Corporations collect huge fees while poor land in jail!
Fascist Amerika, where profit is more important than justice.
CHILDERSBURG, Alabama (PNN) - July 2, 2012 - Three years ago, Gina Ray, who is now 31 and unemployed, was fined $179 for speeding. She failed to show up at court because the ticket had the wrong date on it, so her license was revoked.
When she was next pulled over, she was arrested for driving without a license. By then her fees added up to more than $1,500. Unable to pay, she was handed over to a private probation company and jailed; she was subsequently charged an additional fee for each day she was illegally incarcerated.
For that driving offense, Ms. Ray has been locked up three times for a total of 40 days and owes $3,170, much of it to the probation company. Her story is not about innocence.
Rather, it is about the mushrooming of fines and fees levied by greedy towns across the country and the for-profit businesses that administer the system. The result is that growing numbers of poor people, like Ms. Ray, are ending up jailed and in debt for minor infractions.
“With so many towns economically strapped, there is growing pressure on the courts to bring in money rather than mete out justice,” said Lisa W. Borden, a partner in Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, a large law firm in Birmingham, Alabama, who has spent a great deal of time on the issue. “The companies they hire are aggressive. Those arrested are not told about the right to counsel or asked whether they are indigent or offered an alternative to fines and jail. There are real constitutional issues at stake.”
Half a century ago in a landmark case, the Fascist Police States of Amerika Supreme Court ruled that those accused of crimes had to be provided a lawyer if they could not afford one. But in misdemeanors, the right to counsel is rarely brought up, even though defendants can run the risk of jail. Probation companies promise revenue to the towns, while saying they also help offenders, and defendants often end up lost in a legal Twilight Zone.
Here in Childersburg, where there is no public transportation, Ms. Ray has plenty of company in her plight. Richard Garrett has spent a total of 24 months in jail and owes $10,000, all for traffic and license violations that began a decade ago. A onetime employee of United States Steel, Garrett is suffering from health difficulties and is without work. William M. Dawson, a Birmingham lawyer and Democrat Party activist, has filed a lawsuit for Garrett and others against the local fascist officials and the probation company, Judicial Correction Services, which is based in Georgia.
“The Supreme Court has made clear that it is unconstitutional to jail people just because they can’t pay a fine,” said Dawson.
J. Scott Vowell, the presiding judge of Alabama’s 10th Judicial Circuit, said in an interview that his state’s Legislature, like many across the country, was pressuring courts to produce revenue, and that some legislators even believed courts should be financially self-sufficient.
Stephen B. Bright, president of the Southern Center for Human Rights, who teaches at Yale Law School, said courts were increasingly using fees “for such things as the retirement funds for various court officials, law enforcement functions such as police training and crime laboratories, victim assistance programs and even the court’s computer system. In one county in Pennsylvania, 26 different fees totaling $2,500 are assessed in addition to the fine.”
Dawson’s Alabama lawsuit alleges that Judicial Correction Services does not discuss alternatives to fines or jail and that its training manual “is devoid of any discussion of indigence or waiver of fees”.
In a joint telephone interview, two senior officials of Judicial Correction Services, Robert H. McMichael, its chief executive, and Kevin Egan, its chief marketing officer, rejected the lawsuit’s accusations. They said that the company does try to help those in need, but that the authority to determine who is indigent rests with the court, not the company.
