“People are talking about how life-changing it’s been inside to be able to make some choices about what they’re watching on TV, or what music they’re listening to—to be able to listen to music at all,” Kinnon said. Plus, incarcerated people have tens of thousands of choices within the free eBook and audiobook library, which contains more than 63,500 titles. Some inmates with vision issues can now read almost anything in large print, when they were previously limited to the small selection of large-print books. Other inmates with low levels of literacy take advantage of audiobooks to open up the world of books to them.

Media services like these are often offered in other jails, but as they’re typically controlled by for-profit prison telecom companies, they’re often exorbitantly expensive. In most places any form of communication used to keep incarcerated people connected to the outside world, be it phone calls or tablets, has also been used to control incarcerated populations and generate profits for jails and their contractors.

San Francisco has offered jail tablets and their content at no cost to incarcerated people, part of a wave of institutions starting to decouple carceral communications from a profit motive. The free tablet program was introduced in May of 2023, a logical follow-up to San Francisco making jail phone calls free in 2020, the first county in the country to do so and the second city after New York.

Before 2023, the San Francisco jails had never implemented any tablet program for all inmates. When the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department decided to dip its toes into providing the devices, Michelle Lau, the acting director of the Financial Justice Project within the San Francisco treasurer’s office, recalls that the very first iteration of the bid request was similar to others across the country—riddled with charges for tablet services.

She remembered thinking, “We just did this whole thing with jail phone calls—why are we doing basically the same thing on a tablet?” The San Francisco Jail Justice Coalition, a coalition of community groups, pushed for a completely free tablet program. “Some [community members] even said if there were any charges, they would prefer no tablet, rather than one with high charges,” Lau said.

Tablets have been trickling into prisons and jails over the past several years, with the devices first launched in 2012 by prison communications company JPay, now owned by prison telecom giant Securus. Soon prisons and jails began hailing “free” tablets for their inmates, as these companies would indeed often distribute tablets to inmates at no cost. But once incarcerated people actually used the tablets, they were far from free.

Music might be $1.99 per song, as it is for the most expensive songs in Washington State. In Pennsylvania state prisons, eBooks cost between $2.99 and $24.99. E-messaging can be as much as Arkansas’s $0.50 per message. Or, tablet costs may rack up based on how much the tablet is used; in Minnesota’s Fillmore County, tablet use costs $0.25 for each minute, which adds up to more than $30 to watch a typical movie on a tablet screen.

Meanwhile, most incarcerated people earn little money, if any, to pay for these services. As a result, families, many of whom are indigent themselves, may support them financially. And because of the disproportionate share of Black inmates in prisons and jails, much of these fees are paid by low-income Black women, either mothers or girlfriends or wives.

Over the past two and a half years, five states have made prison phone calls (though not necessarily jail phone calls) free. The latest one, Massachusetts, just passed a law in November. A handful of major cities in addition to San Francisco have also made jail phone calls free, including New York, Miami, Louisville, and Los Angeles. 

Change will soon happen on the federal level, too. In early January 2023, President Biden signed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022, which allows the FCC to regulate in-state prison and jail phone calls as well as out-of-state phone calls. Under federal regulation, which is set to begin sometime in the latter half of 2024, the price of prison and jail phone calls nationwide will likely fall significantly. 

In San Francisco, Sheriff Paul Miyamoto had already supported free phone calls, so it wasn’t surprising when his office ultimately released a request for proposals for a completely free tablet program. Alissa Riker, the sheriff’s office’s director of programs, said free tablets were “a long time coming” given the office’s “philosophy of not charging the folks in custody and their families.”

Lau says San Francisco received bids from the two major prison telecoms, Securus and ViaPath (formerly GTL) for the project. They also received one from Nucleos, a new company focused on prison education programming that seemed excited about a free tablet program. The company recently transitioned to a public benefit corporation, which requires it pursue both profits and positive social benefits.

In the end, Nucleos won the contract. 

Most jails and prisons, however, are contracted with either Securus and ViaPath for their tablets. Together, the companies hold roughly 80 percent of the prison communications market valued at more than $1 billion. And Securus and ViaPath have been tracking the recent and growing trend toward free phone calls

“Some of the companies running jail phone calls, they see the writing on the wall” about the looming unprofitability of jail phone calls, said Joanna Weiss, co-executive director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center. “They are often making up the money through the use of tablets.”

In 2015, a Securus presentation to potential investors noted that the company has “successfully decreased its exposure” to new regulation by “investing in businesses that are not regulated.” These businesses are any number of ancillary services like e-messaging, eBooks, movies and TV show rentals, and music that the company can then charge inmates to use on a tablet. (The Martha Wright-Reed Act clarifies that the FCC may now regulate video calls.)

But companies aren’t the only ones that profit—prisons and jails can earn commissions on tablet services just as with phone calls. “We’re always looking for ways to bring in additional money to the county,” Pennsylvania’s Westmoreland County Jail Warden John Walton told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, commenting on the jail bringing in $161,000 in tablet commissions in 2019.

Riker, from the San Francisco sheriff’s office, noted that this is what sets San Francisco’s free program apart. “Money is why other sheriff’s offices aren’t doing it,” she said. 

Typically, an institution’s profits from jail communications, whether via tablets or phones, are intended to fund inmate programming (though they sometimes simply shore up budgets or go to dubious purchases). Riker told Bolts that she’s gotten calls from people working at other jails who were astonished that San Francisco could afford to fund free tablets and give up that funding stream—regardless of the fact that the money is sourced from vulnerable prisoners and their families. 

In 2023, the mayor’s office committed to using approximately $500,000 annually from the city’s general fund to support free tablet services for people in jail. As the San Francisco sheriff’s office’s annual budget is just under $300 million, the tablet program makes up roughly 0.2 percent of the department’s total budget.

The move has been part of a citywide shift away from prison profiteering. In 2020, San Francisco’s board of supervisors passed an ordinance to bar the city from profiting off of goods and services purchased by prisoners, which led to free jail phone calls as well as the end of markups on commissary items.

But even as tablets may be an important tool for people behind bars to connect with the outside world, carceral institutions also use them to replace in-person services like classes and visitation, and even to help better control a jail or prison population. Miami-Dade County jails, like many jails across the country, suspended in-person visitation during the initial months of the Covid-19 pandemic. But also like many other jails, Miami-Dade has yet to reinstate in-person visits almost four years later.

“Visitation right now is only video calls,” said Katherine Passley, the co-executive director of Beyond the Bars, a Miami activist group organizing families of incarcerated people and pushing for changes at the jails. Passley’s father is incarcerated at a Miami-Dade County jail. Even though the county offers free 15-minute video calls, the service itself is “horrible,” Passley said, not only because of Miami’s internet connection problems—the National Digital Inclusion Alliance ranked Miami one of the worst cities in the country for internet connectivity—but also because the video contract with ViaPath precludes the use of Apple iPhones for video calling. The vast majority of Beyond the Bar’s membership can’t even access video calls, she said.

As for prison programming, the sheriff’s office in San Francisco considers the tablets a supplement to in-person classes and programming and explicitly refuses to use them as a replacement. This is not necessarily the case in other jurisdictions, which may see tablet services as an affordable replacement for educational programming. Low staffing issues in South Carolina prisons partly inspired a tablet program with educational services so the state could “use technology to deliver services to these folks in their cells,” as Department of Corrections Director Bryan Stirling told the Greenville News. 

Plus, many wardens have extolled the virtue of tablets for keeping incarcerated people busy—and keeping them under their thumbs. “It’s a great tool for us, because number one it keeps them occupied, but number two it’s something that we can take away from them for behavior modification purposes,” Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County Jail Warden Tim Betti told The Scranton Times-Tribune in 2020.

In Miami, Beyond the Bars has concentrated on tackling fee elimination in the jails, following in the footsteps of San Francisco. For instance, they’ve successfully advocated for the county to get rid of a $2 daily fee that pushed inmates into debt and commit to providing free 90-minute phone calls each day for people in jail. The group is currently working to reintroduce in-person visitation in the jails to ensure that incarcerated people and their families aren’t only able to see their loved ones through a screen.

Beyond the Bars has also recently pushed for free tablet services in Miami-Dade County jails. The tablet program outlined in the county’s request for proposals is not quite as ambitious as San Francisco’s but is better than that of the vast majority of jails nationwide. When the Miami-Dade County jails implement the program, the plan is for inmates to get their own free tablets with access to a limited number of free resources, such as an eBook library and one free movie a month. More specific details of the tablet program, however, will likely be up to the as-of-yet unannounced contractor. Beyond the Bars reached out to the local public library, which has agreed to work with them similarly to the San Francisco library—but it’s unclear if the library will ultimately be part of the program.

Kinnon, the San Francisco librarian, said she’s fielded inquiries “every week or two” from libraries interested in replicating San Francisco’s model. But she notes most of these libraries are in jurisdictions contracted with Securus or ViaPath—companies that would have to give up their profits on books and music, unlike the newcomer Nucleos. Kinnon said that from what she understands, ViaPath and Securus “have not expressed any openness or interest in working with public libraries.” Kinnon mused that one possible, though clunky, workaround would be for carceral systems to offer two tablets, one with free library services and one with the telecom provider’s services.

Companies like ViaPath and Securus “need to feel pressure…to be more open to do this and make it work,” said Kinnon, adding that San Francisco and Nucleos needed to work together to find creative ways to make the free tablet project happen. 

“But we did it,” she said. “And that means it could happen anywhere.”

The post San Francisco Expands Free Jail Communications by Adding Tablet Services appeared first on Bolts.

Speeding or other traffic tickets can quickly spiral out of control for people in North Carolina, not just because of the ticket cost or court fees that follow, but also the added punishment that can impair their livelihood: When people cannot pay off traffic debts, North Carolina automatically suspends their driver’s licenses.

These suspensions can rapidly escalate. People may lose their ability to travel to their jobs, which compounds their inability to pay the underlying fines and fees. Because their livelihoods depend on it, people often continue to drive, risking arrest and prosecution for driving with a suspended license, and potentially jail and new fines and fees. A 2019 analysis from Legal Aid Justice Center, a legal advocacy nonprofit, found that about 1.2 million North Carolinians—about 15 percent of the state’s driving-age population, and disproportionately Black drivers—had suspended licenses for failing to pay court costs or for failing to appear in court, which is the other major driver of license suspensions. A recent survey from Duke University found that 28.5 percent of people in this situation faced eviction as a result. 

While running for district attorney in 2018 in Durham, where nearly one in five residents have had their licenses revoked or suspended at some point, Satana Deberry denounced the fines and fees that make low-level cases into “debt traps that people cannot escape.” After her election, she made it a priority to confront these exploding court costs. Over her first term, she has partnered with the Durham Expunction and Restoration program, or DEAR, to use her broad authority to clear thousands of suspended licenses. This has helped thousands of Durham residents regain their right to drive and earn a livelihood.

Deberry is running for re-election in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, up against a challenger who says her office has been too lax in some cases. The primary has centered on violent crime, yet Deberry will also be judged on how she has dealt with entrenched poverty driven by the court system.

But Deberry’s approach to suspended licenses can also not contend with the rapid rate at which people are stripped of their licenses in the state. The state has adopted multiple laws over the past 15 years that have made it more likely North Carolinians will be hit with fines and fees they cannot pay. The DA’s office, some advocates stress, is not the optimal place to run after the issue. With other avenues for reform seemingly blocked, though, alternatives are hard to come by.

North Carolina joined many other states during the Great Recession in amping up its use of fines and court fees as revenue generators. Democratic and Republican politicians agreed during that period to increase regressive court costs and fees for driver’s license restoration; these moves hiked the costs of the court system by tens of millions of dollars. The fees were often justified as necessary to upkeep courts, but as of 2018, the vast majority of court fees went to the state’s general fund and other state agencies.

If nationwide trends are an indicator, this approach is hardly profitable: a 2019 Brennan Center report found that fines and fees are an inefficient source of government revenue. Despite this, North Carolina’s legislatures doubled down with laws meant to ensure reliance on fines and fees. 

On paper, judges can waive these costs whenever defendants can’t afford them thanks to a 1983 U.S. Supreme Court decision. But a North Carolina law passed in 2011 requires that the court system publish the names of judges who waive fines and fees along with the total dollar amount. That list is still regularly published as of March 7. 

“One of the biggest complaints that we get from the judges is: my name is going to end up on that list,” says Laura Holland, an attorney with the North Carolina Justice Center who has represented clients with traffic debt. She says judges told her that, if they waive fees, “it’s going to look like I’m waiving debt, and my county needs funds.”

Daniel Bowes, director of policy and advocacy of ACLU of North Carolina, said the 2011 law “had a clear chilling effect” on judges. “Judges have broad discretion,” Bowes said. “It’s just that they’ve been pushed politically not to waive the fees.” 

Bowes also points to a 2017 law that requires judges who wish to waive a defendant’s fees to first send a letter to every city agency losing out on revenue so they can weigh in. The North Carolina Administrative Office of the Courts decided to issue a monthly notice to all impacted agencies, towns or other entities, offering their lawyers to sit in on criminal court cases if they want. The notice also asked agencies to check a box if they object to court costs being waived, and the court regularly publishes a table of these responses.

Roger Echols, Durham’s DA between 2014 and 2019, piloted DEAR’s driver’s license clinic to provide pro bono legal assistance for people looking to clear the underlying fines and fees that led to their driver’s license suspensions. DEAR attorneys help people ask the court to clear unpaid debt, with the DA’s blessing. But this approach put the responsibility on residents to know their rights and initiate the waiver process, meaning people with suspended licenses were driving to the clinic or arranging for someone else to do so, often during work hours. 

After defeating Echols and entering office in 2019, Deberry worked with DEAR to expand a program offering mass remittances that began during her predecessor’s final weeks in office. 

Deberry relied on a North Carolina statute that allows prosecutors to petition the state directly, rather than wait for license holders to request it, shifting the burden onto the state. Deberry’s mass remittances covered license suspensions for non-payment of court fees or failure to appear that were at least two years old, absolving court debt from as far back as 1987. With DEAR’s help, Deberry’s office made hundreds of requests for remittance every week.

“I wanted to provide as broad relief as possible without people having to hire lawyers, without people having to get caught up in the paperwork,” Deberry told Bolts. “That is the whole reason that the fines and fees got to the point that they were, because people weren’t able to follow all of these steps.”

Thanks to these petitions, more than 11,000 people in Durham regained their right to a driver’s license and $2.7 million worth of debt was remitted, according to Deberry’s office. Deberry’s office stopped the mass remittance program in late 2020 when they had worked their way through pre-2018 suspensions, but four years worth of new suspensions have since piled up. Will Crozier, a Duke University professor who has studied driver’s license suspensions in North Carolina, credits the work that DEAR has accomplished, but suspects, “it’s not curing old licenses nearly as fast as they’re getting imposed.”

Data obtained by Bolts show thousands of suspensions for failure to pay court debt and failing to appear in court have been issued in Durham since 2018. 

Deberry’s office also says gathering records for a new round of mass relief is time and resource-intensive, and that they now refer people with suspensions to DEAR for help. Deberry has also said she’s open to more mass debt relief actions in the future, something advocates argue will be necessary after a pandemic.

Deberry has also adopted new policies to try to prevent license suspensions in the first place. The office drops some fines, when it determines that a ticketed person can not afford it. Sarah Willets, who handles communication for the Durham DA’s office, says prosecutors consider a person’s ability to pay and “if they can be held accountable without incurring those costs.” In these cases, Willets says, the DA’s traffic team dismisses some cases or agrees to a dismissal in exchange for taking a safe driving course or writing an essay.

Holland says Deberry’s overall approach has changed the culture of Durham County when it comes to fines and fees, affecting decisions from judges as well. “They’re actually more often than not inquiring about someone’s ability to pay,” she says of county judges. “It just kind of shifted the day to day operations of the courthouse.”

“We’ve been actively working to make the courts consider a person’s ability to pay before imposing fines and fees, particularly on indigent defendants in court,” Deberry confirms. 

Deberry’s office also said it dismisses charges when police arrest someone for driving on a suspended license, but only under the condition that they get their license restored. The office did not respond to a follow-up when asked if they considered dismissing all charges where the license suspension resulted from non-payment; some reform-minded prosecutors have adopted such a declination policy.

Moreover, in relying on prosecutorial discretion, Deberry’s proactive approach is vulnerable to the political winds, which could soon change. 

Deberry is now focused on Tuesday’s primary against attorney Jonathan Wilson II. Another opponent, Daniel Meier, suspended his campaign and endorsed Wilson on April 28, writing that Deberry was “unwilling to accept any responsibility” for violent crime and that he would rather work to elect Wilson than divide the vote of those critical of Deberry’s tenure.

Wilson did not respond to requests for comment from Bolts on his views on fines and fees. He has said elsewhere he would “reduce violent crime and restore the swift administration of justice” by relying more on pre-trial detention for people charged with violent crimes. 

Data released earlier this year by the city of Durham (which makes up the vast majority of the county) showed that violent crime declined there in 2021, but homicides jumped significantly. Other jurisdictions in North Carolina and around the country have seen similar trends, and Deberry points out that the rise in homicides has happened in places with tough-on-crime prosecutors as well as reform-minded ones. 

Advocates fighting to end predatory fines and fees are asking for bolder solutions that can only happen at the state level. 

A program like Deberry’s only goes so far if state agencies do not cooperate or waive fees. Lifting a suspension does not mean people can legally drive; each person still needs to reapply for their license and pay a mandatory reinstatement fee with the DMV, which can’t be forgiven. There is no data available on how many people had their licenses fully restored, which requires a wait that can stretch on for months.

“We’re kind of putting the burden on the district attorneys and the clerks to take care of this, and it results in something that’s really piecemeal,” says B. Leigh Wicclair, a staff attorney at the North Carolina Pro Bono Research Center. “There’s some things that should just be sort of uniform policies across the state,” she says. 

Wicclair also says a disparity in resources between counties makes it unrealistic to set up a program like DEAR everywhere.

Yet there is little momentum around the most obvious path for change: statewide legislation that would end the practice of suspending driver’s licenses. Many states have adopted such laws in recent years, including neighboring Virginia. But similar bills to end automatic suspensions for non-payment, to allow restoration fees to be waived and make it easier to pay off court costs have not passed in North Carolina.

DEAR’s work would also be less necessary if judges waived more court costs to begin with, an uphill climb due to the laws adopted over the past decade and the legislature’s current composition. Shirley Randleman, a former state senator who played a leading role in orchestrating the laws that targeted what judges can do, left politics for several years but is now mounting a comeback. 

Deberry says the biggest help to addressing the issue would be legislative reform. “I think the answer to that is change in the General Assembly, where fines and fees are not exorbitant,” Deberry says. For now, though, she says much of the responsibility still lies with prosecutors. 

Holland says future change will depend on how the issue is framed. “This is not about scoffing the law and people not paying because they didn’t want to pay,” she says. “This is about not punishing poor people.”

The post North Carolina Drivers Still Face “Debt Traps” Despite Some Local Reforms appeared first on Bolts.

Carl Richard, a city marshal in Shreveport, Louisiana, spoke in opposition to efforts to change how Louisiana courts are funded at a January 31 hearing. Speaking on behalf of the Louisiana City Marshals and City Constables Association, the court officers responsible for collecting the fines and fees that fund their operations, Richard told members that courts around the state could lose staff and won’t be able to replace old computers if the state adopts reforms that move away from relying on imposing financial charges on often-poor criminal defendants.

“Leave the court costs alone on traffic tickets, criminal matters and things in city courts,” Richard pleaded. “None of us were around when these court costs were put on the tickets, but we’re having to live with them now.” 

Lawmakers created the Louisiana Commission on Justice System Funding in 2019, in part to look for ways to fund local courts that won’t trap poor people in a cycle of debt and incarceration. Like many states, Louisiana levies fines and fees on criminal defendants to fund a significant portion of essential government functions, including the court system.  

Court fees raise money for clerks, sheriffs, marshals, public defenders, buildings and security, district attorneys, juries, postage, crime labs, the local Crime Stoppers nonprofit, and many more. These small fees add up for defendants, often accompanied by surcharges for missed payments. A simple traffic ticket can balloon into hundreds or thousands of dollars if you cannot afford to pay. Then, if you don’t appear for their court date, you may be arrested, with contempt fines added. 

But three years after lawmakers created the funding commission, wary local officials continue to resist reforms. Meanwhile, the state’s commission on court funding has sputtered without issuing substantial recommendations or even compiling some of the basic information needed to help reform a system that’s both morally dubious and financially unstable. 

Will Harrell, an attorney with the New Orleans-based Voice of the Experienced who sits on the commission, said at the January meeting that he felt “depressed” and “almost physically ill” by the lack of movement—citing the resistance of local officials like Richard. “We’re all in agreement that we need to move away from fines and fees… but not the fines and fees that fund my office,” Harrell said. “We’re three years into this, spinning [our] wheels, we’ve not come up with a solid commitment to go to the appropriations committee and say here’s what we need to move forward.”

Louisiana’s funding commission is part of a larger attempt by lawmakers to address deep inequities in the state’s criminal legal system. About a third of Louisiana’s population is Black, but Black people make up nearly two thirds of the state’s prison population. Poor and Black Louisianans also disproportionately pay court fines, monetary punishments meant to deter lawbreaking, and fees, which courts impose to fund numerous services. The disparities exacerbate other inequities; Louisiana has the second-highest poverty rate in the country and also scores low on life expectancy, child well-being, and infant mortality, all of which are more likely to impact poor and Black Louisianans. 

Similar organizing efforts to limit predatory methods of government funding are rocking other states. Last year, governors in 10 states signed legislative reforms to curb debt-based driving restrictions, according to the Fines and Fees Justice Center. Just two weeks ago, Oklahoma’s Senate passed legislation to reduce reliance on fines and fees and move toward a centralized system for funding courts. 

States are starting to turn away from fines and fees in part because they are a lousy source of funding. A 2019 Brennan Center for Justice report found that it cost profiled Texas and New Mexico jurisdictions an average of $0.41 to collect fines and fees for every dollar raised. Funding from fines and fees is also volatile, and agencies dependent on them often see considerable fluctuations. The pandemic made this even more apparent, since reduced collections and closed court buildings meant fewer fines and fees collected. 

Here again, the impact is often felt by the more vulnerable. Most public defenders’ offices across Louisiana faced budget deficits as traffic tickets fell by more than a quarter during the pandemic.

Sarah Whittington, a staff attorney with the New Orleans-based legal services organization Justice and Accountability Center (JAC), says fines and fees imposed on her clients seem disconnected from the reality of poverty. She recalled one client who owed $1,050 in court costs, and who started paying them off until the pandemic hit. No longer working and with his disability application pending, the man could no longer afford his monthly payment of $96, Whittington says. The judge’s solution: He would have to pay $400 in two months—equal to 55 hours of minimum wage work in Louisiana, at $7.25 an hour.

“Why is a criminal defendant paying for a D.A.R.E. program [or] a spinal injury fund?” Whittington said. “In recent years, if you wanted to go find money, raise money, it was going to be through criminal defendants.”

According to estimates based on 2018 legislative audit reports, district courts in the state rely on self-generated funds for 51 percent of their budgets; that number was 71 percent for city and parish courts. At such levels, fines and fees can be addictive revenue sources for city and state governments that have pledged not to raise taxes and whose federal funding has declined. 

Once agencies are “used to having that money, they don’t want to address the fact that you’re asking defendants, many of whom have not been convicted of anything, to pay,” says Vanessa Spinazola, executive director of JAC and a member of the funding commission.

These conflicts of interest abound. Even public defenders in Louisiana receive additional funding per case if their client is convicted—which is to say if the public defender loses the case. Louisiana advocates have had success declaring some of these conflicts to be unconstitutional. In the federal cases Cain v. White and Caliste v. Cantrell in 2019, defendants with experience in the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court (in New Orleans) successfully argued that fines and fees represent a conflict of interest because judges levy costs that fund the court itself, meaning that judges assess fees that they then benefit from.  

In Cain v. White, defendants who did not pay hundreds of dollars in fines were sent to jail for as long as two weeks, with their bonds each set at $20,000. Caliste v. Cantrell concerned defendants who were jailed for their inability to pay high bail amounts, including bail fees that help fund the court. In that case, a panel of three Fifth Circuit judges, two of whom were appointed by a Republican president, concluded that a judge both setting bail and relying on bail fees for court funding “pushes beyond what due process allows.” 

Broader attempts to reform this system have dragged for years, however. Louisiana lawmakers seem to acknowledge its perverse incentives, with insufficient follow-through. In 2017, the state passed a legislative package meant to address the state’s inequitable criminal justice system. One act required that defendants’ abilities to pay fines and fees were accurately assessed, yet fears about harming court funding led the legislature to delay implementation of the law.

In 2019, lawmakers created the commission on justice funding to study alternative ways to fund the courts. The commission is a catch-all of stakeholders, from the DA association to advocacy organizations, and also actors that gain financially from the current system like bail bonds interest groups. Nearly half of those on the funding commission represent offices that themselves rely on fines and fees. 

Officials’ support for change seems to extend only so far as their own funding isn’t threatened. When a vote went before the commission to recommend certain fees be eliminated, the recommendation narrowly failed, with support split almost entirely between those whose offices did and didn’t benefit from fines and fees.

In fact, the commission has issued no new recommendations for funding to state lawmakers three years after its inception. Commissioner Harrell, the attorney, lamented that they were becoming known as the “kick-the-can commission.”

“What the hell y’all been doing for these past three years?” Harrell asked fellow commissioners at a recent meeting.  

“There have been commissions, there have been court cases, there has been legislative advocacy at the local level,” says Joanna Weiss, co-director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center. “What seems to be lacking is the will to change,” she says. “Because the legislature has the power to solve the problem.”

One reason for the delay seems to be the lack of basic information about fines and fees in Louisiana. Each court has its own collection methods and accounting practices. Last year, when state auditors gave the funding commission a presentation about collections and disbursement, fewer than five percent of the more than 1,500 offices that collect criminal fines and fees had reported that information to the state. The 77 agencies that responded to state auditors collected a total of $70.6 million in fines and fees in 2020; nearly a third of criminal fines were contempt fines.

Other states trying to shift away from user-funded systems have benefited from a unified system—meaning that local courts are connected with centralized administration, funding and data reporting. 

Efforts to end Louisiana’s reliance on criminal fines and fees have also stalled despite bipartisan support. One member of the funding commission is Scott Peyton, Louisiana and Mississippi state director for Right on Crime, a conservative criminal justice organization. Peyton, a former probation officer, argues that burdening people with fines and fees actually decracts from public safety by contributing to recidivism. 

“There were times I felt like a bill collector that wore a gun,” Peyton told Bolts.

When defendants could pay, it often wasn’t even them coming up with the money but rather grandmothers and girlfriends. One 2018 survey by the Alabama Appleseed Center for Law and Justice found that middle-aged Black women were more likely than any other demographic group to be paying off someone else’s debts from fines and fees.

Ashley White with The Bail Project in Baton Rouge, who has attended commission meetings to give public comment, said current reform discussions are “rooted in the assumption that [the justice system] has to be the same size or larger.”

Making the system smaller would reduce the funding it needs to operate. Louisiana has more appellate judges per capita than any other state. It’s even one of two states, along with Ohio, that has mayor’s courts; Louisiana has about 250 of these courts, which hear minor cases in towns with no city court. 

The system has ballooned so large that lawmakers are chasing new sources of money from criminal defendants, even as they say they want to reform the system. Since 2017, 68 new criminal fees have been introduced in the Louisiana legislature, more than half of which have passed, according to an analysis by JAC. 

In the current legislative session, advocates plan to fight any new fees that are introduced and hope to pass legislation to make creating new fees more difficult. One proposed bill seeks to abolish mayor’s courts in the state. There will also be a continued push for judges to be required to assess someone’s ability to pay when imposing fines and fees. Meanwhile, the funding commission will continue to meet and try to get a complete picture of how much revenue from fines and fees the court system actually uses to operate.

White says there need to be fundamental reforms to reinvest funding toward health, education, and social services, which would help divert people from interacting with the justice system at all. Smaller changes—like reducing fines and fees—likely can happen first. 

But there are barriers to even these more modest changes, starting with the officials who benefit from the status quo. “People in Louisiana have made livelihoods off the back of mass incarceration,” White said.

The post Louisiana Court Officials Resist Reforms to End the Predatory Fines and Fees that Fund Their Offices appeared first on Bolts.

On New Year’s Eve, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law a bill that will end the suspension of driver’s licenses over a failure to pay a traffic ticket, a major win for economic and racial justice advocates who have long decried the practice. The law will also reinstate the licenses of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, many of whom have lost driving privileges because they cannot afford to pay their fines.

Suspending driver’s licenses entrenches and punishes poverty by preventing people from driving to work, taking kids to school, or visiting their doctor during the COVID-19 pandemic. People who are stopped for driving on a suspended license face misdemeanor or felony charges, and arrests of people who can’t afford to pay fines and fees inflate jail populations across the country. 

“This win is a significant step toward scaling back economic and racial inequality in New York,” Katie Adamides, New York state director at the Fines and Fees Justice Center, said in a press statement about the new law. (Note: Jonathan Ben-Menachem, the author, was employed by the Fines and Fees Justice Center until July of 2020.) The law was sponsored by Assemblymember Pamela Hunter and Senator Timothy Kennedy.

Advocates are also warning, though, that New York needs to take many other steps if it aims to fight the criminalization of poverty, especially because Cuomo cut out an important part of the legislation before signing it.

After the 2008 recession and the wave of austerity that followed it, local tax revenues dropped and tax increases became less politically viable. As a result, jurisdictions increased the amounts of fines and fees, and they imposed them on more people in order to fund government services. Since fines and fees are not adjusted according to wealth, they’re an inherently regressive form of taxation, and cities with larger Black populations tend to rely more on fines to fund government.

When the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, led to a Department of Justice investigation that exposed the town’s racist and extractive policing practices, efforts to reform fines and fees accelerated nationwide. In recent years, advocates have targeted driver’s license suspensions.

With its new law, New York joins 10 states that have stopped suspending licenses for failure to pay court debt, according to the Fines and Fees Justice Center. Hawaii, Oregon, and Virginia adopted similar laws last year, and others have restricted license suspensions more narrowly as well. (New York, unlike other states, already did not suspend licenses over fines and fees related to criminal convictions as opposed to traffic violations.) Advocates are hoping to get other states such as Texas to join.

Studies undertaken in New York show that driver’s license suspensions for unpaid fines and fees disproportionately target Black and low-income communities, as is true nationally. 

According to data released by Driven By Justice, an advocacy coalition that supported the new law, New York ZIP codes with lower average incomes and fewer white residents tend to see dramatically more suspensions. In New York City, where driving on a suspended license is one of the most-charged crimes, 80 percent of all those who are arrested for this offense are Black or Latinx.

The inequitable impact traces back to the fact that Black and Latinx drivers are pulled over and ticketed at higher rates, making them more likely to accrue debt and have their license suspended. New York courts are among the most aggressive in the country when it comes to traffic tickets. In Buffalo, for example, police issue seven times as many tickets for tinted windows as they do for speeding; drivers even told the Investigative Post in 2019 that they had received a separate ticket for each tinted window. Those multi-ticket stops are most common in Black neighborhoods.

The new law does not eliminate all driver’s license suspensions related to traffic tickets, however.

The bill that had initially passed the legislature would have also ended suspensions for a failure to appear in court for traffic hearings. But in late December, the governor’s office requested a chapter amendment, which the legislature agreed to, removing this provision. 

In a memorandum explaining the carve-out, the governor wrote: “Allowing drivers to simply ignore their tickets will inevitably allow for scofflaws to remain on the roads, and present a health and safety hazard to the public.” 

But a failure to appear in court is connected to poverty as well. People who can’t pay a traffic ticket may also not be able to take time off work to go to court, or may be unable to arrange child care. Those who can afford it can pay off their fines without the need to show up in traffic court. 

“Driver’s license suspensions for failure to appear only punish poor New Yorkers who can’t afford to take time off of work to appear in court,” Scott Levy, chief policy counsel at Bronx Defenders, told the Political Report. “The state is shooting itself in the foot by not ending these suspensions for failure to appear. It means that thousands of people across New York will not get the benefit of being able to drive to work without the fear of being arrested.”

Under the new law, people who miss their court appearance will be afforded a 90-day grace period before their license is suspended, and two notifications will be sent by mail or digital communication. The new law also imposes a moratorium on all criminal charges for driving on a suspended license (when the suspension stems from failure to pay or appear) between Jan. 1 and July 1, when the state will implement a new system to offer payment plans to people who cannot afford their traffic tickets. 

The cumulative effect of driver’s license suspensions in New York has been enormous. Between January 2016 and April 2018 alone, there were almost 1.7 million driver’s license suspensions in New York for both nonpayment of traffic fines and non-appearance at traffic hearings. 

The new law also still allows suspensions for nonpayment of fines and fees for drivers who violate vehicle height or weight restrictions. These account for less than 1 percent of tickets statewide and mainly impact drivers of large trucks and construction vehicles.

Beyond tickets and driver’s license suspensions, advocates have pointed to a broad array of potential fines and fees reforms in New York. The No Price on Justice coalition is calling for the abolition of all state-imposed court fees, commissary garnishment for court debt, arrests and incarceration for nonpayment of fines, and mandatory minimum fines.  

State lawmakers have introduced legislation to address several of the coalition’s policy goals. In the last session, one bill would have abolished a wide range of court fees, including the mandatory surcharge attached to criminal convictions. It would have ended commissary garnishment and debtors’ prison practices, too. Another bill would have required all state prisons to provide free phone calls for incarcerated people for a minimum of 90 minutes per day; currently, incarcerated people must pay exorbitant sums that they often cannot afford in order to get in touch with their families. It’s likely that these bills will be reintroduced in the 2021 session.

Democrats made legislative gains in New York in 2020, including securing a newly veto-proof majority, which may ease passage for progressive legislation in the upcoming session. 

Some advocates hope that this new landscape will encourage politicians to take up even more ambitious transformations of the state’s fiscal policy.

For example, the state property tax cap—a policy long pursued by Governor Cuomo—prohibits local governments other than New York City from raising property taxes by more than 2 percent each year. Municipalities that have few ways to raise revenue may then end up resorting to fines and fees. Abolishing the property tax cap would give municipalities another option.

“While recent reforms like ending driver’s license suspensions for unpaid traffic tickets are steps in the right direction, New York is long overdue for much broader fines and fees reform,” Adamides, of the Fines and Fees Justice Center, told the Political Report. “Until the state ends its reliance on fines and fees for revenue, we will continue to see the extreme harm that these regressive taxes cause to those least able to afford them.”

—

This story has been updated to reflect the author’s past employment with the Fines and Fees Justice Center.

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Virginia will no longer suspend driver’s licenses because people owe court debt, thanks to legislation that was signed into law last week.

The state has been suspending hundreds of thousands of licenses each year, disproportionately those of African Americans and lower-income Virginians. “Payment systems are not sustainable because people are robbing from rent and from putting food on the table in order to make a payment,” Angela Ciolfi, executive director of the Legal Aid Justice Center, an advocacy organization that has sued Virginia for years over license suspensions, told the Political Report.

Overall, 1 million Virginians had suspended licenses in 2017 on grounds that included debt obligations, according to a report by the Legal Aid Center. That’s about one out of seven adult Virginians, a staggering share that matches separate findings in North Carolina. 

In 2019, Virginia adopted a one-year moratorium against this practice. The law it adopted last week makes that pause permanent, and severs one of the pillars by which local and state governments enforce the unequal fines and fees system that their revenues often depend on.

“The big issue is the dependence of states on the use of fines and fees to fund the court system,” Ciolfi said. “People who can afford to pay their court debt do and simply walk away, whereas people who can’t afford to pay are subjected to a repeated series of attempts to coerce collection, penalties for failure to pay, and even jail time and other draconian responses. All we did was repeal one of the most pervasive and most ubiquitous ways of enforcing fines and fees.” 

The Legal Aid Center also found that about half of Virginians whose licenses were suspended were African Americans, these disparities mirror disproportionate policing and arrests in the state’s Black communities. This, too, is in line with national trends; a study released earlier in 2020 by New York Law School’s Racial Justice Project showed that driver’s license suspensions, specifically over unpaid traffic debt, disproportionately harms New Yorkers of color. 

Suspensions compound underlying inequalities. In taking away many people’s main mode of transportation, they cut off access to work and make it harder to pay off debt in the first place.

Those who continue using their cars to get to their jobs can get prosecuted for driving on a suspended license; activists have pressured prosecutors to stop charging people for driving on a suspended license and to clear past suspensions.

“If someone is unemployed, or underemployed, unsheltered, or has a family, regularly paying fines and fees, much less paying them off, is extremely difficult,” Alexes Harris, a sociologist at the University of Washington who studies monetary sanctions, told the Political Report. “Adding the burden of suspending or revoking their driver’s licenses creates more disadvantages that have a cascading effect.”

These problems are especially acute in areas that are not served well by public transit, as is common in Virginia. “Many, many, many jobs in America are inaccessible to people who don’t drive,” Angie Schmitt, a transportation writer, told the Political Report last year. Suspensions “can trap otherwise willing workers in a cycle of dependency and repeated incarceration.” COVID-19 has stretched public transit systems even thinner.

Going forward, Virginia will continue suspending licenses on some circumstances unrelated to driving. Still, last week Northam also signed a separate law that ends suspensions over other grounds than unpaid debt, including over drug-related conviction. 

Northam also approved other criminal justice reforms last week. One new law raises the threshold at which Virginia will treat theft as a felony to $1,000, from $500; that change is in line if not still considerably lower than reforms many states have adopted in recent years.

Another law requires that state prosecutors get a judge’s approval before treating kids younger than 16 as adults. But prosecutors will retain sole discretion over whether to prosecute 16- and 17-year olds in adult court; other states have stripped them of that authority. 

Those reforms have Virginia catching up to what’s already law in many places. By contrast, the ones that deal with driver’s licenses have it playing more of a standard-setting role.

Virginia is only the eighth state to prohibit driver’s license suspensions over unpaid fines and fees, according to the Fines and Fees Justice Center’s comprehensive national tracker. It follows California, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, Mississippi, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Montana, a state with a GOP legislature and Democratic governor, made this move last year.

Virginia’s version passed with wide bipartisan support, and with a leading sponsor from each major party (Republican Senator William Stanley and Democratic Delegate Alfonso Lopez). Still, similar proposals had stalled in Virginia’s legislature for years; Democrats gained control for the first time in decades this fall.

Other legislatures, including Florida, New York and Oregon, considered similar bills this year.

Virginia has a lot of work left as well against the criminalization of poverty since its public authorities will continue imposing fines and fees, and going after those who cannot afford them.

“We know that the court system has myriad ways of collecting these court debts without taking away people’s driving licenses,” Ciolfi said. “For instance we have seen some jurisdictions increase their use of the show cause and probation violations in order to enforce the payment of court debt, which can subject people to additional fines and fees, additional convictions, and additional jail time for being unable to pay.”

The economic crisis brought on by the novel coronavirus is only making it harder for people to meet the financial obligations that courts pile on, and criminal justice advocates want states to offer bold relief. 

Harris called on public authorities to “immediately stop sentencing fines and fees and collecting fines and fees, no interest or added collection fees or late penalties should be added to what they already owe.” Maine has vacated warrants that relate to unpaid court debt, while Chicago temporarily stopped sending driving-related tickets to collection firms.

“People should be allowed to use whatever income they have to feed their families and provide shelter,” Harris said.

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A new paper by Brandon Garrett and William Crozier of the Duke University School of Law finds that more than 1.2 million North Carolinians have lost their licenses for “non-driving related reasons” such as not paying fees and fines. Their paper also documents racial disparities in these revocations. “Poverty functions differently for whites than it does for blacks,” they write. This finding is in line with studies that show that fines and fees—and their myriad outsize consequences—are disproportionately imposed on African Americans.

Losing one’s license can trigger further economic hardships and mounting legal if not carceral problems, most notably for people who keep on driving after losing their license since they would otherwise be unable to go to work or simply move about.

This is true everywhere, and all the more so in areas with poor public transit. In North Carolina, the latter is aggravated by significant legislative cuts to transit funding, and by the behavior of wealthy actors like Duke University, which just sank a light rail project that was long in the works.

To regain their license, North Carolinians must pay fees in addition to the original debt, which may itself stem from poverty-related violations such as a lapsed registration. But payments are harder to make when mobility is impaired and alternatives lacking. “Many, many, many jobs in America are inaccessible to people who don’t drive,” Angie Schmitt, who writes on transportation policy for Streetsblog USA, told me via email. License revocations “can trap otherwise willing workers in a cycle of dependency and repeated incarceration.”

One North Carolinian who asked to be relieved from fees he could not afford wrote in his lawsuit that the loss of his license meant that he would “have to forgo the truck driving training school, and job placement,” or else “illegally drive and risk violating his supervised release and going back to prison.” A judge dismissed the case in March. Another case still stands, however. Johnson v. Jessup, a class-action lawsuit, went to trial in March and is now in the hands of U.S. District Judge Thomas Schroeder.

Durham is taking action this year through its Second Chance Driving Project, an initiative supported by the Durham Expunction and Restoration Program (DEAR), local officials, and organizations such as the North Carolina Justice Center.

Sarah Willets’s feature in Indy Week details the program’s “unprecedented scale.” Durham County District Attorney Satana Deberry has cleared tens of thousands of traffic cases this year, and she has separately asked courts to clear thousands of fines and fees that are more than two years old. Parts of this initiative were launched under Deberry’s predecessor, Roger Echols. The program will result in thousands of county residents regaining their eligibility to have a license, though informing them of this is yet another challenge.

This initiative utilizes reform avenues that state law already grants to counties, and Willets writes that DEAR hopes its initiative will function as a model for other jurisdictions.

States can also altogether end the practice of revoking licenses due to nonpayment of fines and fees. Mississippi’s Department of Public Safety announced such a reform in 2017, and Maine’s legislature followed suit last year. In Illinois and Montana, bills that would restrict the practice have each advanced one legislative chamber. Willets found no active effort to do this in North Carolina as of March.

Even in the absence of legislation, initiatives to expand public transit—when done with an eye toward equity goals—can assist the housing, employment, and legal outlook of people whose ability to drive has been restricted.

They can also help all people move across their region. Poor transportation, whether it stems from difficulties in acquiring a car or accessing transit, harms the reentry of many people involved in the criminal legal system, independently of whether they are eligible to have a driver’s license. This prospect showcases the pernicious nature of ideas like a New York proposal to ban people from using the subway for life if they have been convicted of certain offenses.

“We need to be providing better transit options everywhere,” Schmitt said, even as she emphasized this could not replace reform to stop license suspensions for non-driving related reasons. “And Durham is a great example of a place with poor transit options.”

Durham seemed on its way to improving this aspect of the problem as well with its light rail project. Local officials, in conjunction with those of neighboring Orange County, had agreed to increase county funding after the state budget was cut, and they talked about linking people to jobs and housing; advocates were demanding additional access to affordable housing and jobs as part of this development. But Duke’s announcement cut these conversations short and fatally wounded the project. Residents held protests against Duke this week.

Such failures to expand public transit, as well as failures to design projects in ways that improve equality, are missed opportunities to help disentangle people from the criminal legal system’s cycle of penalties.

“I think access to transit and affordable transportation is critical to combat poverty and the collateral consequences of being justice involved,” Wendy Jacobs, who leads the Durham County Board of Commissioners and who last month called Duke’s decision “devastating,” told me via email. “Transportation means freedom, freedom to access opportunities … If you do not have this, then you are severely limited to what [you] have access to in life whether it is jobs, education, healthcare, healthy food, etc.”

“We will need to find a new path toward equitable access to housing, jobs and transportation because these urgent needs remain,” Jacobs added, referencing light rail’s demise.

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