Reformers Seek to Undo Growth of New 'Debtors' Prisons'

[jimmy olsen]

A shameful indictment of the American justice system. 

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/reformers-seek-undo-growth-debtors-prisons-n425276

Reformers Seek to Undo Growth of New 'Debtors' Prisons'

by Jon Schuppe

In the three decades since the U.S. Supreme Court banned jailing people because they couldn't afford to pay fines, the practice has crept back into fashion, giving rise to what critics describe as a new generation of debtors' prisons.

And now comes the backlash.

A wave of investigations and lawsuits by civil rights organizations is forcing local courts to curtail their reliance on fines, fees and surcharges related to traffic tickets and other minor offenses. Officials across the country are slowly rethinking what it means to be poor in the eyes of the justice system — and finding ways to allow indigent people to avoid falling into a cycle of debt and incarceration.





The latest push emerged last week in tiny Alexander City, Alabama — population 15,000 — where the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal lawsuit alleging the local government and police chief ran "a modern-day debtors' prison" in which poor people were ordered to pay off their fines by serving time in the municipal jail at a rate of $20 a day.

"We are definitely in a moment where there is a lot of public interest and outrage about this," said Sam Brooke, the SPLC's deputy legal director.

Much of that interest has to do with the response to the shooting last year of an unarmed black man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. That killing triggered riots and a furious national discussion about inequalities in the criminal justice system — including the use of court fines.

A U.S. Department of Justice report commissioned in response to the unrest documented how Ferguson's strategy of boosting municipal revenue through heavy-handed enforcement of petty offenses. The burden fell disproportionately on the town's poorest citizens, many of whom ended up behind bars, federal investigators found.

In effect, the report backed up what many civil right organizations had been documenting for years.





"It amplified the message and allowed for more reform to happen," Brooke said. "When we go into places and say, 'This isn't right,' we get, 'What do we need to make it better?' — Rather than them blowing us off entirely."

Brooke runs the SPLC's new economic justice unit, which in the last 18 months has begun to target municipal courts where poor people say they were forced into jail for no other reason than their inability to pay a fine.

Last year, the organization forced Montgomery, Alabama to adopt new policies to avoid incarcerating people who couldn't afford traffic tickets. The city promised to set a clear standard for judges to determine whether someone is too poor to pay, and avoid sending them to jail for that reason alone.





The SPLC is a relatively late entrant into growing field of civil rights organizations that are trying to expose and dismantle what they see as illegal incarceration of indigent defendants.

The American Civil Liberties Union, The Brennan Center for Justice, Human Rights Watch, and Equal Justice Under Law have all made the issue a priority, winning reforms in Ohio, Washington state, Colorado, Georgia and Missouri.

Their work has expanded to the use of private companies to collect debt, which is more common in the South, where there tends to be resistance to increased government spending.

"Ultimately we want to get to a point where it's not politically conscionable to have a debtors prison happening in your local court," Brooke said.

Some officials bristle at the comparison to debtors' prisons, saying the link is unfair.





Debtors' prisons — a remnant of an ancient English legal strategy to scare people into paying — became a feature in early American criminal justice before they were abolished in the mid-1800s. Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly deemed it illegal to incarcerate people because they can't repay a debt. That included a 1983 ruling that said courts must ask defendants about their ability to afford fines, and jail only those who willingly defy the system.

Courts are supposed to use payment alternatives, like garnishment or community service.


But the ruling left a legal gray area that governments took advantage of as American prison populations skyrocketed. The trend toward jailing poor defendants was hastened by the economic crisis of the early 2000s, when many cash strapped municipalities turned to their courts, rather than taxpayers, to generate revenue. That in turn led to the growth of private companies that promised to save local governments money by collecting fees from people on probation, many of whom were jailed for inability to pay.

Stories of lives ripped apart by such jailings became legion, leading to claims that they violated constitutional rights of due process and equal protection.

Reforms in Ohio came about when the state ACLU chapter told Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor in 2013 of indigent defendants being jailed for failure to pay fines in several local courts. The fix, O'Connor recalled, was simple: creating "bench cards" that reminded judges that the law required them to determine whether a person could afford a fine. If they couldn't, that was not a reason to have them jailed.

"What it boiled down to was a re-education of the judiciary," O'Connor said. "And advising them that they were missing a step or two in the process in determining how to collect those fines."

It appears to have worked.

"I haven't heard from the ACLU back on this so I guess things are going on pretty well," O'Connor said.

But advocates say illegal debt-collection practices continue to thrive across the country.

And that's what the SPLC said it found in Alexander City.

The alleged victims include Amanda Underwood, a 35-year-old mother of five and fast-food worker who says that since April 2014 she has twice spent time in the municipal jail after she was unable to come up with money she owed for driving with a suspended license. She agreed to become a plaintiff in the lawsuit "because I didn't think what Alexander City was doing was fair."

Alexander City's lawyer did not respond to a request for comment, and its police chief, named as a defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment.

Not long ago, Underwood was issued another driving-while-suspended ticket — received when she borrowed a friend's car to buy her children food. She has got a court date scheduled for Oct. 1, and expects to be asked to pay $250, which she knows she won't have.

But she hopes that, by then, the SPLC lawsuit will have persuaded the city to change its ways.

"I don't want this to happen to anybody else — or even to me — again," she said.

[Monoriu]

Ok, so they put people behind bars because they can't afford to pay fines.  How does putting them behind bars help them collect the debt?  Are they required to perform work while in prison, and their salaries will be confiscated to pay the fine?  Or are they not interested in collecting the uncollected fines in the first place, and the mechanism is used to scare others into paying up?  I am asking because presumably putting people behind bars costs money.

[Valmy]

I would guess the idea is people don't want to be in prison so will be more motivated to pay up or something.

[Admiral Yi]

People weren't put in debtors prisons in lieu of paying their debts, they were put there to incentivize them to do so.  It's a bad analogy.

[Martinus]

People weren't put in debtors prisons in lieu of paying their debts, they were put there to incentivize them to do so.  It's a bad analogy.

I understand the difference but how are both not debtor prisons? In both cases the end result is the same - you get your freedom taken from you when you fail to pay your debts.

The analogy is imperfect but not for the reason you mention - but because debtor prisons were about private debts, not public debts.

[Admiral Yi]

I understand the difference but how are both not debtor prisons? In both cases the end result is the same - you get your freedom taken from you when you fail to pay your debts.

The analogy is imperfect but not for the reason you mention - but because debtor prisons were about private debts, not public debts.

They're both not debtors' prisons because the subject of the article is plain old jail.  You break the law, in this case not paying your fines, and you go to jail.

[Jaron]

In a civilized society, money has no value or purpose and debtors prisons are unnecessary.

[dps]

I understand the difference but how are both not debtor prisons? In both cases the end result is the same - you get your freedom taken from you when you fail to pay your debts.

The analogy is imperfect but not for the reason you mention - but because debtor prisons were about private debts, not public debts.

They're both not debtors' prisons because the subject of the article is plain old jail.  You break the law, in this case not paying your fines, and you go to jail.

Basically, we have two ways to punish people for breaking the law--fines and imprisonment.  If someone can't afford to pay a fine, and knows that they can't be tossed in the pokey for not paying, there's no disincentive to breaking the law.

In theory, we could do away with fines, and simply make everything, even minor traffic violations and the like,  punishable with jail time.  Arguably, that would be fairer, because then whether or not you could afford to pay the fine, you'd get the same punishment.  OTOH, even most poor people can probably scrap up enough money to pay the fines for minor offenses, and would in most cases probably rather do so than go to jail. 

[Eddie Teach]

The conversion rate is pretty ludicrous.

[Martinus]

That being said:

Amanda Underwood, a 35-year-old mother of five and fast-food worker

Why the fuck a fast food worker has 5 children is beyond me?

[The Larch]

John Oliver's report on this issue from a few months ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjpmT5noto

[Valmy]

That being said:

Amanda Underwood, a 35-year-old mother of five and fast-food worker

Why the fuck a fast food worker has 5 children is beyond me?

Somebody has to. You rich lawyers aren't doing it.

[Martinus]

John Oliver's report on this issue from a few months ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UjpmT5noto

John Oliver addressed another issue that the article does not seem to mention - i.e. that failure to pay a fine would result in an additional fine, creating a vicious circle (and thus making it more similar to debtor's prison).

If the situation is more like described in the article (i.e. you get a fine and if you do not pay you simply go to jail in lieu of the fine but failure to pay the fine is not treated - and punished - as a separate offense) then I am inclined to agree with what Yi and dps said.

[Tonitrus]

That being said:

Amanda Underwood, a 35-year-old mother of five and fast-food worker

Why the fuck a fast food worker has 5 children is beyond me?

Maybe she used to be a stay-at-home mom, and her husband abandoned her/died?

[DontSayBanana]

That being said:

Amanda Underwood, a 35-year-old mother of five and fast-food worker

Why the fuck a fast food worker has 5 children is beyond me?

Who says she started out as a fast food worker?  The way the American workplace shed jobs between 2008 and 2010, she could just as easily have had a better job and had to get a job in fast food before the unemployment ran out.