I am neither black nor poor. Which is why the story of how the American system of justice has been corrupted to line the pockets of corporate America was such a shock and a surprise to me.
An excellent comment by Roadbed Guy to yesterday’s excellent diary by Phoebe Loosinhouse about the dangers of being Michael Brown in Ferguson led me to this outstanding article from the New Yorker by Sarah Stillman about the criminalization of poverty in America.
It’s a long article, but it should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the justice system in America and what it has become. Private corporations now incarcerate convicted criminals and monitor thousands of Americans on probation or parole, and the numbers are growing.
As an idealistic white middle class boy growing up in the Midwest, I learned to respect the American justice system. It was blind and fair, I was taught, and so I thought. Sometimes it made mistakes, but in general it got it right most of the time, and it worked in spite of bias, wealth, influence, politics, whatever.
So imagine my surprise to learn that poor folks, mostly black it seems, all across America are being set up to fail over and over again for petty crimes – driving without a license, minor drug offenses, jaywalking, being 5 minutes late to a court date – and that they then fall into the privatized justice system that extorts thousands of dollars in fines, fees, and court costs.
The industry aims to shift the financial burden of probation directly onto probationers. Often, this means charging petty offenders—such as those with traffic debts—for a government service that was once provided for free. These probationers aren’t just paying a court-ordered fine; they’re typically paying an ever-growing share of the court’s administrative expenses, as well as a separate fee to the for-profit company that supervises their probation and enforces a payment schedule—a consolidated weekly or monthly set of charges divided between the court and the company. The system is known as “offender-funded” justice.
This “justice” system has been seriously compromised by the trend to privatize the criminal justice system in America. Once a criminal is convicted and turned over to a private justice provider, if they can’t pay, their relatives are called. And if they still can’t pay, they can set up installment payments that guarantee that they will be poor – forever.
Last fall, I spoke with Jack Long, a Georgia attorney who filed a habeas petition on behalf of a client who, after stealing a two-dollar can of beer from a convenience store, was ordered to spend a year wearing an ankle bracelet operated by a company called Sentinel Offender Services. The man wound up owing more than a thousand dollars to the company in fees and late-payment penalties, and started selling his blood plasma to keep pace. It wasn’t enough. Eventually, a judge whose court had an exclusive contract with Sentinel jailed him for the unpaid fees.
When private corporations are paid to incarcerate convicts and monitor parolees, then there is no incentive to ever terminate their sentences, and plenty of incentive to make sure they stay in the system.
With municipal budgets under enormous strain across the country, the industry has also pitched itself as a source of revenue for small courts. “If your municipality is looking to reduce incarceration rates and to increase the collection of fines and court costs in the municipal court, please give our office a call today,” the Georgia-based Freedom Probation Services advertises. In return for an exclusive contract with a municipality, companies like Freedom Probation offer their services to courts for free. The private-probation business has established a presence in such states as Utah, Missouri, Montana, and Colorado, although its home remains in the Cotton Belt.
Many states are forced to rely on the private justice providers due to cutbacks in budgets. And – surprise, surprise – the trend is most pronounced in rural America where the poor have ironically become a major source of income for the courts.
Within the private corrections industry, “alternatives to incarceration”—including probation services and halfway houses—used to be regarded as an afterthought. The size of America’s incarcerated population more than quadrupled in the three decades since 1980, and, in time, the private sector seized an immensely lucrative opportunity; between 1990 and 2009, the number of inmates in private prisons increased seventeen-fold, and revenues for the largest private-prison firm, Corrections Corporation of America (C.C.A.), reached $1.7 billion.
Incarcerating the poor has become a growth industry in America.