Dan mentioned a riveting piece in the New York Times during one of his recent "round-ups." The article is entitled "Is It Now a Crime to be Poor?" And the answer is yes. Absolutely yes.

I served as an Assistant Public Defender in Dallas County for two and a half years in the late 1990s. And it was a crime to be poor back then too. As a public defender, all of my clients were indigent and I often commented that, most days, I felt more like a poverty lawyer than a criminal defense lawyer. I defended numerous people against charges that they were Driving While License Suspended (DWLS) - people who were often forced to make a choice between putting food on the table or purchasing car insurance to clear a license suspension. I defended a mom who stole jeans from an expensive store so she could sell them to friends in order to buy medicine for her young son who was suffering with juvenile diabetes. I defended countless homeless and mentally ill people against criminal trespass charges.

And I enlisted a large civil firm to challenge Dallas County's practice of jailing people on warrants issued for failure to pay fines and court costs without first holding required hearings to determine whether they could afford to pay the fines and costs. The New York Times piece mentioned the constitutional prohibition against "debtors prison." But our jails are filled with poor people who are "sitting out" costs and fines they can't otherwise pay or who are serving time on charges that stem, essentially, from their poverty. And how much sense does this make? Not only do counties fail to collect the costs and fines, but they pay to incarcerate and feed people for failure to pay the costs and fines -- people who often lose their jobs and fall deeper into poverty while they are sitting in jail. It's a lose-lose proposition.

As Barbara Ehrenreich sets out in the New York times piece, the recent economic downturn is only exacerbating the criminalization of the poor:

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 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 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.

Even in a progressive town like Austin, where I now practice at Sumpter & Gonzalez, there are ordinances galore that aim to push the homeless wherever it is they are supposed to go when they can't be "camping" in the park, or panhandling near an ATM or roadway.

Thankfully, there are also good prosecutors in Austin who get it, and who will dismiss a case if we convince them that the source of the offense was not criminality, but poverty. Getting cases dismissed one at a time is better than nothing, but it's only a very small dent in a huge problem that demands systemic reform. And, let's be honest, even such reform, were it to happen, would hardly begin to address all the day-to-day obstacles faced by poor people.

Indeed, it would only be one small step for the poor.

But a pretty big step for humankind.

Labels: barbara ehrenreich, homelessness, indigent defense, money, poverty, public defenders, what prosecutors do right

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