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Not a Crime to Be Poor
Not a Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America | Peter Edelman
2 posts | 2 read | 2 to read
In addition to exposing racially biased policing, the Justice Department’s Ferguson Report exposed to the world a system of fines and fees levied for minor crimes in Ferguson, Missouri, that, when they proved too expensive for Ferguson’s largely poor, African American population, resulted in jail sentences for thousands of people. As former staffer to Robert F. Kennedy and current Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman explains in Not a Crime to Be Poor, Ferguson is everywhere in America today. Through money bail systems, fees and fines, strictly enforced laws and regulations against behavior including trespassing and public urination that largely affect the homeless, and the substitution of prisons and jails for the mental hospitals that have traditionally served the impoverished, in one of the richest countries on Earth we have effectively made it a crime to be poor. Edelman, who famously resigned from the administration of Bill Clinton over welfare "reform," connects the dots between these policies and others including school discipline in poor communities, child support policies affecting the poor, public housing ordinances, addiction treatment, and the specter of public benefits fraud to paint a picture of a mean-spirited, retributive system that seals whole communities into inescapable cycles of poverty.
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review
Jana
Mehso-so

If you want a meticulously researched, dry, statistics-driven, anecdotal book explaining why and how it is expensive and criminal to poor, you will love this book. This is perfect for a classroom setting but as a read for someone who is non-academically interested in this topic, both policy-wise and sociologically, I was hoping for something a little more...human. He discusses success stories and how they can be replicated but it‘s all business.