The New Yorker Article on How Debt To Pay For Court Fines Means Prison for Many Poor
These stories are beyond heart wrenching.
This article details how the nation's poor get stiffed with thousands of dollars of fines for such things as parking tickets, and then when behind in paying, as the late fees etc keep them in perpetual debt, they end up in jail anyway!
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/get-out-of-jail-inc
Nearly fifty miles east, in the small town of Childersburg, an icy atmosphere prevailed in the court of Judge Larry Ward. (Another municipal court that he presided over, in nearby Harpersville, had been shut down in 2012, after a scathing legal ruling declared the debt-collecting practices there “disgraceful.”) On the afternoon I visited, last fall, shortly before Ward’s retirement, dozens of defendants pleading guilty formed a line curling out the door. There was hardly a lawyer in sight. Tense whispers swept the courtroom each time Judge Ward sent a debtor to jail. “Alicia,” people murmured, like a round of telephone, as a stout, sad-looking woman with spiky blond hair was handcuffed and escorted out by police.
Meagan Poole, a young mother who had just been released from medical care, was threatened with jail after she failed to pay several hundred dollars in court costs and J.C.S. supervision fees tied to a car's expired license plate. She was thirteen dollars short. “Either you go get the money or you’re going to jail,” Judge Ward said. She ran to the parking lot to see what she could shake from friends and family by the 5 P.M. deadline.
“Here’s how it is,” said a gaunt construction worker who was waiting for a public-intoxication hearing outside the courthouse in Clanton, a peach-farming town at the center of the state. “If you don’t have seven hundred dollars, then the company makes you pay one thousand four hundred.” He shook his head. “They’re jacking it all up!” He rattled off the names of friends and family members also “on J.C.S.”: a brother, a brother-in-law, a cousin, a pink-sneakered friend standing beside him.
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