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(Where's Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo when we need them?)
NY Times July 2, 2012
Probation Fees Multiply for Poor as Companies Profit
By ETHAN BRONNER
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was revoked.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.”
Half a century ago in a landmark case, the Supreme Court ruled
that those accused of crimes had to be provided a lawyer if they
could not afford one. But in misdemeanors, the right to counsel is
rarely brought up, even though defendants can run the risk of
jail. The probation companies promise revenue to the towns, while
saying they also help offenders, and the defendants often end up
lost in a legal Twilight Zone.
Here in Childersburg, where there is no public transportation, Ms.
Ray has plenty of company in her plight. Richard Garrett has spent
a total of 24 months in jail and owes $10,000, all for traffic and
license violations that began a decade ago. A onetime employee of
United States Steel Corporation, he is suffering from health
difficulties and is without work. William M. Dawson, a Birmingham
lawyer and Democratic Party activist, has filed a lawsuit for Mr.
Garrett and others against the local authorities and the probation
company, Judicial Correction Services, which is based in Georgia.
“The Supreme Court has made clear that it is unconstitutional to
jail people just because they can’t pay a fine,” Mr. Dawson said
in an interview.
In Georgia, three dozen for-profit probation companies operate in
hundreds of courts, and there have been similar lawsuits. In one,
Randy Miller, 39, an Iraq war veteran who had lost his job, was
jailed after failing to make child support payments of $860 a
month. In another, Hills McGee, with a monthly income of $243 in
veterans’ benefits, was charged with public drunkenness, assessed
$270 by a court and put on probation through a private company.
The company added a $15 enrollment fee and $39 in monthly fees.
That put his total for a year above $700, which Mr. McGee, 53,
struggled to meet before being jailed for failing to pay it all.
“These companies are bill collectors, but they are given the
authority to say to someone that if he doesn’t pay he is going to
jail,” said John B. Long, a lawyer in Augusta, Ga., who is taking
the issue to a federal appeals court this fall. “There are things
like garbage collection where private companies are O.K. No one’s
liberty is affected. The closer you get to locking someone up, the
closer you get to a constitutional issue.”
The issue of using the courts to produce income has caught the
attention of the country’s legal establishment. A recent study by
the nonpartisan Conference of State Court Administrators, “Courts
Are Not Revenue Centers,”, said that in traffic violations, “court
leaders face the greatest challenge in ensuring that fines, fees
and surcharges are not simply an alternate form of taxation.”
J. Scott Vowell, the presiding judge of Alabama’s 10th Judicial
Circuit, said in an interview that his state’s Legislature, like
many across the country, was pressuring courts to produce revenue,
and that some legislators even believed courts should be
financially self-sufficient.
In a 2010 study, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York
University School of Law examined the fee structure in the 15
states — including California, Texas and Florida — with the
largest prison populations. It asserted: “Many states are imposing
new and often onerous ‘user fees’ on individuals with criminal
convictions. Yet far from being easy money, these fees impose
severe — and often hidden — costs on communities, taxpayers and
indigent people convicted of crimes. They create new paths to
prison for those unable to pay their debts and make it harder to
find employment and housing as well as to meet child support
obligations.”
Most of those fees are for felonies and do not involve private
probation companies, which have so far been limited to chasing
those guilty of misdemeanors. A decade or two ago, many states
abandoned pursuing misdemeanor fees because it was time-consuming
and costly. Companies like Judicial Correction Services saw an
opportunity. They charge public authorities nothing and make their
money by adding fees onto the bills of the defendants.
Stephen B. Bright, president of the Southern Center for Human
Rights, who teaches at Yale Law School, said courts were
increasingly using fees “for such things as the retirement funds
for various court officials, law enforcement functions such as
police training and crime laboratories, victim assistance programs
and even the court’s computer system. In one county in
Pennsylvania, 26 different fees totaling $2,500 are assessed in
addition to the fine.”
Mr. Dawson’s Alabama lawsuit alleges that Judicial Correction
Services does not discuss alternatives to fines or jail and that
its training manual “is devoid of any discussion of indigency or
waiver of fees.”
In a joint telephone interview, two senior officials of Judicial
Correction Services, Robert H. McMichael, its chief executive
officer, and Kevin Egan, its chief marketing officer, rejected the
lawsuit’s allegations. They said that the company does try to help
those in need, but that the authority to determine who is indigent
is the court, not the company’s.
“We hear a lot of ‘I can’t pay the fee,’ ” Mr. Egan said. “It is
not our job to figure that out. Only the judge can make that
determination.” Mr. Egan said his company had doubled the
percentage of completed sentences where it is employed to more
than two-thirds, from about one-third, and that this serves the
company, the towns and the defendant. “Our job is to keep people
out of jail,” he said. “We have a financial interest in getting
them to comply. If they don’t pay, we don’t get paid.”
Mr. Bright, of the Southern Center for Human Rights, complained
that with the private companies seeking a profit, courts in need
of income and the most vulnerable caught up in the system, “we end
up balancing the budget on the backs of the poorest people in
society.”
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