The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/tag/cash-register-justice/)
Hundreds of Mississippi prisoners work at places like fast-food outlets and meatpacking plants to pay off court-ordered debts. Collectively, they earn $2.1 million annually.
A report from nonprofit groups said jail inmates, most of whom have not been convicted, pay large amounts for phone calls and commissary products.
Like many towns and cities around the country, New Orleans has been funding its criminal court largely from fines and fees assessed on people who can least afford it. Critics recently won an agreement from the city to increase funding, but judges say they won’t change their practices without a mandate from the state legislature.
A Tulsa County reform group believes treating court debt as a civil rather than criminal matter would do more than anything else to prevent Oklahoma from being a debtors’ prison system.
In an in-depth study, the Brennan Center for Justice of the New York University School of Law called for an end to the unfair, unreliable, stigmatizing, and inefficient practice of fining defendants in the criminal courts to fund courthouses and local governments.
A study of three Georgia cities which earn over 10 percent of their revenue from municipal citations and traffic tickets found high levels of distrust of authority among residents. The lesson, according to researchers: what a city gains in monetary value is lost in community capital.
Since January 1, 2018, a state law prohibits the collection of legal fees from families affected by the juvenile legal system. But some local officials haven’t got the message, according to a study by the Berkeley Law Policy Advocacy Clinic.
“When you take away a person’s license, you kind of take away their ability to provide for their family,” says Matt Holland, one of the staggering number of Americans who are penalized because they can’t afford to pay their court costs.
The California court system has relied on a complicated scheme of fines, fees, assessments and penalties levied on defendants as a source of funding. A bill in the legislature would eliminate the payments.
Before leaving office, former Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner signed into law a sweeping act restructuring court fines and fees across the state. But critics, including the legislator who sponsored the bill, say it still falls short of lawmakers’ intentions to create a fairer system.