The New York Times has an article about the proliferation of probation fees and other costs passed on through the courts, many of which are paid to private companies who have taken over many of the facets of our criminal justice system through government contracts. The article starts with this typical story:
Three years ago, Gina Ray, who is now 31 and unemployed, was fined $179 for speeding. She failed to show up at court (she says the ticket bore the wrong date), so her license was revoked.
When she was next pulled over, she was, of course, driving without a license. By then her fees added up to more than $1,500. Unable to pay, she was handed over to a private probation company and jailed — charged an additional fee for each day behind bars.
For that driving offense, Ms. Ray has been locked up three times for a total of 40 days and owes $3,170, much of it to the probation company. Her story, in hardscrabble, rural Alabama, where Krispy Kreme promises that “two can dine for $5.99,” is not about innocence.
It is, rather, about the mushrooming of fines and fees levied by money-starved towns across the country and the for-profit businesses that administer the system. The result is that growing numbers of poor people, like Ms. Ray, are ending up jailed and in debt for minor infractions.
“With so many towns economically strapped, there is growing pressure on the courts to bring in money rather than mete out justice,” said Lisa W. Borden, a partner in Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, a large law firm in Birmingham, Ala., who has spent a great deal of time on the issue. “The companies they hire are aggressive. Those arrested are not told about the right to counsel or asked whether they are indigent or offered an alternative to fines and jail. There are real constitutional issues at stake.”
There certainly are.
In Georgia, three dozen for-profit probation companies operate in hundreds of courts, and there have been similar lawsuits. In one, Randy Miller, 39, an Iraq war veteran who had lost his job, was jailed after failing to make child support payments of $860 a month. In another, Hills McGee, with a monthly income of $243 in veterans benefits, was charged with public drunkenness, assessed $270 by a court and put on probation through a private company. The company added a $15 enrollment fee and $39 in monthly fees. That put his total for a year above $700, which Mr. McGee, 53, struggled to meet before being jailed for failing to pay it all.
“These companies are bill collectors, but they are given the authority to say to someone that if he doesn’t pay, he is going to jail,” said John B. Long, a lawyer in Augusta, Ga., who is taking the issue to a federal appeals court this fall. “There are things like garbage collection where private companies are O.K. No one’s liberty is affected. The closer you get to locking someone up, the closer you get to a constitutional issue.”
The issue of using the courts to produce income has caught the attention of the country’s legal establishment. A recent study by the nonpartisan Conference of State Court Administrators, “Courts Are Not Revenue Centers,” said that in traffic violations, “court leaders face the greatest challenge in ensuring that fines, fees and surcharges are not simply an alternate form of taxation.” …
In a 2010 study, the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law examined the fee structure in the 15 states — including California, Florida and Texas — with the largest prison populations. It asserted: “Many states are imposing new and often onerous ‘user fees’ on individuals with criminal convictions. Yet far from being easy money, these fees impose severe — and often hidden — costs on communities, taxpayers and indigent people convicted of crimes. They create new paths to prison for those unable to pay their debts and make it harder to find employment and housing as well as to meet child support obligations.”
The more one looks at the realities of our criminal justice system, the more this country’s incessant self-congratulations about being the “land of the free” that protects due process and believes in fairness looks like little more than a bad joke.
11 comments
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ashleymoore
July 10, 2012 at 9:15 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
America, land of the fee.
d cwilson
July 10, 2012 at 9:17 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Hit ‘em with fines, then hit ‘em with enrollment fees. If they can’t pay, but them in jail and rack up even more fees.
What a sweet scam. A ponzi scheme for our criminal justice system. Why do I get the feeling that if the defendant racks up so many fees that they could never pay them back, the taxpayers will “reimburse” the contractor for their loss?
dingojack
July 10, 2012 at 9:37 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Ah America! –
SlouchingScurrying toward the early 18th century!*Dingo
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* Wood Street Compter (a private debtors prison), London c1710.
paulb
July 10, 2012 at 9:43 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
If the tobacco companies are canny enough they will start operating for-profit probation companies as well as their tobacco plantations. And then, argue that it seems such a waste to have all this free labour sitting around idly in prisons costing the taxpayers money. if they have an excess of these criminals they could run auctions to sell them off to other probation companies to help harvest their sugar cane and cotton.
reverendrodney
July 10, 2012 at 12:01 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Creeping privatization. We are being recolonized, this time by corporations. It makes me sick.
anandine
July 10, 2012 at 12:30 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It brings to mind Ernie Ford’s song about owing his soul to the company store.
Illuminata, Genie in the Beer Bottle
July 10, 2012 at 1:13 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Kinda makes me glad I’m CF. I shudder to think what the next generations lives will be like.
JustaTech
July 10, 2012 at 2:31 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The thing that really gets me is how enormously bad this is for the economy. No one can make enough money in prision to pay the debts. And once they’ve been in prision, no one wants to hire them. And if you can’t afford to pay off the tickets to get your dirver’s licence back, well then you can’t have any job at all, because in many areas of the country if you can’t drive you’re not getting anywhere.
So the taxable income goes down and the county is even poorer, so they up the fines and the cycle grows.
kermit.
July 10, 2012 at 2:42 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
So the taxable income goes down and the county is even poorer, so they up the fines and the cycle grows.
Of course the goal is to enrich the folks running the “private courts”, not enhance the public coffers (which wouldn’t justify this anyway).
Privatize the government! Enriching the people at the top will never be more efficient!
kagerato
July 10, 2012 at 3:34 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
This particular article is about misdemeanors and other minor crimes, but the same kind of behavior is going on with private debts. When the debtor cannot pay, the collections agency will take the matter to court. If the individual doesn’t show up there, either, in several states they can be hauled off to jail for contempt of court. Then, if they refuse to provide information or money that the judge believes they have, they can be held pretty much indefinitely since there are rarely any sane limits on the period of civil contempt.
Ibis3, denizen of a spiteful ghetto
July 10, 2012 at 5:07 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The “wrong date” thing has me wondering if the whole thing isn’t a scheme. How hard would it be to give a kickback to a clerk to print wrong dates on notices to appear?