In America, you’re presumed innocent until proven guilty. Unless you’re poor, that is. Increasingly, it’s a crime to be poor, and the punishment is often further impoverishment. Fifty years ago, Chuck Berry sang about a brown-eyed handsome man who was “arrested for the crime of unemployment. ” Little has changed since then. Scott was behind on his child-support payments, and he may have feared that he’d be jailed for his failure to pay. For poor people, even minor scrapes with the law can have major consequences, including prison time, probation, endless debt and permanent joblessness.
For people of means, those same legal problems are a nuisance, but they aren’t life-changing events. More cities and states have realized that poverty can be a profit center. Not for poor people, of course, but for government treasuries and for private companies hired to handle the influx into the criminal justice system of people whose only crime was the inability to pay a traffic ticket or a misdemeanor fine. Cash-strapped cities like Ferguson, Mo. count on fines and court-imposed fees to balance their budgets, and that reliance on the revenue from petty violations was cited by the Justice Department as a contributing factor in Ferguson’s high rates of traffic stops and arrests for minor crimes and misdemeanors. In many states, offenders are expected to finance the justice system, including court costs, room and board while incarcerated, probation supervision and drug-treatment programs. For anyone living paycheck to paycheck, even a $100 fine can be a challenge, and paying off the debt to the court and to the privatized probation company can be impossible, especially if the arrest has led to the loss of a job or a driver’s license. Just being arrested can be devastating: Half a million people are languishing in jail awaiting trial because they can’t afford to pay the bail. ‘Without a license, I can’t work. Without work, I can’t pay my fines to get my license back. People who are let out of prison are often said to have “paid their debt to society. ” But in most cases, they haven’t paid their debt for the costs of their imprisonment and probation. More than 80% of people let out of prison leave owing money, according to an investigation by NPR and the Brennan Center for Justice. Those of us who live sheltered middle-class lives often wonder why anyone would run away from the police or resist arrest. Running away can cost you your life, as what happened to Walter Scott. Why would he risk being shot in the back by a police officer. Perhaps he feared that an arrest for a minor traffic violation (the tail light on his car was out) would lead to a downward spiral of fines, jail time and permanent joblessness, as it has for others. According to relatives, Scott was behind on his child-support payments, and he may have feared that he’d be jailed for his failure to pay. Which, of course, would have cost him his job and any chance he and his family had of a future. So he ran, and he died. There’s a clear racial element to this story, of course. Black and Hispanic men are far more likely to be pulled over by police, and far more likely to be arrested for petty crimes, such as jaywalking, loitering, or sleeping in public or in their car. “Poor people, especially people of color, face a far greater risk of being fined, arrested, and even incarcerated for minor offenses than other Americans,” according to a survey from the Institute for Policy Studies, “The Poor Get Prison: The Alarming Spread of the Criminalization of Poverty. The report details with statistics and shocking anecdotes how the system works to grind up anyone caught in it. A man caught shoplifting a can of beer — let’s call him Jean Valjean — is fined $200 and sentenced to a year of probation. He cannot afford to pay the fees that finance his own probation, so he’s jailed, where more fees rack up. Don’t for a minute think this is a problem confined to states that fly the Confederate battle flag over the State House. In New York, you can be arrested for putting your feet on the seat in the subway. In Washington, D. you can be arrested if your kids skip school. And in California, the DMV has replaced the INS as the most-feared government agency. To help balance the state budget after the 2008 recession, California imposed numerous fees on top of the basic fines for traffic tickets, so that a $100 fine for, say, failure to report a change of address now actually costs $490. The basic $100 fine is doubled for a “state penalty assessment” and another 20% is tacked on for a “state criminal surcharge. ” Then there are fees for court operations, court construction, the DNA fund, the Medevac fund, and the EMS fund. Don’t forget the “conviction assessment” and the “county fund,” and there’s even a $1 charge for “night court. And if you don’t pay the fine in full, you’ll lose your license. In California, the DMV is the biggest debt collector of all. The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area figures that about $10 billion in fines and fees haven’t been paid in California, leading to the suspension of 4 million driver’s licenses. Nearly one in six Californians can’t drive legally. In California, if you can’t drive, you can’t work, as one client told the lawyers committee. “Without a license, I can’t work. Without work, I can’t pay my fines to get my license back. Woody Guthrie was right: Stay away from California “if you ain’t got the do re mi. ” But where else can you go if you don’t have any dough? Nowhere in America, it seems.
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Март 2019
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