Introduction: A Tale of Poverty, Pandemic, and Prisons

Abstract

Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Extreme Poverty, notes that “Covid-19 arrived in a world where poverty, extreme inequality and disregard for human life are thriving, and in which legal and economic policies are designed to create and sustain wealth for the powerful, but not end poverty” (Alston 2020). A 2018 report by Alston’s office noted that at that time, approximately 40 million Americans subsisted in poverty, 18.5 million in extreme poverty, and 5.3 million in “absolute poverty” (Alston 2018).5 An outlier among its allies, the United States also has the highest rates of infant mortality and youth poverty among the member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). [...]extreme poverty persists despite the United States’ significant wealth;the UN Special Rapporteur’s report observes “a dramatic contrast between the immense wealth of the few and the squalor and deprivation in which vast numbers of Americans exist” (Alston 2018, 4). The Trump administration’s utter lack of a national public health strategy or robust relief program for the many millions suffering due to COVID-19 shows that American poverty is not accidental. Through a yearlong seminar and lecture series on poverty and a spring conference on poverty and sexuality, IRW-affiliated scholars examined how institutions and regulatory systems shape families, kinship, domestic relations, intimacies, labor, and practices of care in the twenty-first century.