Peter Edelman, 85, is a renowned legal scholar and professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. He specializes in the fields of poverty, welfare, juvenile justice, and constitutional law. Edelman worked as an aide for Senator Robert F. Kennedy and in the Clinton Administration; he resigned from that position to protest Bill Clinton’s signing a welfare reform measure with which he disagreed. Edelman was one of the founders and former president of the board of the New Israel Fund
Quote: “Money bail is ruining the lives of literally millions of poor people and costing the country unnecessary billions of dollars in incarceration costs every year. Local jail populations grew by 19.8 percent just between 2000 and 2014, with pretrial detention accounting for 95 percent of that growth… The single feature shared by almost every defendant in pretrial detention is that they are poor. Rich people make bail; poor people don’t. Regardless of actual guilt or innocence, poor people are criminalized for their inability to buy their way out of jail.”
— Peter Edelman in Not a Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America | Goodreads.com
Learn more about Peter Edelman from Wikipedia. ►
Watch “Peter Edelman: How Did America Get So Poor?” [16:19]. ►
Read “More Than a Nuisance: How housing ordinances are making poverty a crime” ►
Watch “Peter Edelman, ‘Not A Crime To Be Poor’ ” [55:14]. ►
Photo: Shutterstock
We welcome your comments. Click here.
Amazing Jews
In Celebration of the Jewish People
