The double-standard of making the poor prove they’re worthy of government benefits

It’s a crime to be poor in America

Even minor scrapes with the law can lead to fines, prison and permanent joblessness

In America, you’re presumed innocent until proven guilty. Unless you’re poor, that is.

Increasingly, it’s a crime to be poor, and the punishment is often further impoverishment.

Fifty years ago, Chuck Berry sang about a brown-eyed handsome man who was “arrested for the crime of unemployment.” Little has changed since then.

For poor people, even minor scrapes with the law can have major consequences, including prison time, probation, endless debt and permanent joblessness. For people of means, those same legal problems are a nuisance, but they aren’t life-changing events.
More cities and states have realized that poverty can be a profit center. Not for poor people, of course, but for government treasuries and for private companies hired to handle the influx into the criminal justice system of people whose only crime was the inability to pay a traffic ticket or a misdemeanor fine.
Cash-strapped cities like Ferguson, Mo., count on fines and court-imposed fees to balance their budgets, and that reliance on the revenue from petty violations was cited by the Justice Department as a contributing factor in Ferguson’s high rates of traffic stops and arrests for minor crimes and misdemeanors.
In many states, offenders are expected to finance the justice system, including court costs, room and board while incarcerated, probation supervision and drug-treatment programs. For anyone living paycheck to paycheck, even a $100 fine can be a challenge, and paying off the debt to the court and to the privatized probation company can be impossible, especially if the arrest has led to the loss of a job or a driver’s license.
Just being arrested can be devastating: Half a million people are languishing in jail awaiting trial because they can’t afford to pay the bail.
People who are let out of prison are often said to have “paid their debt to society.” But in most cases, they haven’t paid their debt for the costs of their imprisonment and probation. More than 80% of people let out of prison leave owing money, according to an investigation by NPR and the Brennan Center for Justice.
Those of us who live sheltered middle-class lives often wonder why anyone would run away from the police or resist arrest. Running away can cost you your life, as what happened to Walter Scott. Why would he risk being shot in the back by a police officer?
Perhaps he feared that an arrest for a minor traffic violation (the tail light on his car was out) would lead to a downward spiral of fines, jail time and permanent joblessness, as it has for others. According to relatives, Scott was behind on his child-support payments, and he may have feared that he’d be jailed for his failure to pay. Which, of course, would have cost him his job and any chance he and his family had of a future.
So he ran, and he died.
There’s a clear racial element to this story, of course. Black and Hispanic men are far more likely to be pulled over by police, and far more likely to be arrested for petty crimes, such as jaywalking, loitering, or sleeping in public or in their car.
“Poor people, especially people of color, face a far greater risk of being fined, arrested, and even incarcerated for minor offenses than other Americans,” according to a survey from the Institute for Policy Studies, “The Poor Get Prison: The Alarming Spread of the Criminalization of Poverty.”
The report details with statistics and shocking anecdotes how the system works to grind up anyone caught in it. A man caught shoplifting a can of beer — let’s call him Jean Valjean — is fined $200 and sentenced to a year of probation. He cannot afford to pay the fees that finance his own probation, so he’s jailed, where more fees rack up.
Don’t for a minute think this is a problem confined to states that fly the Confederate battle flag over the State House. In New York, you can be arrested for putting your feet on the seat in the subway. In Washington, D.C., you can be arrested if your kids skip school.
And in California, the DMV has replaced the INS as the most-feared government agency.
To help balance the state budget after the 2008 recession, California imposed numerous fees on top of the basic fines for traffic tickets, so that a $100 fine for, say, failure to report a change of address now actually costs $490.
The basic $100 fine is doubled for a “state penalty assessment” and another 20% is tacked on for a “state criminal surcharge.” Then there are fees for court operations, court construction, the DNA fund, the Medevac fund, and the EMS fund. Don’t forget the “conviction assessment” and the “county fund,” and there’s even a $1 charge for “night court.”
And if you don’t pay the fine in full, you’ll lose your license. In California, the DMV is the biggest debt collector of all.The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area figures that about $10 billion in fines and fees haven’t been paid in California, leading to the suspension of 4 million driver’s licenses. Nearly one in six Californians can’t drive legally.
In California, if you can’t drive, you can’t work, as one client told the lawyers committee. “Without a license, I can’t work. Without work, I can’t pay my fines to get my license back.”
Woody Guthrie was right: Stay away from California “if you ain’t got the do re mi.” But where else can you go if you don’t have any dough? Nowhere in America, it seems.




Poverty looks pretty great if you're not living in it. The government gives you free money to spend on steak and lobster, on tattoos and spa days, on — why not? — cruise vacations and psychic visits.
Enough serious-minded people seem to think this is what the poor actually buy with their meager aid that we've now seen a raft of bills and proposed state laws to nudge them away from so much excess. Missouri wants to curtail what the poor eat with their food stamps (evidence of the problem from one state legislator: "I have seen people purchasing filet mignons"). Kansas wants to block welfare recipients from spending government money at strip clubs (in legalese: any "sexually oriented business or any retail establishment which provides adult-oriented entertainment in which performers disrobe or perform in an unclothed state for entertainment").


Then there are the states that want to drug-test welfare recipients — the implication being that we worry the poor will convert their benefits directly into drugs.


Sometimes these laws are cast as protection for the poor, ensuring that aid is steered in ways that will help them the most. Other times they're framed as protection for the taxpayer, who shouldn't be asked to help people who will squander the money on vices anyway.
But the logic behind the proposals is problematic in at least three, really big ways.
The first is economic: There's virtually no evidence that the poor actually spend their money this way. The idea that they do defies Maslow's hierarchy — the notion that we all need shelter and food before we go in search of foot massages. In fact, the poor are much more savvy about how they spend their money because they have less of it (quick quiz: do you know exactly how much you last spent on a gallon of milk? or a bag of diapers?). By definition, a much higher share of their income — often more than half of it — is eaten up by basic housing costs than is true for the better-off, leaving them less money for luxuries anyway. And contrary to the logic of drug-testing laws, the poor are no more likely to use drugs than the population at large.


The second issue with these laws is a moral one: We rarely make similar demands of other recipients of government aid. We don't drug-test farmers who receive agriculture subsidies (lest they think about plowing while high!). We don't require Pell Grant recipients to prove that they're pursuing a degree that will get them a real job one day (sorry, no poetry!). We don't require wealthy families who cash in on the home mortgage interest deduction to prove that they don't use their homes as brothels (because surely someone out there does this). The strings that we attach to government aid are attached uniquely for the poor.


That leads us to the third problem, which is a political one. Many, many Americans who do receive these other kinds of government benefits — farm subsidies, student loans, mortgage tax breaks — don't recognize that, like the poor, they get something from government, too. That's because government gives money directly to poor people, but it gives benefits to the rest of us in ways that allow us to tell ourselves that we get nothing from government at all.


Political scientist Suzanne Mettler has called this effect the "submerged state." Food stamps and welfare checks are incredibly visible government benefits. The mortgage interest deduction, Medicare benefits and tuition tax breaks are not — they're submerged. They come to us in round-about ways, through smaller tax bills (or larger refunds), through payments we don't have to make to doctors (thanks to Medicare), or in tuition we don't have to pay to universities (because the G.I. Bill does that for us).
Mettler's research has shown that a remarkable number of people who don't think they get anything from government in fact benefit from one of these programs. This explains why we get election-season soundbites from confused voters who want policymakers to "keep your government hands off my Medicare!" This is also what enables politicians to gin up indignation among small-government supporters who don't realize they rely on government themselves.


Mettler raises a lot of concerns about what the submerged state means for how we understand the role of government. But one result of this reality is that we have even less tolerance for programs that help the poor: We begrudge them their housing vouchers, for instance, even though government spends about four times as much subsidizing housing for upper-income homeowners, including in many cases second and vacation homes.
That's a long-winded way of saying that these proposed laws — which insist that government beneficiaries prove themselves worthy, that they spend government money how the government wants them to, that they waive their privacy and personal freedom to get it — are also simply a reflection of a basic double-standard.