Poverty and Criminal Justice in the United States

Source: oneradionetwork.com

On March 18, 2014, Salon recently published an article named “10 shameful ways the United States is failing to preserve basic human rights.” The article bases its information on a new Human Rights Watch report called World Report; which evaluated countries around the world, the United States scores poorly on safeguarding the rights of its own population. In a nutshell, the article puts the top ten shameful ways the United States fails to preserve basic human rights: harsh sentencing, abysmal prison conditions, youth detention, poverty and justice, racial disparities in criminal justice, labor rights, health policy, women’s rights, national security and surveillance, and lastly rights on non-citizens. The people who are “most vulnerable in our society include racial and ethnic groups, minorities, the poor, immigrants, prisoners, and the elderly.” 

Focusing on poverty and criminal justice, it is clear that the poor are the ones who suffer the most because they cannot afford to pay high court fees and other charges such as getting an expensive lawyer to defend them in a fair trial. Also, according to the article, the poor and homeless who occupy public space are harassed and arrested by policemen. The poor are “stigmatized, scapegoated, and mistreated” by the criminal justice system. Lawyers who are overworked as public defenders do not give the poor a fair trial in court. 

According to the United States Constitution, the sixth amendment gives us the right to a fair trial, but it seems that in today’s world it is only true if you can afford to pay a good lawyer. The system should not be like this, this is a disadvantage for the low income families. One solution to the problem is to have a legislative reform or to ratify the sixth amendment and have set prices on lawyers to represent every single person equally and fairly. This would eliminate the rich having fair trials because of their money. This way everyone would be treated equally and we would be given a fair trial. Also, public defenders should have a limit to the amount of cases they can have in a given time. This would eliminate overworked schedules and they could focus on each individual case and ultimately give everyone a fair trial by law. 

The problem with poverty lies deep in our society. In a Thinkprogress article published on March 18, 2014, Republican Paul Ryan “the recent vice presidential candidate and GOP leader on budget policy, recently blamed poverty on inner city men being lazy.” It’s not the first time someone has said this type of offensive comment. Poor people are not lazy; society needs to stop stigmatizing the poor. There must be a change in the way our society thinks of the poor. Poverty is a problem that lies in the whole government system. More money should be invested in public education because children need to be given a fair opportunity to be successful. In addition, college tuitions are a major problem in this society. Many high school students who graduate never attend college because they simply cannot afford it and it is not because they are lazy.