This is long, but, IMO, very much worth reading.
pubdef.ocgov.com/poverty.htm
*It has been said that a civilized society is best measured by how it treats the poor. If such is the case, we Americans are abject failures. Nationwide over 20% of our children live in poverty. In Los Angeles 30% of all children are poor.
According to the Children Defense Fund, which has collected and studied this data for over a decade: “Recent academic studies demonstrate that the effects of poverty cannot be explained away as mere side effects of single parenthood, race, parents low IQ’s or lack of education.” To the contrary, poverty itself spawns this waste and desolation.
If poverty were a disease it would be the most insidious, devastating, and life threatening disease that Americans suffer. The poor suffer not just economically, but they also suffer lack of opportunity, lack of education, lack of health care, and significantly more violence than others better situated in the community. They suffer higher disease rates, death rates and imprisonment than their affluent brethren. They are imprisoned at much higher rates and they are executed for capital crimes more often than any other group. In fact, they are almost the exclusive recipients of the death penalty.
20.5 percent of all children under age 18 were poor
11.1 percent of White children were poor
39.9 percent of Black children were poor
40.3 percent of Hispanic children were poor and
19.5 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander children were poor
In Washington D.C. and Los Angeles more than 30% of young black men are in jail, on probation, or on parole for the commission of crime. The vast majority of these young men are poor. African American and Hispanic communities have understandably become alarmed. Concerned community leaders complain that entire generations of young minority men are being put at risk by incarceration.
There is good reason to fear that minority men are severely at risk in the criminal justice system. 71% of all “3 strike” offenders in California prisons are African Americans or Latino Americans. What is worse, these men are all serving 25 to life sentences. Unbelievably, many of these men are serving these life sentences for petty theft and minor drug offenses. Offenses such as these are common among the poor. So common in fact that minority people suffer imprisonment wildly disproportional to their numbers in the general population.
For example, while previous studies have shown that African Americans and white Americans use drugs at about the same rate, African Americans are charged at nearly five times the rate of whites, and in “3 strikes” cases at 17 times the rates of whites in Los Angeles.
Minorities are treated differently in the courts. They are viewed with suspicion, they are held in custody longer, they are presumed guilty, their defense is poorly funded compared to the prosecution, and they are often treated abusively by the people who are charged with enforcing our laws.
Even though we are the most affluent country in the world, we continue to commit a greater proportion of our citizens to prison than any other civilized country. The vast majority of these people are poor.
In the past several decades we have increased punishment for hundreds of crimes. We increased punishments for drug use, theft, burglary, robbery, rape, and car jacking. You name the behavior. We increased the punishment.
We enacted new laws; 3 strike laws, one-strike laws, and career criminal laws. For good measure, we increased the number of crimes allowing life sentences and death penalties. We became punishment delirious. We doubled the number of people in prison but did very little to stop serious crime. And who are the people going to jail for these newly enhanced crimes? You have seen the data. Poor people are going to jail.
If crime is on the decrease, someone neglected to talk to the caretakers of our prison system. Prison population in California is about 160,000 and is over twice the prison population in 1987. Most of these inmates are poor minorities and whites.
So, even though it is very clear that our criminal justice system is broken, and many within the system have lost confidence in it, we keep chasing the same solutions. More punishment for longer terms seems to be our only response. Why do we persist in addressing the symptoms rather than the causes? I believe because we have sufficiently isolated the poor who are not like “us”, and sufficiently demeaned them, that we have become indifferent to their plight. It is a matter of insensitivity and arrogance. It is our arrogance. We are more concerned about our status, our houses, our cars and our vacations than we are about taking care of each other.
Our unwillingness or inability to educate ourselves about poverty and do something about it is astounding. Our failure in this regard, may ultimately be very destructive to our democracy. There is already a perception in this country that giving up a few Constitutional rights is a fair exchange for personal safety.
There are other less drastic solutions however; solutions which do not exact increasingly severe jail sentences, solutions that do not further isolate poor minorities, but solutions which reach the causes of poverty and crime. *
***" There is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions: indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skins have different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter."
Robert Kennedy***
