The criminalization of poverty in the United States has a wide sweep. In the four years since Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, countless stories have come to light about the fees and fines imposed by courts for minor violations; about driver’s license suspensions that push people into unemployment; and the ways in which money bail often traps the innocent, forcing guilty pleas from people who can’t raise the cash.

But it extends further than that. Today, in the United States, the poor are often punished simply because they are poor, and especially if they are people of color. Low-income children are arrested for minor schoolyard scuffles instead of being sent to the principal’s office. Recipients of public benefits are charged with fraud because they made mistakes filling out government forms. Cities use vagrancy laws to banish the homeless. And in an estimated 2,000 local municipalities across 44 states, police can order landlords to evict people they consider “chronic nuisances” because they rack up a certain number of petty infractions as small as forgetting to cut their grass, leaving garbage out on their property, or having practically any arrest on their record.

These “chronic nuisance” or “crime-free” ordinances are some of the most troubling examples of the criminalization of poverty. In the United States, they date to the 1980s and the War on Drugs, when city councils first began allowing police to seize crack houses without a trial. Over time, the laws proliferated and evolved, and today, police departments have wide latitude to choose when and where to enforce the ordinances. Too often they are turned on victims, rather than on their assailants.

Take Lakisha Briggs, a certified nurse’s assistant in Norristown, Pennsylvania. In 2012, Norristown classified anyone who called 911 three times in four months a “nuisance.” In April of that year, after several 911 calls, the police came to arrest Briggs’s abusive boyfriend, but they warned her that if she called again she and her daughter would be evicted; even calls from concerned neighbors would count against her. Later, when her former boyfriend returned from prison, he continued the abuse. “I had no choice but to let him stay,” she told a reporter. That June, when he knocked her unconscious and stabbed her in the neck with a shard of glass from a shattered ashtray, she still refused to call the police and ended up wandering outside until someone saw her and called a trauma team to medevac her to a nearby hospital. A few days later, she was evicted.

Today in the United States, the poor are often punished simply because they are poor, and especially if they are people of color.

Norristown isn’t the only example. In 2012, Matthew Desmond, author of the prize-winning book Evicted, studied 59 cities across the country and found they all had nuisance ordinances: 39 included assault, sexual abuse, battery, or domestic violence as potential reasons for eviction; only four explicitly stated that victims of domestic violence could not be evicted for calling 911 too many times. In Illinois, a state whose cities and towns have roughly 110 crime nuisance ordinances, Kate Walz of the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law has seen them invoked not only against victims of domestic violence, but also against people with loved ones who have threatened to commit suicide or children who tried to run away.