A recent report by prominent civil rights and legal services groups in California concluded that Blacks and Latinos were systematically stopped, fined, and arrested for driving with a suspended license. This misdemeanor offense carries with it a criminal conviction, a basis for violation of probation or parole, years of probation, and more fines and fees.
Have erratic schedules incompatible with childcare?
What is particularly insidious is that individuals who are unable to pay their debts are given an option to convert their fees to jail time or to perform community service for a fee. Their labor is then extracted at no cost to the state, but at tremendous cost to the person’s time and job opportunity. Unsurprisingly, this style of debt peonage has reverberating effects across all labor markets. Researchers at UCLA have theorized that it leads to the depression of labor standards and to the displacement of other workers.
In an era when policymakers are, at best, attempting to undo the effects of mass incarceration by decreasing jail populations and promoting out-of-custody rehabilitative programs, re-incarcerating people to collect on court debt is extraordinarily punitive. It does unsurprisingly little to deter serious and violent crime. Repeat offenders are created out of nothing but shaky finances, despite a person’s genuine attempts to be law-abiding members of society. Moreover, it is a drain on public resources without much gain. California, to date, boasts over $11 billion in uncollected court debt, and over 4 million driver’s licenses suspended for inability to pay court-debt.
Jurisdictions across the country, and especially in California, should reverse this trend by adopting laws that do not punish poverty. Expungements should not depend on the petitioner’s ability to pay outstanding criminal justice debt. Laws like SB 881, which ends driver’s license suspensions for outstanding traffic debt, should be passed to promote the financial independence of those who are seeking a meaningful second chance at life. There must be a dramatic retooling of the way that court debt is imposed, or else the current system is doomed to create permanent barriers to economic security long after incarceration.
Related
The criminalization of poverty has become a sadly familiar topic. Largely overlooked, however, has been the related criminalization of unemployment.
In the past, unemployment was criminalized under the rubric of vagrancy prosecutions and related forms of racially-targeted labor control. Today, such practices have returned in new forms. In several contexts people face jail time if they do not work to the government’s satisfaction. How this happens is explored in Get To Work or Go To Jail, a report I recently coauthored with colleagues at the UCLA Labor Center and A New Way of Life Reentry Project. In many ways, these work requirements parallel the more familiar ones in public benefits programs, where people risk losing income support if they do not work enough.
The most straightforward examples come from probation, parole, and other forms of criminal justice supervision that operate outside the confines of prison. As Yale Law School professor Fiona Doherty has been documenting, work requirements are a pervasive feature of these systems. Failure to work can violate the terms of supervision-and create a path back to jail. On any given day, some 9,000 Americans are behind bars for violating probation or parole requirements to have a job.
As with work (or work search) requirements in aid programs such as Unemployment Insurance, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly Food Stamps), and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), an essential question is always whether lack of work is voluntary or involuntary. In practice, this is a question of labor standards: Which jobs should someone be allowed to reject? Those that pay below the prevailing wage? Subject workers https://guaranteedinstallmentloans.com/payday-loans-tx/ to retaliation for organizing?