People like to talk about justice as if it starts in a courtroom.
It really doesn’t. Justice starts so much earlier, at kitchen tables and in cars, in rent payments and grocery aisles, in whether someone can afford childcare, transportation, and basic healthcare while working full time.
The MIT Living Wage Calculator makes this plain. It shows what people actually need to earn to cover basic necessities like housing, food, healthcare, and transportation. Not comfort. Not savings. Just survival.
And the numbers tell a story the Michigan justice system refuses to acknowledge or confront.
What a Living Wage Actually Looks Like
Wayne County
In Wayne County, a single adult working full time needs to earn about $20.39 per hour just to meet basic needs. Add one child and that number jumps to approximately $35.59 per hour.
That is not extravagance. That is rent, food, transportation, healthcare, and childcare.
Kent County
In Kent County, the living wage for a single adult is about $23.01 per hour. With one child, it rises to over $38 per hour.
Again, this is not discretionary spending. This is the cost of existing without constant crisis.
Lake County
In Lake County, a single adult needs about $19.25 per hour to cover basic expenses. With one child, the living wage climbs to around $33.54 per hour.
Even in counties with lower housing costs, full time work at low wages does not equal stability.
Compare That to Reality
Michigan’s minimum wage is $12.48 per hour; that gap matters.
It means many people are working full time and still cannot afford to live and are forced to rely on benefits like SNAP, benefits that are constantly under fire in today’s volatile political environment. It means people are constantly making tradeoffs between rent and healthcare, childcare and transportation, food and utilities.
And it means economic instability becomes the background condition of daily life.
Economic Instability Is a Justice Issue
When people cannot reliably cover the basics, they live on the edge. That edge looks like:
- housing insecurity and eviction risk
- untreated medical conditions and medical debt
- unreliable transportation that leads to job loss or missed appointments
- unpaid fines and fees that snowball into warrants
- limited access to education or training that could improve long term stability
Research consistently shows that economic deprivation and inequality are linked to higher crime rates and community disinvestment. This is not because poverty equals criminality. It is because poverty increases exposure to risk, surveillance, and punishment.
People are not justice involved because they willingly choose danger. They are justice involved because stability is structurally pushed out of reach.
Poverty Is Policed
Low income does not just create stress, it creates contact.
- Traffic enforcement becomes debt enforcement when people cannot afford repairs or insurance.
- Bail becomes a wealth test rather than a legitimate safety assessment.
- Probation and parole become financial traps when fees are layered on top of already unstable lives.
The legal system treats poverty as noncompliance, even when compliance is economically impossible. That is not justice. That is intentional punishment for surviving.
Money Shapes Outcomes Long Before a Judge Is Involved
Wealth and privilege go a long way because together they decide, who gets arrested, who sits in jail pretrial, who can afford an attorney, who can comply with court conditions, and who spirals deeper into the system.
These are not neutral outcomes because they are literally shaped by income at every single step. A person with a living wage has margin. Margin allows stability. Stability reduces contact with systems that punish disruption.
A person without margin lives one missed paycheck away from crisis. The justice system is very skilled at catching people in crisis because that translates to them not having the means to fight back.
Real Public Safety Starts With Economic Stability
Public safety is often framed as enforcement. More police. More penalties. More supervision. But real public safety looks like people being able to afford housing, healthcare, transportation, and childcare without constant financial instability.
Fair wages do more to prevent harm than fines and fees ever will.
You cannot punish your way out of poverty, and you cannot surveil your way into stability.
Pulling It All Together
Money is not a side issue in justice; it’s the entire basis. It’s why cash bail is a thing, why Michigan DOC needs high incarceration numbers to keep jobs, and why entire industries have popped up around jails and prisons. It has always been about money.
If full time work does not cover the cost of living, the system will continue to punish people for economic conditions they did not choose and cannot escape.
Justice does not begin in the courtroom; it begins with whether people can afford to live. And until we finally address that, everything downstream will remain broken.
MIT Living Wage References
- MIT Living Wage Calculator
Wayne County: https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/26163
Kent County: https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/26081
Lake County: https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/26085 - MIT Living Wage Calculator Methodology
https://livingwage.mit.edu/pages/methodology
