Peter Edelman has been focused on poverty in America for a very long time.
He's one of the two Clinton Administration staffers who resigned in protest when the president signed a welfare reform bill in 1996.
America is hard on poor people, a situation Edelman covers in his book Not a Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America.
Examples abound: Ferguson, Missouri, where fines and fees were used to fund city government, is just one. The author visits with others.
