Ponderings

Poverty has always been criminal.
Still this case is a shocker.

At the outset there is nothing remarkable about this case. Sofia Salva, a Sudanese refugee who speaks halting English, was pulled over by two Kansas City police officers because of a phony license tag in her car. The officers quickly discovered that she has outstanding tickets and warrants, the most egregious of which is child endangerment.

With a total of six years between them, the young officers had just enough experience to be callous but not yet enough to sort through the nuances.

Sofia Salva pleaded with the arresting officers for medical care more than a dozen times before they ever took her into custody for a string of poverty related crimes. She claims that she continued to plead for help when held overnight in the jail. Only when she passed a large clot, 12 hours later, was she allowed to go to the hospital. And there her unborn child was born and died.

In retrospect, with the priceless gift of video cameras, we can see with clarity Salva’s plea for medical attention and in the Monday morning light the officers’ callousness is unconscionable. But long before she met the Kansas City officers we had missed our chance to help Sofia Salva and her unborn child.

Sofia Salva had outstanding tickets in part because she could not pay them. She had been charged with child endangerment not because she had acted in an abusive manor but for negligence. Apparently Sofia left young children unsupervised in her home when she went to get food, maybe more than once. Given the reality of her uninsured and unregistered life, her choice also meant that she protected the children from being in an unsafe driving situation. Too many of the choices which confront the poor in our nation are choices between the lesser of two evils.

Disney captures the paradox of the poor hero beautifully in the lively street scene in the movie “Aladdin”. A hungry young Aladdin steals a loaf of bread for basic sustenance and then dives for cover as the police chase ensues. Even the nobility of Robin Hood’s thievery doesn’t diminish the criminal nature of his conduct. Part of the suspense of the story is the question of whether he will be caught.

Debtor’s prisons, common in the 18th century when the colony of Georgia was designed to be an experiment for the “worthy poor”, are coming back into vogue. Governor Patrick of Massachusetts has set out an initiative to loosely titled, “safety” in which the criminal is to pay for the cost of their prosecutions.

Already are court dockets are filled with crimes of poverty. People driving with out insurance, unpaid parking tickets, forged registrations, and shoplifting for basic stuff like Tylenol. Currently there are 90,000 women in prison in this country; in the year before there arrest 80% of them had incomes of less than $2000. Their most common crimes? Check forgery, illegal use of a credit card, property crimes. (prisonactivist.org) We spend billions of dollars to keep these poor criminals off our streets.

While we are investing in the corrections industry, health care in this nation is increasingly unattainable. In the midst of the most recent bankruptcy reform conversations we learned what we already knew, that more than half of all bankruptcies are caused by uninsured medical expense. Rather than address the problem of affordable access to healthcare, our most recent Congress addressed the punitive path of bankruptcy reform.

Ironically Sofia Salva, a refugee in the heartland, knew one American value. Whatever else Sofia may have learned about our American culture she had been here long enough to hear our religious platitudes naming our commitment to unborn children. She had experienced our most recent and rhetoric filled election cycle. She could not have missed the message that in our red state the unborn child is valued. She knew that she was carrying an unborn child that needed help, desperately. Tragically Sofia just hadn’t been here long enough to know that the platitudes don’t apply to the unborn children of poor immigrants.

We can continue to wage war on the poor. We can hire more police officers and build more prisons, we can even build bigger fences at the border; we have proven that it is good for the economy. But a more reasonable solution might simply be to provide access to healthcare, transportation, and food. Of course that would presume that we are serious about our promises to the unborn.