Incarceration Nation

Welcome to the newest source of revenue for cash-strapped states and counties:  massive fees for tickets, probation and violations that are leaving more and more Americans broke and at the mercy of private companies collecting debts for counties and cities....and if they can't pay, into the new American Debtor's Prisons you go.

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 the New York University School of Law examined the fee structure in the 15 states — including California, Florida and Texas — 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.” 

Squeezing blood from a turnip, folks.  Get caught these days in the courts for misdemeanors and because courts and justice are expensive (and in the Republican Party world, must be profitized) then the cost of doing business is being taken in pounds of flesh off people who don't have legal representation and get crushed in the courts.  Our lovely friends in Jesusland simply declare "those people" are getting what they deserve, and of course it means we can never raise taxes on the good, Christian Republicans in the tax base.

Meanwhile, states are sucking ordinary Americans dry for being too broke to pay...and if they can't pay, they end up in prison until they can come up with the money.  The Supreme Court made such a practice directly illegal, but in the world of misdemeanors and fees as opposed to felonies, everybody looks the other way as states impose a massively regressive tax on the poor and indigent.

This is what happens when you introduce profit motive into the justice system.  The poor always lose and the rich get richer.

Coming soon to a broke-ass red state near you.  Try not to get any traffic violations.