The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder Published 9/10/2019

The Criminalization of Poverty in America w/ Peter Edelman 

Report Peter Edelman (@peterbedelman), Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law and Public Policy and the faculty director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Georgetown University Law Center, joins us to discuss his book, 'Not a Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America.'

Interview: 24.00 - 57.37

Awarded “Special Recognition” by the 2018 Robert F. Kennedy Book & Journalism Awards Finalist for the American Bar Association’s 2018 Silver Gavel Book Award Named one of the “10 books to read after you've read Evicted” by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “Essential reading for anyone trying to understand the demands of social justice in America.”—Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy Winner of a special Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the book that Evicted author Matthew Desmond calls “a powerful investigation into the ways the United States has addressed poverty . . . lucid and troubling” In one of the richest countries on Earth it has effectively become a crime to be poor. For example, in Ferguson, Missouri, the U.S. Department of Justice didn’t just expose racially biased policing; it also exposed exorbitant fines and fees for minor crimes that mainly hit the city’s poor, African American population, resulting in jail by the thousands. As Peter Edelman explains in Not a Crime to Be Poor, in fact Ferguson is everywhere: the debtors’ prisons of the twenty-first century. The anti-tax revolution that began with the Reagan era led state and local governments, starved for revenues, to squeeze ordinary people, collect fines and fees to the tune of 10 million people who now owe $50 billion. Nor is the criminalization of poverty confined to money. Schoolchildren are sent to court for playground skirmishes that previously sent them to the principal’s office. Women are evicted from their homes for calling the police too often to ask for protection from domestic violence. The homeless are arrested for sleeping in the park or urinating in public. A former aide to Robert F. Kennedy and senior official in the Clinton administration, Peter Edelman has devoted his life to understanding the causes of poverty. As Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy has said, “No one has been more committed to struggles against impoverishment and its cruel consequences than Peter Edelman.” And former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes, “If there is one essential book on the great tragedy of poverty and inequality in America, this is it.”  

It took me a month to read Not a Crime to be Poor, because the subject matter is by turns frustrating,sad, and anger inducing, and because it is heavy on the statistics (which it of course, needs to be.) 

The Revolution of Robert Kennedy by John Bohrer

There were only two or three things that he ever stayed angry at me about... Ted Knap of the Scripps-Howard Newspaper wrote a story, a big headline in the New York World-Telegram [and Sun] and elsewhere: “JFK would have done it differently: RFK.” It turned out that what that was based on was that Ted Knap had called me up about this speech, which I hadn‘t written — I think it was that May sixth ‘65 speech — and said, “Is the Senator saying that President Kennedy would have done it differently?” I said something like, “Gee, I don‘t know, Ted. If you read that in there then I suppose it‘s in there,” I mean, really quite a mealy-mouthed answer. Then he said in the article, “A top aide to the Senator said so-and-so.” The Senator was just livid, and I owned up to it. I said, “I have tell you. I don‘t think it‘s fair because this is what I said.” So I don‘t know if he believed that that‘s what I‘d actually said or not. He rolled his eyes heavenward, and he said, “How do we know what he would have done? He isn‘t with us anymore,” and proceeded to kind of bawl me out that I should never take it on myself to do something like that, and so on.

─ Peter Edelman

From 2008, when Hillary Clinton was first trying to run for President:

Among those who ardently and eloquently opposed the Clinton "welfare reform" bill was Marian Wright Edelman. Her husband, Peter Edelman, quit his high-level job at the Department of Health and Human Services in protest when Bill Clinton signed the bill. He was deeply upset about what the legislation would do to helpless children.

In a July 2007 interview with Amy Goodman, Marian Wright Edelman had this to say about the "welfare reform bill" and Hillary Clinton:

AMY GOODMAN: Marian Wright Edelman, we just heard Hillary Rodham Clinton. She used to be the head of the board of the Children’s Defense Fund, of the organization that you founded. But you were extremely critical of the Clintons. I mean, when President Clinton signed off on the, well, so-called welfare reform bill, you said, “His signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children.” So what are your hopes right now for these Democrats? And what are your thoughts about Hillary Rodham Clinton?

MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN: Well, you know, Hillary Clinton is an old friend, but they are not friends in politics. We have to build a constituency, and you don’t—and we profoundly disagreed with the forms of the welfare reform bill, and we said so. We were for welfare reform, I am for welfare reform, but we need good jobs, we need adequate work incentives, we need minimum wage to be decent wage and livable wage, we need health care, we need transportation, we need to invest preventively in all of our children to prevent them ever having to be on welfare.

And yet, you know, many years after that, when many people are pronouncing welfare reform a great success, you know, we’ve got growing child poverty, we have more children in poverty and in extreme poverty over the last six years than we had earlier in the year. When an economy is down, and the real test of welfare reform is what happens to the poor when the economy is not booming. Well, the poor are suffering, the gap between rich and poor widening. We have what I consider one of—a growing national catastrophe of what we call the cradle-to-prison pipeline. A black boy today has a one-in-three chance of going to prison in his lifetime, a black girl a one-in-seventeen chance. A Latino boy who’s born in 2001 has a one-in-six chance of going to prison. We are seeing more and more children go into our child welfare systems, go dropping out of school, going into juvenile justice detention facilities. Many children are sitting up—15,000, according to a recent congressional GAO study—are sitting up in juvenile institutions solely because their parents could not get mental health and health care in their community. This is an abomination.

[...]

Does one's gender make one immune from betraying helpless children and the poor?

Just ask Marian Wright Edelman and Peter Edelman. If you think Edelman's quotation was taken out of context, read the full interview here.

You have a racial disproportionality in the poverty itself and then you have, as a consequence of the changes in family structure in the neighborhoods of concentrated poverty in the biggest cities, you would have some bad things that happen in terms of behavior. Then it becomes easier to make the racialized stories stick in the politics. You end up with 27 percent African American, Latino, Native American poverty -- which is actually down over the decades from where it was. It was 55 percent in 1959 -- African-American poverty -- when they started measuring poverty, so we actually made progress on that, even though white poverty is 10 percent.

It's really a vicious circle because the image of African-American poverty feeds the negative politics.

...

The fact is that the largest group of people in the country [on welfare] are white.

Peter B. Edelman has been saying it for years. But only a few people have been listening. The gap between the nation's wealthiest and the poorest households is growing, and poverty is higher now than 40 years ago, says the Georgetown Law School professor. 

So when the Washington, D.C.-based groups the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute released a new study Wednesday that showed the income gap was growing -- and New Mexico had the greatest income disparity -- I called Edelman immediately to get his reaction.

"This is what I've been saying for 40 years," he told me over the phone. "People are the very bottom have been struggling."

Ever since he was a legislative aide to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, Edelman has been dedicated to fighting poverty in the U.S. He accompanied Kennedy when he met with Chicano labor leader Cesar Chavez, and also went with Kennedy to Mississippi to tour impoverished areas. Those images have stayed with him.

He later served in the Clinton administration but resigned in protest over Clinton's signing of the 1996 welfare reform law.

In his most recent book, "So Rich So Poor: Why It's So Hard to End Poverty in America," Edelman argues that Americans rarely discuss poverty, even as 20.5 million Americans found themselves in extreme poverty in 2010. Around 6 million of those have no income other than food stamps. Meanwhile, as the American economy grew, the fruits of that growth went mainly to the people at the top.

So the new study's numbers didn't shock Edelman. (The study said that the income of the top 20 percent of the wealthiest households in New Mexico was 9.9 time higher than state's 20 percent poorest household. This report comes after new U.S. Census data found that New Mexico is now the poorest state in the nation. My AP story is here.) 

Still, the numbers disturbed him. "We don't do enough for the people at the very bottom," he said "Yes, we have programs that are helpful but they aren't helpful enough."

In New Mexico. the gap is largely blamed on the number of high-paying jobs for well-educated scientists who work at places like Los Alamos National Lab and the large number of unskilled workers stuck in the state's service and agricultural jobs. Not many other options.

Since the late-1970s, the income for the state's poorest grew by only an average of $2,000. As the same time, income for New Mexico's wealthiest household grew up $68,000, the study's authors say. The lost of manufacturing jobs, cuts to various aid programs and the state's boom and bust economy are being blamed.

In addition, the state also has a large number of American Indian reservations with high unemployments rates and a big high school dropout rate among Mexican Americans. Economists and sociologists say New Mexico's economy just isn't growing enough and political leaders rarely discuss issues directly affecting poverty.

But that may be changing, Edelman says. Now that President Obama and Republicans in the House must tackle the "fiscal cliff," he says both parties have a chance to look into tax reforms that may make a dent. Edelman believes that the Affordable Health Care Act, or Obamacare, may also take some stress off the poor. Yet, Edelman says he hopes the new study and more reporting on poverty can change to focus to talking about the country's obligation to the nation's poorest Americans.

It doesn't matter that he's been disappointed in the past, from the assassination of RFK to appointments that didn't make as much of a dent in poverty as he might have liked.

Peter Edelman