Privatized Debtors' Prisons

According to a scary story in the NY Times, the latest trend in our so-called judicial system is for municipalities to turn their courts into profit centers by handing their uncollected misdemeanor fines over to private companies, who have the authority to jail people and to levy additional fees of their own.  To paraphrase one person cited in the story, it's now about generating revenue and not about meting out justice.


The private companies who go in for this line of work don't charge the cities anything, of course. They make their money by assessing fees onto the fines of the defendants and charging jailed defendants a daily charge for being held.  The story cites one county in Pennsylvania that has authorized 26 different fees, totaling $2500, that the private companies can charge in addition to the original fine.  In one Alabama case, a $179 traffic ticket is now a bill of over $3000 to the private company, and the defendant has already spent 40 days in jail.

And forget all Supreme Court rulings about the rights of defendants to legal representation. I don't think the Miranda ruling applies to people charged with misdemeanors.  But when misdemeanors can mean jail time, it should.  

These companies are bill collectors, but they are given the authority to say to someone that if he doesn’t pay he is going to jail,” said John B. Long, a lawyer in Augusta, Ga., who is taking the issue to a federal appeals court this fall. “There are things like garbage collection where private companies are O.K. No one’s liberty is affected. The closer you get to locking someone up, the closer you get to a constitutional issue.”

  J. Scott Vowell, the presiding judge of Alabama’s 10th Judicial Circuit, said in an interview that his state’s Legislature, like many across the country, was pressuring courts to produce revenue, and that some legislators even believed courts should be financially self-sufficient.

All government functions cannot be expected to generate revenue, nor can they legitimately be turned over to private companies.  The failure stories mount up, from for-profit schools all over the country, to New Jersey's privatized and under-supervised halfway houses where a misdemeanor defendant was killed a few weeks ago, and now this.

What all of these private companies have down pat is their sales pitch for gullible and gutless politicians who are looking for easy answers, and that is always what is promised, the answer to whatever might be the problem of the moment.  What they're not so good at is delivering the services they promise or safeguarding the constitutional rights of the people in their control.

But we keep going back for more.