'Debtors prison' ends up as the road to jail for the poor

Carol Forsloff - “We
are creating a two-tiered system of justice in which the poorest among
us are punished more harshly than those with means,” said Vinita Gupta,
the ACLU’s Deputy Legal Director.

This statement underlines the
results of two new studies revealing how court fees, imposed in tough
economic times, has created more serious problems for the indigent than
other people, creating the road back to jail for former offenders.

A
prison sentence for a relatively minor crime can end up being an
indefinite one under practices creating a "debtors prison" for former
offenders, according to two new studies.

While
many Americans favor harsh penalties for crime, would they support a
life sentence for possession of marijuana, because that is virtually
what happens under a criminal justice system that allows the imposition
of fees a newly-released prisoner receives upon leaving prison.

Some
of these fees are court costs, public defender fees and interest
payments that accrue over time, making repayment impossible for the
indigent.

Since
prisoners face problems securing work, especially during a tight job
market, this means they end up not having enough money to pay their
debts.  And in fifteen states this means they can be returned to prison.

A
new report entitled Criminal Justice Debt: A Barrier to Reentry by
Alicia Bannon, Mitali Nagrecha and Rebekah Diller spells out how this
system of fee imposition and debt collection creates an endless cycle of
prison for relatively small offenses.  It is just one of the reasons
why the prison population is growing, especially in recent years.

Both
the American Civil Liberties Union and the Brennan Center for Justice
have recently studied the problems involving fees and debt collection
practices.
system.
The problems were examined by the ACLU in criminal debt collection in Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio and Washington.

What
research has found is courts are raising money by passing on fees to
prisoners when they leave jail.  Those who can't pay are returned to
jail.  This increases the tax burden on the public for the cost of
maintaining more and more people for longer and longer jail terms.

Gupta
says, “Moreover, these efforts don’t serve the taxpayer well. Often
courts are spending more money incarcerating someone for failure to pay a
debt than the amount of the debt itself.'

Aggressive
efforts to collect fees fall especially hard on the poor.  The young
man caught with marijuana in some states faces jail time, gets out of
prison with no money and problems getting work, and then is faced with
fees he cannot pay.  The white collar executive, who has stolen hundreds
of thousands of dollars in fraudulent financial schemes, often has
family and friends and residual funds to help defray those same fees.

This
unequal justice puts the poor at greater and greater vulnerability in
the community and increases the likelihood of crimes being committed so
they can pay the fees or their being returned to prison because they
can't pay them.

Legal experts looking at this problem recommend the following:

• States
  should stop jailing individuals for failure to pay criminal justice
  debt before an ability-to-pay determination, and any fees should not
  subject a person to financial hardship.

• Public
  defender fees should be eliminated to reduce pressures that can lead to
  conviction of the innocent, over-incarceration, and violations of the
  Constitution. At the very least, defendants should not be ordered to pay
  defender fees they cannot afford.

• All
  jurisdictions should disclose fee collection costs, including
  incarceration, so taxpayers can assess the effectiveness of collection
  efforts.