the united states abolished debtors' prisons in 1929

Louisianas Debtors Prisons: An Appeal to Justice, https://www.aclumaine.org/en/news/prison-being-poor-time-end-debtors-prison-system-maine, https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-maine-calls-legislature-end-debtors-prisons, filed lawsuits challenging "pay or stay" sentences, 2015, the ACLU of Maine called for an end to practices that result in the jailing of indigent people who cannot afford to pay court fines and fees. 55, 6267 (1933) (tracing the development of public welfare offenses in the United States). at 57 (Douglas, J., concurring in the judgment). http://www.npr.org/2014/05/24/314866421/measures-aimed-at-keeping-people-out-of-jail-punish-the-poor. After the War of 1812, a costly stalemate, more and more Americans were holding debt, and the notion of imprisoning all these debtors seemed increasingly feudal. Moreover, America was seen as a country of immigrants, and many European immigrants had come here to escape debt. She knew she had not fixed her muffler, and believed that was why she was being pulled over. The ACLU of North Carolina is a member of the Court Costs and Fees Working Group, which is working to end the practice of modern-day debtors' prisons in North Carolina. If debtors imprisonment is unconstitutional, why does it happen? The ACLU Racial Justice Program and allies across the country are bringing lawsuits and advocacy to expose and challenge these practices. First, some of the responses leave unresolved the substantive definition of indigence for the purposes of ability-to-pay hearings.63 Without such a definition, discretion is left to the same courts that have been imprisoning criminal debtors thus far.64 Second, even tightly written laws,65 settlements, and resolutions need to be enforced, which requires accountability and monitoring.66 Abolishing the new debtors prisons is as much a test of moral and societal conviction as it is of sound drafting. See Act of May 5, 2015, 2015 Ga. Laws 422. See sources cited supra note 95; see also, e.g., Mich. Const. ^ See DOJ, Ferguson Investigation, supra note 29, at 3, 910. If the debtor fails to show up, or if the judge deems that the debtor is willfully not paying the debt, the judge may write a warrant for the debtors arrest on a charge of contempt of court. The debtor is then held in jail until he or she posts bond or pays the debt, in a process known as pay or stay.. shall become a judgment in the same manner and to the same extent as any other judgment under the code of civil procedure.157 In Florida, convicted indigents assessed costs for due process services are expressly provided with the same protections as civil-judgment debtors.158 But not all collections statutes are so explicit, of course.159. 1951) (citing In re Clifts Estate, 159 P.2d at 876), and Oklahoma, see Sommer v. Sommer, 947 P.2d 512, 519 (Okla. 1997); Lepak, 844 P.2d at 855. Did the United States abolished debtors prisons in 1929? Debtors' prisons impose devastating human costs. The legal revolution which has brought federal law to the fore must not be allowed to inhibit the independent protective force of state law for without it, the full realization of our liberties cannot be guaranteed.). 853, 855 (1973). ^ Joseph Shapiro, Measures Aimed at Keeping People Out of Jail Punish the Poor, NPR (May 24, 2014, 4:58 PM), http://www.npr.org/2014/05/24/314866421/measures-aimed-at-keeping-people-out-of-jail-punish-the-poor. As of the time of publication, Equal Justice Under Law had litigated (or is litigating) similar issues against Jennings, Missouri; Ferguson, Missouri; New Orleans, Louisiana; Jackson, Mississippi; and Rutherford County, Tennessee. 575, 576 (Fla. 1939); Roach v. Oliver, 244 N.W. 1915); Gooch v. Stephenson, 15 Me. In fact, the recent bench card promulgated by Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice OConnor begins as follows: Fines are separate from court costs. Credit: Michelle Frankfurter, Jacquelyn Martin / AP Photos, Support our on-going litigation and advocacy work. The new American debtors prisons seem problematic along multiple dimensions. The United States was, after all, the first major nation to get rid of debt prisons in the 1820s and 1830s and embrace "fresh starts" for bankrupts at a time when "debtors were imprisoned. art. In the United States, debtors' prisons were banned under federal law in 1833. In response, since 2009, the ACLU and ACLU affiliates across the country have been exposing and challenging modern-day debtors' prisons, and urging governments and courts to pursue more rational and equitable approaches to criminal justice debt. State and local courts have increasingly attempted to supplement their funding by charging fees to people convicted of crimes, including fees for public defenders, prosecutors, court administration, jail operation, and probation supervision. New York released prisoners owing less than $25 in 1818, doubled this threshold in 1825, and abolished imprisonment for debt in 1831. Const. ^ See id. II, 13 (exempting fines and penalties imposed for the violation of law), and states where case law has specifically mentioned crime, e.g., Plapinger v. State, 120 S.E.2d 609, 611 (Ga. 1961). To be fair, provisions limiting the ban to debts arising out of contract (four states)128 or stemming from civil cases (seven states)129 would seem to leave regulatory offenses uncovered. And many debtors currently caught in the cogs of the criminal justice system would have no such property. Sch. I, 5. Myers v. State, 1 Conn. 502 (1816) (holding that a defendant who rented his carriage on Sunday, a crime punishable by a fine of twenty dollars, couldnt be found guilty without a showing of mens rea). The case was brought on behalf of Kevin Thompson, a black teenager in DeKalb County, Georgia. ^ For example, in 1855, Massachusetts passed a statute saying: Imprisonment for debt is hereby forever abolished in Massachusetts. Appleton, 71 Mass. I, 11; Mont. In 2011, the ACLU and the ACLU of Michiganfiled lawsuits challenging "pay or stay" sentencesimposed onfive peoplewho were jailed by Michigan courts for being too poor to pay court fines. Through the Tennessee Coalition for Sensible Justice, the ACLU of Tennessee supported the passage of SB 802/HB 1173, which would amend the law to offer courts alternatives to revoking peoples licenses, including allowing a person to file an indigence affidavit and have all their fees and fines waived, giving courts the ability to permit restricted licenses to allow people to drive to work, school, recovery programs and other necessities, and setting up a payment plan to pay the fees over time. at 55 (Georgia); id. Underlying the debts is a range of crimes, violations, and infractions, including shoplifting, domestic violence, prostitution, and traffic violations.27 The monetary obligations come under a mix of labels, including fines, fees, costs, and interest, and are generally imposed either at sentencing or as a condition of parole.28 Arrest warrants are sometimes issued when debtors fail to appear in court to account for their debts, but courts often fail to give debtors notice of summons, and many debtors avoid the courts out of fear of imprisonment.29 When courts have actually held the ability-to-pay hearings required by Bearden30 and theyve often neglected to do so31 such hearings have been extremely short, as many misdemeanor cases are disposed of in a matter of minutes.32 Debtors are almost never provided with legal counsel.33 The total amount due fluctuates with payments and added fees, sometimes wildly, and debtors are often unaware at any given point of the amount they need to pay to avoid incarceration or to be released from jail.34 Multiple municipalities have allowed debtors to pay down their debts by laboring as janitors or on a penal farm.35 One Alabama judge credited debtors $100 for giving blood.36, The problem is widespread. This imposes direct costs on the government and further destabilizes the lives of poor people struggling to pay their debts and leave the criminal justice system behind. Finally, violations of monetary obligations that are statutorily defined as civil. Read more. This practice both aggravates known racial and socioeconomic in-equalities in the criminal justice system8 and raises additional concerns. Read more. (It may be . In 2016 the ACLU of Arkansas, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Morrison and Foerster law firm filed a federal proposed class action lawsuit challenging a debtors prison in the City of Sherwood and Pulaski County. . The threat of imprisonment may create a hostage effect, causing debtors to hand over money from disability and welfare checks, or inducing family members and friends who arent legally responsible for the debt to scrape together the money.10, Take the story of Harriet Cleveland as a window into the problem: Cleveland, a forty-nine-year-old mother of three from Montgomery, Alabama, worked at a day care center.11 Starting in 2008, Cleveland received several traffic tickets at a police roadblock in her Montgomery neighborhood for operating her vehicle without the appropriate insurance.12 After her license was suspended due to her nonpayment of the ensuing fines and court costs, she continued to drive to work and her childs school, incurring more debt to Montgomery for driving without a license.13 Over the course of several years, including after she was laid off from her job, Cleveland attempted to chip[] away at her debt while collection fees and other surcharges ballooned it up behind her back.14 On August 20, 2013, Cleveland was arrested at her home while babysitting her two-year-old grandson.15 The next day, a municipal judge ordered her to pay $1554 or spend thirty-one days in jail.16 She had no choice but to sit out her debt at the rate of $50 per day.17 In jail, [s]he slept on the floor, using old blankets to block the sewage from a leaking toilet.18. ^ See supra notes 7590 and accompanying text. Read More. And it seems ill-equipped to protect impoverished debtors who see no reason to embark upon, much less document, futile searches for credit or employment. Rev. The ACLU and ACLU affiliates across the country have been exposing and challenging modern-day debtors' prisons across the country. The statute seems to have provided for a Bearden-like inquiry: [N]o convicted person may be held in contempt for failure to repay if he shows that his default was not attributable to an intentional refusal to obey the order of the court or to a failure on his part to make a good faith effort to make the payment. ^ Stillman, supra note 11. Krueger v. Stone, 188 So. Read More. ^ See id. The Court identified some of those limits in a pair of equal protection cases in the 1970s: James v. Strange75 and Fuller v. Oregon.76, The debtor in James v. Strange owed $500 to pay for a court-appointed attorney and challenged the Kansas recoupment statute under which the state had attempted to recover the money.77 The Court struck down the recoupment statute because it failed to provide any of the exemptions provided by [the Kansas Code of Civil Procedure]. art. The Twelve Tables, the oldest codification of Roman law we have, permitted its usage in 451 B.C. Imprisonment for indebtedness was commonplace. The issue reached the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1970s, with two cases in which the Court found it unconstitutional to incarcerate people solely because they could not pay a public debt ( Williams v. ^ See, e.g., Alicia Bannon et al., Brennan Ctr. Also in this category are costs of imprisonment (billed to inmates in 41 states), and of parole and probation (44 states). In this process, indigent people who cannot afford to pay court fines and fees are routinely incarcerated in violation of their constitutional rights. See Complaint, Cleveland v. Montgomery, supra note 14, at 23. The report documents the routine jailing of poor people across the state solely for their failure to pay court-imposed fines and fees. See Appendix, State Bans on Debtors Prisons and Criminal Justice Debt, 129 Harv. Of course, while the disparity between how indigent and well-heeled defendants are treated, see supra note 87 and accompanying text, is arguably not right, it seems reasonable enough to pass rational basis scrutiny, see, e.g., FCC v. Beach Commcns, Inc., 508 U.S. 307, 31415 (1993); U.S. R.R. ^ Id. & Mary L. Rev. Indeed, federal constitutional law may compel an answer on this point. I, 18; Utah Const. And the Court has made clear this discretion is central to the core penal goals of deterrence, incapacitation, and retribution.162 Against that baseline, the tradition of Bearden simply mandates that once a sentencing court has imposed a monetary obligation, it may not convert that obligation into imprisonment for failure to pay absent a special finding, a basic threshold that ensures the defendant isnt invidiously punished for being poor. Well never put our work behind a paywall, and well never put a limit on the number of articles you can read. Imprisonment-for-debt claims would impose a heightened requirement on financial obligations that, unlike traditional fines and restitution, really further noncriminal goals despite being imposed from within the criminal system. Matthew 18:24-26 . The debt in James had this characteristic, as the underlying statute specified that the total amount . art. . Daley v. Datacom Systems Corp., 585 N.E.2d 51 (Ill. 1991), the Supreme Court of Illinois held that municipal fines counted as debts for the purposes of the Collection Agency Act. Another type of legal claim should be considered alongside Bearden: one based on the many state constitutional bans on debtors prisons.24 These state bans were enacted over several decades in the first half of the nineteenth century, as a backlash against imprisonment for commercial debt swept the nation. Many Californians do not have valid drivers licenses because they cannot afford to pay the exorbitant fines and fees associated with a routine traffic citation. at 48 n.9 (majority opinion). Press 2006) ([B]efore [our debt is transferred from Scrooge] we shall be ready with the money; and even though we were not, it would be a bad fortune indeed to find so merciless a creditor in his successor.). In 2014, the ACLU of New Hampshire secured the release of three people imprisoned for failing to pay court-imposed fines that they simply could not afford. . (quoting lawyer Alec Karakatsanis)); The New Debtors Prisons, The Economist (Nov. 16, 2013), http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21589903-if-you-are-poor-dont-get-caught-speeding-new-debtors-prisons [http://perma.cc/5M9N-74HT]. art. that a State may impose unduly harsh or discriminatory terms merely because the obligation is to the public treasury rather than to a private creditor.82 The Court suggested that it was applying rational basis scrutiny, although in light of the Courts strong language some judges have read James as subjecting the classification to some form of heightened scrutiny.83, Similarly, the debtor in Fuller v. Oregon owed fees for an attorney and an investigator.84 But in Fuller, the Court upheld Oregons recoupment statute because the defendant wouldnt be forced to pay unless he was able.85 The majority found that the recoupment statute provided all of the same protections as those provided to other judgment debtors, and was therefore wholly free of the kind of discrimination that was held in James v. Strange to violate the Equal Protection Clause.86 Justice Marshall, joined by Justice Brennan in dissent, cited the Oregon constitutional ban on imprisonment for debt and pointed out that indigent defendants could be imprisoned for failing to pay their court-appointed lawyers, while well-heeled defendants who had stiffed their hired counsel could not.87 The majority opinion pointed out that this issue hadnt been preserved for appeal,88 and opined in dicta that the state ban on imprisonment for debt was an issue for state courts to decide.89 Justice Douglas, concurring in the judgment, agreed, but noted the apparent inconsistency between [the relevant state constitutional provision] and the recoupment statute.90. Sometimes called legal financial obligations (LFOs), the total debt generally includes a mix of fines, fees, court costs, and interest.5 And unlike civil collection actions (for the most part6), incarceration is very much on the menu of sanctions that the unpaid creditor, usually a municipality,7 can impose.

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