Qiana Williams spent 11 days in debtors’ jail for failing to pay traffic fines before becoming a paralegal for the ArchCity Defenders, a legal advocacy organization based in St. Louis, Mo.
“I don’t consider myself a criminal,” Williams said, noting she simply couldn’t afford payment.
She was one of four panelists in a Brennan Center for Justice discussion on the money collected in the justice system, moderated by CNN legal analyst Laura Coates.
The live discussion followed a report from the Brennan Center, which details the many ways the revenue in the justice system thwarts any attempts at reform.
Lisa Foster, a retired California judge who is co-director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center, a national advocacy organization, said the profits earned from fines and fees after arrests or infractions were “frankly hidden taxes.”
While the center’s report goes much deeper, the live discussion, produced in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, centered on civil asset forfeiture and general fines and fees, often made from traffic violations.
According to the report, Florida earned over $1.5 million in revenue from civil asset forfeiture in 2018.
Foster used as an example the small town of Brookside, Ala., with just over 1,000 residents. Despite recording only 55 serious crimes from 2011 to 2018, municipal authorities collected $487 in fines and forfeitures for every man, woman and child in town.
She said that too many states rely on fines and fees which punish non-criminals.
Some of which can come with criminal charges, like driving with a suspended license, which often results from unpaid fines. The authors of the study, as well as Foster, say such offenses should not be criminal offenses.
“Driving on a suspended license is one of the top five criminal charges,” Foster said. “What does that have to do with public safety? Absolutely nothing.”
But fellow panelist Carmen Best, former police chief of Seattle who oversaw the city’s narcotics unit, took a different view.
Best said she believes in civil asset forfeiture and using fines and fees, but said it needs to become more equitable, and departments shouldn’t receive direct benefits from seized assets.
“The last thing we want to do is create a debtors’ prison or a debtors’ system,” Best said.
According to the US Census Bureau, in fiscal year 2019, state and local governments collected $16 billion from fines, fees and forfeitures, or 0.46 percent of their total general revenue.
But Foster said budgeting and general revenue should be more than enough to fund the justice system, not the people who cannot afford to pay.
“I have never called the fire department in my entire life, and I’m old,” she said.
“But I gladly pay my taxes to support a robust fire department, because I know, if my neighbor’s house burns down because they couldn’t afford to pay the fire department, my house is gonna be next.”
“The justice system is no different,” Foster continued. “It’s supposed to serve the entire community.”
Ram Subramanian, a fellow panelist in the discussion and one of the study’s authors, said the report was meant to give readers a “birds eye view” of how revenue-building works in public safety.
The report proposes several sweeping solutions to revenue building in the system like alleviating court-imposed fines and fees, requiring penalties to commensurate with the ability to pay, redirecting civil asset forfeitures away from forfeiting agencies as well as many other proposals.
“The whole debt collection aspect of fines and fees just creates another layer of oppression,” Williams said.
James Van Bramer is associate editor of The Crime Report