Injurious Income Inequality

Income inequality, in simple terms, can be defined as a measure of the wage gap between different peoples across the income range. It has been a heavily discussed topic since there was a global shift towards the class system of capitalism. There isn’t a more relevant time for this topic to come up since instead of affecting somewhat of the population, income inequality has impacted a vast majority of the population. This holds true especially in the US, one of the leaders of the global economy, where the rich keep getting richer and the poor, poorer, with more than 50% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, with a lot working more than 1 job to cover their expenses. How has income inequality continued to rise and get worse through the years?

To begin, let’s look at something else America is currently leading the world by: prison population. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Criminal Psychology, pages 632-637 looks at the US justice system and criminal behavior through a lens of psychology, criminal justice, sociology and criminology. Pages 632-637 go in depth to discuss the details of the mass incarceration over the years. What’s important is that instead of looking at raw numbers, this excerpt looks at the count of inmates every 100,000 residents instead, delivering a percentage based statistic; a more accurate representation of the situation. The important part is that they also dive into the prison population over the years. The author says in 2015 alone 2,173,800 persons were incarcerated, meaning one of every 114 adults in the US was behind bars (2019, Morgan). Moreover, people can’t work or accrue wealth in prison. In other words, one of every 114 adults in the country literally couldn’t work, and even if they could, prison labor only pays less than a dollar an hour like the case with inmates in private prisons. This contributed to the increasingly worsening case of income inequality.

In addition the treatment of the prison population in the US is extremely harmful towards their social standing and economic ladder climb. Sliva and Samimi explore the problematic treatment of prisoners and the relationship between guidelines and private corporations hiring prisoners for their work. The author argues that the prison population is predominantly colored and poor, with the increase in public skepticism of the term “Prison-industrial complex (PIC)”. This is largely due to the fact that the private prison industry has been one of the fastest-growing industries in the US. The author argues the term PIC has also been used to describe the overlapping interests of the government and industry. The author also explores the historical context of how the ratification of the 13^th amendment, while ending African slave labor and the exploitation of working-class immigrant labor, also opened the doors for prison labor due to how it’s worded as “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” (2018, Sliva, Samimi). This had major modern consequences for the prison population, where even protective programs like Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP), which aimed to establish jurisdictions for employing prison labor, failed to prevent a loophole. Only industries using interstate commerce are under PIECP, hence there’s only less than 1% actually being treated fairly under those regulations. Companies like Boeing, Microsoft, McDonald’s, and Walmart have all employed inmate workers or contracted with suppliers who employ inmate workers – in order to maximize profits and minimize costs. According to the author, those earning in traditional correctional industries make $1 an hour on average, while federal prisoners, who are required to work in areas like food service, warehouse, inmate orderly, plumber, painter etc. as long as they’re medically able, are only paid 12 to 40 cents per hour per Federal Bureau of Prisons website (2018, Sliva, Samimi).

There is historical context behind corporations being able to mistreat the working class and seize power. In his book in chapter 4, Legal Limits, Professor Robert Henry Stanley delves into the supreme court’s complicity in creating these problems. His focus on the 14^th amendment really sheds light on things and helps clear view of the historical recount of the US favoring corporations over it’s residents. In fact, “in 1886 alone, the high court invalidated 230 state laws designed to regulate corporations.” (2021, Stanley).. The altered interpretation of the 14^th amendment made it so corporations are liable as a person in court. In other words, they are also protected by a person’s rights, which caused a chain reaction ultimately resulting in the abolishment of laws protecting corporations, setting off chain reaction where the corporations would start having political interests backed by profit motives. The greedy pursuit of profit drove labor exploitation sky high, all the while there were whole new set of laws which made companies immune to a lot of illegal activities compared to before. This ultimately lowered the strain of regulations on the corporate bodies, the effects of which can still be felt today: how the wealth gap has widened ever so rapidly and the abyss just keeps getting wider (2021, Stanley).

In contrast to historical evidence, Martha R. Burt provides a modern analysis to the statistics and problems of homelessness very well in her article, “What Will It Take To End Homelessness?”. She argues that “On any given day, at least 800,000 people are homeless in the United States, including about 200,000 children in homeless families” (2001, Burt). She likens the homelessness problem to a “revolving-door crisis”, where there’s more people becoming homeless than there are people withdrawing from it. That within these statistics, lie the truth that there are more people with families and children becoming homeless than there are individuals becoming homeless. The author argues that things are only getting worse and that a lot of the poor population are a part of the homeless population. The author’s argument is that when you’re homeless, income and work, things needed to get out of homelessness get increasingly difficult to come by. This problem is worse for people who have been homeless since they were born, making it increasingly harder for them to get out of that position. According to the author, physical and mental disabilities can also affect an individual, preventing workplaces from hiring them because of ableist discrimination. In the case of mental disability, however, it’s because they exhibit behavior that can be harmful to themselves as well as for others. The solution to that is obviously good rehabilitation programs and more funding for them, but of course, those are non-existent, according to the author. There’s a policy failure in terms of the legislators, and the author says regular citizens need to vote better but also try and help out however they can, due to a sense of community if nothing else.

Nunez in “A Snapshot of Family Homelessness Across America” looks at the fastest growing homeless population across America: families. The authors argue that, although families are the fastest growing homeless population, lack of acknowledgement and delusional superiority among the populace, with many thinking “America is the greatest country in the world. How can this be?”, has actually held back progress in terms of solving the problem. Therefore, the author works on bringing more light to the problem to increase awareness of how severe this is. Homeless families can’t afford basic shelter or food or clothes. There are over 400,000 homeless families in shelter, with over 1.1 million children among them (1999, Nunez et al.). For there to be a lack of acknowledgement to uphold a façade of a concept of America being the greatest country only serves to exacerbate how severe this issue is if it remains as only a statistic and if there are no helpful programs put into place for them. Most of the homeless families consist of single mothers and their children, but there are also a lot of parents with their children that are homeless. The path of a lack of a social safety net that they are forced to walk on leads deeper and deeper into poverty and can only get worse and worse for them. A combination of all those prevent homeless families to reach a state of recovery and get back on their feet economically.

All of this points to one thing: companies have started to become more powerful while the working class keep getting trampled underneath. There’s a lack of laws regulating corporations but an abundance of laws making sure corporate profits and GDP remains high. The system creates room for exploitation and the more powerful rob and take advantage of those incapable of doing anything about it. One person, or collective, cannot and should not be blamed for the ever-stretching income inequality. Rather, the system has been set up to not have preventative measure in the case of human greed taking over on behalf of the corporations. Our government has abandoned us and only gives importance to things that only ensure the top spot on the global economic ladder.