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octoberlib

(14,971 posts) Wed Mar 25, 2015, 12:34 PM Mar 2015

In modern-day debtors' prisons, courts team with private sector

For teenager Kevin Thompson, a traffic ticket ended up costing him not only his driver's license, but also his freedom.
In his account of the experience, Thompson says he was ordered to pay $810 in fines by Georgia's DeKalb Recorders Court, an amount that was out of reach for the low-income auto shop and tow truck worker. Instead of working with Thompson to find another way to pay, such as through community service, the court handed off Thompson to a for-profit probation company called Judicial Correction Services (JCS). JCS told Thompson he had 30 days to pay the fine, but also gave him erroneous legal information, such as overestimating the cost of a public defender.

Thompson notes that the court later took up a JCS officer's recommendation to incarcerate him, resulting in a five-day stint in jail for failing to pay the fine.

Thompson, whose case was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, is just one of the poor Americans ending up in a modern-day version of the debtors' prison, an antiquated punishment that was eliminated by the U.S. in the 1830s. A rash of new cases are coming to light as municipal courts increasingly outsource probation to for-profit companies like JCS, which make their money by tacking on their own fees to traffic violations. They typically don't charge the courts or municipalities for their services.

"Since 2009, we have been hearing increasing reports that people are being jailed for a failure to pay fines and fees," Nusrat Choudhury, staff attorney in the ACLU Racial Justice Program, told CBS MoneyWatch. "We've observed that for-profit corrections companies are proliferating. They offer a win-win to local governments because they offer to generate revenue from people who are too poor to pay on probation day."

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-rise-of-americas-debtor-prisons/