Two New Articles on Spatial Inequality

Two articles that study poverty and its consequences in relation to place have just come out that may be of interest.

The first is: Lisa Pruitt & Beth Colgan, Justice Deserts:  Spatial Inequality and Local Funding of Indigent Defense, 52 Ariz. L. Rev. 218 (2010).  (The AZ L. Rev.’s posting of the article can be found here.)  The abstract is below:

This Article, written for a symposium on “Funding Justice,” maps legal conceptions of (in)equality onto the socio-geographic conception of spatial inequality in relation to indigent defense services in Arizona. In particular, we examine county-to-county variations in funding and structures for providing this constitutionally mandated service. We conclude that the State of Arizona’s current system for delivering indigent defense services puts it at serious risk of violating the U.S. Constitution’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel and/or the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. We outline county-level, legislative and judicial solutions to the problems we identify.

Like more than a third of U.S. states, Arizona delegates to counties the responsibility of providing counsel to indigent criminal defendants. Individual Arizona counties must finance this service, and each also has the autonomy to determine how best to provide it, e.g., by establishing a Public Defender office, paying contract attorneys, and/or appointing counsel. Inequalities and problems associated with underfunding of indigent defense arise, however, because county governments in Arizona are financed primarily by local tax revenue, leaving counties with dramatically differing capacities to provide both discretionary and mandatory services. These disparities occur in part because Arizona is unevenly developed to a dramatic degree. For example, more than 60% of the state’s residents live in Maricopa County, while five of the state’s remaining 14 counties are each home to as little as 1% or less of the state’s population. Further, poverty rates and income levels vary dramatically from county to county, with non-metropolitan counties typically featuring the highest poverty rates and the lowest per capita and median household incomes. Because the fiscal capacity of a local government is limited by its residents’ per capita income, this uneven development – coupled with an emphasis on local tax revenue to finance county government and virtually no effort at redistribution of tax revenue at the state level – creates severe spatial inequalities in service provision among counties.

To illustrate the county-to-county variations in the funding and delivery of indigent defense services, we discuss in detail the economic and demographic profiles of five Arizona counties: metropolitan behemoth Maricopa County, with a population of 4 million and a diverse economy; sparsely populated, barely metropolitan and amenity-rich Coconino County, home of the Grand Canyon and a tourism-driven economy; persistent poverty Navajo and Apache counties, both with significant American Indian lands and American Indian populations, who consume state justice systems services at a lower rate than non-Indians; and Arizona’s most rural county, Greenlee, with only 8,000 residents, a dearth of lawyers, and a surprisingly affluent, mining-dependent economy.

In addition to focusing on disparities in funding of indigent defense among these five Arizona counties, we also assess the counties’ provision of indigent defense for several problems commonly associated with underfunding: caseloads and competency, financial conflicts of interest, lack of parity with prosecution, and the risk that a single case will overwhelm a county’s defense system. Despite some gaps in publicly available information detailing the funding and provision of indigent defense – information that could be developed through discovery should litigation be initiated – we find sufficient evidence of significant county-to-county variations in funding and delivery of indigent defense to suggest constitutional violations. At particular risk from a systemic standpoint are non-metropolitan counties that do not have Public Defenders but instead rely entirely on lawyers with whom county governments contract to provide indigent defense. To the extent that these lawyers are supervised or their caseloads monitored, that task falls to local Superior Courts, a situation which itself raises problems.

While Arizona’s dramatically uneven development and heavy reliance on local taxation to finance indigent defense make it a particularly interesting case study, we assert that the legal arguments we formulate could apply to any of the 18 states that fund indigent defense primarily or entirely at the county level.

I read this article and learned a lot about the state I am not always proud to call home and about the way indigent defense is funded.  It is another strong contribution by Prof. Pruitt that continues to shed light, as earlier of her articles have done, on the particular challenges of created by rural space in an urban-centric politics.

The second article is: Lisa Pruitt, Spatial Inequality as Constitutional infirmity:  Equal Protection, Child Poverty and Place, 71 Montana L. Rev. (2010).  The abstract is below:

This is the first in a series of articles that maps legal conceptions of (in)equality onto the socio-geographical concept of spatial inequality, with a view to generating legal remedies for those living in places marked by socioeconomic disadvantage. Written for a symposium on “rural law,” this article considers in particular whether the funding and delivery of government services at the county level in the state of Montana violate the state’s constitution because of the grossly disparate abilities among Montana counties to finance and provide such services. Pruitt’s analysis focuses on children as a particularly vulnerable and immobile population, many of whom are deprived of government services based on place of residence. Further, the article scrutinizes the provision of health and human services as a category of services to which Montana children experience great variations in access.

County governments in Montana are financed principally by local property tax revenue. Uneven development across the state, from one county to the next, consequently confers on individual counties vastly different capacities to provide services. Because of the lack of centralized funding for services such as public health and other human services, those who live in sparsely populated, relatively undeveloped and property-poor counties are least served by local government. At the same time, wealthy counties – which tend also to be more populous – have economies that are more diversified, property tax bases that are more substantial, and a correspondingly greater capacity to deliver services. More densely populated counties also face lower per capita costs for delivering services because they are better able to achieve economics of scale.

To illustrate these disparities, Pruitt discusses in detail the economic and demographic profiles of five Montana counties. These include Yellowstone County, home to Billings, the state’s largest city; fast-growing Gallatin County, which exemplifies rural gentrification and the rural resort phenomenon; Stillwater County, a sparsely populated nonmetropolitan county with significant mineral wealth; Big Horn County, a persistent poverty county with a majority American Indian population; and Wheatland County, a tiny county with a dwindling population and an agriculture-based economy.

The legal critique of this spatially and economically uneven landscape relies primarily on the 1972 Montana Constitution, which is among the most progressive state constitutions in the nation. In particular, Pruitt argues that the constitution’s equal protection and dignity clauses are violated by the county government funding scheme and its consequences. The Montana equal protection clause forbids discrimination based on “race, color, sex, culture, social origin or condition, or political or religious ideas.” Pruitt maintains that significant disparities in service provision, which occur arbitrarily across county lines, violate this equality guarantee. Pruitt’s second argument is for state provision of a minimal degree of services to children. Relying on the constitution’s dignity clause and the doctrine of parens patriae, Pruitt argues that children cannot live with dignity unless their fundamental needs are met. She asserts that the typical emphasis on autonomy with respect to the dignity right is misplaced with regard to children. For the child population, Pruitt maintains that a right to dignity should be grounded instead in their inherent dependency and vulnerability, thus imposing a duty on the state to provide children’s first-order needs when their parents cannot or do not do so. In addition to this analysis under the Montana Constitution, the article also challenges the orthodoxy of U.S. constitutional jurisprudence regarding poor people, public benefits, and equal protection.

Finally, Pruitt argues that Montana’s school funding scheme, which has been the subject of recent litigation, now represents a better model – albeit a still-imperfect one – for financing public services. This is because the school funding formula seeks to level the funding playing field by providing more state monies, along with federal funds that are somewhat similarly allocated, to school districts based on the presence of at-risk students. School districts with the highest percentages of at-risk students tend also to be the school districts with poorer property tax bases. By contrast, the scheme for financing county government results in a situation in which more affluent counties are better able to provide services to residents, while those living in the most rural and property-poor counties have access only to very limited health and human services. Financing so linked to the local scale thus aggravates and further entrenches spatial inequalities, an outcome that is in contrast to the school funding formula, which aims to achieve greater substantive equality by channeling money to the schools with the greatest need.

While this article analyzes spatial inequality in the context of a specific state and with respect to a particular type of government service, the capacity and significance of spatial inequality as a critique of legal equality guarantees is not so limited. The services that governments provide implicate a wide range of rights, and these rights may be violated if the services are not provided in an equitable manner. Pruitt thus calls for all branches and scales of government to be more attentive to the difference place makes to service delivery, in order to ensure more even and fair access.