Courtesy of Deputy Attorney General Sally
Quillian Yates
There is no principle underlying our criminal
justice system more essential than that we must treat equally the wealthy and
the poor. As former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy said in 1962, “If
justice is priced in the market place, individual liberty will be curtailed and
respect for law diminished.”
To the vast majority of Americans, this concept
is a given; it’s innate to being American. This country banned debtors’
prisons under federal law back in 1833. In 1970, the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled that a maximum prison term could not be extended because a defendant
failed to pay court costs or fines. A year later, those same justices
ruled that a defendant may not be jailed solely because he or she is too poor
to pay a fine. Again, in 1983, in a case called Bearden v. Georgia,
the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the Constitution does not permit “punishing a
person for his poverty.”
Despite these longstanding ideals and
principles, in some places around our country, fines are still being imposed
and people are still being incarcerated for nonpayment without a judge ever
making the basic required inquiry — “Can this person afford to pay?” In
these places, court fines, fees and other financial obligations can lead to
unnecessary incarceration, trap people in a cycle of poverty, and undermine the
faith in the justice system that is so critical to public safety.
Take for example the city of Ferguson,
Missouri. The Justice Department Civil Rights Division’s investigation of the Ferguson
Police Department found that Ferguson’s courts imposed excessive fines and routinely
ordered the arrest of low-income residents when they failed to make payments
they could not afford. For example, a 67-year-old woman living on a fixed
income was taken to jail for missed payments related to a trash-removal
citation. The court imposed fines totaling $1,000, which she struggled to
pay in $100 monthly installments.
In a city of 21,000, Ferguson’s courts issued
arrest warrants for over 9,000 people in 2013 alone, almost entirely on cases
stemming from low-level offenses. When people were arrested, they
routinely sat in jail because bond was set with no regard to their financial
situation. The Civil Rights Division’s investigation found that these
harms were borne disproportionately by the city’s African-American community.
Unfortunately, these troubling dynamics aren’t
unique to Ferguson. In Georgia – where I served as U.S. Attorney – the
state had a system in which people were being fined for low-level misdemeanor
offenses such as traffic violations or public nuisance citations. Due to
a law passed in 2000, private probation companies supervised these people and
set monthly or weekly payment amounts that were much higher than necessary to
collect funds owed during their probationary term. In some cases,
probationers were expected to pay all court fines and surcharges, as well as
provider supervision fees, in less than half of the term. Many of these
private probation providers failed to consider whether probationers had the
ability to meet their financial obligations. And some of these private
companies would unlawfully extend the probation term, improperly allocate
probationer payments to themselves instead of the court, or obtain arrest
warrants for failure to pay. One can see how this system was not only
unfair, but could easily trap low-income individuals into a cycle of poverty
through the series of cascading events they set in motion.
Thanks to the leadership of judges and elected
officials in Georgia, the state produced a comprehensive report of
recommendations and then enacted reforms into law to address the state’s
problematic misdemeanor private probation system. There is still a lot of
work to be done, but their progress is inspiring.
The issues raised by the practices in Missouri,
Georgia and other areas of our country are why the Justice Department today
convened a meeting of advocates, researchers and criminal justice practitioners
to discuss avenues for more equitable alternatives to these problematic systems
for fines, fees and fixed bail. State officials, judges, and many others
shared their ideas for creating a system driven not by profit, but by a
commitment to fair and constitutional practices. The conversation will
continue tomorrow at the White House, where the Attorney General, other
administration officials and leaders in the field will deliberate over ways to
disentangle incarceration from poverty.
The Justice Department will publish a
report based on the proceedings from the meeting, recommending steps
that practitioners, policymakers and legislators can take to ensure that our
criminal justice system is working to protect public safety and ensures equal
justice under the law. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice’s Civil
Rights Division and Office of Access to Justice have been working to
identify and reform inequities in state and local bail
systems where they find them.
These efforts will help ensure that we live up
to the promise of ensuring our justice system is fair to all segments of society.
Those are the principles we have been given by our forefathers, and it is
one that we continually strive to deliver to the American people.
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