They took the deal.
Some people who have never been evicted or arrested like to say that accessible court records are necessary to promote “a free and open society.” Limiting access to court records, they argue, would pave the way for undemocratic state practices: secret police, undocumented arrests, hidden prisons, and God knows what else. Next to the concrete realities of how records are actually used to make families’ lives much harder, these abstract worries seem grossly out of touch. For millions of poor Americans, including those who have never committed a crime, court records severely constrict their opportunities. Let’s deal with the real problems we have, not the imaginary problems we don’t.
39. Martha Davis, “Participation, Equality, and the Civil Right to Counsel: Lessons from Domestic and International Law,” Yale Law Journal 122 (2013): 2260–81; Raven Lidman, “Civil Gideon as a Human Right: Is the U.S. Going to Join Step with the Rest of the Developed World?,” Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review 15 (2006): 769–800.
40. Quoted in Cass Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 3.
41. Quoted in Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 215.
42. “Exploitation” appears but twice in William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 [1987]), when Wilson summarizes orthodox Marxist accounts, and again twice in Wilson’s When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996), when he describes blacks’ aversion to it. In Lo?c Wacquant’s Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), you can find four instances of “exploitation,” only one of which refers to the exploitation of the poor by the rich (page 123n7). The word makes a single appearance in Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), on page 176, in reference to sexual liaisons between inner-city residents; a single appearance in Sudhir Venkatesh’s American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), on page 150, in reference to housing project tenants being exploited by gangs; and a single appearance in Harrington’s The Other America (page 32). “Exploitation” does not appear at all in the pages of many other modern classics that take up the plight of the poor, from Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein’s Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997) to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Random House, 2012).
43. On food prices in poor neighborhoods, see Chanjin Chung and Samuel Myers, “Do the Poor Pay More for Food? An Analysis of Grocery Store Availability and Food Price Disparities,” Journal of Consumer Affairs 33 (1999): 276–96; Marianne Bitler and Steven Haider, “An Economic View of Food Deserts in the United States,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 30 (2011): 153–76.
44. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2008), 40; Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 237–38; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]), 30; Allan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,” American Journal of Sociology 118 (2012): 88–133. Of all people, Daniel Patrick Moynihan recognized the central importance of exploitation to understanding racialized urban poverty. In his report to the US Department of Labor that would later become infamous, Moynihan wrote: “The Negro situation is commonly perceived by whites in terms of the visible manifestation of discrimination and poverty….It is more difficult, however, for whites to perceive the effect that three centuries of exploitation have had on the fabric of Negro society itself….Here is where the true injury has occurred: unless this damage is repaired, all the effort to end discrimination and poverty and injustice will come to little.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: US Department of Labor, 1965).
45. This point is indebted to Satter’s Family Properties.
46. On rip-off schemes, see Alan Andreasen, The Disadvantaged Consumer (New York: The Free Press, 1975); Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (New York: Norton, 2010), 20; David Caplovitz, The Poor Pay More (New York: The Free Press, 1967). On payday loans, see Pew Charitable Trust, Payday Lending in America: Who Borrows, Where They Borrow, and Why (Washington, DC: Pew, July 19, 2012); Gary Rivlin, Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. (New York: Harper, 2010).
47. On markets being embedded in state and social relations, see Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91 (1985): 481–510; Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 [1944]). On the relationship between poverty and policing, see Megan Comfort, “When Prison Is a Refuge: America’s Messed Up,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 2, 2013; David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Lo?c Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006); Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
48. Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1948), 238.
49. Katie Dodd, Quarterly Benefits Summary (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Department for Work and Pensions, 2015); Hugo Priemus, Peter Kemp, and David Varady, “Housing Vouchers in the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands: Current Issues and Future Perspectives,” Housing Policy Debate 16 (2005): 575–609; “Housing Benefit: How Does It Work?,” BBC News, November 9, 2011.
50. No study has shown that, compared to housing vouchers, project-based assistance can deliver housing at equal quality for less cost. On the cost of public housing compared to vouchers, see Janet Currie, The Invisible Safety Net: Protecting the Nation’s Poor Children and Families (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), chapter 4; Amy Cutts and Edgar Olsen, “Are Section 8 Housing Subsidies Too High?,” Journal of Housing Economics 11 (2002): 214–43.
On neighborhood quality of voucher holders compared to public housing residents, see Sandra Newman and Ann Schnare, “?‘…And a Suitable Living Environment’: The Failure of Housing Programs to Deliver on Neighborhood Quality,” Housing Policy Debate 8 (1997): 703–41; Edgar Olsen, “Housing Programs for Low-Income Households,” in Means-Tested Transfer Programs in the United States, ed. Robert Moffitt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 365–442.