Poor Land in Jail as Companies Add Huge Fees for Probation
 

By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: July 2, 2012
www.nytimes.com

CHILDERSBURG, Ala. -- Three years ago, Gina Ray, who is
now 31 and unemployed, was fined $179 for speeding. She
failed to show up at court (she says the ticket bore the
wrong date), so her license was revoked.

When she was next pulled over, she was, of course, driving
without a license. By then her fees added up to more than
$1,500. Unable to pay, she was handed over to a private
probation company and jailed -- charged an additional fee
for each day behind bars.

For that driving offense, Ms. Ray has been locked up three
times for a total of 40 days and owes $3,170, much of it
to the probation company. Her story, in hardscrabble,
rural Alabama, where Krispy Kreme promises that "two can
dine for $5.99," is not about innocence.

It is, rather, about the mushrooming of fines and fees
levied by money-starved towns across the country and the
for-profit businesses that administer the system. The
result is that growing numbers of poor people, like Ms.
Ray, are ending up jailed and in debt for minor
infractions.

"With so many towns economically strapped, there is
growing pressure on the courts to bring in money rather
than mete out justice," said Lisa W. Borden, a partner in
Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, a large
law firm in Birmingham, Ala., who has spent a great deal
of time on the issue. "The companies they hire are
aggressive. Those arrested are not told about the right to
counsel or asked whether they are indigent or offered an
alternative to fines and jail. There are real
constitutional issues at stake."

Half a century ago in a landmark case, the Supreme Court
ruled that those accused of crimes had to be provided a
lawyer if they could not afford one. But in misdemeanors,
the right to counsel is rarely brought up, even though
defendants can run the risk of jail. The probation
companies promise revenue to the towns, while saying they
also help offenders, and the defendants often end up lost
in a legal Twilight Zone.

Here in Childersburg, where there is no public
transportation, Ms. Ray has plenty of company in her
plight. Richard Garrett has spent a total of 24 months in
jail and owes $10,000, all for traffic and license
violations that began a decade ago. A onetime employee of
United States Steel, Mr. Garrett is suffering from health
difficulties and is without work. William M. Dawson, a
Birmingham lawyer and Democratic Party activist, has filed
a lawsuit for Mr. Garrett and others against the local
authorities and the probation company, Judicial Correction
Services, which is based in Georgia.

"The Supreme Court has made clear that it is
unconstitutional to jail people just because they can't
pay a fine," Mr. Dawson said in an interview.

In Georgia, three dozen for-profit probation companies
operate in hundreds of courts, and there have been similar
lawsuits. In one, Randy Miller, 39, an Iraq war veteran
who had lost his job, was jailed after failing to make
child support payments of $860 a month. In another, Hills
McGee, with a monthly income of $243 in veterans benefits,
was charged with public drunkenness, assessed $270 by a
court and put on probation through a private company. The
company added a $15 enrollment fee and $39 in monthly
fees. That put his total for a year above $700, which Mr.
McGee, 53, struggled to meet before being jailed for
failing to pay it all.

"These companies are bill collectors, but they are given
the authority to say to someone that if he doesn't pay, he
is going to jail," said John B. Long, a lawyer in Augusta,
Ga., who is taking the issue to a federal appeals court
this fall. "There are things like garbage collection where
private companies are O.K. No one's liberty is affected.
The closer you get to locking someone up, the closer you
get to a constitutional issue."

The issue of using the courts to produce income has caught
the attention of the country's legal establishment. A
recent study by the nonpartisan Conference of State Court
Administrators, "Courts Are Not Revenue Centers," said
that in traffic violations, "court leaders face the
greatest challenge in ensuring that fines, fees and
surcharges are not simply an alternate form of taxation."

J. Scott Vowell, the presiding judge of Alabama's 10th
Judicial Circuit, said in an interview that his state's
Legislature, like many across the country, was pressuring
courts to produce revenue, and that some legislators even
believed courts should be financially self-sufficient.

In a 2010 study, the Brennan Center for Justice at the New
York University School of Law examined the fee structure
in the 15 states -- including California, Florida and Texas
-- with the largest prison populations. It asserted: "Many
states are imposing new and often onerous 'user fees' on
individuals with criminal convictions. Yet far from being
easy money, these fees impose severe -- and often hidden --
costs on communities, taxpayers and indigent people
convicted of crimes. They create new paths to prison for
those unable to pay their debts and make it harder to find
employment and housing as well as to meet child support
obligations."

for the rest of this article, go to 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/us/probation-fees-multiply-as-companies-profit.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=us

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