Probation Fees Multiply for Poor as Companies Profit
Source: NY Times
CHILDERSBURG, Ala. — 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 She failed to show up at court (she says the ticket bore the wrong date), so her license was revoked.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.”
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/us/probation-fees-multiply-as-companies-profit.html?_r=1&hp
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
msongs
(67,403 posts)xtraxritical
(3,576 posts)
asjr
(10,479 posts)
limpyhobbler
(8,244 posts)
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)Our weekly rag runs the latest arrests reports, from all over the county.
Time after time after time people are arrested for anything from felonies to misdemeanors,
including drug possession and.or sales, thefts, and of course lots of DUIs.
People are arrested, processed bond out, if they show up for court they get fines,
until the next arrest, which comes along pretty quickly.
Murders, no bail.
Use of firearm, no bail.
Child porn, no bail.
Other than that, bail and fines.
Plus we have the constant "safety checks" roadblocks, stop and checks, etc.which scoop up the expired license tags, licenses, lack of insurance, plus whatever a warrant check shows.
so far the jail and courts are still run by the city and county, down here.
Stratosgc
(37 posts)When you have the situation we are in today where progressive taxes are out and revenue is produced by State lotteries, cigarette and liquor taxes and traffic fines, we have created a government the preys on the weakest of its people. We have created a cannibal state. That was the suation in England when we revolted and left.
My area of Maryland has contracted out to a company to put in speed and traffic light cameras. One of those devices showed up in my colleague's neighborhood. He was unaware of it, and got 6 tickets in a week for $60 before he even knew the machine was there. He was driving 42 mph in a 35 mph zone. It is just a money maker, more preying on the population.
Solly Mack
(90,764 posts)magic59
(429 posts)A vicious cycle with the poor an easy target. Kind of like sharecropping or the company store of old. With corporations running government, writing law, there is only one name for that. Fascism.
coalition_unwilling
(14,180 posts)to mind.
Forced prison labor (pka 'slavery') rounds out the picture.
permatex
(1,299 posts)correct. I also see it as the 1% screwing the 99% again. Anyway to make a buck on the backs of those that can least afford it.
coalition_unwilling
(14,180 posts)the rope with which to hang him." 
permatex
(1,299 posts)and it seems they've done that.
mahatmakanejeeves
(57,425 posts)It's called peonage. I had a post about peonage in another thread.
Slavery by Another Name
The best book I read in 2011 was Slavery by Another Name, written by Douglas A. Blackmon, the ex-Atlanta bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal. No amount of recommedation is enough. This is an astonishing work about a subject that I knew next to nothing about.
I'll let the author speak for himself:
INTRODUCTION
The Bricks We Stand On
On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with “vagrancy.” Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham’s offense was blackness.
After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner—fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses—Cottenham’s sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.
The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North—U.S. Steel Corporation—the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay off Cottenham’s fine and fees. What the company’s managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama, was entirely up to them.
A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a mine called Slope No. 12—one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the edge of Birmingham known as the Pratt Mines. There, he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour digging and loading coal. His required daily “task” was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners— many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement. The lightless catacombs of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal, must have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in the countryside of Alabama—even a child of slaves—could have ever imagined.
Please read this book. Once Sara Robinson has done that, then she can tell me all about enlightenment.
limpyhobbler
(8,244 posts)And they are kind of succeeding. But to be fair it's not just just Alabama, it's nationwide.
elleng
(130,895 posts)and will be found so when it gets to court.
The Supreme Court case that concluded It is a denial of equal protection to limit punishment to payment of a fine for those who are able to pay it but to convert the fine to imprisonment for those who are unable to pay it. Williams v. Illinois, 399 U.S. 235 . Pp. 397-401. was taken to the Supreme Court by my bosses, in Chicago, in my first job after college. It was one of the reasons I later went to law school.
The Court stated, more recently, in a different case:
Petitioner accumulated fines of $425 on nine convictions in the Corporation Court of Houston, Texas, for traffic offenses. He was unable to pay the fines because of indigency 1 and the Corporation Court, which otherwise has no jurisdiction to impose prison sentences, 2 committed him to the municipal prison farm according to the provisions of a state statute and municipal ordinance 3 which required that he remain there a sufficient [401 U.S. 395, 397] time to satisfy the fines at the rate of five dollars for each day; this required that he serve 85 days at the prison farm. After 21 days in custody, petitioner was released on bond when he applied to the County Criminal Court of Harris County for a writ of habeas corpus. He alleged that: "Because I am too poor, I am, therefore, unable to pay the accumulated fine of $425." The county court held that "legal cause has been shown for the imprisonment," and denied the application. The Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas affirmed, stating: "We overrule appellant's contention that because he is too poor to pay the fines his imprisonment is unconstitutional." 445 S. W. 2d 210 (1969). We granted certiorari, 399 U.S. 925 (1970). We reverse on the authority of our decision in Williams v. Illinois, 399 U.S. 235 (1970).
The Illinois statute involved in Williams authorized both a fine and imprisonment. Williams was given the maximum sentence for petty theft of one year's imprisonment and a $500 fine, plus $5 in court costs. The judgment, as permitted by the Illinois statute, provided that if, when the one-year sentence expired, Williams did not pay the fine and court costs, he was to remain in jail a sufficient length of time to satisfy the total amount at the rate of $5 per day. We held that the Illinois statute as applied to Williams worked an invidious discrimination solely because he was too poor to pay the fine, and therefore violated the Equal Protection Clause.
Although the instant case involves offenses punishable by fines only, petitioner's imprisonment for nonpayment [401 U.S. 395, 398] constitutes precisely the same unconstitutional discrimination since, like Williams, petitioner was subjected to imprisonment solely because of his indigency. 4 In Morris v. Schoonfield, 399 U.S. 508, 509 (1970), four members of the Court anticipated the problem of this case and stated the view, which we now adopt, that
"the same constitutional defect condemned in Williams also inheres in jailing an indigent for failing to make immediate payment of any fine, whether or not the fine is accompanied by a jail term and whether or not the jail term of the indigent extends beyond the maximum term that may be imposed on a person willing and able to pay a fine. In each case, the Constitution prohibits the State from imposing a fine as a sentence and then automatically converting it into a jail term solely because the defendant is indigent and cannot forthwith pay the fine in full."
