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America does an excellent job at shaming its poor people. Sure, there are state and federal programs that exist to help them. And in this way, we can pat ourselves on the back and make ourselves feel better about our supposed sense of charity. But look below the surface and you will also see a consistent pattern of policies that are designed to stigmatize and punish the impoverished for their condition.
Recently in Wisconsin, the state’s budget committee approved a plan to drug test Medicaid recipients, despite zero evidence existing that those who receive public benefits use drugs. Nevertheless, Republicans keep insisting that we should be policing poor people every chance we get. And the assault on poor people at the state level can be increasingly seen in the ways that some states have set up laws to arrest and incarcerate those who are too cash-strapped to pay court fees. The good news, however, is that organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are fighting back. On Thursday, the ACLU filed a lawsuit alleging that officials in Lexington County, South Carolina, engage in practices which set up today’s equivalent of a “debtors’ prison”—locking up those who cannot afford to pay their debt. And it will come as no surprise that it is often people of color who are most impacted by this system.
Thursday’s lawsuit, filed on behalf of five indigent plaintiffs, [including Twanda Marshinda Brown, the single mother of seven children who was jailed for 57 days because she could not afford to pay her court-ordered $2,407.63 in fines for driving on a suspended license] alleges that Lexington County has been engaging in the equivalent of modern-day “debtors’ prison” practices: issuing arrest warrants for people who are unable to pay court fees or court-ordered fines for minor infractions like parking tickets, and jailing them without offering them lawyers or determining whether they have the ability to pay in the first place. [...]
Simply put, courts cannot jail people because they are too poor to pay fines—sometimes called “pay or stay.” In 1833, Congress abolished the use of debtors’ prisons and in 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court followed suit in a case called Bearden v. Georgia.
In Bearden, the Supreme Court noted that it had “long been sensitive to the treatment of indigents in our criminal justice system.” It continued: “There can be no equal justice where the kind of a trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has.”
Lady Justice is supposed to be blind. But yet, we are inundated with plenty of examples of how our legal system seems to be built around the exact opposite of impartiality, particularly for black and brown bodies. In fact, so much so that Langston Hughes once wrote this:
That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.
The law has been used as a tool to punish and harm minorities and the poor. And still, good lawyers and advocates have also used the law to try to reverse some of the damage that has been created by those very same laws—exactly what the ACLU is trying to do here. The organization claims that what Lexington County is doing is clearly unconstitutional.
The 14th Amendment prohibits the incarceration of a person for nonpayment of legal debt (including court fines, fees, costs, assessments, or restitution) without first holding a court hearing on the individual’s ability to pay the legal debt or whether there are alternatives to incarceration, and making a finding that the individual willfully refused to pay.
In addition, the Sixth Amendment requires that indigent defendants be afforded the assistance of court-appointed counsel when faced with actual incarceration as a result of their nonpayment of legal debts. [...]
Yet despite these constitutional infirmities, the revenue generated by such modern-day debtors’ prison practices often make such practices an attractive solution to cities and municipalities suffering budget shortfalls. In the past two years, the ACLU has resolved debtors’ prison lawsuits with county and city officials in Biloxi, Mississippi; DeKalb County, Georgia; Benton County, Washington; and Macomb County, Michigan. In each of these four cases, the settlements or the legal ruling requires reforms to end debtors’ prison practices. One such reform is a bench card—a step-by-step guide to assist judges in notifying indigent people of their rights and to ensure that people aren’t being jailed simply for being poor.
In the end, this comes down to race and money. In addition to who is being jailed (all of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are poor people of color), the county generates revenue from these practices. There is a clear financial incentive to lock up people for months who cannot afford to pay their fines. Meanwhile, this practice separates them from their families and almost always causes them to lose their jobs. And they are robbed of their right to hearings which would determine their eligibility to pay in the first place. But none of that will stop conservative politicians from blaming them from being poor and trying to promote policies like this that further criminalize them. Thus, the damaging cycle begins again. Not only is this wrong, this is how structural inequality continues.
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