BookTalk

By Kaaryn Gustafson, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law

Every September, the Census Bureau releases updated statistics on the poverty rate in the United States. For a day or two I will read media reports about poverty, and then poverty disappears from the news until the next September. The poverty rate varies a bit from year to year but remains consistently — and shamefully — high. 

According to a 2009 study drawing upon data from the Luxembourg Income Study, a project that gathers comparative economic information from various nations, the only upper-income countries with child poverty rates equal to or higher than United States (22 percent) were Russia (also 22 percent) and Mexico (27 percent). Some level of economic inequality within a population may be inevitable, but poverty — and the stress, hunger, homelessness, and daily chaos that go with it — are not. How much attention a county gives poverty, how a country tolerates poverty, and how a country allocates the resources targeted for the poor are political decisions. The United States has become poverty-tolerant and, increasingly, tax dollars are going to police the poor rather than to address poverty.

There have been moments in American history when poverty has been an issue of public and political concern but those moments are distant memories. Since the War on Poverty in the 1960s, the public and politicians have become complacent about ameliorating poverty. Political concern about the poor has, indeed, remained but it has taken a new form. Over the last few decades, federal and state governments have instituted a host of policies and practices that equate receipt of certain public benefits with criminality, that police the everyday lives of the poor, and that weave the criminal justice system into the fabric of the welfare system. 

By David K. Shipler, a former New York Times journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who writes online at The Shipler Report.

The Supreme Court has an opportunity next term to play catch-up in applying the Fourth Amendment to the advanced technology of surveillance. The Court has granted the Obama administration’s cert. petition seeking to overturn a well-reasoned opinion by the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit requiring law enforcement to obtain warrants when secretly installing GPS tracking devices on vehicles.

This could be a mundane case or a landmark, depending on which way the justices go. The Fourth Amendment has been seriously eroded in recent decades, as documented in my book The Rights of the People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties. The Court’s majority could continue the pattern by ruling with the government, carving out yet another exception to the warrant requirement. Or, the Court could decide to set broad new standards to redefine the “reasonable expectation of privacy” in a digital age.

The expectation of privacy is a key legal concept. The courts have ruled that where no such expectation exists, no “search” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment occurs, and therefore no probable cause or judicial oversight is required.