Is Debtor’s Prison Making A Comeback?
By James Donahue
When
I was a child I recall a large empty concrete building on the outskirts of the county seat that I was told was the old “poorhouse”
where people were forced to stay and work off debts. They said residents of the poorhouse kept a garden on the grounds and
raised their own food.
I don’t
know how true the story was because at the time, poor farms and debtor’s prisons had been closed down by federal law
in the United States for over a century. The introduction of bankruptcy laws created a legal way for people to eliminate financial
debt when they had no other way out.
Changes
in the bankruptcy laws which have been going on during the past decade or longer, are making it more difficult and more costly
for people to use this means to climb out of debt. For example, people must pay for debt counseling services and a substantial
cash-up-front lawyer’s fee before they can even file. And people in debt like that usually don’t have the means
of making such payments.
As property values
drop and more and more people are out of work, but prices keep rising, cities and counties are finding themselves pinched
for the revenues needed to keep local services operating. They are doing things like imposing higher fees for parking violations,
local services and charging prisoners for room and board during their time in the local jails.
That governments are charging prisoners for time spent in jail obviously
contradicts the concept of serving jail time in exchange for paying off personal debt. How does one pay off debt while in
jail and unable to work? So what is to be done?
A
recent report noted that debt collection agencies are a growing business in the United States where more than 35 percent of
the people are unable to pay their bills. Most of the money is owed to credit card companies which are charging outlandish
fees of up to 24 percent interest on loaned money. It is a form of organized crime in disguise.
Now there appears a new private scam called Judicial Corrections Services.
This is a privately operated company that contracts with the courts to manage the probation of people that cannot pay fines
and court costs. These people not only get charged these fees, but also a monthly supervision fee, with interest. When they fail to pay, the courts issue warrants for their arrest,
and they then have additional fines, court costs and jail rent fees added to the initial debt.
Sometimes small
$100 fines can grow to thousands of dollars in debt for people trying to exist on welfare and unemployment checks. They find
themselves in financial holes that are impossible to climb out of.
Currently there are private judicial correction services operating in about
12 states, and the number may be growing.
Somehow
these operators are getting around a 1980 Supreme Court ruling that made it illegal to put someone in jail because they cannot
pay a debt, especially if there hasn’t been a hearing to determine their economic status.
People who are unable to pay simply can’t pay. And throwing
them in jail isn’t going to help.
