Criminalizing poverty

In this paper, I show that there are many ways of limiting the access to social rights through the use of criminal legislation addressed to disadvantaged groups (e.g. criminalizing the occupation of abandoned lands). I start by describing situations in which disadvantaged groups, e.g. poor and immigrants are prosecuted, punished and corned to live in hard life conditions with the obligation to follow all the legal rules as equal citizens. I will argue that in some special and extreme conditions of poverty, disadvantaged groups could disobey some legal rules, particularly some new criminal legislation that it could be considered part of the overcriminalization process. My central argument is that this people could claim to unjust States a right not to be punished to avoid their special situation of inequality. I argue that in these special conditions there is no moral obligation to support the idea that we should respect all laws equally and to condemn to this people to live in their adverse constitutional luck.