A federal appeals court ruling on a “debtors’ prison” lawsuit makes it even more critical that Louisiana find a sustainable way to fund its courts besides fines and fees, according to New Orleans City Business.
The new ruling has far-reaching implications because such fees are clearly a key funding source for Louisiana’s judicial system. Beyond the situation in this state, “cash register justice,” the widespread practice of local governments turning their poorest constituents into cash cows by imposing burdensome court fees and fines, is drawing criticism and calls for reform.
As it has undoubtedly helped many counties and municipalities deal with their underfunded budgets, the revenue earned from this practice has become a pipeline to cyclical poverty and mass incarceration, critics say.
The federal court recently agreed that criminal court judges in Orleans Parish have an “institutional conflict of interest” in ruling on whether convicts are too poor to pay the fines and fees that help fill the court’s coffers.
The ruling on August 23rd by a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals likely means that, barring a successful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the local court must set up a “neutral forum” to make those determinations before anyone can be forced to pay up under threat of jail, according to The Times-Picayune.
It was 2017 when a groundbreaking new ruling in Louisiana “forced a reckoning over the way the most incarcerated state in the world pays for its criminal justice system,” wrote The Appeal.
Judge Sarah Vance of the Eastern District of Louisiana had found that New Orleans’ criminal district judges were operating their courts with a clear conflict of interest: The judges control the revenue from the fines and fees they levy on poor defendants.
“The unsurprising consequence of this arrangement is that judges often jail people who can’t afford the fines without considering their ability to pay, creating a de facto debtors prison,” said The Appeal.
A half-dozen people convicted of crimes in Orleans Parish signed on to the suit, claiming the judges and court staff routinely broke the law by issuing arrest warrants for convicted defendants’ failure to pay court fines without giving them a chance to plead poverty, according to The Times-Picayune.
“As part of the 2017 criminal justice overhaul, Louisiana lawmakers passed Act 260, which was meant to ensure fines and fees do not become a barrier to successful reentry into society. “But enforcement has been pushed back amid concerns about the impact on court funding,” reported New Orleans City Business.
This spring, researchers, advocates, and justice practitioners met with journalists to launch a two-year program aimed at increasing public awareness of the problem. The conference was organized by John Jay’s Center on Media, Crime, and Justice (publisher of The Crime Report), with support from Arnold Ventures.
Alexes Harris, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington, who is one of the leading researchers in a field, told the conference attendees, “It’s a two-tier system of justice.”
“One problem is the perverse incentives that are built into the system because so many of the actors are reliant on fines and fees for revenue,” said Joanna Weiss, co-director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center, which established last year a “clearinghouse” for data about how the practice is being implemented across the country.
“This is happening at the same time as we have an aversion in this country to tax increases, which of course would be the equitable way of funding government, where everyone pays their fair share.”
Weiss also noted that the data collected so far from researchers shows that an average city earns 1.4 percent of its revenue from court-imposed costs —while at the same time for every one percent increase in revenue from the system, there is an associated 3.7 percent decrease in the violent crime clearance rate.
A second conference, “The Hidden Fines & Fees That Create 21st-Century Debtors’ Prisons in America,” will be held September 26th and 27th at John Jay College in New York City.