INEQUALITIES

American Poverty and Human Rights Series

Poverty in the United States disproportionately affects women and children, communities of color, the elderly, and people with disabilities. Against the backdrop of the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights 2017 visit to the United States, the Center launched a year-long programming series to explore some of the most salient and distinctive elements of American poverty and their multiple and intersecting impacts on human rights.

Through events ranging from lectures to expert roundtables and consultations held throughout 2017-2018, the Center aimed to foster dialogue on a broad range of topics and examine whether human rights law, institutions, and discourse can enhance our understanding of poverty in the U.S. and contribute toward finding solutions. This series revolved around a range of questions, including:

• How do we conceptualize and measure poverty—in relative or absolute terms? Based on income, wealth, or other factors, such as access to services, community support structures, education, and health outcomes? And how does this influence our understanding of its human rights impacts?
• How does our legal system structurally discriminate against or fail to protect people in poverty against being disproportionately policed and disparately penalized because of their economic status, e.g. through debtors’ prisons, money bail, laws on homelessness, or exploitative fines and fees that have become increasingly common as local and state governments privatize their criminal justice systems?
• In what ways do women and ethnic and racial minorities experience poverty-related human rights violations distinctly, and at a disproportionate rate?
• What legal tools exist domestically and internationally to halt and remedy the deprivation of human rights amongst the poorest populations—and to challenge the continued accumulation of wealth by those who already have more than they could ever need?