Page 66 - Impact: Collected Essays on the Threat of Economic Inequality

64
Conclusion
Profiting off of the impoverished, propping up municipalities by generating revenue on the backs of the poorest among us, and incarcerating those who are unable to pay excessive fines and fees should be forbidden in a civilized society . That Blacks are special targets of the modern-day debtors’ prisons is both shameful and unsurprising . Writer and social critic Ta-Nahisi Coates has labeled those engaged in these shakedown schemes as the “Gangsters of Ferguson,”42 behaving more like corporate shareholders than public servants .43 No one is suggesting that those who willfully avoid paying fines and fees should get off scot-free . The concern is for those who genuinely cannot pay these costs . The system is clearly broken when popular comedians like John Oliver devote valuable airtime mocking it for being absurd, fiscally unsound—often costing more to track down and incarcerate someone than is likely to generate revenue from someone who can’t afford to pay—and racist . Oliver even launched a faux Twitter campaign, #ShutDownTheF**kBarrel, his terminology for what happens when the poorest people lose everything, or even wind up in jail, over what started as a very small, but for them unaffordable, fine for a minor offense .44 It’s anything but funny, obviously, for those who get caught up in snowballing debt due to fines, court costs, and penalties . The good news, however, is that there are ready fixes to the debtors’ prison juggernaut . It is our collective responsibility to make those changes happen, so that Michael Brown’s, Walter Scott’s, and Eileen DiNino’s deaths will not have been in vain . •
42 Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Gangsters of Ferguson, The aTlanTic (March 5, 2015), http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ archive/2015/03/The-Gangsters-Of-Ferguson/386893/.
43 McCoy, supra note 12.
44 Ed Mazza, Help John Oliver #ShutDownTheF**kBarrel, The huffingTon posT (March 23, 2015), http://www.
huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/23/john-oliver-fuck-barrel_n_6921650.html.
Impact: Collected Essays on the Threat of Economic Inequality