The Department of Injustice

David Bernell

 

 

As President-Elect Biden is selecting people to serve in his government, I want to add something to the conversation.

 

I want a new government agency. To start it could be a council/committee/office in the White House. That way this idea can be taken out for a test drive to see if it works, without needing any action from Congress.

 

We know about the history of the United States (and if you don’t, you should). The big, horrible actions and injustices our country has taken against Black people and Native Americans. Locking up Japanese Americans during World War II. Forced sterilization of people found to be undesirable. These actions and others in our history can never be erased and maybe never remedied, even if there were agreement to confront these things head on.

 

There are also many smaller acts of injustice that have been carried out. These are smaller, everyday occurrences. Right now we all know about the Trump Administration taking children from their parents and locking people up in cages. The Biden Administration will be expected to put an end to these practices. But do you know about any of the many other routine, small injustices our government commits or allows to happen every day, that all just sail by under the radar? Maybe some of these can be remedied.

 

1.  Several years ago a woman in Texas lost her housing assistance, food stamps, and Medicaid because she was lucky enough to win a car in an online contest. The car’s value exceeded the limit on assets she could have and still be eligible for aid. [1]  

2.  Thousands of people in New York City who are homeless stay in that circumstance even though they have vouchers to pay the rent because landlords require that tenants maintain an annual income above a particular level. [2]

3.  A man in New Jersey whose family had health insurance was only approved by the insurance company for a drug treatment facility in Florida, far from home and the support of his family. The man died of an overdose in the facility, which was later shut down by law enforcement. [3]

4.  The Innocence Project has documented many cases in which innocent people have wrongly remained in prison for years, often because prosecutors resist measures such as DNA tests that could prove a person’s innocence. [4]

5.  A couple had their six-week old child taken away when a doctor saw marks on the baby’s stomach and determined they were the result of child abuse. The couple spent months fighting this. Subsequent analysis found that the marks were likely to have been caused by the straps on the family’s baby swing. [5]

 

And that’s only the beginning. There are dozens, hundreds, thousands more examples of this (a quick search on the internet will yield numerous examples like these). These are the injustices that we pay no attention to as a country, and which our political leaders often don’t know about and don’t have the bandwidth to learn about, even if they do care about them. Government agencies and employees may be understaffed, leading to terrible delays. Or it may be the case that agencies tasked to pay attention to these issues end up following the laws, often to their logical consequences, but sometimes to their illogical, inconceivable, maddening, unjust outcomes, that may never have been intended to harm people, but they do.

 

I want a new government agency: The Department of Injustice, or better yet, The Department Against Injustice. A department that welcomes all examples, complaints, requests, pleas, and anger at the injustice we see around us every day. That seeks out all gaps in policy, the loopholes, the unintended (and even intended) consequences of government actions, laws, regulations and standard operating procedures.

 

Just call them, email, text, send a video. Everyone gets a response, everyone gets attention and help addressing their problem. Not everyone can or will get what they want. But nobody gets ignored. Nobody gets the frustration and helplessness of having nowhere to turn. And people get a chance to avoid interminable delays that ultimately deny justice.

 

Injustice not only needs a spotlight, an article in the newspaper, a story that goes viral. It needs a place to seek out remedies, to have someone with authority and political power who pays attention and wants to help make things better and get things right, a place to turn injustice into justice.

 

The examples above and the many others I’m sure are out there may be difficult to address. They may present thorny issues, hard tradeoffs, legal conundrums, and weak alternatives. But that’s no reason to avoid them. As my mom might say, “We could put a person on the moon. Surely we can do this.”

 

I don’t know how to do this, but I know what I want:

 

I want a new government agency.

 

 

 

[1] Woman Denied Public Assistance Because of Her New Car, KTRE 9, July 27, 2006, https://www.ktre.com/story/5206986/woman-denied-public-assistance-because-of-her-new-car/.

 

[2] Lawsuit: Landlords Are Illegally Locking Out Thousands Of Homeless New Yorkers, Gothamist, August 8, 2019, https://gothamist.com/news/lawsuit-landlords-are-illegally-locking-out-thousands-of-homeless-new-yorkers.

 

[3] 1,000 people sent me their addiction treatment stories. Here’s what I learned. Vox, December 30, 2019, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/30/21004923/drug-rehab-racket-addiction-treatment-survey-2019-review.

 

[4] Wrongful Conviction and Prosecutorial Misconduct, HG.org Legal Resources, https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/wrongful-conviction-and-prosecutorial-misconduct-27301

 

[5] Hundreds of parents say kids wrongly taken from them after doctors misdiagnosed abuse, NBC News, December 5, 2019,  https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hundreds-parents-say-kids-wrongly-taken-them-after-doctors-misdiagnosed-n1096091