Not a Crime to Be Poor, Peter Edelman
Not a Crime to Be Poor, Peter Edelman
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Not a Crime to Be Poor
The Criminalization of Poverty in America

Author: Peter Edelman

Narrator: Eric G. Dove

Unabridged: 7 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/31/2017


Synopsis

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.

About Peter Edelman

Peter Edelman is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law and Public Policy and the faculty director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Georgetown University Law Center. Edelman was a top advisor to Senator Robert F. Kennedy and served in President Bill Clinton’s administration. He is the author of So Rich, So Poor (The New Press) and lives in Washington, D.C.


Reviews

Goodreads review by kelly

Very eye-opening book about the manner in which American poverty has become criminalized over the last 30 years--through mass incarceration, the money bail system, child support enforcement, housing ordinances, etc. What's interesting about Edelman's book is that it is mostly solutions based; instea......more

Goodreads review by Sara

This book is a great analysis about the impact of poverty on involvement in the America’s courts. From Ferguson to Georgia and many other places, the author takes a deep dive into the ways that courts as moneymakers are completely normalized in our country. But he doesn’t stop there. He makes a stro......more

Goodreads review by Benya

One of my favorite informative reads this week. Did you know that employment gaps because of criminal records cost the U.S. gross domestic product an estimated over $65 billion a year, or that mass incarceration costs upwards of $80 billion a year? Peter Edelman offers a thoroughly researched, pierc......more