The New Debt Prisons: Entrapping debtors betrays the American idea. It must end.
Most people are probably unaware of the breadth of punitive user fees that Americans are saddled with when they go through our criminal justice system. In North Carolina, as of 2019, people were charged $10 per day in jail, and faced a $600 crime lab fee if their case had forensics, and an additional $600 fee if an expert witness testifies. That was on top of a $173 fee for appearing in criminal court. In 2014, NPR found that in over 40 states defendants can be billed for services that might include a public defender, room and board for time in jail and prison, their own probation and parole supervision, and even court-required electronic monitoring devices.
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Cindy Rodriguez, for example, is a disabled, middle-aged woman in Tennessee who was arrested on a charge of shoplifting in 2014. She followed her public defender’s advice, pleaded guilty, and accepted probation. Her probation lasted nearly a year under the supervision of a private probation contractor. The company charged her $35-45 a month and $20 for each randomly administered drug test, on top of the $578 she owed the court. She had to sell her van to keep up with these payments and lost her apartment. Still, she was booked into jail for owing money.
Deepening Racial Bias in the Criminal Justice System:
This method of funding law enforcement only magnifies the systemic racial discrimination in our criminal justice system. This was seen starkly in Ferguson, Mo. The Department of Justice found that the city’s predatory practices against its Black residents were driven by a toxic combination of explicit racial prejudice and callous fiscal manipulation. In 2013, city officials expanded the use of fines to the equivalent of half of its police budget. Ninety-two percent of Ferguson’s court warrants, almost exclusively used to compel fee payments, were against Black residents.
Study after study confirms that Ferguson is far from the exception. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found in 2017 that “municipal fee targeting tends to aggregate in communities of color,” whose governments use “law enforcement as ticketing and collections agencies to increase municipal revenues as distinct from focusing on public safety and civil compliance.” A nationwide study of over 9,000 cities found that cities with the largest share of Black residents collect over five times as much in fines and fees per capita as the cities with the smallest share of Black residents. In places where police can keep seized property, the negative racial impact is even worse. A nationwide study revealed that where police departments are allowed to permanently seize property, budget shortfalls lead to major increases in Blacks and Latinos experiencing arrests and property seizures for D.U.I.’s and drugs offenses, while the treatment of whites remains largely unchanged.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/opinion/politics/debt-america.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
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