Our for-profit judicial system

Well, it took a while.  But now we have courts "legally" channeling profits to private businesses.

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 She failed to show up at court (she says the ticket bore the wrong date), so her license was revoked.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 — 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. ...NYT

We know that for years Arizona has been channeling people into the for-profit prison system.  Now Alabama is doing much the same.

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. ...

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. ...NYT

It looks as though ALEC is using its own means to push states well beyond Arizona into handing over the dough to private interests.  We-the-people are paying twice for our courts -- first through taxes and then through "user fees" that travel through the courts to private, parasitic businesses.  They don't save us money.  They cost us even more.

NYU's Brennan Center has been looking at these practices across a number of states.  According to the Times, the Center reports that "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.”

Even at neighborhood and small town level, corporations have figured out how to take money from us for services we've already paid for with our taxes.  The costs, even more shamefully, extend to incarcerating people who shouldn't be anywhere near jail.

Comments

[Alabama Transplant]

The New York Times has a poor record of late. For example, the paper believed everythinmg the Duke prosecutor said. I'll wait until all sides are told, not just the version of a biased newspaper. Why is a law firm like Baker Donelson, which represents businesses all over the South, trying to put one of the South's largest employers out of business. The Business Council of Alabama should hold Baker Donmelson accountable. Dawson and thae Baker Donelson law firm will have questions to answer one day.

[Susanna King]

In states like Alabama and South Carolina, where I live, it is political suicide to raise taxes. Yet the government still needs money to keep basic services running, so they increase fees instead. Hunting and fishing licenses, business license fees, etc. It's a shell game that hurts small businesses and the working poor.