Page 54 - Impact: Collected Essays on the Threat of Economic Inequality

Their Debt to Society
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Erika L. Wood1
On August 4, 2014, in broad daylight on a hot summer day in the small Midwestern city of Ferguson, Missouri, an unarmed Black teenager was shot dead in the street by a white police officer . The incident was shocking . Protests erupted and the media descended . Similar events have happened too many times in the past; and they have already repeated in the months since . But this shooting, at this moment, got the country’s attention . In the split second it took for Michael Brown to be killed, the Ferguson police department and its tangled web of municipal courts and local politics came under the national spotlight .
That spotlight, intensified by a Department of Justice (“DOJ”) investigation, revealed an intricate penal system where laws and punishments were deployed to simultaneously raise revenue for town coffers and oppress the Black community . The DOJ found that Ferguson’s law enforcement practices “are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs .”2 According to the DOJ, this emphasis on revenue contributed to a pattern of unconstitutional policing and frequent due process violations by its municipal court system . And race played its part . The DOJ declared that Ferguson’s police and municipal court practices “reflect and exacerbate existing racial bias, including racial stereotypes .”3
But Ferguson is not unique . During its investigation, the Department of Justice peeled back the layers of municipal bureaucracy to reveal a criminal justice system that is both nefarious and common . Studies of other states and localities before and since Ferguson expose intricate systems where fines and penalties are levied and enforced so that the local police department, courts, jails, and probation officers are all financed on the backs of the defendants brought before them . In other words, the more defendants brought into the system, the more revenue is generated to pay for salaries, pensions, uniforms, and equipment . The system’s purpose is no longer public safety; it is money . In the words of the DOJ report, Ferguson officials “consistently set maximizing revenue as the priority for Ferguson’s law enforcement activity .”4
A criminal conviction brings with it a package of financial obligations that fall into three basic categories: fines, restitution, and fees . Fines are intended to be part of the punishment, defined and detailed in the criminal code and incurred as part of the criminal sentence . Restitution is intended to help compensate victims for harm suffered . But fees have the sole purpose of generating revenue, and they have increased dramatically in both type and amount in recent years .5
1 Professor of Law and Director, Voting Rights & Civic Participation Project, New York Law School.
2 u. s. dep’T of JusTice, civil righTs div., invesTigaTion of The ferguson police deparTmenT 2 (March 4, 2015) [hereinafter “DOJ Report”], available at http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ ferguson_police_department_report.pdf.
3 Id.
4 Id. at 9.
5 alicia Bannon eT al., Brennan cTr. for JusTice, criminal JusTice deBT: a Barrier To reenTry 7 (2010), http://csgjusticecenter. org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/2010-Brennan-Center-CJ-Debt-Barrier-to-Reentry.pdf; see also Joseph Shapiro, As Court Fees Rise, the Poor Are Paying the Price, NPR, May 19, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/05/19/312158516/ increasing-court-fees-punish-the-poor (since 2010, 48 states have increased criminal and civil court fees.).
Impact: Collected Essays on the Threat of Economic Inequality