Poverty

...Yet we know that fines and hours of "community service" are vastly insufficient either to deter or punish...

...I do not mean that we should merely seize their property, for then they would continue to feast on hidden assets...

...Any remainder might be used to compensate the victims of his crimes and, beyond that, for the relief of the deserving poor...

...We hesitate to toss bribe-takers and stockmanipulators into the pokey with cutthroats and muggers...

...This punishment may seem hard, but what is more appropriate than that someone who has impoverished the rest of us by mugging the economic and political system which enables us to enjoy prosperity in freedom should himself suffer some corresponding degree of want...

...By this snooping and bossing around, though, we would only make the criminal's life even more like the lives of the ordinary poor, who must put up with the same prying and pushing around from social workers, bureaucrats, and politicians whenever they need welfare, job training, or medical care...

...And the country-club minimumsecurity prisons to which we sometimes send an embezzler or election-rigger mock equally the ideals of rehabilitation and retribution...

...the criminal would be confined to a lifestyle compatible with the imposed level of poverty...

...He would have to live in housing, and in a neighborhood, that people with that income can find and afford—no sharing of 482 • DISSENT daddy's mansion or girlfriend's condo...

...If this provision risks breaking up families, it only makes the resemblance to conventional poverty more striking, for how many impoverished fathers have had to move out so that their loved ones could receive welfare...

...Thus, we spare a criminal sentenced to poverty one of the most heart-rending tortures of everyday impoverishment: the knowledge that one is inflicting one's own poverty upon one's children...

...and if not, their families, silent partners, and unindicted co-conspirators would set them up again...

...I mean that such a criminal should be sentenced, for a term of years or for life, to a more or less extreme level of relative poverty: the equivalent of, say, $4,000 a year, or $8,000, or (for first and relatively minor offenders) $12,000...

...He would have to dress the way people with that income dress—no "borrowing" a Saville Row suit from his former partner...

...If the poor have rats and roaches, let him have rats and roaches too...

...Would this render the program prohibitively expensive...

...But there is something else we could do...

...if a poor man cannot don worsted for an interview, let the criminal, too, go forth in chino...

...Nor is it income only that the court would limit...

...q FALL • 1988 • 483...

...The supervisors and investigators can make sure here, too, that no surreptitious luxuries are supplied by the former spouse...

...like other poor people, let him buy always in small quantities, and therefore often at the highest prices...

...Sometimes we are left hoping—foolishly, we all realize—that the embarrassment of exposure will sufficiently punish the price-fixers, polluters, and perjurers...

...A spouse who chooses to remain with someone sentenced to poverty would be subjected to the same rules as the criminal—but how often will that happen...

...Of course we ought not to condemn the innocent (however much they may have benefited from the criminal conduct) to poverty along with the malefactor...

...Nor could anyone under such a sentence accept credit beyond, or at better terms than, what would be extended to anyone else at his income level...

...If the poor are garbed in polyester, let polyester be his raiment also...

...If that seems like coddling, however, ask yourself how many top management positions he is likely to obtain or succeed at when he must show up first for interviews, and then every day, in duds from K-mart or worse—perhaps hand-washed in a rusty sink—and when he is tired from his long trek or three-bus odyssey to reach the corporate tower, still perhaps smelling of his slum...

...for another, any excess of salary and benefits earned by the criminal over his lifestyle limit should be applied to cover the costs of keeping him in line...

...The custody of any minor children will also have to be decided, and I suggest that, in the rare instances where custody is even contested, the children be distributed as they are in cases of surrogate motherhood: the impoverished party is ipso facto unfit, and cannot prevail...

...We could sentence them to poverty...

...No: for one thing, it would still be cheaper than incarceration...

...We would allow the criminal to hold any job he could get and keep...

...How long can he hold a decent job when he cannot dine with his contacts at the country club or buy them lunch at the fashionable bistro—remember, the firm could not legally pick up the tab—or when he cannot work late for fear of missing the last bus home or of having to walk from bus to tenement or shelter after dark through some valley of the shadow of death...

...Of course, making sure that all these rules are followed will require supervision, even investigation, which society will have to provide...

...If sentencing a criminal to poverty still seems too cruel, think how we are all, every day, by our actions and by our neglect, by our greed and by our sloth, by what we do and say as individuals, and by our participation in our society and its politics, condemning to equal poverty or worse millions of our fellow human beings, men, women, and children, who have done absolutely nothing wrong...

...Anyone whose spouse is sentenced to poverty should be entitled to an automatic and immediate divorce, as well as a share of the preforfeiture marital assets...