No solvency – the criminal justice system drives inequality and overwhelms any increase in income.

Incarceration radically undermines a person’s capacity to build wealth. This is due to the loss of income and job growth opportunities during time spent in prison. Additionally, there is difficulty in finding steady, high-quality employment upon release due to state and local legal barriers, employer bias towards people with criminal records and convictions, and continued systemic burdens such as continued supervision placed on the formerly incarcerated. The continued push towards mass incarceration is closely tied to the movement to criminalize poverty through local and state fines and fees. Since 2010, over 48 states have either increased their criminal fees or adopted new fees (Shapiro 2014). In North Carolina, fees have risen by 400 percent, leading to the startling fact that 20 percent of people incarcerated in a county jail in North Carolina are there for failure to pay their fines and fees debt (Hunt and Nichol 2017). The Ferguson Report, written by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in the aftermath of the police shooting and death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, brought national attention to the unconstitutional and discriminatory impact of the practices and priorities held by local government. Local law enforcement agencies and the courts engaged in patterns that systematically targeted communities of color, essentially using community residents as cash registers to fund the municipal budgets through fines and fees related to non-violent offenses, such as traffic violations, loitering, sleeping on the sidewalk, and other causes for ticketing (US Department of Justice 2015). The DOJ deemed these acts to be unconstitutional. Ferguson was representative of the systemic racism prevalent in many other municipalities: Over-policing of communities of color has led to disproportionate rates of stops and arrests of people of color, forcing these communities to pay exorbitant fines and fees and extracting their wealth—and in many cases driving them into debt (Bingham et al. 2016). Additionally, even if women are not the ones being arrested and/or fined, they are the ones primarily paying the fine, fee, or bail money for their sons, grandsons, brothers, partners, uncles, and other family members (deVuono-powell et al. 2015). 63 percent of court-related costs were paid for by family members outside of the system, and 80 percent of these family members were women. Further, close to 90 percent of costs for phone calls and visits to an incarcerated person are incurred by women (deVuono-powell et al. 2015). This creates an additional financial burden to the layers of economic insecurity women of color already experience from race and gender discrimination in the labor market. These practices and the crusade towards mass incarceration and criminalization of nonviolent crimes effectively strip wealth from Black and brown women and communities. In many cases, these realities prevent people of color from building wealth at all. It is clear that any policy discussion about a guaranteed income must both address the historic barriers placed on women and people of color to build wealth and eliminate current wealth extraction policies that are reinforced by current governmental policies. Putting money into people’s pockets through government interventions won’t mean anything if that money is taken by the government with the other hand.