
A few weeks ago, news emerged that a New York building was planning a separate entrance for residents of its low-income units--"poor doors." Outrage ensued, but the truth is, urban design that tries to segregate well-off from welfare is nothing new. Before poor doors there were anti-homeless spikes, pay-per-minute benches, public spaces secluded behind private infrastructure, and more."
The Economics of Police Militarism
"...On Thursday, Jelani Cobb filed a powerful account from the sidewalks and homes of Ferguson. Cobb asks about 'the intertwined economic and law-enforcement issues underlying the protests,” including, for instance, the court fees that many people in Ferguson face, which often begin with minor infractions and eventually become “their own, escalating, violations.' 'We have people who have warrants because of traffic tickets and are effectively imprisoned in their homes,” Malik Ahmed, the C.E.O. of an organization called Better Family Life, told Cobb. “They can’t go outside because they’ll be arrested. In some cases, people actually have jobs but decide that the threat of arrest makes it not worth trying to commute outside their neighborhood.'"
Get Out Of Jail, Inc.
"On a cold November afternoon, Harriet Cleveland, a forty-nine-year-old mother of three, waved me over from the steps of her pink cottage in Montgomery, Alabama. She was off to her part-time job as a custodian at a local day-care center.... We’d need to start walking soon, she explained. The job, which paid seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour, was the only one she’d been able to find for some time, and was four and a half miles away. As we set off..., she recounted the events that had led me to her doorstep: her arrest and jailing for a string of traffic tickets that she was unable to pay. It was, in part, a story of poverty and constraint, but it was also a story of the lucrative and fast-growing 'alternatives to incarceration' industry."
Poverty/Homelessness
Palliative Care Program Helps Homeless In Their Final Days
Called PEACH -- for Palliative Education and Care for the Homeless -- the watchword of the mobile program is to give individuals the dignity of choosing where they receive medical and supportive care, and hopefully where they will able to die.
Former Police Chief: Anti-Homelessness Laws In U.S. Are "Close to Ethnic Cleansing"
Since 2009, the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty has been analyzing anti-homelessness measures in 187 cities. The organization concluded in a recent study that such costly ordinances are on the rise and have not proven to work in reducing homelessness rates.
Read the NLCHP Report
Palliative Care Program Helps Homeless In Their Final Days
Called PEACH -- for Palliative Education and Care for the Homeless -- the watchword of the mobile program is to give individuals the dignity of choosing where they receive medical and supportive care, and hopefully where they will able to die.
Former Police Chief: Anti-Homelessness Laws In U.S. Are "Close to Ethnic Cleansing"
Since 2009, the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty has been analyzing anti-homelessness measures in 187 cities. The organization concluded in a recent study that such costly ordinances are on the rise and have not proven to work in reducing homelessness rates.
Read the NLCHP Report
The Three Biggest Right-Wing Lies About Poverty
Rather than confront poverty by extending jobless benefits to the
long-term unemployed, endorsing a higher minimum wage, or supporting
jobs programs, conservative Republicans are taking a different tack.
They’re peddling three big lies about poverty. To wit:
Lie #1: Economic growth reduces poverty.
Meanwhile, the share of Americans in poverty remains around 15 percent. That’s even higher than it was in the early 1970s.
How can the economy have grown so much while most people’s wages go nowhere and the poor remain poor? Because almost all the gains have gone to the top.
Read on...
They’re peddling three big lies about poverty. To wit:
Lie #1: Economic growth reduces poverty.
Advertisement
“The best anti-poverty program,” wrote Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, in the Wall Street Journal, “is economic growth.”
Wrong. Since the late 1970s, the economy has grown 147 percent
per capita but almost nothing has trickled down. The typical American
worker is earning just about what he or she earned three decades ago,
adjusted for inflation.Meanwhile, the share of Americans in poverty remains around 15 percent. That’s even higher than it was in the early 1970s.
How can the economy have grown so much while most people’s wages go nowhere and the poor remain poor? Because almost all the gains have gone to the top.
Read on...
Do hard times spark more crime?
As concern about economic inequality rises to the top of the issue
agenda, it is instructive to note that the upturn in poverty of recent
years has not been accompanied by a rise in violent crime. To the
contrary, since 2008, unemployment and homicides have been inversely
related.
Is this a puzzling
anomaly? Most people assume that hard times cause crime spikes. They
reason, plausibly enough, that financial pressures — as a consequence
of, say, becoming unemployed — lead to stress, anger and violence.
Many criminologists agree. The "strain theory" of crime holds that high or rising unemployment and poverty rates may be indicators of increasingly unequal opportunities, and that periods of sharply unequal opportunity are likely to produce more crime.
Read on...
This is an op-ed from the LATimes. Tom
Many criminologists agree. The "strain theory" of crime holds that high or rising unemployment and poverty rates may be indicators of increasingly unequal opportunities, and that periods of sharply unequal opportunity are likely to produce more crime.
Read on...
This is an op-ed from the LATimes. Tom
Noam Chomsky: America Hates Its Poor
An article that recently
came out in Rolling Stone, titled “Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail,”
by Matt Taibbi, asserts that the government is afraid to prosecute
powerful bankers, such as those running HSBC. Taibbi says that there’s
“an arrestable class and an unarrestable class.” What is your view on
the current state of class war in the U.S.?
We don’t use the term “working class” here because it’s a taboo term. You’re supposed to say “middle class,” because it helps diminish the understanding that there’s a class war going on.
Read on....
2 Years in Jail for Sitting on a Milk Crate? The Shocking Ways America Punishes Poor People Living on the Street
Laws all over the country are designed solely to target the homeless. There are better solutions.
Editor's note: There are more than one million homeless people in America and 138 million people who live paycheck to paycheck. Many more are struggling, wondering how they'll make rent or get enough food. Those numbers are astounding. This is America. Many proudly think our society is fair, but the evidence overwhelmingly shows that fairness in America is a myth. In the weeks and months ahead, AlterNet will shine more light on America's economic injustice in an ongoing series, Hard Times USA. Since many have chosen to look aside, or think the traditional ways of doing politics will fix things, there is still much to learn about how this problem will be solved, or not solved.
We are launching our ongoing series with two articles today: Part 1, below, looks at how America punishes poor people living on the street, part of a larger pattern of dealing with poverty through criminalization rather than social and policy fixes that have been shown to work better.
In 2008, Atlanta police orchestrated an unusual sting: officers shed their uniforms to go undercover as tourists and office workers, a stunt designed to entrap beggars in the city's tourist areas. Forty-four people were arrested for panhandling in one month. The best part about the sting, police officials said at the time, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, was that while actual tourists rarely bothered to come back to testify about their terrible abuse at the hands of the city's beggars, the undercover cops would make for enthusiastic witnesses. At the time, Atlanta had banned panhandling within 15 feet of an ATM, bus stop, taxi stand, payphone, public toilet -- and anywhere after dark.
Laws that restrict panhandling are designed to target poor people living on the street. Other examples of laws that apply almost exclusively to the unhoused include bans on sitting or lying down on the sidewalk, eating in public, setting up camp or sleeping in a park or other public places. Advocates say these laws are used as a tool to drive the homeless out of sight.
Read on....
Editor's note: There are more than one million homeless people in America and 138 million people who live paycheck to paycheck. Many more are struggling, wondering how they'll make rent or get enough food. Those numbers are astounding. This is America. Many proudly think our society is fair, but the evidence overwhelmingly shows that fairness in America is a myth. In the weeks and months ahead, AlterNet will shine more light on America's economic injustice in an ongoing series, Hard Times USA. Since many have chosen to look aside, or think the traditional ways of doing politics will fix things, there is still much to learn about how this problem will be solved, or not solved.
We are launching our ongoing series with two articles today: Part 1, below, looks at how America punishes poor people living on the street, part of a larger pattern of dealing with poverty through criminalization rather than social and policy fixes that have been shown to work better.
In 2008, Atlanta police orchestrated an unusual sting: officers shed their uniforms to go undercover as tourists and office workers, a stunt designed to entrap beggars in the city's tourist areas. Forty-four people were arrested for panhandling in one month. The best part about the sting, police officials said at the time, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, was that while actual tourists rarely bothered to come back to testify about their terrible abuse at the hands of the city's beggars, the undercover cops would make for enthusiastic witnesses. At the time, Atlanta had banned panhandling within 15 feet of an ATM, bus stop, taxi stand, payphone, public toilet -- and anywhere after dark.
Laws that restrict panhandling are designed to target poor people living on the street. Other examples of laws that apply almost exclusively to the unhoused include bans on sitting or lying down on the sidewalk, eating in public, setting up camp or sleeping in a park or other public places. Advocates say these laws are used as a tool to drive the homeless out of sight.
Read on....
Turning Poverty Into an American Crime
I completed the manuscript for Nickel and Dimed in a time of seemingly boundless prosperity. Technology innovators and venture capitalists were acquiring sudden fortunes, buying up McMansions like the ones I had cleaned in Maine and much larger. Even secretaries in some high-tech firms were striking it rich with their stock options. There was loose talk about a permanent conquest of the business cycle, and a sassy new spirit infecting American capitalism. In San Francisco, a billboard for an e-trading firm proclaimed, “Make love not war,” and then—down at the bottom—“Screw it, just make money.”
When Nickel and Dimed was published in May 2001, cracks were appearing in the dot-com bubble and the stock market had begun to falter, but the book still evidently came as a surprise, even a revelation, to many. Again and again, in that first year or two after publication, people came up to me and opened with the words, “I never thought...” or “I hadn’t realized...”
Read on...
When Nickel and Dimed was published in May 2001, cracks were appearing in the dot-com bubble and the stock market had begun to falter, but the book still evidently came as a surprise, even a revelation, to many. Again and again, in that first year or two after publication, people came up to me and opened with the words, “I never thought...” or “I hadn’t realized...”
Read on...
Women's Day Marks Crisis of Poverty, Violence for Some
NEW DELHI - Indian activists marked International Women's Day on Sunday by protesting over a spate of violent attacks launched on women by religious extremists in the name of "moral policing."
A collective formed by residents in Bangalore, in India's south, met in parks and open areas where young Hindu extremists have targeted women for wearing jeans, or being seen in public with men.
While women from Australia to Liberia gathered to hail achievements and to campaign on issues such as work equality, voting rights and abortion access, there was little to celebrate for the female population in many parts of the world.
Read on...
A collective formed by residents in Bangalore, in India's south, met in parks and open areas where young Hindu extremists have targeted women for wearing jeans, or being seen in public with men.
While women from Australia to Liberia gathered to hail achievements and to campaign on issues such as work equality, voting rights and abortion access, there was little to celebrate for the female population in many parts of the world.
Read on...
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