In ‘A Pound of Flesh,’ UW professor Alexes Harris examines the lifelong consequences of legal financial obligations
It used to be said when you were released from prison that you had “paid your debt to society.” Today, that’s true only if you have money. As Alexes Harris demonstrates in “A Pound of Flesh,” crime not only doesn’t pay, it costs a lot. Many people leave the prison system in Washington state — and every other state — owing thousands of dollars in debt. While the history of charging court costs to defendants goes far back, it’s only in the last few decades that most people sentenced to jail time are assessed additional costs.
The sources of this debt are varied. In Washington, a felony conviction carries an automatic $500 “victim penalty assessment.” A jury trial costs $250. A mandatory DNA sample costs $100. If you need a public defender, that costs $450, and, unless you have the money up front, that gets added to your debt. Some charges accrue even if you’re found innocent. Much of the debt may be for victim restitution, which involves both a set fee and additional charges for lost wages and hospitalization. There are collection fees and a 12 percent simple interest rate. Even juveniles can come out of jail owing money. The average amount charged per conviction is over $1,300, but some of the interviewees in Harris’ study left prison owing tens of thousands of dollars.
Legal financial obligations, or LFOs, cannot be shed through the normal mechanisms of bankruptcy and there’s no limit on how long the debt can be serviced. “Willful” nonpayment, as determined by clerks or prosecutors, can bring a contempt of court charge and more jail time. In one of the counties Harris studied, it was assumed that anybody could pay something. A homeless man was told he should collect aluminum cans to meet his $25 a month payment schedule.
People who are unable to pay their debts are kept under court supervision indefinitely. The LFOs hurt their credit records and keep their criminal records from being expunged. Being saddled with unpayable debt — and most LFOs are never completely paid — increases depression and emotional and financial stress on people who otherwise could have “paid their debt” to society.
Although one of the major justifications for LFOs is victim restitution, only a minority of the money collected goes to victims. The vast majority of it goes to fund the apparatus of supervision and collection.
Harris does a good job of explaining the negative impact of LFOs on the poor and on poor communities. She points out the class and racial biases in LFOs — sometimes explicit, as when White defendents in some Washington counties get charged less than people of color with similar offense records, or when people who can pay upfront can stay out of jail on probation and have their criminal records expunged.
LFOs are assessed and waived arbitrarily. Officials in one large urban county in Harris’ study understood that most defendants were poor and levied the minimum charges they legally could. A smaller, more rural county levied the maximum in almost every case. A third county had an “autojail” system, in which debtors who couldn’t meet their monthly payment schedule were automatically given jail time.
Officials claim that LFOs are a way that people can redeem themselves for their crimes. The class bias is barely disguised here, because one’s ability to pay off debts depends on one’s economic status. Given the correlation of race and class, there’s also an implicit racial bias. Court officials report waiving interest on LFOs for some offenders — usually based on their perception of the offender’s contriteness and compliance, and, perversely, on whether they otherwise have the resources to put their lives back together. As Harris puts it, “Monetary sanctions reinforce existing class inequalities by sentencing a population that is often undereducated, unemployed, homeless, and physically or mentally disabled to pay relatively large amounts of money. Overwhelmingly, felony defendants come from poverty-stricken neighborhoods with high rates of under- and unemployment and failed school systems ... Monetary sanctions exacerbate poverty ... by overburdening already marginalized people with debt they can never pay off.”
The class and racial biases inherent in the LFO system are mostly hidden — legislators assume that judges will take poverty into account in assessing fees and fines; judges assume, similarly, that when their clerks recommend a level of LFO, they’ve taken ability to pay into account. As with much of the hidden racism and classism in this society, people choose to ignore what’s right in front of them.
LFOs were based in the idea that people should pay the costs of the government services they receive and the costs society incurs because of their actions, which itself is a kind of class bias. In any case, justice is not a service, but a common good upon which everybody in the society depends. When we try to make offenders pay the cost of this common good, we only increase the unequal nature of justice.