Showing results by author "Peter Edelman" in All Categories

Dead End the Musical is a powerful and entertaining adaptation of Dead End, Sidney Kingsley’s landmark 1935 stage production. Like Kingsley’s play, Dead End the Musical shines a light on the social ills of a time and place that still resonate today: poverty, crime, class struggle, and economic and social inequality. It is also a story about justice and redemption, love and desire, hopes and dreams.

As former staffer to Robert F. Kennedy and current Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman explains in Not a Crime to Be Poor, Ferguson is everywhere in America today. Through money bail systems, fees and fines, strictly enforced laws and regulations against behavior including trespassing and public urination that largely affect the homeless, and the substitution of prisons and jails for the mental hospitals that have traditionally served the impoverished, in one of the richest countries on Earth we have effectively made it a crime to be poor.