"Rikers Island is filled with thousands of poor people accused of petty crimes...Their poverty alone imprisons them." The Brooklyn Bail Fund provides bail money to poor defendants. If you're interested in the difference between how rich and poor people experience our legal system, their site has a good explainer.

"Government assistance for families whose incomes flutter just above the poverty line nearly doubled from 1983 to 2004... The numbers look very different for those scraping along at the bottom, generally unemployed single mothers with children. Their benefits declined in real terms by about one-third."

Not long ago, "microlending" was the world's hottest poverty-fighting tactic—the UN even declared 2005 to be the "International Year of Microcredit." Now, a barrage of new studies say that microcredit isn't as great as everyone thought it was.