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| On Point with Tom Ashbrook: Justice, Race And Municipal Courts |
Ashbrook: Municipal courts which are jailing residences, many poor, many black for unpaid tickets. How they are using those fines and a threat of what can look like debtors prison as a big part of their revenue stream for their communities. Now those courts are in the spot light. Lawsuits talk of reform and its not just in Missouri. This hour on point american justice and a debtors prison problem.
People paying attention to this may remember in may 2013 Ronnie Tucker was taken to the Ferguson jail after failing to pay speeding tickets, failing to appear in court. Last weekend he spoke to NPR about what conditions were like in that jail,
“So when I got caught I had to sit in jail for like 14 or 15 days with no shower, no change of clothes, dirty cells, we've been treated like dogs.”
Not just him Tanya Deberry was pulled over by Saint Louis county police officer over a year ago. She was handcuffed and arrested when the officer saw that she had an arrest warrant for unpaid traffic tickets in fergeson. She told NPR her arrest was unfair
“Just traffic tickets no criminal act, nothing. Just traffic tickets. If you have the money you will never go through that type of situation. If you don’t have the money its jail, jail.”
A republican state senator in Alabama Cam Ward talking to PBS news-hour in December saying that he is concerned about the return of what can effectively be or look like debtors prison.
“What is currently in existence is almost like the wild west. There is no regulation. If your going to create a “debtors prison” all your doing is inviting yourself to a federal lawsuit.”
Joining me now from Saint Louis is Brendan Roediger, professor of law at Saint Louis University. One of the plaintiff attorneys in a class action lawsuits against authorities in Ferguson and near by Jennings Missouri, for jailing hundreds of residences for unpaid debts.
And with us from us from New York is Alec Karakatsanis, cofounder of the national civil rights organization of equal justice under law, brought similar lawsuits in Montgomery Alabama last year. The city agreed to reforms to its municipal court.
Do we have a national problem here Alec or is this just something that is very localized?
Karakatsanis: We do have a national problem. I think is what we are seeing is the rise of modern debtors prison. I think it is impossible to understand that phenomena without understanding the context ... We have seen the rise of courts trying to fund municipalities through generating revenue of the backs of the very poor through traffic tickets.
When you start to conceive of your court as a mechanism for revenue generation rather than a dispenser of justice, we have a real problem at hand.
… We have over two and a half million beings in cages every day in the United States, if you include immigrant detention centers. This mass incarceration which has been unseen in modern recorded world history and certainly in the history of the United States changes the way we think about human beings and human bodies. When you have to transfer that many people from their homes and families into cages, it changes the way you think about them.
We have to develop processes to make it more efficient. So you stop providing them lawyers. You start putting them in jail for really minor things like what Ms. Deberry was talking about, traffic tickets. You lose any sense of what kind of a brutal thing it is to put a human being in a cage. So what we have seen is traffic debtors throughout Saint Louis county and Alabama and throughout many other states being thrown in jail by these mass assembly line court hearings…
... We are putting them in cells that are caked in feces and blood and mucous. No shower no toothbrush for weeks and days. No medical care, no mental health care. These are the kinds of things our society has started doing to people because, in my view, we have lost any sense of what a brutal thing caging another person is. That is the context in which all of this needs to be understood on a national level.
Ashbrook: Brendan … If your looking from the outside ... some people could look on and say, ‘Look, we need public order. You break the law you pay the fine. Whats the problem?’
Roediger: There are over four hundred thousand outstanding warrant in Saint Louis county. I refuse to believe that this is just the capital of irresponsibility. The system is designed to make it easy to fall out of the bottom for one mistake. These prisons are far worse than what debtor's prisons were historically. Historically debtors prisons were places that allowed you to go to work and get out of debt. This is really just incarceration in terrible conditions and when you leave you still owe the debt.
Ashbrook: Describe how this system works. I have been reading stories out of Saint Louis this month. You got a law that is supposed to cap the amount of a community's revenue that comes from the municipal courts. But here on community Calverton park reported it has two thirds of all city revenue from municipal court fines and fees. I would say that is pretty dependent on this. I am looking at Ferguson itself a population of just twenty-one thousand, has the highest number of arrest warrants in the state relative to its size, fifteen hundred warrants per one thousand people. Now, Brendan, are residences of Ferguson more lawless than elsewhere? Or are they under a different kind of law enforcement regime?
Roediger: Well certainly they are not more lawless. The reality is that these municipalities they prospectively budget for these increases. So they will decide at the end of a year, ‘we want to make two hundred thousand more off traffic ticket fines or half a million more off of traffic. This sends a message. It encourages local level policing. It changes the dynamic of community policing. It is absolutely controlled by the top.
Ashbrook: It can look like we are farming fines out of these communities and these tend to be low income communities where the consequences can be quite enormous that a few hundred dollars may be just an unreachable sum to pay. Then they end up in jail. Then they lose their job. Then they lose their licenses. You're in this cycle and its hard to get out of.
Roediger: Absolutely. One mistake could change everything. I would add that wealthier municipalities prey on poor people just as much as some of these poor communities. Its easier to hide that money it may not show up as such a large percentage of annual revenue. It absolutely occurs.
Ashbrook: What do you want out of this lawsuit? These two suits against Ferguson and Jenning.
Roediger: The lawsuits are about compensating our plaintiffs and those individuals who have been subject to these debtors prisons and also about getting the court to order that some of these things fundamentally change…. I do believe that it is very difficult to imagine reforming this systems… Abolition may actually be the simplest and the best solution. It is a solution that many places historically have gone with.
Karakatsanis: ...I have to tell you that one of the most heartbreaking things that I have experienced over the past year or so that I have been really investigating this issue in depth is I’ve done hundreds of interviews with people all over the place trying to get the core of the problem. When you sit there with someone and you hear about the despair of these people feel when they just do not see away out they are being told by police and court that unless they pay us we will jail you. In Saint Louis you could be having seven or eight different municipalities telling you this at once. Who do you pay first? They are all going to jail you.
This notion that they can’t get their licence back so they can get a job so that they can get the money to pay it back. It is this never ending cycle. It is why in the past five months we have seen four suicides or attempted suicides in these jails by people who could not afford to buy their way out. The city that we sued, Jennings, a very small town about half the size of Ferguson. We have seen two suicides in the past two years by people who were held there solely because they could not pay a few hundred dollars to get out. This is the kind of thing we are seeing throughout the country.
The other point is that these arrest warrants Brendan mentioned that there are four hundred thousand in the county. Ferguson averages 3.6 arrest warrants per household. When you have that many arrest warrants, a lot of police citizen interaction is created that would otherwise be unnecessary. So you're encouraging the police to check everyone's ID, to stop people and ask them questions, to arrest them for something very minor or owing a debt. This leads to many potential situations where excessive force could be used or there could be a misunderstanding…
People are tired of being constantly stopped and forced to explain themselves to police. The accumulation of those little daily indignities of having to show your ID every time you leave the house is something we have seen a lot in Ferguson.
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More information on what a Debtor prison is
Google News Search: Debtor prison
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