Author: Christine S. Scott-Hayward
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520298314
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
Most people in jail have not been convicted of a crime. Instead, they have been accused of a crime and cannot afford to post the bail amount to guarantee their freedom until trial. Punishing Poverty examines how the current system of pretrial release detains hundreds of thousands of defendants awaiting trial. Tracing the historical antecedents of the US bail system, with particular attention to the failures of bail reform efforts in the mid to late twentieth century, the authors describe the painful social and economic impact of contemporary bail decisions. The first book-length treatment to analyze how bail reproduces racial and economic inequality throughout the criminal justice system, Punishing Poverty explores reform efforts, as jurisdictions begin to move away from money bail systems, and the attempts of the bail bond industry to push back against such reforms. This accessibly written book gives a succinct overview of the role of pretrial detention in fueling mass incarceration and is essential reading for researchers and reformers alike.
Author: Loïc Wacquant
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392259
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410
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Book Description
The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation and to impose precarious employment on the postindustrial proletariat. It also erects a garish theater of civic morality on whose stage political elites can orchestrate the public vituperation of deviant figures—the teenage “welfare mother,” the ghetto “street thug,” and the roaming “sex predator”—and close the legitimacy deficit they suffer when they discard the established government mission of social and economic protection. By bringing developments in welfare and criminal justice into a single analytic framework attentive to both the instrumental and communicative moments of public policy, Punishing the Poor shows that the prison is not a mere technical implement for law enforcement but a core political institution. And it reveals that the capitalist revolution from above called neoliberalism entails not the advent of “small government” but the building of an overgrown and intrusive penal state deeply injurious to the ideals of democratic citizenship. Visit the author’s website.
Author: Tony Messenger
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250274656
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
In Profit and Punishment, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist exposes the tragedy of modern-day debtors prisons, and how they destroy the lives of poor Americans swept up in a system designed to penalize the most impoverished. “Intimate, raw, and utterly scathing” — Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water “Crucial evidence that the justice system is broken and has to be fixed. Please read this book.” —James Patterson, #1 New York Times bestselling author As a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Tony Messenger has spent years in county and municipal courthouses documenting how poor Americans are convicted of minor crimes and then saddled with exorbitant fines and fees. If they are unable to pay, they are often sent to prison, where they are then charged a pay-to-stay bill, in a cycle that soon creates a mountain of debt that can take years to pay off. These insidious penalties are used to raise money for broken local and state budgets, often overseen by for-profit companies, and it is one of the central issues of the criminal justice reform movement. In the tradition of Evicted and The New Jim Crow, Messenger has written a call to arms, shining a light on a two-tiered system invisible to most Americans. He introduces readers to three single mothers caught up in this system: living in poverty in Missouri, Oklahoma, and South Carolina, whose lives are upended when minor offenses become monumental financial and personal catastrophes. As these women struggle to clear their debt and move on with their lives, readers meet the dogged civil rights advocates and lawmakers fighting by their side to create a more equitable and fair court of justice. In this remarkable feat of reporting, Tony Messenger exposes injustice that is agonizing and infuriating in its mundane cruelty, as he champions the rights and dignity of some of the most vulnerable Americans.
Author: Eva Mysliwiec
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
A Widow of Babong
Author: Kaaryn S Gustafson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814732917
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
Over the last three decades, welfare policies have been informed by popular beliefs that welfare fraud is rampant. As a result, welfare policies have become more punitive and the boundaries between the welfare system and the criminal justice system have blurred—so much so that in some locales prosecution caseloads for welfare fraud exceed welfare caseloads. In reality, some recipients manipulate the welfare system for their own ends, others are gravely hurt by punitive policies, and still others fall somewhere in between. In Cheating Welfare, Kaaryn S. Gustafson endeavors to clear up these gray areas by providing insights into the history, social construction, and lived experience of welfare. She shows why cheating is all but inevitable—not because poor people are immoral, but because ordinary individuals navigating complex systems of rules are likely to become entangled despite their best efforts. Through an examination of the construction of the crime we know as welfare fraud, which she bases on in-depth interviews with welfare recipients in Northern California, Gustafson challenges readers to question their assumptions about welfare policies, welfare recipients, and crime control in the United States.
Author: Virginia Eubanks
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1466885963
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
WINNER: The 2019 Lillian Smith Book Award, 2018 McGannon Center Book Prize, and shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice Astra Taylor, author of The People's Platform: "The single most important book about technology you will read this year." Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: "A must-read." A powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination?and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equity The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years—because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect. Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems—rather than humans—control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile. The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values. This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.
Author: Alexandra Natapoff
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465093809
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
A revelatory account of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals. Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted; it punishes the innocent; and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans -- most of them poor and people of color -- are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of drivers' licenses, jobs, and housing. For too long, misdemeanors have been ignored. But they are crucial to understanding our punitive criminal system and our widening economic and racial divides. A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018
Author: Jessica T Simes
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520380339
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
A spatial view of punishment -- The urban model -- Small cities and mass incarceration -- Social services beyond the city : isolation and regional inequity -- Race and communities of pervasive incarceration -- Punishing places -- Beyond punishing places : a research and reform agenda -- Appendix : data and methodology.
Author: Stephen Pimpare
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1595586962
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
In A People's History of Poverty in America, political scientist Stephen Pimpare brings the human lives and real-life stories of those who struggle with poverty in America to the foreground, vividly describing life as poor and welfare-reliant Americans experience it, from the big city to the rural countryside. Prodigiously researched, A People's History of Poverty in America unearths rich, poignant, and often surprising testimonies—both heart-wrenching and humorous—that range from the early days of the United States to the present day. Pimpare shows us how the poor have found food, secured shelter, and created community, and, most important, he illuminates their battles for dignity and respect in the face of the judgment, control, and disdain that are all too often the price they must pay for charity and government aid. In telling these hidden stories, Pimpare argues eloquently for a fundamental rethinking of poverty, one that includes both a more nuanced understanding of the history of the American welfare state, and a meaningful—and truly accurate—new definition of the poverty line. Hailed by Kirkus Reviews as an “illuminating history of America's poor” and a “useful counter against those who blame the poor for their bad luck,” A People's History of Poverty in America reminds us that poverty is not in itself a moral failure, but our failure to understand it may well be.
Author: Loïc J. D. Wacquant
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816639000
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 227
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Book Description
In this title, the author examines how penal policies emanating from the United States have spread thoughout the world. The author argues that the policies have their roots in a network of Reagan-era conservative think tanks, which used them as weapons in their crusade to dismantle the welfare state and, in effect, criminalise poverty.
