Whoa.
If anything ever showed you the over-criminalization of America, it's the reality that one in seven New Yorkers now has an open warrant for arrest. This is fundamentally preposterous.
The vast majority of warrants occur when people who receive summons for minor violations, such as riding a bike on the sidewalk or drinking a beer in public, fail to appear in court. Once they miss their court date, a bench warrant is issued for their arrest, meaning any interaction with a police officer, in which their ID is run and the warrant shows up, results in them being handcuffed and taken to the nearest precinct.
From there, a downward spiral rapidly accelerates and everyday people soon become criminals in the eyes of the system.
For reasons ranging from lost tickets to lack of funds to pay fines to simple neglect, a full 40 percent of those ticketed failed to appear in court last year. These open warrants can interfere with their ability to find jobs, receive public housing, and achieve legal immigration status.
The system is flawed and disproportionately impacts poor people and women/men of color. If you are unemployed or a single parent struggling with the cost of living in New York City and end up with a citation for jaywalking or missing the trash can with a wadded up piece of paper, or putting your backpack on an empty subway seat, the result should not be that you become a criminal over this. But it's happening by the thousands and ends up perpetuating a struggling underclass of New York (and America) made up of people who feel like they have to operate under the table or around the system just to avoid arrest. It's a mess.
Citations for ultra-petty offenses should never result in being jailed. The jail time itself costs exponentially more to the city, and certainly to the people being jailed, than could ever reasonably be justified.
While a few pilot programs are being launched to help people expunge their records with amnesty for petty crimes, something much more serious, like a systemwide purge of all petty crime penalties, should happen. At the point in which one in seven New Yorkers has a warrant out for their arrest, the whole system needs to be reconsidered.
Moderate, slow reforms are simply not enough. We need a revolution of the American justice system.