Page 51 - Impact: Collected Essays on the Threat of Economic Inequality

The mean LFO assessment for a single conviction is $2,540 and the median is $1,347 . Add the additional LFOs assessed by probationary or correctional departments and multiple convictions, and most offenders owe around $7,234 . At that level, and with the accumulation of interest, offenders who pay fifty dollars per month will still have debt in thirty years .29
The Darkest Shades of Poverty
Because ethnic minorities make up the majority of convicted felons, they are statistically more likely to be subject to LFOs . As relocation patterns are not random, people leaving prison are more likely to return to places where they have family or friends . 30 As such, the penalties not only work against the poorest in society, but also work disproportionately against minority communities since they are forced to absorb more returning felons .
The amount of these debts in some situations is striking . For example, in one county in Washington, offenders owe more than $500 million in outstanding LFO debt,31 with Latino defendants in this state receiving significantly greater LFOs than similarly situated non-Latino defendants .32
These communities suffer a dual blow since the high debt occurs in places already suffering from other collateral consequences of felony convictions . Such places are home to politically impotent populations, which include many disenfranchised offenders . The offender is thus resigned to such a neighborhood permanently or, as is too often the case, winds up in prison again .
Monetary sanctions contribute to a cycle that devastates across class and color lines, and such penalties must be reconsidered . Offenders already pay with imprisonment and time away from their lives, family, and society; imposing financial sanctions beyond only contributes to a system of indentured servitude .
Thinking Forward
Countering the underdevelopment of communities demands a bold course of action . Conviction and incarceration already reduce the employment prospects and earning capacity of those with criminal records .33 Adding unpayable LFOs to this burden divests an individual from the greater society .34 At worst, it helps set conditions for the individual to resort to extralegal means of sustenance and sets the conditions for return to prison .
29 See Giessen, supra note 23, at 552.
30 See Nancy Wolff et al., Sexual Violence Inside Prisons: Rates of Victimization, 83 J. urB. healTh 835, 845 (2006).
31 Susan Kelleher, Unpaid Court Costs Can Bring Cycle of Debt, Threat of Jail, ACLU Warns, The seaTTle Times, ocT. 3, 2010, available at http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2013066985_debtor04m.html.
32 Task force on race and The criminal JusTice sysTem, preliminary reporT on race and washingTon’s criminal JusTice sysTem 1, available at http://www.law.washington.edu/About/RaceTaskForce/preliminary_report_race_criminal_ justice_030111.pdf.
33 See generally Bruce Western & Katherine Beckett, How Unregulated is the U.S. Labor Market? The Penal System as Labor Market Institution, 104 am. J. soc. 1030 (1999); see also Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (2007).
34 Ann Cammett, Shadow Citizens: Felony Disenfranchisement and the Criminalization of Debt, 117 penn sT. l. rev. 349 (2012).
Criminal Justice Reform
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