After spending time with police officers on ride-alongs, meeting with politicians on the state and federal level and grass roots organizations fighting for human rights, it's clear that our criminal justice system is still crippling communities of color through mass incarceration.

In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, 'booming' state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.

If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.

Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor

Public housing officials are free to discriminate against you on the basis of criminal records, including arrest records. And so, you know, what you find is that even for these extremely minor offenses, people find themselves trapped in a permanent second-class status and struggling to survive.

If we continue to tolerate this level of poverty in our cities, and go along with eviction as commonplace in poor neighborhoods, it's not for a lack of resources. It will be a lack of something else.