Every day around the world, thousands of people are detained for committing petty offenses
—minor violations that pose no threat to public safety.
Petty offenses are small offenses which are punishable by imprisonment or by fines or by some other punishment.
The word is petty offenses, but they are never petty
because actually the implication—the impact on the persons who are arrested—is actually huge.
In Nigeria, the poor are the ones that usually are arrested and detained for petty offenses.
These are basically individuals that you look at.
You find that they have little or no education.
They have little or no job skills.
Many times they are homeless.
They may be mentally ill. They may be engaged in sex work. They may be trans persons.
There are a whole range of ways in which we see people in public spaces,
and not because they have done something, but because of who they are.
Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world.
And amongst the population, it’s the poorest—Malagasy people—who will be arrested.
In Guyana, it’s the trans community that’s been increasingly targeted by petty offenses,
and, in particular, vagrancy laws.
So there was an offense, the one that we challenged,
that criminalized cross-dressing.
I had two-and-a-half years homeless on the streets of Miami and spent 10 months in a New York City homeless shelter.
And people were actually targeted with those petty offenses:
urinating in public, drinking in public, smoking, sleeping in public, resting in public—
and when they couldn’t pay the fines, eventually they were jailed.
In most cases, petty offense laws were first implemented by colonial governments hundreds of years ago.
You know the history.
All the countries that were colonized by the British have a legacy of very similar laws,
which treat destitute people, very poor people,
as criminally responsible for their situation.
The whole point of them was to keep Black and brown people on the plantations.
With colonialism, part of what it brings is the class system—
is a system of the rich, the more privileged, the white,
who are supposed to be entitled to be in a particular environment.
Those unable to pay fines for petty offenses are regularly forced to await trial in overcrowded prisons.
In some African countries, as much as 80 percent of people in pretrial detention are there for petty offenses.
So they don’t have beds to sleep on. They don’t have blankets.
Hygiene is extremely poor.
Children as young as 13 were often held in the same big, crowded, smelly cells as adults.
And worst is, there’s no separation between pretrial detainees and convicted people,
meaning that a child who’s accused of stealing peanuts—and I’ve met such a kid—
can sleep next to a person who’s found convicted of murder or rape.
Laws which we’ve had since the end of the 19th century after slavery don’t serve us well.
These small crimes, which take up a lot of court time,
cause the police to be engaged in work which is not genuine police work,
allow our police holding cells to be filled with persons who have not committed real offenses.
I think what we have to do is have compassion for one another.
I think what our government needs to do is take a look in the mirror
and realize that for 400 years it’s been creating a system that has kept people impoverished.
Remember, this is not about figures and numbers or people that nobody sees.
These are human beings.
We cannot treat it as if we don’t care.
We talk about justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity.
I think we may even understand justice, liberty, equality to some degree.
I think what we least understand is the idea of fraternity.
The idea of fraternity is ultimately the idea that you and I are bound—
all of us are bound—together.