guardian | Every day, indigent Americans are ripped from their homes and their
communities and forced into jails of varying degrees of dysfunction and
decay. The US supreme court ruled three decades ago that it is
unconstitutional to imprison people because they cannot afford to pay
debts. The ruling, however, hasn’t ended the practice of jailing people
for unpaid government fees and fines.
In 2010, the ACLU found
that courts across the nation regularly deny Americans proper
consideration of their financial position and throw them into jail over
fines they could never hope to pay. As a result, local jails nationwide
have transformed into modern-day “debtors’ prisons” overcrowded with indigent people whose only punishable offense is being poor. The effects are devastating.
This
growing phenomenon funnels poor Americans into the criminal justice
system with sentences that disrupt their lives, too often trapping them
in a damning cycle of poverty and incarceration that far outlasts their
initial conviction. These practices have a disparate impact on
communities of color in the United States.
Consider 19-year-old Kevin Thompson,
a black teenager in DeKalb County, Georgia, who was jailed simply
because he was unable to pay $838 in fines and fees associated with a
routine traffic citation. Though only half of DeKalb County’s residents
are black, nearly all probationers jailed for failure to pay by its recorders court, which handles minor offenses like traffic misdemeanors, are black. The ACLU filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Mr Thompson and reached a settlement
with the county that included a number of new reform measures aimed at
preventing others from facing the same unconstitutional treatment.
Jail sentences like those imposed on Mr Thompson and Mr Staten aren’t just unjust – they’re also costly. The ACLU’s 2010 report In for a Penny
found that individuals incarcerated for failure to pay often cost the
state more than they owe. The report identifies one individual whose
incarceration in New Orleans cost more than six times his $498 debt. So
why are we stuck with this senseless system?
