Income Inequality

Since The Social Scale is dedicated to ‘promoting legal justice and income equality in our society,’ we must reach out to the underrepresented and marginalized groups affected most by these socioeconomic phenomena.  Although legal injustices and income inequality inevitably affect everybody, underrepresented and marginalized groups’ voices are often left unheard, and their needs are often left unmet.  The Social Scale desires to bring attention to these groups’ voices, and to see that their needs are met.

Income inequality is a major obstacle to be overcome in our society.  While there are other ways to address socioeconomic disparities, ‘literature concentrates on income as a better indicator of welfare’ (Spicker, 2006).  Income inequality in our society is obscene.  It is a widely known fact that one-percent of our population controls at least as much wealth, if not more, as the other 98% of the population.  If we are to continue to prosper as a society, we must continue to develop and sustain ways to alleviate, if not eliminate income inequality.

The presence of income inequality cannot be understated.  According to Paul Spicker (2006), ‘inequalities of income have important implications for welfare.  Wherever there is competition for goods, such as access to land or housing, people on lower incomes cannot pay as much as their competitors and are likely to be excluded or marginalized.’  Spicker’s theory is based on observations of European socioeconomics, but it can be applied universally.  There are underrepresented and marginalized groups not only in Europe, but in our society as well.  The disadvantages facing underrepresented and marginalized groups in our society are what The Social Scale is specifically designed to address.  We would like the underrepresented and marginalized groups who are facing disadvantages to be relieved of these disadvantages, and enjoy socioeconomic prosperity equal to the one-percent of the population who continue to oppress disadvantaged groups by extending socioeconomic inequality.

There are far too many people in our society that are living in poverty.  It is a founding principle in our society that ‘all men are created equal.’  We have now reached a point in our society’s development that this principle of equality is to be extended to women and children too, and all races and ethnicities.  It is absurd that one-percent of the population controls as much wealth as the remaining 98%, especially when 46 million Americans are living in poverty (Imbery, 2015).  There is no excuse for income inequality in our society, particularly when sharing resources does not have a substantial negative effect on anyone’s prosperity.

The Social Scale would like to be an advocate for the underrepresented and marginalized groups in our society who are living in poverty, or who are close to living in poverty, because there is no legitimate reason why these groups should be facing such inhumane socioeconomic inequality.  The faces of the underrepresented and marginalized groups in our society are predominantly African American and Latino.  The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has reported that between 2007 and 2014, real median income declined 10.5% for African Americans, and that ‘median household income continues to be significantly lower for African Americans and Latinos, when compared to whites’ (Marker, 2015).  If the economic decline for these groups continues to fall, these communities will likely face difficulties and challenges not faced by their white counterparts.  Even so, The Social Scale will work closely with all members of the community facing economic challenges, but will give priority to reaching out to African Americans and Latinos who are being negatively affected by income inequality.

Part of the process of providing assistance to those in the community being negatively affected by income inequality is the redistribution of resources.  According to Spicker (2006),

‘A measure is redistributive if the people who receive goods or services from a measure are not the same as the people who pay … Tawney argued that public spending is the most effective way of redistributing resources … The provision of universal benefits helps to create equality in its widest sense – the reassurance provided by social protection.’

Redistributing resources to the most severely affected groups will help alleviate the pressures of living in poverty.  There should be no ‘less than’ living standard in the community at all, considering the significant profits of corporations in our society in general.  The ‘less than’ living standard refers to the grim statistics on poverty in our society.  Nobody should have to be forced to experience the standard of living associated with living in poverty.  In the US, nobody really has to live in poverty; our country has in place a relatively well-functioning socioeconomic safety net.  The key to utilizing this safety net is the appropriate distribution of resources to sustain the programs already in place.  Deborah Weinstein (2015), executive director of Coalition on Human Needs says,

‘There is a wealth of evidence that anti-poverty programs like SNAP … low income tax credits, pre-school, Medicaid, and housing assistance really make a difference … New research tracking impacts over decades confirms the value of these programs, and more accurate counting of income and expenses among the poor shows that SNAP alone lifted more than ten million people out of poverty in 2012.’

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reports that federal housing assistance helped lift 2.8 million people out of poverty in 2014 (Marker, 2015).  Another statement by Weinstein asserts that,

‘While economic gains are not reaching the poor in a sustained way, government programs are helping.  The Census Bureau’s new report shows that low-income tax credits, nutrition and housing programs, Social Security and SSI are among the programs that work to lift families out of poverty’ (Imbery, 2015).

In further support of redistribution of income through government-funded assistance programs, Coalition on Human Needs produced a report based on the ‘Census Bureau’s new poverty and income data’ (Imbery, 2015).  One highlight of this report states,

‘The economy alone is not doing enough to reduce poverty.  A greater investment in programs with demonstrated anti-poverty effectiveness is needed to step up the pace so that millions of Americans can be spared poverty’s hardships and can contribute to greater prosperity’ (Imbery, 2015).

The Social Scale would like to expedite the process of providing the resources that disadvantaged members of the community need by helping these members locate and utilize assistance for which they may be eligible.  The Social Scale will not directly provide the resources that will assist in helping members of the community rise above poverty.  What The Social Scale will do is be the liaison that underrepresented and marginalized groups need in order to be connected to the government assistance programs already functioning, such as SNAP, Medicaid, housing assistance, etc.  How many more millions of American must live in poverty until the community reaches out to them to let them know there can be hope for a more stable life?  The Social Scale will exist with the direction for positive change in this matter.

Legal Injustice

The other main subject of interest at The Social Scale, besides income equality, is addressing legal injustice issues in the community.  A good source for a foundational understanding of why the US criminal justice system functions the way it does is the work of a philosopher from the mid-20^th century named Louis Althusser.  Althusser has a work titled Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).  In this work, Althusser examines the concept of ideology in the perspective of labor production and economy.  He describes ‘ideology’ as a representation of ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (Leitch, 2001, p. 1498).  He leads to this definition after first describing ideological state apparatuses (ISAs), which are ‘a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions’ (Leitch, 2001, p. 1489).  Examples are the religious, educational, family, and legal ISAs (Leitch, 2001, p. 1489).  According to Althusser, ‘no class can hold State power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses’ (Leitch, 2001, p. 1491).  This means that within ISA institutions, one of which happens to be the legal ISA, order and privilege are maintained by a general agreement among members of the society who are closely alike.  The members of our society who are alike and control the legal ISA in our society are the people who run the criminal justice system.

The reason Althusser’s theory of ISAs relates to the criminal justice system is because the criminal justice system is designed to profit and capitalize off of the value of human labor.  The one-percent of people with the most wealth in our society dictate to members of the criminal justice system how the system is to operate so as to maximize the profit off of the system as a whole.  This is what is known as the prison-industrial complex.  According to Bishop A.E. Sullivan (2012), ‘Someone is making a lot of money off of funding the prison industrial complex and keeping it full.’  This statement shows support for the relationship between Althusser’s assertion that as people act on what is really an imaginary relationship or what is an ideology, these actions materialize or shape and evolve into real, physical manifestations and situations which ultimately reveal a class struggle.  Class struggle happens when resources are not evenly distributed throughout society.  The result of this class struggle is that large populations become marginalized and disenfranchised from the democratic process.

Because the criminal justice system disproportionately affects minorities, it can be seen as an agent of the class struggle.  Since minorities are incarcerated at a higher rate than whites but represent a smaller percentage of the general US population, it can be observed that many minorities are involved in the criminal justice system as offenders and not as officers or administrators.  This concept shows that since the majority of offenders are minorities, then the criminal justice system is run by whites in the US, because whites in the US have historically invested in minorities only as slave laborers.  Morgan Whitaker (2013) with MSNBC says,

‘One hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the progress made by African Americans is undeniable – which is why statistics about incarceration in the black community can be so shocking.  In 2011 there were more African Americans in prison or ‘under the watch’ of the justice system than were enslaved in the United States in 1850.’

The prison-industrial complex can then be seen as contemporary slavery, because the 13^th Amendment outlaws slavery, except in the case of incarceration.  After a person is incarcerated, he is considered ‘state property,’ so to speak, as he is bound by law to being a servant of the state.

Since the criminal justice system is currently under the influence of the prison-industrial complex, and since the present purpose of the prison-industrial complex is to unfairly and disproportionately incarcerate minorities, the conclusion can be made that minorities face more injustices in the legal system than do whites.  Also, it is obvious that injustices will exist, in order to keep jails and prisons full of minorities.  The statistics on drug offenses shows how injustice exists.  In Whitaker’s (2013) article, the following statistic is revealed:

‘… there has been a 700% increase in the US prison population.  Today, African Americans are also more likely to spend time in prison for drug related offenses than their white counterparts.  According to the Sentencing Project, African Americans make up 12% of the nation’s drug users, but represent 34% of those arrested for drug offenses, and 45% of those in state prison for such offense as of 2005.’

This means that more African Americans are being incarcerated than whites, even though ‘people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites’ (Whitaker, 2013).  When we look at relative statistics, more African Americans are in jail than any other ethnicity in the US.  Seeing how African Americans have historically struggled for equal opportunities in the name of humanity and survival, it is no secret that the black African American community faces insurmountable pressures from the oppression, discrimination, and degradation imposed on the community by institutions such as the criminal justice system.  There is a need for legal justice not only in the black African American community, but in other minority communities as well.  But the black African American community’s issues of legal injustices are a more immediate concern, if for no other reason than that too many of its members are legally enslaved due to the legal injustices affecting the black African American community.

The Social Scale would like to help solve the problem of legal injustice by standing up for and giving a voice to those who have been affected by wrongs committed by the criminal justice system.  The criminal justice system, as represented by law enforcement, was created to protect and serve.  Now it has grown into a system of control and manipulation.  At The Social Scale, we feel that victims of legal injustice deserve our support and assistance in fighting a system designed to disproportionately affect some and not others.  We do not believe in standing by and doing nothing when there are gross displays of brutality being played out in our society.  Legal injustice is not new, but the excessive force being used and the abuses in the system warrant review by an outside organization like The Social Scale, if for no other reason than to ‘serve and protect’ the people in the community who have been and are being mistreated by the criminal justice system.

The Social Scale will be a ‘fall-out shelter’ for people in the community who have been abused by the legal system.  We will work as a mediator between the legal system and those affected by its abuses.  We do not have in-house counsel yet, but we will find representation when and where we can to see that victims of legal injustice are able to receive the proper treatment for their alleged offenses.  We will also provide resources with which those involved in the criminal justice system can familiarize themselves, so that there is a fair chance for them to receive justice in their cases.

References

Imbery, L. (2015). Coalition on Human Needs. Retrieved from                                    www.chn.org/2015/09/16/unshared-recovery-46-million-poor-poverty-rate-unchanged/#.VnFblFm5aM9

Imbery, L. (2015). Coalition on Human Needs. Retrieved from http://www.chn.org/2015/09/21/cutting-poverty-in-half-will-take-a-quarter-century-at-this-rate/#VnOopc1m5aM8

Leitch, V. B. (2001). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Marker, W. (2015). Coalition on Human Needs. Retrieved from http://www.chn.org/2015/09/25/resources-from-around-the-coalition-poverty-wage-gap-economic-growth-and-more/#.VnOoklm5aM9

Spicker, P. (2006). An Introduction to Social Policy. Retrieved from http://www.spicker.uk/social-policy/equality.htm

Sullivan, Bishop A. E. (2012). PennLive.com. Retrieved from http://connect.pennlive.com/staff/pennoped/index.html

Weinstein, D. (2015). The Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deborah-weinstein/what-portion-of-our-colle_b_7276240.html

Whitaker, M. (2013). MSNBC. Retrieved from http://www.msnbc.com/politicsnation/criminal-injustice-the-percentage-african