Fees, Fines, and Debt: How Governments and Companies are Jailing Poor People to Make a Buck

This week’s St. Louis Patch dispatch reported this story:

Wakita Shaw’s troubles started with a $425 payday loan, the kind of high-interest, short-term debt that seldom ends well for the borrower . . .  Shaw was surprised in May of last year to hear that the St. Louis County police were looking for her. She and her mother went to the police station. They arrested her on the spot. They told her the bail was $1,250… People do go to jail over private debt. It’s a regular occurrence in metro St. Louis, on both sides of the Mississippi River.”

Last week, a San Diego paper covered how motorists given speeding tickets for $35, actually end up owing the state $235 (including a criminal conviction fee, state court construction charge, and DNA identification fee).
Similarly, Ricardo Graham was incarcerated in Rhode Island for 40 days because he couldn’t pay court fees. He was jailed and held for a bail of $745 – while the state paid $4,000 to incarcerate him – and lost his job due to his imprisonment.
Across the country, states and local governments are raising and aggressively collecting criminal fees and fines (including court fees, jail stay fees, and even public defender fees). Often, failing to pay these fees lands people in jail. Courts are supposed to hold hearings to determine whether a person has the means to pay before punishing them for nonpayment. Instead, courts are bypassing this key constitutional safeguard and simply jailing those who can’t pay their fees.

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Our Depraved Future of Debt Slavery (Part I)

It is almost surprising that the concept of slavery is very foreign to those living in the developed world, especially the U.S., since it was extensively practiced as recently as 70 years ago. What’s more disturbing about this ignorance is the fact that the system of post-Civil War slavery in the U.S. was not so different than the systems of slavery many Americans and Europeans will be experiencing in upcoming years. Indeed, I’m sure many people will probably take offense to such a comparison even being made, as they feel it demeans the atrocious acts committed in the past.

I would argue, however, that we demean history by failing to understand it and learn from it. Many people refer to debt slavery when referencing current policies of the West, especially in Greece right now where the concept has become very real, but they perhaps still under-estimate how bad it can get. These systems of slavery are primarily borne out of deeply-rooted economic structures which foster high levels of dependency, greed and malice by those with unchecked levels of political power. In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, these powerful groups consisted of wealthy Southern agricultural and industrial elites.

In his book “Slavery By Another Name” [documentary here], Douglas A. Blackmon documents how very few of the 4 million slaves that existed at the end of the Civil War were actually allowed to realize their freedom until decades later. As the white middle class of the South grew from 1870-1950 (with the exception of some years encompassing the Great Depression), due in no small part to the success of Southern industry, the blacks were kept in their chains through various mechanisms, such as convict leasing and debt peonage, over and above the outright discrimination and violence that they also suffered.

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