Page 48 - Impact: Collected Essays on the Threat of Economic Inequality

Shackles Beyond the Sentence:
How Legal Financial Obligations Create a Permanent Underclass
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SpearIt1
In the depths of poverty in America, among the poorest of the poor, are prisoners and ex- prisoners . Sociological studies demonstrate that those convicted of crimes tend to be greatly disadvantaged prior to conviction .2 The majority of individuals in American jails and prisons are functionally illiterate,3 and 68 percent of prisoners nationwide lack a high school diploma .4 In prison, if an inmate works, it is generally below minimum wage, usually for pennies on the dollar .5 Once released, ex-prisoners are largely excluded from meaningful employment; or if they luck out and find work, it is characterized by low mobility and high turnover .6 The struggle for solvency under such conditions is always survival-mode; yet when courts attach “legal financial obligations” (“LFOs”) to a felony conviction, the aggregate effect is a class of citizen that is always indebted to the state—a financial slave in a system where it is virtually impossible to “pay” one’s debt to society .
Poverty concentrates in ethnic minority communities . As ethnic minorities have the highest rates of incarceration7 and make up the majority of prison inmates,8 this story of class necessarily emphasizes disadvantage along color lines . That felons are burdened by heavy debt, in turn, burdens their communities disparately; the reintegration of economically debilitated ex-prisoners burdens communities whose market conditions are already characterized by under-resourcing and high unemployment .
LFOs add to an array of legal consequences that create a permanent underclass . Such penalties keep a lock on individuals long after they leave prison . It is a schema that serves little social or penal purpose, and instead embodies the worst of bad policy undermining the criminal justice system .
This essay argues that such financial penalties literally make the poor pay for failed criminal justice policy . Reliance on mass imprisonment has created a financial vortex, which sucks away the
1 Associate Professor, Thurgood Marshall School of Law, Texas Southern University.
2 Alexes Harris et al., Drawing Blood from Stones: Legal Debt and Social Inequality in the Contemporary United
States, 115 am. J. soc. 1753, 1756 (2010).
3 Literacy Statistics, Begin To read, www.begintoread.com/research/literacystatistics.html (last visited May 26,
2015).
4 caroline wolf harlow, Bureau of JusTice sTaTisTics, u.s. dep’T of JusTice, educaTion and correcTional populaTions
(revised Apr. 15, 2003), available at http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ecp.pdf.
5 Sara Flounders, The Pentagon and Slave Labor in U.S. Prisons, gloBal research (Feb. 4, 2013), http://www.
globalresearch.ca/the-pentagon-and-slave-labor-in-u-s-prisons/25376.
6 Bruce wesTern, punishmenT and inequaliTy in america 123-25 (2007).
7 These figures were calculated by the Prison Policy Initiative, which showed incarceration rates for Whites at 380, Latinos at 966, and Blacks at 2207 per 100,000 in the population. Peter Wagner, United States Incarceration Rates by Race and Ethnicity, 2010, prison policy iniTiaTive (2012), http://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/raceinc.html.
8 e. ann carson, u.s. deparTmenT of JusTice, Bureau of JusTice sTaTisTics, prisoners in 2013 (revised Sept. 30, 2014), available at http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p13.pdf (The Bureau of Justice Statistics calculated that male Blacks and Latinos made up 59 percent of state and federal inmates).
Impact: Collected Essays on the Threat of Economic Inequality