Even the Right to an Attorney Comes With a Price Tag: 21st Century Debtors' Prisons
NOVANEWS
By Peter Edelman, The New Press
(Photo: HopeMedia Stock Photography; Edited: LW / TO)
The mass incarceration system in the United States is structured to make poverty itself a crime. Peter Edelman, early on in his book, offers some initial examples of how.
In New Orleans's Municipal Court, Section A, even when the judge was presiding, not a word was audible to anyone in the audience, and, with multiple negotiations happening simultaneously around the room, no one in the gallery could understand anything that was going on. In the center of the grim circus were the shackled men wearing orange jumpsuits -- almost all African American -- being held for arraignment, awaiting trial because they could not make bail, or doing time for criminal contempt because they had not appeared i...