Schuldt
In a series of posts, Wisconsin Justice Initiative founder and former executive director Gretchen Schuldt helps you out. An avid reader, she returns to the blog with book reviews so you can decide what’s of interest to you and what’s worth your time.
Journalist Tony Messenger’s excellent, maddening book shows just how illogical, counter-productive, and harmful even the small-crime end of our courts system is.
His work is a useful primer in the real workings of the law and a clear condemnation of the backdoor taxes and harmful non-financial costs levied by legislators, prosecutors, and judges on people, especially poor people, accused of those low-level offenses.
For years, in some cases, Messenger writes, defendants are caught in a cycle of jail and court appearances stemming from their inability to pay fines, fees, and “pay-to-stay” jail charges. In others instances, an inability to pay forfeitures and fines leads to driver’s license suspensions, which means there is a good chance the person involved won’t have the transportation needed to get to work to earn the money to pay the fine.
Wisconsin is all in on that latter punishment. Roughly half of driver’s license suspensions are because of unpaid traffic fines or forfeitures. The state also allows jails to charge people held in custody for their stays; Messenger said at least 23 counties do just that. And municipal courts, where offenses are considered civil violations and not criminal offenses, are empowered by state law to jail defendants who are unable to pay their forfeitures.
Messenger, a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, focuses on stories of real people caught in Missouri’s version of the court and fines cycle and approach that makes the system’s gross flaws conspicuous and immediate in a way that a less personal approach cannot do. He writes mostly about his own state of Missouri, but the jail-related poverty penalties imposed through courts and sheriff’s departments exist all over the country.
One of the Missouri people Messenger writes about, Brooke Bergen, an addict, who was arrested for stealing an $8 tube of lipstick. She got probation for her crime. A judge later sent her to jail for 10 days for failing to answer a phone call for a random drug screen, a probation violation. The jail billed her for her stay. She was later jailed again, this time for 14 days, when she failed a drug test administered by a private firm with a questionable reputation for the accuracy of its results.
Bergen’s jail bill, despite a few payments, rose to $943.50.
The judge finally sent Bergen to jail for a year when another probation violation allegation was lodged against her. As a result, her husband took custody of their child and Bergen was ordered to pay $277 per month in child support. On top of that, her jail board bill was now over $15,000. She had to show up in court every month to make a payment or explain why she could not.
“They put all this on you and you can’t get out,” Bergen said. “They made it impossible for me to get on with my life.”
The Missouri Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that courts could not jail people for nonpayment of jail board fees, but that decision had less to do with justice than with a technicality: the legislature failed to specify pay-to-stay charges as court costs, so courts lacked the authority to help counties collect them. Delinquencies are now collected via civil measures (as they are in Wisconsin). Messenger suggests that not all judges embraced the spirit of the high court decision and still demand that defendants appear frequently in court to discuss their payments. If they miss their appearances they can be jailed for that sin and end up with even more pay-to-stay debt.
The poverty penalties can start well before conviction, Messenger points out. Anyone who can’t afford a $500 bail, for example, will sit in jail awaiting trial and may well be expected to pay for the pleasure.
Does anyone benefit from such systems? Yes, according to Messenger. Counties or sheriff’s departments collecting the board fees benefit monetarily. Prosecutors and judges benefit because people stuck in jail are more likely to plead guilty just to get the ordeal over with, obviating the need for trial and all its time-consuming demands and processes.
This unjust system exists because cash-strapped local governments need or want the money and don’t want to raise taxes on the general population, Messenger argues.
Elected judges go along with it because they don’t want to anger powerful constituencies, including law enforcement and their buddies in local and state governments, where decisions are made on things like, oh, court budgets.
In addition, said Michael Wolff, a retired law school dean, “Some locally elected judges are just mean peckerheads who are perhaps representative of their constituents.”
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Tony Messenger is a journalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His work focuses on criminal justice reform, poverty, and race, documenting how poor Americans are convicted of minor crimes and then saddled with significant fines and fees. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for his series of columns on debtors’ prison practices in Missouri.
In October 2019, WJI brought Messenger to Milwaukee to headline a talk titled “ From Ferguson to the Finish Line: A Path Forward on Criminal Justice Reform.” |