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Fees & Fines
By Meghna Philip – 05/21/12
A new documentary by University of Pennsylvania law students chronicles the story of Philadelphia’s aggressive criminal justice debt collections over the past two years. As the Brennan Center has previously written, these efforts have targeted one in five Philadelphians for a total $1.5 billion in alleged fines, fees and court costs dating back to the 1970s.
The filmmakers questioned a number of men and women impacted by the collections. The interviews highlight the fundamental injustice of fees and fines that force people to pay over and over for their crimes, long after having served their sentences.
In Philadelphia, and in many jurisdictions around the country, outstanding criminal justice debt can prevent people from accessing public benefits for themselves and their families. It can also bar people from accessing pardons or expungements of their criminal records, which is a huge barrier to employment.
“This is another example of just kicking the poor down,” Pennsylvania State Senator Shirley M. Kitchen says in the film. “The budget is being balanced on the backs of the poor, the working class, and the middle class. And all of this is just not fair.”
Criminal justice debt policies all over the country demand reform. But the collections process in Philadelphia is particularly egregious. The courts in the City of Brotherly Love lack crucial documentation to substantiate many of these debts. Thousands of formerly incarcerated people – overwhelmingly poor and from communities of color – are locked in battles over debts that they should not owe, and that they cannot pay. Seventy percent of those who allegedly owe money to the courts are elderly, disabled, impoverished or unemployed.
The ACLU and Community Legal Services of Philadelphia serve many clients trapped in cycles of criminal justice debt. The groups have asked that the Philadelphia courts waive all debts owed prior to 2005. This is the best way to ensure that the city is not wrongfully pursuing people for debts they do not owe. It is beyond time for the city to take this important step to encourage the reentry of hard-working people trying to lead productive lives after incarceration.
Said Malissa Gamble, a formerly incarcerated community organizer who was interviewed in the film: “I take full responsibility for what I have done, but I would like to move on with my life. I don’t want to continuously be beat over the head, and beat down, so when I think that I’m doing something good, the city comes again and they try to tear me down. There’s something strange about that.”
A trailer for “Pay Up! Criminal Justice Debt in Philadelphia” is available here.
The full-length film is available here.
Tags: Justice, Racial Justice, Civil Justice, Criminal Justice, Fees & Fines
By Roopal Patel – 04/12/12
In Louisiana, people who are represented by a public defender and are later convicted must pay a $35 fee to augment funding for public defenders even though they have already had a judicial determination made that they cannot afford an attorney. The fee creates a system that undermines the Constitutional right to conflict-free counsel by forcing attorneys to rely on their clients’ convictions for much needed funding. The existing fee already acts as an illogical tax on indigent defendants. And now there are two bills before the Louisiana House that would raise the fees on people who are likely unable to pay.
Like many states, Louisiana has systematically underfunded its defender offices – recently resulting in a layoff of 10 percent of the staff in the Orleans Parish public defender office. Even though their indigent clients face potential incarceration for failure to pay, cash-strapped defenders have been forced to advocate for more vigorous enforcement. In 2011, the Louisiana Public Defender Board sued 23 New Orleans judges who failed to collect the $35 fee. Richie Tompson, the chief public defender in Jefferson Parish argues that the fee increase is a necessity; otherwise defenders would be forced to restrict services.
Increasing the fee to $55 as proposed by State Representative Jeff Arnold or to $100 as proposed by State Representative Marcus Hunter – a former public defender – would only lead to an increase in the number of people unable to pay, along with a likely increase in costs related to collection.
Although intended to help fill budget gaps, Louisiana has failed to track the costs of collecting criminal justice fees and fines. There has been no formal study done of how many people are able to pay the current fee of $35, but the number could be as low as 20 percent of convicted people. The exact numbers of the poor affected by increasing the fee are difficult to determine, but the numbers are significant. Public defenders in Orleans Parish alone represent about 80 percent of all criminal defendants, taking on over 45,000 cases in 2010. Ironically, a fee scheme that doesn’t adequately assess the likelihood of actually collecting the funds may likely lead to greater deficits and further burdens on defenders
The Brennan Center urges the Louisiana state legislature to consider the example of Massachusetts. That legislature formed a commission that conducted a cost-benefit analysis weighing the possible revenue to be generated from a largely indigent population against the costs of implementing a proposed jail fee and ultimately decided not to impose the fee. Without such analysis, Louisiana runs the risk of imposing fees that cost more to track and enforce than any revenue they generate.
A client- and conviction-dependant funding scheme places well-intentioned public defenders in conflicting positions relative to their clients. Creating a structure that results in a need to lobby against clients’ interests is the wrong response to a budgetary problem.
Tags: Justice, Racial Justice, Civil Justice, Civil Right to Counsel, Criminal Justice, Fees & Fines, Indigent Defense Reform
By Meghna Philip – 02/24/12
Over the past two years, Philadelphia courts have initiated an unprecedented, aggressive drive to collect criminal justice debt from its residents. These efforts have targeted more than 320,000 people — roughly 1 in 5 Philadelphians — who allegedly owe over $1.5 billion in debt stemming from prior involvement in the criminal justice system. The debts the courts are pursuing date as far back as the 1970s. Documentation is sparse, and the city may be going after thousands of people who do not actually owe this debt.
A Philadelphia Daily News report introduced us to one of the victims of this process, Evelyn Piner, a 53-year-old Philly resident who received a notification demanding $900 in forfeited bail for skipping a court hearing in 1990. However, Piner was in prison serving a sentence at the time of the alleged hearing. Proving she was in prison has become near impossible, as the city prison system’s documents prior to 1991 were destroyed by water damage. Piner, on public assistance, is now saddled with hundreds of dollars in debt that she has little hope of paying.
Piner’s experience, ironically, represents the exact sort of systemic dysfunction that Philadelphia has been trying to correct through its Criminal Courts “Reform Initiative.” The courts launched this initiative in 2010 in response to a series of reports by the Philadelphia Inquirer criticizing them for being in “disarray.” The reports focused in part on the broken Office of the Clerk of Quarter Sessions, which, with a $4.5 million annual budget, was responsible for maintaining court records, staffing courtrooms, and collecting legal financial obligations from defendants. The Office was faulted by government auditors for its mishandling of millions of dollars in bail, fines, and court fees, and for its poor and inaccurate maintenance of records. In April 2010, the city dissolved the Office and took over its functions.
But things did not immediately improve. A July 2011 Interim Report on the Reform Initiative reveals some serious flaws in the city’s takeover of the Office. At that time, the courts planned to “update files” with more “accurate information” and “[establish] policies and procedures to ensure the accurate accounting of funds due to the court and to defendants.” The courts expected the review “to be completed within six to twelve months." Yet the report describes the “aggressive program” of collections that courts began in the summer of 2010, just after the city takeover.
The new collections effort thus used the same unreliable records and operated under the same lack of transparency and accountability as the system it sought to replace. It is no surprise, then, that courts are going after people whose debts either don’t exist, or have previously been waived. Courts have also sent notice letters to decades-old addresses, tacking on significant added collection fees when no one responds. In addition, due to mistaken identities, individuals have been charged with other people’s debt. Advocates have likened the corrupt process to the robo-signing of mortgages.
As the Brennan Center has emphasized, the collection of criminal justice debt must be reformed across the country. But reforms must be fiscally sensible and must focus on removing the barriers to re-entry that criminal justice debt can create. Philadelphia’s so-called “reforms” have merely transferred the costs of a broken system onto the backs of an overwhelmingly poor and vulnerable population. It is one of the most extreme examples of the disturbing trend of cash-strapped jurisdictions looking to criminal justice debt as a means to generate revenue.
The ACLU and Community Legal Services of Philadelphia have seen low-income clients suffer as a consequence of the new collections regime. Courts have the ability to garnish wages, and put liens on people’s homes. The government has kicked people who owe court costs off welfare. Collection agencies have inaccurately threatened people with jail for failing to pay.
Philadelphia is not the first city to try aggressively collecting from indigent defendants. After a Brennan Center report highlighted the fiscal insensibility of such tactics in Florida, Leon County closed its collections court and simultaneously cancelled approximately 8,000 writs of arrest for individuals owing fees. In Orange County, Florida outstanding writs issued over a 3-year period were canceled for individuals without verifiable or locatable permanent addresses. Advocates have called for Philadelphia courts to waive a large number of the debts for which they lack adequate records — perhaps everything owed before 2005. This is a necessary first step the Philadelphia courts should take to repair the damage dealt by its irresponsible “reforms.”
Tags: Justice, Criminal Justice, Fees & Fines
By Roopal Patel & Meghna Philip – 12/22/11
If Lindsay Lohan can afford to pay more than $100 per night to stay in jail, so should anyone else who gets in trouble with the law, at least according to one California county official, Jeff Stone.
Last week, Riverside County, California initiated Stone’s plan to charge inmates $142 per night for being incarcerated in local jails. This is only slightly less than a one-night stay in Riverside’s finest hotel, which runs $190.
This jail stay fee is a short-sighted, fiscally insensible policy. The vast majority of those incarcerated will not be able to pay the fee. Celebrities like Lindsay Lohan are hardly representative of the majority of California’s jailed or imprisoned people, who are disproportionately poor. Stone himself has estimated that only about 25 percent of the county's prisoners would be able to pay anything at all if charged this new fee. The Sheriff's Deputy Chief of neighboring San Bernardino County said Stone’s estimate was high.
Under the ordinance, the county is allowed to garnish wages, put liens on people's homes, and charge parents if their children are jailed. Such financial consequences will push already economically struggling individuals further into poverty and have detrimental effects on the rehabilitation and re-entry of those involved in Riverside County’s criminal justice system.
In addition, there is evidence that instituting such fees may actually result in a net loss for state and local governments. In 2010, an investigative commission in Massachusetts demonstrated that the costs of adding a new jail fee in that state would far outweigh the benefits. The commission determined that the best fee system must track and determine an inmate's ability to pay, and that adequate development of tracking systems would be very costly. Considering the limited revenue that could be generated from an overwhelmingly indigent inmate population, as well as the socioeconomic costs of collecting from such a population, the commission decided not to implement the new jail fee. Such detailed cost-benefit analyses must be conducted before adding new fees that could be detrimental to both local budgets and inmates' rehabilitative prospects. Unfortunately, Riverside County has neglected such a process and implemented a fee that will likely cost more to track and enforce than any revenue it generates.
Riverside County's new policy illustrates how broken California’s criminal justice system is. In May, the Supreme Court found California’s state prison overcrowding unconstitutional, ordering it to downsize by 30,000 prisoners. In response, the state legislature approved a realignment plan to shift thousands of prisoners to local jails, stretching local resources to the limit and resulting in absurd policies such as Riverside’s new pay-to-stay fee.
But shifting the state prison population to local jails does not remedy the problem of prison overcrowding. California must focus its immediate energy on better long-term solutions to address the problems that led to its current state of overincarceration, such as scaling back its Three Strikes law, the toughest in the country. (Advocates are gearing up for a proposed ballot initiative to roll back the law next year.)
In the meantime, local jurisdictions must institute reasoned impact analysis when considering placing new debt burdens on the overwhelmingly poor population involved in the criminal justice system.
Tags: Justice, Criminal Justice, Fees & Fines
By Meghna Philip – 12/15/11
Last year, the Brennan Center published a comprehensive national report on the negative consequences criminal justice debt has on poor people. The report highlighted how underfunded criminal justice systems have sought to fill budget gaps by administering fees, fines and surcharges more and more aggressively, with less and less consideration of people’s ability to pay. Since the initial publication of this report, advocates around the country have mobilized around legal and legislative action to protect poor people from the unfair consequences of criminal justice debt.
Last week in Washington, D.C., at the National Legal Aid and Defenders’ Association (NLADA) Centennial Conference, the Brennan Center hosted a panel to highlight some particularly successful and inspiring efforts. The panel featured Nick Allen of Columbia Legal Services (CLS) in Washington State, Melissa Broome of the Job Opportunities Task Force in Maryland, and Carl Takei of the ACLU’s National Prison Project.
Nick Allen presented his organization’s successful pursuit of legislation for new waivers and reductions of interest on certain fines and fees. Interest on legal debt in Washington accrues at the high rate of 12 percent per year during incarceration, when prisoners are either unemployed, or making extremely minimal rates working inside prisons, and thus effectively unable to make payments. Before the legislation passed, one of CLS’ clients entered prison with $35,000 in debt. By release, his debt was more than $100,000 due to interest accrued. The new legislation allows a person to petition the court, after release, for a waiver of all interest that has accrued on their non-restitution legal debt during incarceration. The legislation received bipartisan support due to its potential for encouraging realistic payments of legal debt, reducing the costs of debt-related re-incarceration over time, and contributing to successful re-entry.
Melissa Broome spoke of the Job Opportunities Task Force’s efforts to pass legislation ensuring that existing statutory fee exemptions for poor parolees are actually enforced. In 2009, a Brennan Center report found that categorical exemptions put into place by the Maryland legislature to protect people who are unable to pay were largely inaccessible and unenforced. The legislature had vested the Parole Commission, a body with which parolees have little ongoing contact, with the exclusive authority to grant exemptions. The Commission routinely imposed the $40-per-month fee, without conducting evaluations of whether parolees should receive exemptions. Resulting debts led parolees to avoid meeting with their parole agents, which would then lead to parole violations and re-incarcerations, costly to the state. After significant advocacy efforts to highlight the negative consequences of inadequate fee exemptions, Maryland this year passed legislation to ensure that parolees are informed of and have better access to the fee exemption process.
Carl Takei outlined the ACLU’s litigation strategy to protect poor people from the rise of new debtors’ prisons in several states. This alarming practice violates the Supreme Court’s decision in Bearden v. Georgia, which dictates that it is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to jail someone who has failed to pay fines or restitution due to indigence. The ACLU’s report, In For A Penny, details its strategy of litigation and public education to put an end to this unconstitutional practice in Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia and Washington.
Last week’s panel showcased promising examples of how to tackle reform in the creation and collection of criminal justice debt, and how to protect poor people from unjust consequences. A forthcoming Brennan Center report will highlight such stories, and provide further examples of achievable reforms that can be implemented across the country. As cash-strapped criminal justice systems continue to enhance debt collection, activists, advocates and policymakers must continue to fight penny-wise, pound-foolish practices and their disproportionate effects on poor people.
Tags: Justice, Criminal Justice, Fees & Fines
By Rebekah Diller – 10/21/11
This post orginally appeared on the Vera Institute of Justice blog.
As states struggle to close persistent budget gaps, they are casting about for ways to raise revenue. One of the more penny-wise, pound-foolish schemes is to levy more fees on a group least able to pay: people involved in the criminal justice system. Just this year, Arizona instituted a $25 background check fee for any family member who wants to visit an inmate in state prison, a move made despite significant evidence that involvement with family is key for preventing recidivism.
Arizona is not alone. In Criminal Justice Debt: A Barrier to Reentry, a report published last year by the Brennan Center for Justice, we surveyed recent fee practices in 15 states and found a disturbing uptick in both the dollar amount and the number of fees imposed on criminal defendants. These fees kick in at almost all stages throughout the process: Fees may be charged for one’s public defender and prosecution, for court costs upon conviction, each day in jail or prison, and for each month of parole or probation supervision.
These fees may seem small in isolation—$25 here, $50 there—but as “The Unintended Sentence of Criminal Justice Debt” demonstrates, they can have harmful and lasting consequences. The amounts add up quickly, often totaling hundreds or thousands of dollars. Collections efforts take an added toll, generating additional fees and interest, often leading to driver’s license suspensions and wrecked credit histories. At its worst, inability to pay criminal fees paves the path back to prison by prompting violations of parole or probation, arrests for failure to appear at fee-related hearings, or other new offenses.
As the human costs mount, there is scant information about the repercussions of imposing these financial costs. Jurisdictions have looked at only one side of the ledger—the amount of money they expect to generate—without thinking through what happens when significant numbers of individuals cannot pay.
It is time to rethink the problem. First, states should exempt up front those who lack the means to pay. This is not only the just thing to do, it’s the smart thing. Jurisdictions would then stop spending scarce resources to chase down debt that is, in many cases, simply not payable.
Second, as “The Unintended Sentence” suggests, evidence-based analysis and programming are desperately needed. For individuals who cannot pay debts such as restitution and fines that are part of their sentence, credit for well-designed community service and other programming could offer a way out of the vicious debt cycle. The rigorous study associated with a demonstration project can help other jurisdictions reform their criminal debt practices too.
Tags: Justice, Criminal Justice, Fees & Fines
By Rebekah Diller – 04/14/11
The Maryland legislature this week took an important step toward helping formerly incarcerated individuals reintegrate successfully into society. In the final hours of the legislative session, it passed a bill that promises to reform a significant financial burden the state has placed on persons on parole.
For 20 years, the state has charged people on parole a $40 monthly fee for their supervision even though the fee is largely uncollectible. The unemployed, disabled and those enrolled in education or job training programs are supposed to be exempt. However, a 2009 Brennan Center report, Maryland’s Parole Supervision Fee: A Barrier to Reentry, found that the exemption system was broken. Most persons on parole are not even aware that the exemptions exist, much less of the system for applying for one. As a result, people emerge from parole in debt and, in many cases, with bad credit.
Maryland has finally taken steps to fix this problem. A bill passed Monday and awaiting the governor’s signature, will ensure that persons on parole are made aware of the opportunity for an exemption and the process by which to apply for one. More will need to be done upon its passage to ensure that the process for obtaining exemptions becomes truly accessible. However, the bill marks an important first step toward fixing the broken exemption system and removing a major barrier to reentry for the thousands of people coming out of prison each year in Maryland . Read the Brennan Center’s testimony in support of the bill here.
Tags: Justice, Racial Justice, Criminal Justice, Fees & Fines
By Emily Savner – 12/03/09
Putting the Sixth Amendment Aside…
In a dramatic policy shift, the Nevada Supreme Court has directed Las Vegas (Clark County) judges to begin charging fees to indigent defendants for their representation by the public defender’s office, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
No formal court rule has yet been issued by the Supreme Court or the Clark County District Court, and, according to the Clark County Public Defender, details regarding the fee’s imposition and collection are still murky. However, as of last week, assessment of the shotgun fee was nonetheless scheduled to go forward.
Clark County will follow the lead of Washoe County (Reno) by charging indigent defendants for the cost of their legal representation. Clark County’s new fee will operate on a sliding scale, with the fee will range from $250 to $750 depending on how much time the defender spends on the case and whether or not the case goes to trial, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Individual judges will be tasked with determining how much of the fee is assessed in a particular case, according to the report.
“This is their co-pay,” one district court judge told the Review-Journal. “Now we're an HMO.” Although a callous way to analogize the justice system, a move toward financing the court with “user fees” is a business model Nevada is not alone in adopting. Instead of funding courts through higher state appropriations for the judiciary, jurisdictions across the country are upping all kinds of fees collected from the pockets of criminal defendants, as state revenue collected from other sources slows. Crime is one rock-solid investment, even in recessionary times.
At least, the Review-Journal reports, revenue collected from this new fee will go toward funding indigent defense services. The same cannot be said of other jurisdictions, where courts’ user fees fund completely unrelated state functions.
Where does the right to counsel play into all this? Seemingly, nowhere.
Read the rest of this story ...
Tags: Justice, Criminal Justice, Fees & Fines
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