Who Should Pay For the Criminal Justice System?
by TChris
Thanks to Adam Liptak for calling attention to an underreported story and an underappreciated problem.
Almost every encounter with the criminal justice system these days can give rise to a fee. There are application fees and co-payments for public defenders. Sentences include court costs, restitution and contributions to various funds. In Washington State, people convicted of certain crimes are also charged $100 so their DNA can be put in a database. ...
The sums raised by these ever-mounting fees are intended to help offset some of the enormous costs of operating the criminal justice system. But even relatively small fees -- $40 per session, say, for a court-ordered anger management class or $15 for a drug test -- can have devastating consequences for people who emerge from prison with no money, credit or prospects, and who live in fear of being sent back for failing to pay.
Governments increasingly balance their budgets by imposing "user fees" on the individuals it drags into the court system. Those individuals are disproportionately poor, and it isn't unusual for them to sit jail time in lieu of paying fines and court costs. Liberty should not depend on wealth, and we shouldn't impose hidden taxes on the people who can least afford to pay them.
Judge James R. Thurman of the Magistrate Court in Lee County, Ga., said his state's many fees, known there as add-ons, were a backdoor way to make poor people pay for the free lawyers guaranteed to them by the United States Supreme Court's decision in Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963.
"You're asking the people who can't afford to hire an attorney to pay anyway by making them pay through add-on fees," Judge Thurman said.
Indeed, according to the American Bar Association, at least 15 states, including New Jersey and Connecticut, charge application fees to people seeking court-appointed lawyers
Washington denies the right to vote -- a right as precious as liberty -- to people who haven't paid their court debts. Why should the right to vote depend on afflluence?
Defendants placed on supervision get stuck with supervision fees, money they could be spending on rent or tuition or gas. Liptak quotes a defendant who sums up the justifiable frustration of those who enter the criminal justice system:
"Society's interest is in an ex-con becoming solvent and in becoming a contributing member of society," Mr. Rideau said. "They created this court-costs sham to sabotage my efforts to create a life."
| < Voting News | Lawyer Honored For His Criminal Justice Work > |
