Safety Net is Now Dragnet

There’s no minimum age for being sucked into what the Children’s Defense Fund calls “the cradle-to-prison pipeline.”

            In Los Angeles, the fine for truancy is $250. In Dallas, it can be as much as $500 –- crushing amounts for people living near the poverty level. According to the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union 12,000 students were ticketed for truancy in 2008.

            Why does the Bus Riders Union care? It estimates that 80 percent of the “truants,” especially Blacks and Latinos, are merely late for school. That is because over-filled buses whiz by them without stopping. People in LA told me they keep their children home if there’s the slightest chance of their being late. It’s an ingenious anti-truancy policy that discourages parents from sending their youngsters to school.

In New York City, a teenager caught in public housing without an ID – say, while visiting a friend or relative – can be charged with criminal trespassing and wind up in juvenile detention.

The public housing that remains in the U.S. has become ever more prison-like, with residents subjected to drug testing and random police sweeps.

The safety net, or what’s left of it, has been transformed into a dragnet.

The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement. Starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few others opportunities for employment.

The experience of the poor--especially poor people of color--comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks.

In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has intensified as the economy generates more poor people. Crimes that are not a risk to public safety (jumping turnstiles, sleeping in a cardboard box) expensively clog courts and prisons. A Pew Center study found that states now spend $51.7 billion on corrections!

“Zero tolerance” policing has ratcheted up since the recession began. Poor people have become a source of revenue for recession-starved cities. It’s almost illegal to be poor. The police can always find a violation leading to a fine. This is a singularly demented fund-raising strategy.  Surely if we can’t afford to truly help the poor (though I would argue otherwise), neither can we afford to go on tormenting them.

Barbara Ehrenreich,
Florida

Adapted from AlterNet: Is it Now a Crime to be Poor?