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“I hope that people will take away that the institutions of government can function very well by exercising kindness, fairness, and compassion in their deliberations. We live in a very contentious society,” he said in 2017. “I would hope that people will see that we can dispense justice without being oppressive.” Judge Frank Caprio
“Dispense justice without being oppressive”. These words are prescient as we witness federal troops deployed to our major cities (all Democratic majority states and cities, by the way) to allegedly control crime, and where statistics from those same cities show violent crime has been declining for years, according to the Council On Criminal Justice.
The late Judge Caprio had a massive social media presence, despite his ailing health in recent years, and was known and admired worldwide for his compassionate way of dispensing justice in his Providence, Rhode Island, Municipal courtroom. His fame was partly because of his television show, “Caught in Providence”, but he realized early in his career, thanks to a scolding by his father, that poverty ruled the lives of many who came before him for minor traffic and other violations, and it was not “justice” if mandating hundreds of dollars in fines meant that a single parent could not afford to put food on the table:
In one post, he tearfully recalled a moment when his father came to watch him on his first day sitting on the bench and reprimanded him after he failed to hear a mother’s pleas that she could not afford to pay $300 in parking tickets. “It never happened again after that. Never,” Judge Caprio said in the video. Washington Post obituary for Judge Frank Caprio, August 21, 2025.
The history of our civil and criminal justice system has not been particularly compassionate, or even fair to those without money. In fact, it seems to quite literally punish people for being poor, which is why I initially titled this newsletter, Crime and Punishment: Why The Poor Stay Poor In America. A 2022 report published in the American Sociological Review found the following:
Court-related fines and fees are widely levied on criminal defendants who are frequently poor and have little capacity to pay. Such financial obligations may produce a criminalization of poverty, where later court involvement results not from crime but from an inability to meet the financial burdens of the legal process. [Emphasis Added]
The Vera Institute of Justice, founded in 1961 to eliminate mass incarceration, spells out exactly how our country punishes the poor for being poor, including requirements for cash bail, enforcement of local vagrancy laws so the homeless can’t even sit or lie down on a city bench, court-ordered fines and fees, and incarceration during mental health crises.
The District of Columbia, Illinois, New Jersey and New Mexico, for example, have eliminated cash bail with no discernible increase in crime. Why should those with extra cash, or who are fortunate enough to have the support of family and friends be able to buy their freedom when the poor cannot do the same?
There is no doubt that our justice system’s discrimination against the poor overlaps with its discrimination against people of color, and each of the reports and studies I refer to uses statistical research to back up that statement. In case you remain skeptical, a graph published in 2024 by the Prison Policy Initiative using 2022 data, shows the incarceration rates of Black people are nearly five times higher than for incarceration of White people:
Even the Department of Justice in a 2015 blog post acknowledged that the poor suffer disproportionally from the imposition of fines and fees imposed by the court system, while still claiming that “poverty is not a crime”:
…in some places around our country, fines are still being imposed and people are still being incarcerated for nonpayment without a judge ever making the basic required inquiry — “Can this person afford to pay?” In these places, court fines, fees and other financial obligations can lead to unnecessary incarceration, trap people in a cycle of poverty, and undermine the faith in the justice system that is so critical to public safety.
What Judge Caprio understood, but many of our judges and certainly our lawmakers and other elected officials do not, is that dispensing justice, if it is to be called justice, must include both common sense and compassion.
This scene from one of my favorite legal movies, “And Justice for All” sums it up—it’s all about caring for our fellow humans. Do you care?
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I’d love to hear your ideas on “justice” and whether our court system and other branches of government discriminate against the poor in practice. Please leave your thoughts in the Comment Section below. And if you enjoy this post, please take a minute to “Like”, Share and “Re-stack”. Thanks!
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