Challenging America’s ‘Justice Deficit

By: Gen Fujioka
posted 8/8/2008

This article was previously posted on Asian Week and is reposted with the permission of the author

The most serious political challenge facing Obama likely will be the nation’s budget deficit. If he is elected, the same politicians who cheered the launch of a trillion-dollar war will convert to born-again fiscal conservatives. In the name of the deficit, they will attempt to block new spending and starve into submission Obama’s campaign of hope.

Regardless of who becomes president, we cannot allow the budget deficit to dictate our nation’s priorities. Just as we cannot postpone repairing our deteriorating bridges and levees, we cannot delay addressing the nation’s growing social divide — what I call the “justice deficit.”

While the “justice deficit” cannot be simplified into a dollar figure, it can be described with equal precision. It can be measured in the number of children attending failing schools, working families unable to pay for health care and seniors waiting in line for decent housing. It is reflected in the nation’s growing inequality of income and wealth. I also measure the justice deficit by our nation’s declining support of legal services for the poor.

Without legal services programs, only those who can afford to pay an attorney can afford justice in our courts. But since 1982, the federal government has cut the primary source of support for legal services by more than 50% in real dollars — even while the number of poor people qualifying for assistance has increased by three million. Substantial cuts to other federal support, such as to the Community Development Block Grant program, also have had significant impacts on community-based legal services.

An example may illustrate why legal services matter. Some years ago, while I was an attorney at the Asian Law Caucus, we opened a student-led law clinic in San Francisco’s Little Saigon district. Among the first clients at the clinic was a homeless Vietnamese couple. We learned that the couple had been living in public housing until their son had been shot and killed at their doorstep. The housing authority refused to move them even with the killer at large. The couple abandoned their unit but could not afford another place to live.

Through the couple’s tragedy, we discovered a pattern of harassment of Southeast Asian immigrants in public housing, as well as a discriminatory government policy that denied Asian victims — because of their race — the opportunity to transfer to safer housing. Those findings led us to file a lawsuit that succeeded in forcing the housing authority to drop its discriminatory policy. Our clinic in Little Saigon succeeded in helping two grieving parents find housing, while also revealing and challenging the discriminatory policies that impacted hundreds of others. (The story of another family assisted in the process appears in the documentary film, AKA Don Bonus).

Community-based legal organizations not only deliver justice to individual clients, but they also root out patterns of injustice that can provide the basis for larger change. Through such work, the Asian Law Caucus, APILO in San Francisco, ALA in San Jose and APALC in Los Angeles (to name just the organizations in California) have brought to light many of the stories about racial bias and injustice that have appeared in AsianWeek and other media. Their combined advocacy has led to stronger laws protecting workers, battered immigrant women, voters seeking bilingual ballots and others in need.

Because of legal services’ record of exposing inequality and challenging the abuse of power, the right wing has long sought to dismantle legal aid programs. Hence, both Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and Newt Gingrich in the 1990s slashed support for legal services and imposed crippling limits on advocacy.

In order to sustain an agenda for change and social justice, we need to turn the conservative agenda on its head and rebuild an infrastructure for advocacy from the grassroots up. Community-based legal services can play a critical role in that infrastructure, not only through action in the courts but also through mobilizing public support for the changes that we so desperately need.

Gen Fujioka, formerly an attorney with the Asian Law Caucus, is studying public policy and administration at San Francisco State University.

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