By Isabelle Mercado
In the United States, the criminal justice system has become an industry that profits off of criminalizing the poor; a practice that perpetuates and worsens the cycle of poverty rather than promotes justice as it is meant to do. With the highest Gini rate of inequality compared to all western countries and a record of income inequality last seen a year before The Great Depression, it is apparent that the United States is facing a critical problem with poverty. However, rather than fortify the economic safety net with higher taxes and increased spending on social welfare programs, the U.S. has turned to mass incarceration not only as a method of funding government programs, but also as a way to temporarily solve its severe problem with poverty.
The policies and practices that have led to the extreme criminalization of poverty began in the 1970s. Tax cuts under the Reagan administration introduced revenue gaps nationwide and budget cuts proved to be insufficient in filling the gap. As a result, “exorbitant fines and fees” for low level crimes “[were] designed to make up for revenue shortfalls,” meanwhile white collar criminals comparatively receive “slaps on the wrist for financial crimes” and owe a cumulation of “$450 billion in back taxes, fines and fees.” In the early 80’s the “broken windows” law enforcement policy emerged. The “broken windows” policy was founded on the idea that “mass arrests for minor offenses promote community order and civic tranquility, ” preventing more serious crimes. Under the guise of promoting public peace, this policy disproportionately targeted poor people (especially those of color), leading to mass incarceration of the poor, which contributed to the rigid cycle of poverty since a majority of the poor arrested could not afford to pay bail.
As a result of these policies, the criminal justice system became a profitable industry which “ensnares poor defendants in cycles of debt, probation and incarceration,” disproportionately targeting communities of color and perpetuating the unforgiving cycle of poverty. Today, the criminal justice system continues to function as a profitable machine of institutional racism, ableism, sexism and classism. Due to funding shortages for public housing, law enforcement is increasingly being used to drive the homeless off of city streets and into jails for low level offenses. An increase in budget cuts to addiction and mental health services has resulted in prisons becoming “de facto mental hospitals, […] with a special impact on minorities and low-income people.” Even women and children are being affected by this increase in criminalization. In communities with underfunded police departments there has been a rise in “chronic nuisance” ordinances which has the ability to evict women and victims of domestic abuse from their homes, for “calling 911 too often to seek protection from domestic abuse.” With stricter punitive measures and the introduction of policing in schools, children, especially in poor communities of color, are also being affected by the increase in criminalization. Increasingly children are being “arrested and send to juvenile and even adult courts for behavior that not long ago was handled with a reprimand.”
Why is this happening? Why does the government continue to expand and depend on systems like the prison industrial complex? Afterall, the United States is one of the richest, most powerful and technologically advanced nations in the world. This nation has the economic resources required to alleviate the extreme poverty its citizens face, so why doesn’t it? In order to substantially reduce poverty, there would need to be an increased spending on social welfare programs, higher taxes on the upper class and a decriminalization of poverty. The U.S. has the resources to accomplish this, however what the U.S. lacks is a government that has the incentive to commit to supporting its vulnerable citizens. In the U.S., politicians gain and retain power by serving the demands of their benefactors, which overwhelmingly are billionaire lobbyists and corporate special interest groups who benefit from the prison industrial complex, low taxes for the rich, and cutbacks to workers’ rights. And so although America has the ability to alleviate poverty, substantial change will not come from within this system controlled by billionaire lobbyists and dependent on extortion of the poor. Substantial change will come when the people recognize the injustice around them, organize and demand the dismantling of oppression in our institutions. Extortion of the poor and cuts to public programs has never been and will never be a sustainable method of bridging revenue gaps. It is already apparent that there are “close correlations between a nation’s degree of income inequality and it’s rates of homicide, imprisonment, infant mortality, teenage births, and obesity” and that these problems also drain a nation’s resources since they increase the cost of healthcare, security and prisons. However, income inequality will also have harmful effects on powerful companies, the U.S. economy and U.S. global authority. The shrinking of the middle class will prove detrimental to the stable consumer behavior that many businesses rely on, which will have a harmful effect on the U.S. economy. The United States’ prestige and authority as a global policer of human rights is undermined by its extreme poverty rates, increasing social inequality, decreasing prospects of social mobility, and its globally ranked first place position as the country with the highest incarceration rate.. Extortion of the poor and cuts to public programs has never been and will never be a sustainable method of bridging revenue gaps. And so the U.S.’s poverty industry will either be dismantled externally through public demand or the industry itself will collapse from within. As U.N. special rapporteur Philip Alston stated in his 2017 address on U.S. poverty, “At the end of the day, the persistence of extreme poverty [in the U.S.] is a political choice made by those in power, with political will, it could readily be eliminated.” If those in power fail to resolve this dire issue, the American people must organize themselves and work together to dismantle institutions of oppression and stop the criminalization of the poor.