Bean pointed out this story to me, from Eric Ruder in The Intelligence Daily:
In 2006, the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) filed a suit on behalf of Ora Lee Hurley, who couldn’t get out of prison until she had enough money to pay a $705 fine. But she couldn’t pay the fine because she had to pay the Georgia Department of Corrections $600 a month for room and board, and spend $76 a month on public transportation, laundry and food.
She was released five days a week to work at the K&K Soul Food restaurant, where she earned $6.50 an hour, which netted her about $700 a month after taxes. Hurley was trapped in prison for eight months beyond her initial 120-day sentence until the Southern Center intervened. Over the course of her incarceration, she earned about $7,000, but she never had enough at one time to pay off her $705 fine.
“This is a situation where if this woman was able to write a check for the amount of the fine, she would be out of there,” Sarah Geraghty, a SCHR lawyer, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution while Hurley was still imprisoned. “And because she can’t, she’s still in custody. It’s as simple as that.”
Georgia also lets for-profit probation companies prey on people too poor to pay their traffic violations and court fees. According to a 2008 SCHR report entitled “Profiting from the poor”:
In courts around Georgia, people who are charged with misdemeanors and cannot pay their fines that day in court are placed on probation under the supervision of private, for-profit companies until they pay off their fines. On probation, they must pay these companies substantial monthly “supervision fees” that may double or triple the amount that a person of means would pay for the same offense.
For example, a person of means may pay $200 for a traffic ticket on the day of court and be done with it, while a person too poor to pay that day is placed on probation and ends up paying $500 or more for the same offense.
Furious, sputtering gibberish.
Also, btw, I’m pretty sure that woman has a dependent teenage son.
This is something as a public defender in VA that comes up all the time. Not quite such egregious circumstances, but there are LOTS of people here spending time in jail for failure to pay child support who are simply POOR and out of work, and can’t pay the money. I’m sure there is the occasional occurrance of someone who has the money and is willfully refusing to pay, but most of these people are just scraping by.
It is incredibly frustrating to have a client who is struggling to make ends meat, probably has mental health issues, is threatened with jail time for failing to pay restitution owed for whatever they were convicted of, and then has to pay child support to the state because they have kids in foster care. There is just no way for them to win. They are constantly trying to figure out who to pay and who to put off in order to avoid going to jail (where, of course, they won’t be able to make any progress paying anyone). Oh, and every time they go to court and get found in violation of probation, etc, for failure to pay on time – they get assessed additional court costs.
Or poor and in work that doesn’t pay enough?
What is just incredible about this is that the woman was allowed out to work to pay the jail her “rent” in such a way that she was kept in there for months. That is appalling.
The involvement of private companies should be an immediate tip-off to federal investigators that they should look into whether there have been any kickbacks or other improper payments by those companies to legislators, judges, etc. Wherever the administration criminal justice is a for-profit enterprise, there’s the possibility of corruption, as we saw with those PA judges who were throwing kids into juvenile “boot camps” based on how much money they were kicked back by the private companies running the camps, who in turn were paid by the state based on the number of kids held in detention.
Hm. Shows what I know. I would have thought that this was illegal if you had asked me before this. Have these arrangements been vetted in Federal court?
When I first read this post, my very first thought when I read about the private probation was “whose inlaw do you need to be to get that gig?”
I am not sure how I feel about jailing people for missing child support payments. On the one hand, in many cases, it is just digging people into deeper holes. But I have a friend whose ex husband was so angry about being forced to pay child support that he quit his job and moved into his parents basement because he thought that would mean that he wouldnt have to pay the support. It was only when threatened with jail that he went and got a job and started making the payments. But what about when someone really loses their job? Putting them in jail isnt going to increase the chances that they will get another job.
I have worked with poor people who owe money and can’t pay it, and are threatened with insanely bad consequences. That sucks.
I have also worked with poor people who are owed money and who can’t get it, and are therefore ending up as debtors themselves. That sucks, arguably more than the first example.
It is as usual much more complex than it seems. Jail is crazy… but then again, I know plenty of people who will refuse to pay unless they are threatened with jail. And there is really an added layer of complexity when you consider that some of those debts will (if unpaid) result in other innocent folks losing their shirts as well.
So I tend to look at it by analyzing the holder of the debt, and the reason for nonpayment.
IMO the threat of jail would only be appropriate if the person to whom it is owed is themselves poor (no jail for refusing to pay Capital One, for example) and if there is some reason to believe that the debtor is deliberately refusing to pay. That would be a fairly small proportion of cases.
What’s particularly egregious in some of these cases is the folks stuck in jail because they can’t afford to pay for … being in jail.
What’s particularly egregious in some of these cases is the folks stuck in jail because they can’t afford to pay for … being in jail.
Yeah really.
1.They throw you in jail for failure pay and won’t let you out until you can pay…
2.You can’t work to pay it off because you are in jail…
3.You get thrown in jail because you can’t pay it (and any additional fees that stacked up while in jail) off…
4.Wash and Repeat to infinity…
I wonder if people in the workhouse are allowed to go out to apply for/interview for new jobs?
Because if not, this is just a modern chain gang system – a way to provide cheap labor via the courts.
The other thing left out is that the child care arrangements people come up with are often not good. I know when one of our neighbors was in the workhouse for DUI, his kids were on their own most of the day – an aunt or someone came and stayed with them at night. And there was the tragic case (last year?) of the little boy who was beaten to death by the family member who was watching him while his dad was doing time. But if you let your kids go into foster care, there’s the whole process of getting them out again (as well as the abuse that sometimes come from foster families).
I would have thought that this was illegal if you had asked me before this.
I agree with Ron on this. How is this not illegal? Apart from the debtor’s prison problem, paying someone an inadequate amount to pay for the room and board you force them to take strikes me as awfully close to slavery.