Cash Register Justice

Florida recently enacted S.B. 7066 whose purpose is to subvert the will of the overwhelming majority of Floridians who voted to restore voting rights to people after completing their sentence to include parole or probation. This bill adds the additional requirement that all court-ordered Legal Financial Obligations (LFOs) must also be settled. In this article I’m going to take a look at all the problems associated with LFOs beyond just restitution of voting rights and some possible solutions to end the cycle of perpetual debt for poor people that our current system has created.

The idea that a criminal should have to pay some restitution to their victims and perhaps some other reasonable fines probably doesn’t seem all that outrageous at first, and for most of our history it wasn’t. However, there was a change that started in the 1970s, and by the 1990s was out of control. Cash strapped governments at all levels began adding extra fees and cost on to sentences to help fund the operation of the criminal justice system. This idea was an easy sell to voters who liked tax cuts and who for the most part had little contact with the court system.

According to the Fines & Fees Justice Center, Florida now has at least 115 different types of fees and surcharges, the second highest in the country. These include fees to cover the cost of the court and jury, pre-trial confinement, cost of electronic monitoring while out on bail, cost of a court appointed attorney, various fines included in the sentence, victim restitution, cost of post-conviction confinement, cost of medical care while confined, payments to private probation companies, cost of drug & alcohol testing, cost of court ordered classes, extra surcharges, interest and more. Of course, this is all on top of the cost of bail, and child support cost that many inmates accumulate while incarcerated. If a released inmate misses a payment, they risk the state turning their debt over to a collection agency who will add an additional 40% service fee on any outstanding balance.

It’s difficult to get hard numbers on what these costs typically are, but it appears not unusual for someone who spends 2 or 3 years in prison to get released with a $40,000 bill or more. You have to keep in mind that on average people convicted of felonies are already poor with the majority making less than $22,000 per year before being convicted, post release that number falls to a median income of just $10,000. This results in a collection rate of less than 10%, often the amount collected barely covers the cost of the collection actions. When someone fails to pay, in addition to the debt collection fees and interest, they often have their driver’s license suspended which further reduces the earning potential or sets them up for a driving with a suspended license charge and additional LFOs that they won’t be able to pay. In one resent year over a million Florida driver’s licenses were suspended, more than 70% were due to unpaid fines and court cost rather than anything to do with their driving.

Here’s a few examples of the type of situations that can arise from our system of accessing LFOs. A woman who was convicted in the early 2000s and served 8 years for killing an abusive boyfriend had $33,000 in LFOs when she left prison. Thirteen years later after making the minimum payment each month she owed $72,000 due to interest. A Georgia man who plead guilty to shoplifting a $2 beer was given a $200 fine to avoid jailtime, however the sentence with all the other fees added on was over $1,200 which he couldn’t afford, and he ended up jail anyways, presumably accumulating even more debt. Finally, there was a disabled Tennessee woman who received probation on a first offense shoplifting charge. However, after the fines, payments to the for-profit probation company and mandatory drug test (even though her crime wasn’t drug related) her total LFO ended up being over $1,100 which she’s expected to pay despite a monthly income of only $753. She ended up having to sell her car to keep up with the payments and is still unlikely to be able to settle the debt. Although some of these examples aren’t from Florida, our system is similar to Georgia’s and Tennessee’s and results in similar stories.

The current system traps people in a cycle of debt they can often never escape, rarely results in victims receiving any restitution or any meaningful revenue for the state. So why haven’t we done anything about it? I think there’s a couple of reasons. First, politically it’s a lot easier sell to the voters to say we’ll stick it to those lousy criminals rather than raise taxes. Even when the flood of anticipated revenue never materializes, they can use the issue of LFO’s to brand themselves as tough on crime. Explaining that our current system punishes the poor while letting the rich ow easy requires a complicated and nuanced explanation, while making the simplistic proclamation that we’re going to make criminals pay for their crimes is more likely to get the crowd worked up. Now that Florida has passed the law requiring repayment of all LFOs prior to the restitution of voting rights, the effort to reform the system has taken an even greater partisan tone. Many Republicans apparently fear a wave of formerly disenfranchised citizens will flood the polls as new Democratic voters.

Just as important are the corporate interest who have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are. Bail bondsmen, private prisons, debt collection agencies and private probation services all benefit from a system designed to force money out of the hands of the people who can least afford it. The private probation companies are perhaps the least known but most insidious of these interests. Once someone goes on parole, whether after being released from prison or as a punishment for a lesser crime, the probation officer has a huge degree of control over the individual’s life. They can order the parolee to take life skills classes that the company offers for a fee. They can order the individual to take drug and alcohol test (for which they are charged) even if they don’t have any history of abuse. And of course, they are charged for the cost of administering the probation. They’ve also been known to threaten revoking parole for nonpayment. This can make paying the parole officer a higher priority than food and medicine. These companies have a financial incentive to keep people on parole as long as possible. This can include setting the parolees up for failure so they can be sent back to prison followed by additional parole.

This is a serious problem and some even some conservatives seem to recognize the this, but what to do about it. Drastically reducing our dependence on cash bail for low level and nonviolent crimes would be a good first step. The elimination of for-profit prisons and probation services is one of the key needed reforms. The reduction of fees, elimination/reduction in interest and a prohibition on the use of collection agencies are all needed reforms as well. Tying the amount of a fine to a person’s ability to pay and providing alternatives such as community service for those who can’t pay are ideas that need to be considered. Already in Hillsborough County Florida the State Attorney is exploring the idea of creating a “rocket docket” that will stream line the process of reducing LFOs or converting them to community service. One of the problems they’re running into is the nightmare of the state’s nonexistent system of tracking LFOs which makes it nearly impossible for a person to even know what they owe and for the state to know what to forgive or commute to community service.

More than anything, the public must accept the fact that there’s not some magic pot of money that will pay for our criminal justice system. Pretending that the people who are convicted of crimes are going to pay for the system promotes waste and corruption because after all, who cares, it’s not our money. The reality is most people who are convicted of felonies will never be able to pay their LFOs. One way or the other, it’s the tax payers who are going to fund our courts, prisons, and probation systems. Our current system is creating a permanent under class who live outside of normal society, unable to vote, often unable to legally drive, under employable with a mountain of debt they’ll never be able to get out from under. No one benefits from this system but demagogue politicians and the prison industrial complex.