Poor Americans Live in a "Law-Free Zone"

Courtesy of the good people over at Postbourgie, I see three related stories that signal the Administration, Congress and anti-poverty advocates of all stripes are coming together to restore a bevy of civil rights for low-income Americans.  Reforms to crack cocaine sentencing and felony disenfranchisement have both been introduced in Congress.  And a report by the Center for Law & Social Policy reinforces Obama's push to expand legal aid assistance by demonstrating that the "legal needs of low-income Americans" are fulfilled less than 20% of the time.

As we've discussed before, the criminal justice and courts system is one place where class and race collide: these reforms and budget expansions would disproportionately benefit low-income people of color, especially men, who are drastically overrepresented in crack cocaine sentencing and among the overall prison population (in part because of our draconian drug laws).  I didn't know that the punishment for crack cocaine was 100 times higher than for powder cocaine.  That's practically absurd, especially if we consider what good we might have done increasing powder cocaine offensese during those heady, 80s Wall Street days.  Good times.

From felony disenfranchisement, upwards of 5M Americans have lost their right to vote.  That's a tangible slice of the voting population, especially in certain communities.  This reminds me of a hypocrisy of our immigration laws.  If you are eligible to pay taxes and/or serve in the military, why can't you a) be a citizen and b) have the right to vote?  Taxes, voting, military service.  They should be some sort of inseparable package, IMO.

Lastly,

When President Reagan was elected in 1980, legal services achieved the modest goal of providing two attorneys for every 10,000 poor people in a given area.  Since then, the budget for legal services was slashed twice–first by President Reagan in 1982 and again by the right-wing Congress in 1996–and the federal government now spends, in inflation adjusted dollars, less than half what it spent on legal services for the poor in 1980.

And now Chief Justice Roberts would like to cut state funding for legal aid even further.   These three reports are very promising, but we clearly have miles to go before we sleep soundly as a morally upright society.

(Image from the UK's Socialist Unity.  They spend 12x more on legal aid for the poor in the UK than in the US.)