Barbara Ehrenreich has an important Op-Ed today in the New York Times discussing the way poverty is criminalized -- or rather, how being broke means that you're running a gauntlet of legal pitfalls on a daily basis, any one of which might result in jail time. It's an experience I think is really difficult for many people to understand, because most of us take for granted that we can go about our daily business unmolested. As a tool, racial profiling is almost unnecessary because there are so many legal pretexts for stopping people in poor neighborhoods -- or poor people dwelling in our urban theme parks -- that you don't have to stop someone for the color of your skin. They can go with the color of your t-shirt instead.
I also think there's a key question that needs to be asked about these laws: Have they made anything better? (Or perhaps the question is, for whom have these laws made things better?) There's less crime in general, but I'm not sure how much that has to do with the kind of laws Ehrenreich is writing about. Conditions for the isolated urban poor haven't really changed much. At the same time, I do think these laws have achieved at least one significant goal, particularly laws governing public behavior that target the homeless: They've made it possible to spend police resources removing obvious signs of poverty from public view, so they can't bother the rest of us.
-- A. Serwer
