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Access to Justice for the American Underclass
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19333 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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6 / 1991 |
5,351 Words |
| Author
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Stephen J. Schulhofer
Stephen J. Schulhofer is the Greenberg Professor at the
University of Chicago Law School, and director of its Center
for Studies in Criminal Justice. |
Justice has many faces. Lawyers are likely to focus primarily on justice as a matter of fair process. Far more important for most of us are concrete social and economic results: Do people have enough to eat? Do they have a warm, dry place to sleep? Are wealth and power distributed fairly?
Few today would insist that justice requires perfect equality in the distribution of resources. Many more assume that a just society should afford equal opportunity and enough food, clothing, and shelter to maintain a minimally adequate standard of living. In another popular formulation, made famous by John Rawls, all resources are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution would enlarge the social pie enough to help the least favored.
By any measure, justice eludes the American underclass. Socially and economically its members are "truly disadvantaged." Typically, they lack safe housing and adequate medical care. They cannot obtain a decent education for themselves or their children. Opportunities for lawful employment are often paltry or nonexistent.
In one of Chicago's large public housing projects, the Robert Taylor Homes, median family income was estimated at $5,470 and unemployment was estimated to be 47 percent in 1980. In the same year, residents of this project, who accounted for only 0.5 percent of Chicago's population, suffered 11 percent of its murders and 9 percent of its rapes. Norval Morris and Michael Tonry report that homicide has become the leading cause of death for black men and women aged twenty-five to thirty-four.
The most current figures suggest that this problem is growing worse. The New York Times recently reported that in the five years from 1983 to 1988, the likelihood of death by homicide for black males aged fifteen to twenty-four rose by 67 percent. An epidemiologist with the Federal Centers for Disease Control has said, "In some areas of the country it is now more likely for a black male between his fifteenth and twenty-fifth birthday to die from homicide than it was for a U.S. soldier to be killed on a tour of duty in Vietnam."
Access to justice for these unfortunate citizens should mean, first and foremost, economic opportunity--access to an education or job training, a chance to work. But access to these components of social justice is woefully limited.
Of 25,500 black and Hispanic ninth graders
...
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