Jumping Off the Fiscal Cliff, Landing in Troubled Waters

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

- Franklin Roosevelt

The legal definition of "sequestration" is to take into custody property of those held in contempt.  Whether it is a metaphorical cliff or slope or staircase, the plummet of sequestration will have its harshest effect on the most vulnerable members of society, a population continually held in contempt simply for being poor.  Among the programs to be cut if Congress fails to act are Head Start, child care assistance, special education, substance abuse treatment, community health services, nutritional and housing assistance.  These programs provide necessities, not luxuries, to our neediest community members.  The cost of failing to engender even a modicum of dignity and sustenance may include far higher costs in increased criminal activity; the overall price will be more, not less despair.

Poverty itself is a crime; being poor is not.  Yet, since our earliest days, we have treated the poor like vermin.  Long before tea dumped into Boston Harbor, long before taxation without representation created a political slogan, convict transportation from England to the Americas was common practice.  Early on, these United States were populated by convicted felons, indentured servants and slaves; of these convicts were the cheapest source of labor.  Because those convicted of crimes were already somewhat outside the protections of the law, conditions of transport, no doubt, were abominable, with many dying on the journey and upon arrival.  Because there had been no price paid up front and no triangulation, such as with captured Africans, it is unknown what value convicts had and how expendable they were.  And they posed a risk: how could one count on continued servitude of a criminal?

Aside from the purchase of convicted felons on the cheap, America's early "poor laws", among other things, permitted the vendue of the poor.  This was considered "relief" to the impoverished - selling them at auction to the lowest bidder for their (wholly unregulated) care.  Only those with no family to support them were even eligible for this assistance.  Those with families were required to rely on them, not society, for their sustenance.  One need not think too hard to realize that this often led to more impoverishment rather than less.  If society helped with the care of one person, the remainder of the family might have enough to survive and provide a tad more to the next generation in order to thrive (indeed, recent studies on food assistance so prove).  Instead, the poor laws plunged marginal families to destitution perpetuating poverty and all its ills.

Able bodied adults would be forced to work; able bodied children essentially sold into apprenticeships and Americans really never thought of this as anything more than proper and just.  While we shudder today at the idea of selling human beings into bondage for the offense of being of African descent, we barely glance at this history of, well, selling people into bondage for the offense of being poor. We still insist that the poor work for any public help they receive.

Without much thought, society labels crimes associated with poverty: violence, drugs, and theft as more pervasive, more frightening and worse than crimes associated with wealth: identity theft, faking drug labels and embezzlement.  There are no qualms about punishing crimes related to poverty more harshly than crimes that destroy entire societies.  The Thirteenth Amendment even left open an exception to slavery and indentured servitude as penance for crimes (the definition of which had to be street crimes as a notion of "white collar crime"  would not exist until 1939.)  Violent crime has been associated with poverty for so long that it the two ideas are almost synonymous.  Law permits the police to describe an area as "high crime" in order to justify a stop of an automobile or a person.  By "high crime area", it is unlikely that they mean Wall Street even though deviance through non-violent, financially motivated offenses permeates society and affects significantly more people than street crime.

When history is honest it reveals that poverty was and continues to be the greatest offense to the American psyche.  To obtain assistance under the poor laws, one needed to have "settlement" (which is a lot like the modern quarrel about who "belongs enough" to be worthy of their neighbors' care.)  This notion of settlement affected who was even eligible for the horrid conditions of a poor workhouse.  Indeed, communities sued each other over who was responsible to pay for the care of a poor person whose settlement was in dispute.  Then, as now, there were deserving and undeserving poor.

Poor laws help explain the continuation of slavery even by states that had outlawed the peculiar institution.  That is, if a community were liable for its poor and it permitted manumission of impoverished slaves, not only would freed slaves become local vagrants without work, but "owners" could unload their elderly, infirm, idle and otherwise unprofitable workers at whim to the care of the state.  To guard against this occurrence, states with higher slavery rates instituted strict laws related to manumission including everything from outright prohibition to the requirement of freed men and women to leave the state within a short period of time of being granted freedom.  To prevent these same folks from becoming a burden elsewhere, in addition to local poor laws in states with high slavery rates, states with low or no slavery prohibited, or limited through high bonds, freed slaves from settling there.  With nowhere to go, even manumission was effectively meaningless.

Fear of poverty and caring for the poor fomented race bias as migration occurred with the end of the bond system and the increased demands of industrialized America.  This combination led to harsher criminal penalties for crimes, particularly those associated with poverty.   Today, it costs roughly half the amount of money per year to house, feed, clothe, and educate a member of society - even an entire family - than it does to remove any one person from society into prison.  Add to that basic cost, providing counsel to the indigent charged with crimes, the cost of the court system to prosecute, defend and adjudicate those offenses and the pricetag of longterm medical care for those serving long sentences (all of which also face cuts in sequestration).  Policies intended to punish the poor have created more problems and cost society more money than simply addressing poverty and our attitude toward the poor.

Without minimizing the difficult decisions Congress must make after years of reckless borrowing and costly wars, query whether entitlements for the poor are the problem or the solution to the nation's woes.  Neither extolling the virtues of the Framers on this topic nor ignoring that most did not believe that the poor should even vote, let alone care one way or the other about the survival of the impoverished, history may be of assistance.  Major reform movements of the 19th Century, unapologetically rooted in the very same morality that instituted the original poor laws, brought a new consciousness to the plight of the poor and the effect of poverty on the rest of society.  Those efforts would eventually result in federally funded social welfare programs, many of which were instituted during the greatest fiscal disaster of modern times.  These programs, along with those created in the 1960's, demonstrate compassion, reflect a societal priority and are now an accepted aspect of American life. They also lifted us out of the Great Depression and gave meaning to much of the Civil Rights movements.  The opposite - treating the poor like criminals, criminalizing the effects of poverty, and ensuring continued poverty through policy choices are historically proven to perpetuate and compound rather than eliminate problems. 

Sequestration will affect the poor severely leading to higher poverty rates, more crimes associated with poverty, and higher costs in regard to prosecuting and defending those offenses with further ramifications for future generations.  This affects all of America - North and South, 53% and 47%, blue and red alike.  Aristotle warned that poverty is the parent of revolution and crime; thus the cost of cutting welfare programs in a time of great need may become a terribly expensive error.  If we insist upon the attendant punishments for poverty-related crimes, especially without ever addressing "white collar crime" in a meaningful way, we will continue to bankrupt our future premised upon fear and loathing of the poor rather than our disgust that poverty exists at all in a nation premised upon equality with liberty and justice for all.