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<div class="timestamp">July 2, 2012</div>
<h1>Poor Land in Jail as Companies Add Huge Fees for Probation</h1>
<span><h6 class="byline">By <a rel="author" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/ethan_bronner/index.html" title="More Articles by Ethan Bronner" class="meta-per">ETHAN BRONNER</a></h6></span>
<div id="articleBody">
<p>
CHILDERSBURG, Ala. — Three years ago, Gina Ray, who is now 31 and
unemployed, was fined $179 for speeding. She failed to show up at court
(she says the ticket bore the wrong date), so her license was revoked.
</p>
<p>
When she was next pulled over, she was, of course, driving without a
license. By then her fees added up to more than $1,500. Unable to pay,
she was handed over to a private probation company and jailed — charged
an additional fee for each day behind bars. </p>
<p>
For that driving offense, Ms. Ray has been locked up three times for a
total of 40 days and owes $3,170, much of it to the probation company.
Her story, in hardscrabble, rural Alabama, where Krispy Kreme promises
that “two can dine for $5.99,” is not about innocence. </p>
<p>
It is, rather, about the mushrooming of fines and fees levied by
money-starved towns across the country and the for-profit businesses
that administer the system. The result is that growing numbers of poor
people, like Ms. Ray, are ending up jailed and in debt for minor
infractions. </p>
<p>
“With so many towns economically strapped, there is growing pressure on
the courts to bring in money rather than mete out justice,” said Lisa W.
Borden, a partner in Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell &
Berkowitz, a large law firm in Birmingham, Ala., who has spent a great
deal of time on the issue. “The companies they hire are aggressive.
Those arrested are not told about the right to counsel or asked whether
they are indigent or offered an alternative to fines and jail. There are
real constitutional issues at stake.” </p>
<p>
Half a century ago in a <a title="Gideon v. Wainwright." href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0372_0335_ZS.html">landmark case</a>,
the Supreme Court ruled that those accused of crimes had to be provided
a lawyer if they could not afford one. But in misdemeanors, the right
to counsel is rarely brought up, even though defendants can run the risk
of jail. The probation companies promise revenue to the towns, while
saying they also help offenders, and the defendants often end up lost in
a legal Twilight Zone. </p>
<p>
Here in Childersburg, where there is no public transportation, Ms. Ray
has plenty of company in her plight. Richard Garrett has spent a total
of 24 months in jail and owes $10,000, all for traffic and license
violations that began a decade ago. A onetime employee of United States
Steel, Mr. Garrett is suffering from health difficulties and is without
work. William M. Dawson, a Birmingham lawyer and Democratic Party
activist, has filed a lawsuit for Mr. Garrett and others against the
local authorities and the probation company, <a href="http://www.judicialservices.com/">Judicial Correction Services</a>, which is based in Georgia. </p>
<p>
“The Supreme Court has made clear that it is unconstitutional to jail
people just because they can’t pay a fine,” Mr. Dawson said in an
interview. </p>
<p>
In Georgia, three dozen for-profit probation companies operate in
hundreds of courts, and there have been similar lawsuits. In one, Randy
Miller, 39, an Iraq war veteran who had lost his job, was jailed after
failing to make child support payments of $860 a month. In another,
Hills McGee, with a monthly income of $243 in veterans benefits, was
charged with public drunkenness, assessed $270 by a court and put on
probation through a private company. The company added a $15 enrollment
fee and $39 in monthly fees. That put his total for a year above $700,
which Mr. McGee, 53, struggled to meet before being jailed for failing
to pay it all. </p>
<p>
“These companies are bill collectors, but they are given the authority
to say to someone that if he doesn’t pay, he is going to jail,” said
John B. Long, a lawyer in Augusta, Ga., who is taking the issue to a
federal appeals court this fall. “There are things like garbage
collection where private companies are O.K. No one’s liberty is
affected. The closer you get to locking someone up, the closer you get
to a constitutional issue.” </p>
<p>
The issue of using the courts to produce income has caught the attention
of the country’s legal establishment. A recent study by the nonpartisan
Conference of State Court Administrators, <a href="http://cosca.ncsc.dni.us/WhitePapers/CourtsAreNotRevenueCenters-Final.pdf">“Courts Are Not Revenue Centers,”</a>
said that in traffic violations, “court leaders face the greatest
challenge in ensuring that fines, fees and surcharges are not simply an
alternate form of taxation.” </p>
<p>
J. Scott Vowell, the presiding judge of Alabama’s 10th Judicial Circuit,
said in an interview that his state’s Legislature, like many across the
country, was pressuring courts to produce revenue, and that some
legislators even believed courts should be financially self-sufficient.
</p>
<p>
In a 2010 study, the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law <a href="http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/criminal_justice_debt_a_barrier_to_reentry/">examined the fee structure in the 15 states</a>
— including California, Florida and Texas — with the largest prison
populations. It asserted: “Many states are imposing new and often
onerous ‘user fees’ on individuals with criminal convictions. Yet far
from being easy money, these fees impose severe — and often hidden —
costs on communities, taxpayers and indigent people convicted of crimes.
They create new paths to prison for those unable to pay their debts and
make it harder to find employment and housing as well as to meet child
support obligations.” </p>
<p>
Most of those fees are for felonies and do not involve private probation
companies, which have so far been limited to chasing those guilty of
misdemeanors. A decade or two ago, many states abandoned pursuing
misdemeanor fees because it was time-consuming and costly. Companies
like Judicial Correction Services saw an opportunity. They charge public
authorities nothing and make their money by adding fees onto the bills
of the defendants. </p>
<p>
Stephen B. Bright, president of the <a href="http://www.schr.org/">Southern Center for Human Rights</a>,
who teaches at Yale Law School, said courts were increasingly using
fees “for such things as the retirement funds for various court
officials, law enforcement functions such as police training and crime
laboratories, victim assistance programs and even the court’s computer
system.” He added, “In one county in Pennsylvania, 26 different fees
totaling $2,500 are assessed in addition to the fine.” </p>
<p>
Mr. Dawson’s Alabama lawsuit alleges that Judicial Correction Services
does not discuss alternatives to fines or jail and that its training
manual “is devoid of any discussion of indigency or waiver of fees.”
</p>
<p>
In a joint telephone interview, two senior officials of Judicial
Correction Services, Robert H. McMichael, its chief executive, and Kevin
Egan, its chief marketing officer, rejected the lawsuit’s accusations.
They said that the company does try to help those in need, but that the
authority to determine who is indigent rests with the court, not the
company. </p>
<p>
“We hear a lot of ‘I can’t pay the fee,’ ” Mr. Egan said. “It is not our
job to figure that out. Only the judge can make that determination.”
Mr. Egan said his company had doubled the number of completed sentences
where it is employed to more than two-thirds, from about one-third, and
that this serves the company, the towns and the defendant. “Our job is
to keep people out of jail,” he said. “We have a financial interest in
getting them to comply. If they don’t pay, we don’t get paid.” </p>
<p>
Mr. Bright, of the Southern Center for Human Rights, said that with the
private companies seeking a profit, with courts in need of income and
with the most vulnerable caught up in the system, “we end up balancing
the budget on the backs of the poorest people in society.” </p>
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