Gina Ray got a speeding ticket. Because she failed to show up in court, and didn’t have the money to pay her $179 ticket, she spent 40 days in jail and now owes $3,170 in court and penalty fees.
As the economy worsens and debt loads increase, federal and local governments are extracting funds wherever they can. Fines, fees, tickets, audits—all generate extra revenue as they are used to discover and punish law breakers.
No one denies the need to balance the budgets and encourage a lawful society. If having some fiscal consequences for unlawful actions serves this need, so be it. But when courts aggressively pursue the collection of such fines and fees, as they have been doing more and more, their efforts can become counterproductive.
In the case of Gina Ray, Alabama taxpayers have spent at least $3,000 on jail costs alone for her $179 ticket. (In Montgomery County jails, the average daily cost per inmate is $77.00. Estimate a conservative $70 per day for Gina Ray, and the total cost of her jail stays is $3,080.) The likelihood of getting Gina to produce the money she now owes is obviously remote, considering her inability to pay the initial ticket. (Read the full story here.)
The point is that Alabama has spent, and thereby wasted, significant time and funds trying to administer justice through costly jail sentences and fees that are likely never to be paid anyway.
Imposing more fines and time in jail on poor people is not the right solution. The ACLU drew attention to Gina’s story and others in a recent update about the ineffectiveness of debtor’s prisons, but what is a good solution?
Based on a report of the prison system in the state of California, pretrial monitoring programs would help. The cost difference per day, per inmate is huge: $100 versus $2.50. Over 50,000 of the 71,000 Californians incarcerated are being held in county jails awaiting trial, or for violations like Gina’s. This means the state of California spends over $5 million per day housing people in county jails. The state could save millions each day by implementing pretrial monitoring programs.
Community service is also an option. Though supervision is still required, the state is not burdened by the price of repeated jail stays. Court costs would be reduced as well, if community service was imposed by the court as soon as the offender failed to pay the first fine.
Justice Fellowship advocates for common sense solutions that hold offenders accountable and keep governments fiscally responsible. Sending poor people to jail for failing to pay ever-increasing fines didn’t work in Charles Dickens’ day and it doesn’t work now.