As Court Fees Rise, The Poor Are Paying The Price

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/19/312158516/increasing-court-fees-punish-the-poor

by dataminer • 12 years ago

145 49 12 years ago

enjo2• 12 years ago

For all of the courts crying bankruptcy I have on simple fix:

Stop fucking charging so many people with crimes. The actual cause here is so obvious. Why not just stop putting people in jail so often and for so long? Reduce the number of felonies we arrest people for. Reduce the case-load and the cost of running a court goes down.

Magic!

This should also tell you something:

Some judges and politicians — even ones with reputations for being hard on crime — are starting to question whether the use of fines and fees has gone too far. The new law in Colorado was passed on a near-unanimous vote of Republicans and Democrats.

This is one of the most dysfunctional state-houses in the country. When two sides so ideologically opposed come together on any issue everyone else in the country should take note.

mikeash3• 12 years ago

I have a different simple fix: pay for courts with taxes just like other public services.

It's reprehensible that we require defendants to pay for their own trials. It's contrary to the very idea of justice to charge someone to go to court to defend themselves.

It's the same problem as with plea bargains, just with smaller quantities spread across many more people. The principle is the same either way: save us the trouble of proving you did what we're accusing you of, and we'll punish you less. The outcome is likewise the same either way: innocent people are coerced into admitting guilt because they fear being punished more after being found guilty in a trial.

(I like your idea too, of course. This is just another approach.)

baddox2• 12 years ago

I suspect that would work even worse than what we have now.

adwf• 12 years ago

Exactly. The moment the taxpayer starts realising the real costs of absurd policies like '3 strikes', 'Zero tolerance' and other nonsense, is the moment that you start having genuine reform in the system.

When they realise that each and every trial has an exact cost to their wallet. That we shouldn't be incentivising prosecutors and police to get a so-called conviction (eg. plea-bargain), no matter what. Then we can start on true justice. Not just for the benefit of individuals, but for the benefit of society as a whole.

enjo2• 12 years ago

(I like your idea too, of course. This is just another approach.)

It's the same idea really. This is, after all, how it used to work. Then we got "tough on crime". The argument, from the courts themselves, is that they can no longer afford to operate on their tax-funded budgets.

By charging less people with fewer crimes maybe they can get back to operating on an actual tax-payer funded budget!

Zelphyr• 12 years ago

100% agree. Its like the fine you get for a speeding ticket. Do they really think $75 is going to stop anyone from speeding? No, and they don't care. Its a revenue source for them so they keep it reasonably low and make up the difference in volume.

If they really wanted to stop speeding they'd charge $500 for a first offense. So maybe instead of giving those departments incentive to basically rob people--and, lets face it, that's exactly what it is--we fund them through taxes. That way they can focus on doing their jobs and not on speeding ticket quotas.

ENOTTY• 12 years ago

Courts don't charge people, prosecutors and district attorneys do.

r0m4n0• 12 years ago

I believe you nailed the true root cause. District attorneys have the power to choose who to charge and to what degree. It is not a DA's responsibility to weigh what is for the good of society, they need only to be concerned with conviction rates. Does that seem like the foundation for justice?

ceejayoz• 12 years ago

Courts can dismiss charges and say "stop wasting our time", though.

jcromartie2• 12 years ago

One of the hardest things you can possibly do in this country is enact a change that will lead to fewer jobs.

Prosecutors, police, and various administrative staff would suddenly have little to do and would need to be cut from payrolls.

As much as I would like it for our country to put a sense of justice ahead of "jobs", it's not going to happen.

dlss• 12 years ago

As a taxpayer, if that's really the problem I'd rather just pay those cops, prosecutors, jail staff etc to sit around. Maybe the extra man power could be funneled toward preventing real crime (murder, rape, fraud, etc), or maybe it does nothing.

Getting nothing for that money is still better than paying them to make the world worse.

3pt141592• 12 years ago

The core problem is that people think that "jobs" are good. Jobs are terrible. Productivity, health, education, these are the things we want, if you really just want jobs take every unemployed person and give them instructions to walk around a football field all day for minimum wage.

grimtrigger• 12 years ago

I've never heard this argument being made. The more common charge is that those who roll back the security apparatus are "soft on crime"

rch2• 12 years ago

This is wrong It can absolutely happen, and does fairly often. I know plenty of people in research and academia who have been affected by cutbacks. Maybe we should be spreading those cost saving efforts around more than we are currently.

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

Courts don't charge people with crimes, prosecuting attorneys do. District/State/US attorneys are not in charge of the court system.

rdtsc• 12 years ago

More importantly being soft on crime isn't exactly a popular platform for politicians. Pot legalization is kind of moving in that direction and regions across the country have made progress with that. But that is a just an exception.

wdr1• 12 years ago

Courts don't charge people.

lutorm• 12 years ago

The Nation recently ran a story along the same lines:

http://www.thenation.com/article/178845/town-turned-poverty-...

DerpDerpDerp• 12 years ago

This is just disgusting, on several levels.

A 700% rise in incarceration alone should be a sign something has gone seriously wrong with our domestic policing.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

Sorry, I do not see how they can charge for public defender, let alone jail time. I did have a relative charged for a in car breath analyzer but that I can understand.

Its not more damning than impound fees that cities allow towing companies to charge. There are all sorts of ways they have to separate you from your stuff, permanently.

I am all for not permitting governments to run court systems unless they are funded by taxes. If you cannot maintain that level of service you should be disbanded.

wanderingstan• 12 years ago

I was going to say that this is a regression to the US having debtors prisons, but then discovered in Wikipedia that the practices of the original article are already named as such. It also gives a list of policies for each state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors'_prison#Modern_debtors....

nostromo• 12 years ago

It's a classic perverse incentive: local governments profit from crime.

I think all fees (and fines and proceeds from auctions of confiscated goods) should bypass local governments entirely and go directly to the state general fund to lessen the incentive to "make crime."

One example: parking tickets. Parking tickets stopped being about fairly distributing a public good decades ago. Parking tickets are now a revenue stream for cities -- and that's it. Local governments have long since forgotten their original intent.

Confiscated goods are an even more outrageous problem. Even if you aren't convicted of a crime, a police department may decide to keep your cash and your property. Often, you have to sue to get it back.

I'm convinced that if these revenue streams bypassed local governments completely, suddenly they would be a lot less interested in their enforcement.

thinkcomp• 12 years ago

I encourage everyone to support RECAP and Operation Asymptote.

http://www.plainsite.org/asymptote/

dpeck• 12 years ago

The fees are absolutely ridiculous.

My wife got a ticket a few weeks ago for having a brake light out.

County has a standing order that allows routine citations like that be paid outside of court for $15 and showing a receipt for repair (or new bulbs in this case).

That $15 turned into ~$60 after everything else that was tacked on, and of course had to be paid in person, etc.

Thankfully not a huge deal for us, more for time than cost. But there are a lot of people in our county that an unexpected $60 and having to miss work to pay it would ruin their month and possibly get them fired.

danielweber• 12 years ago

Even in my hardest libertarian days, I still thought that the court system is exactly what taxes should be paying for.

noonespecial• 12 years ago

They're wrong about the defendant being the customer. The courts are becoming businesses that produce criminals and then sell them to a mix of private contractor prisons, debt collectors, and sweetheart deal service providers like the electronic monitors.

The defendants are the raw materials. They're being captured and sold to modern-day plantations. This statement gets less hyperbolic every year.

trhway• 12 years ago

"It is good to be the king", specifically to have the monopoly on violence.

fiatjaf• 12 years ago

This is a call for competition in court services, as would be provided by the customary law. For more information see Hasnas[1] and Benson[2].

[1] http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm

[2] http://mises.org/journals/jls/9_2/9_2_2.pdf

dueprocess• 12 years ago

I became a process server in the Waterloo Ontario region (where Blackberry is headquartered) after hearing about the crazy rates process server companies were charging in the area.

Those in need of this essential service are typically cash-strapped single moms and dads. The cost of hiring a "traditional" Process Server is north of $150 - or $50+ an hour.

My service provides court document delivery and signing of the affidavit for a fraction of the price. It's an affordable alternative, and my clients seem grateful for it.

If you ever need family/civil/small claims court papers served in the Waterloo Ontario region, consider Due Process: http://dueprocess.ca

As Court Fees Rise, The Poor Are Paying The Price

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