EDITOR:
Every judge in America received a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice last month with a simple message:
Stop putting poor people in jail simply because they are poor.
“Imposing and enforcing fines and fees on individuals who cannot afford to pay them has been shown to cause profound harm,” wrote Kristen Clarke and two other assistant attorneys general.
Clarke heads the department’s Civil Rights Division.
“Individuals confront escalating debt; face repeated, unnecessary incarceration for nonpayment of fines and fees; experience extended periods of probation and parole; are subjected to changes in immigration status; and lose their employment, driver’s license, voting rights, or home,” the letter added.
It’s the sort of message that shouldn’t be necessary. After all, debtors’ prisons were banned in the U.S. in 1883. But through the rapid rise of fines, fees and other costs — such as the pernicious “pay-to-stay” bills charged by many counties — courts have created de facto debtors’ prisons. They have put millions of poor Americans in jail because those Americans lack the income to pay the costs foisted on them.
So it was for Don Noland a decade ago. Then 17 and living in Maplewood, he almost missed his graduation from St. Louis Career Academy because there were multiple warrants for his arrest over unpaid fines related to minor misdemeanors.
“I was just a student going to school, trying to graduate. I didn’t have any funds to pay the ticket,” Noland, now 28 and working for a distribution company, told me. He faced constant fear of arrest and jail time over the debt. “I felt like I was less of a person.”
Noland is one of thousands of current or former Maplewood residents who stand to recoup some of the money they lost to the city’s unconstitutional practices. Some will receive up to $100 a day for the time they spent in jail as Maplewood sought to collect court costs.
Last month, just before the DOJ letter went out, the city settled a 2016 class action lawsuit filed by ArchCity Defenders; Tycko & Zavareei LLP; and Keane Law LLC. After using traffic tickets and other minor crimes as fundraising tools for more than a decade, Maplewood leaders agreed to pay out $3.25 million in a class action settlement. It was the latest city to do so since ArchCity Defenders started filing debtors’ prison lawsuits following the uprising in Ferguson in 2014.
After Ferguson became a hashtag, many of us learned for the first time of the taxation-by-citation policies in many St. Louis County municipalities. As the DOJ letter notes, it’s not just a Missouri problem. And it’s poor people, particularly poor people of color, who suffer the most when cities use their courts to collect back-door taxes and jail those who can’t afford to pay.
“This practice far too often traps individuals and their families in a cycle of poverty and punishment that can be nearly impossible to escape,” the DOJ letter to judges reads. “The detrimental effects of unjust fines and fees fall disproportionately on low-income communities and people of color, who are overrepresented in the criminal justice system and already may face economic obstacles arising from discrimination, bias, or systemic inequities.”
The themes in the letter mirror a Missouri Supreme Court decision from 2019 that ended the practice of rural judges jailing people who couldn’t afford to pay their “board bills” for stays in jail. Judges can avoid these unconstitutional practices by first holding hearings on whether defendants can pay court costs and then proceeding to sentencing, the DOJ letter advises. It also tells judges that the DOJ plans to seek proposals for pilot programs to help jurisdictions reform their fines and fees practices.
Along with the Maplewood settlement and a campaign called End Justice Fees launched by the ACLU, Fines and Fees Justice Center and Americans for Prosperity, such pilot programs can help the criminal justice system focus more on public safety and less on extracting money from poor people.
Nine years after Ferguson, that city’s insurance company is still battling with ArchCity Defenders over a debtors’ prison lawsuit.
Similar federal civil rights lawsuits are slowly snaking their way through the courts in Oklahoma and South Carolina. Last year, the small city of Brookside, Ala., came under fire when journalists uncovered a scheme to use policing for profit by trapping poor people in debtors’ prisons.
Kennard Williams has seen the system in action. He’s an organizing manager at Action St. Louis, a civil rights nonprofit. He was drawn to activism in part because of his debtors’ prison experience in Maplewood, where he too was a victim. In 2011, unable to afford the fines the city imposed on him for traffic tickets, he faced the dilemma many poor people face: drive to work to make money, pay the fines and risk another arrest; or call into work.
He chose his job, and on more than one occasion got locked up in Maplewood because of it.
“It just puts burdens on people,” Williams says. “Any ticket could turn into a warrant and end up in a suspended license. The system was designed to make people fail.”
--Tony Messenger
Columnist
St. Louis Post Dispatch