Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In October of 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union published a report titled In for a Penny: The Rise of America’s New Debtors’ Prisons. The ACLU had found that debtors’ prisons were “flourishing” in this country, “more than two decades after the Supreme Court prohibited imprisoning those who are too poor to pay their legal debts.” In 2011, Huffington Post reported that debtors’ prisons were legal in more than one-third of the states in this country.
According to the ACLU report, some state and local governments “have turned aggressively to using the threat and reality of imprisonment to squeeze revenue out of the poorest defendants who appear in their courts. These modern-day debtors’ prisons impose devastating human costs, waste taxpayer money and resources, undermine our criminal justice system, are racially skewed, and create a two-tiered system of justice.”
Marie Diamond—writing for ThinkProgress in December 2011:
Federal imprisonment for unpaid debt has been illegal in the U.S. since 1833. It’s a practice people associate more with the age of Dickens than modern-day America. But as more Americans struggle to pay their bills in the wake of the recession, collection agencies are using harsher methods to get their money, ushering in the return of debtor’s prisons.
Two years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported—after interviewing twenty judges across the country—that the number of borrowers who were threatened with arrest in their courtrooms had “surged since the financial crisis began.” The Wall Street Journal added that some borrowers who were jailed had “no idea before being locked up that they were sued to collect an outstanding debt” because of “sloppy, incomplete or even false documentation.” Diamond said it was becoming more and more common for debtors to serve time in jail. She added that some debtors are even required to pay for their time spent in jail—which, she said, exacerbates their dire financial situations.
Back in 2011, NPR told the story of what happened to an Illinois woman named Robin Sanders:
She [Robin Sanders] was driving home when an officer pulled her over for having a loud muffler. But instead of sending her off with a warning, the officer arrested Sanders, and she was taken right to jail.
“That’s when I found out [that] I had a warrant for failure to appear in Macoupin County. And I didn’t know what it was about.”
Sanders owed $730 on a medical bill. She says she didn’t even know a collection agency had filed a lawsuit against her.
“They say they send out these court notices, and nobody gets them,” Sanders says.
She spent four days in jail waiting for her father to raise $500 for her bail. That money was then turned over to the collection agency.
Just this month, the ACLU of Ohio published a report titled The Outskirts of Hope: How Ohio’s Debtors’ Prisons Are Ruining Lives and Costing Communities. The ACLU found that many municipalities in Ohio “routinely imprison those who are unable to pay fines and court costs despite a 1983 United States Supreme Court decision declaring this practice to be a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.” The ACLU said that affluent residents of Ohio who are sentenced to pay fines after being convicted of a criminal or traffic offense can simply pay the fines and go on with their lives. The same does not hold true for “Ohio’s poor and working poor” who may not have the monetary resources to pay their fines. Such people may find themselves at the “beginning of a protracted process that may involve contempt charges, mounting fees, arrest warrants, and even jail time. The stark reality is that, in 2013, Ohioans are being repeatedly jailed simply for being too poor to pay fines.”
Some Findings from The Outskirts of Hope:
Debtors’ Prisons In Ohio
• Despite clear constitutional and legislative prohibitions, debtors’ prison practices are alive and well throughout Ohio. An investigation by the ACLU of Ohio uncovered conclusive evidence of these practices in 7 of the 11 Ohio counties examined.
• Courts in Huron, Cuyahoga, and Erie counties are among the worst offenders. In the second half of 2012, over 20% of all bookings in the Huron County Jail were related to failure to pay fines. In Cuyahoga County, the Parma Municipal Court jailed at least 45 people for failure to pay fines and costs between July 15 and August 31, 2012. During the same period in Erie County, the Sandusky Municipal Court jailed at least 75 people for similar charges.
• Based on the ACLU of Ohio’s investigation, there is no evidence that any of these people were given hearings to determine whether or not they were financially able to pay their fines, as required by the law.
The ACLU of Ohio reported that the U.S. Constitution, the Ohio Constitution, and Ohio Revised Code all prohibit debtors’ prisons. It said that the courts are required by law to determine whether an individual is too poor to pay a fine before jailing the person. It added that “debtors’ prisons actually waste taxpayer dollars by arresting and incarcerating people who will simply never be able to pay their fines, which are in any event usually smaller than the amount it costs to arrest and jail them.”
According to CBS News, “high rates of unemployment and government fiscal shortfalls that followed the housing crash have increased the use of debtors’ prisons, as states look for ways to replenish their coffers.” Inimai Chettiar, director of the justice program at New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice, said, “It’s like drawing blood from a stone. States are trying to increase their revenue on the backs of the poor.” He added, “It’s a growing problem nationally, particularly because of the economic crisis.”
Does it make sense to jail poor people for failure to pay their fines when jailing them only drives them deeper into debt and also “costs counties more than the actual debt because of the cost of arresting and incarcerating individuals?”
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“Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope — some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity.”
– President Lyndon B. Johnson (State of the Union, 1964)
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SOURCES
The Outskirts of Hope: How Ohio’s Debtors’ Prisons Are Ruining Lives and Costing Communities (ACLU)
IN FOR A PENNY: The Rise of America’s New Debtors’ Prisons (ACLU)
Report: Ohio Is Illegally Throwing Poor People In Jail For Owing Money (Think Progress)
The Return Of Debtor’s Prisons: Thousands Of Americans Jailed For Not Paying Their Bills (Think Progress)
Debtors’ Prison Legal In More Than One-Third Of U.S. States (Huffington Post)
Debtor Arrests Criticized (Wall Street Journal)
Welcome to Debtors’ Prison, 2011 Edition (Wall Street Journal)
Modern-day debtors’ prison alleged in Ohio (NBC/AP)
Unpaid Bills Land Some Debtors Behind Bars (NPR)
Modern-day debtors’ prison alleged in Ohio (NBC News)
Some amazing stuff Elaine. One more example proving that privatization is all about the money.
ay:
why incarcerate for child support, just garnish wages or sell his/her property.
What is not mentioned is… Incarceration for child support….. Which might or might not be acceptable under the circumstances….. But, to be incarcerated for failure to pay fines and costs in criminal cases….is against established case law but…. You get hit with contempt for failure to comply with the courts order….
Excellent Elaine…
Lenders Use a New Dirty Trick to Jail You For Small Debts
By Martha C. White
Aug. 28, 2012
http://business.time.com/2012/08/28/lenders-use-a-new-dirty-trick-to-jail-you-for-small-debts/
Excerpt:
Debt collectors can call you, hound you and make you feel like a lowlife, but here in America, they can’t throw you in jail over your unpaid bills. Or can they? A sneaky tactic called “body attachment” is a new twist on this ultimate form of intimidation by creditors, and people who have committed no greater offense than managing their finances poorly are finding themselves thrown in jail with hardened criminals.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that debtors in St. Louis County are being preyed upon by payday lenders and the collection agencies to which they sell their debts. Those lenders and agencies are then using the taxpayer-funded court system to put the screws to people who owe money.
Here’s how it works: The creditor goes to court and gets a judgement against the debtor. In many cases, this action is successful only because the debtor never shows up to defend him or herself, sometimes because they’ve been the victim of “sewer service” and never received the paperwork telling them when to show up to court.
Once the creditor has obtained this judgment, they ask the judge for an “examination.” In theory, this process is intended to assess whether or not the indebted person has bank accounts or other assets that can be seized to pay their debts. The Post-Dispatch says creditors are exploiting this process, filing multiple requests for examinations that force people to return to court over and over. And if they don’t appear in court, then the creditor asks for a “body attachment,” which forces the imprisonment of the debtor until the next hearing — or until they cough up bail money that’s often the same amount as the debt, and often is turned over directly to the creditors.
In this way, the creditor often gets payment on the original debt as well as on all sorts of add-on interest and penalties. One woman profiled in the article was squeezed for $1,250. Her original debt? A $425 payday loan. Another woman was thrown in jail over a $588 debt.
Creditors say they need to use these methods to make sure people show up for their court dates, but not everybody buys it. ”Don’t the county police have something better to do?” asks one Legal Aid lawyer interviewed by the newspaper. In neighboring Illinois, governor Pat Quinn signed off on a law last month that prohibits the use of body attachments in debt suits.
With a prison system that is becoming rapidly more privatized, you can expect to see more of this. Elected officials, relying on corporate money to fund increasingly effective advertising campaigns for their reelection, will remain unresponsive to the needs of the public in these cases.
More sunshine (in government), less money (in politics), and fewer behavioralists; that’s what we need in order to bring about smarter voters.
2 Investigates: Private probation firms costing taxpayers
By Erin Coleman
Nov. 7, 2012
http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/2-investigates-private-probation-firms-costing-tax/nSzmj/
Excerpt:
ATLANTA — Several probation companies that operate in Georgia recently gained national attention for the mounting lawsuits against them.
After seeing them, Channel 2 Action News launched their own investigation into the companies.
Private probation accounts for about 40 percent of all probation in the state.
Channel 2’s Erin Coleman looked into the problems with the system and spoke with attorneys who said taxpayers are actually the ones losing out.
Attorneys who are now suing some of these private companies said more people are ending up in jail for minor offense like shoplifting, running a stop sign or driving on a suspended license.
They told Coleman that taxpayers are the ones who end up paying for it.
“I did about 13 days in there,” said Hills McGee, a disabled veteran arrested four years ago for being drunk in public and thrown in jail for 13 days after he couldn’t’ pay his probation fee of $180 to his privately owned probation company.
McGee’s attorney, John Bell, said he is like so many others who end up in jail for minor infractions because they can’t pay a debt.
“The only focus appears to be how can we make him pay some money, even if it means locking him up at a far greater cost than the money he owed,” Bell said.
Bell told Coleman that taxpayers are the ones who are paying for it. Bell has taken McGee’s case all the way to Federal Court.
“All the incentives are backwards,” Bell said.
‘Cash register justice’: Private probation services face legal counterattack
By Hannah Rappleye and Lisa Riordan-Seville
Special to NBC News
10/24/12
http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/24/14653300-cash-register-justice-private-probation-services-face-legal-counterattack?lite
Excerpt:
AUGUSTA, Ga. — Kathleen Hucks was walking her dogs down the dirt road that leads out of Mim’s Rentals, a small trailer park in rural Augusta, Ga., when a police officer in a cruiser stopped her on Labor Day weekend.
The officer asked the slight 57-year-old for identification and ran her name through the system. Nothing came up for Richmond County, where she lives. Then the officer ran one more search.
“He says, ‘Ma’am I have to place you under arrest — Columbia County’s got a hold on you for violation of probation,’” Hucks remembered.
When her husband, 64-year-old James Hucks, saw his wife getting arrested even though she was no longer on probation, he thought there had been an error. “I said, ‘Look here, don’t y’all realize this case is dead?’”
It was no mistake. A warrant for Hucks’ arrest had been issued in 2010, long after she completed a 24-month probation term arising from a 2006 conviction for drunken driving, possession of marijuana and driving with a suspended license. The reason: She hadn’t paid all the fees she owed to the for-profit company that supervised her probation.
Even though the company’s ability to collect the debt had expired when her probation did, she was arrested. Hucks spent 20 days in jail before a judge freed her.
Last week, Hucks filed suit against Sentinel Offender Services alleging that the Irvine, Calif.,-based company violated her civil rights. The outcome has implications beyond the case of one woman in Augusta because it claims that the Georgia law that allows for a for-profit company to act in a judicial capacity violates the due process clause of the state Constitution.
rafflaw,
Here’s a story out of Alabama:
Probation for Profit
By Matthew Yglesias
Posted Tuesday, July 3, 2012
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/07/03/probation_for_profit.html
Here’s an absolutely hideous story out of Alabama about cash-strapped towns, contract probation systems, and massive abuse of power. The basic story is that you can get fined for a lot of minor violations of traffic rules and such. And you can get additional fines for not paying the fines you have on time. In a traditional conception of the purpose of this setup, the point of the fines is compliance.
The rule that people who are caught driving without a license need to pay a fine is supposed to halt illegal driving, not be a source of revenue.
But some towns have started to farm the fines out to private firms, who promise the usual combination of efficiency gains and campaign contributions. This totally flips the script around to a situation where suddenly noncompliance is profitable, as it leads to escalating fines and human tragedy:
Three years ago, Gina Ray, who is now 31 and unemployed, was fined $179 for speeding. She failed to show up at court (she says the ticket bore the wrong date), so her license was revoked. When she was next pulled over, she was, of course, driving without a license. By then her fees added up to more than $1,500. Unable to pay, she was handed over to a private probation company and jailed— charged an additional fee for each day behind bars.
As with prisons, the basic issue here is that while you can contract out your criminal justice functions to a private company, there’s just no such thing as a private criminal justice system. It’s not like an airline or a parcel delivery company that could be run by the state or could be run by private shareholders. At the end of the day, a prison or a probation system is inherently all about the private coercive authority of the state. It’s hard to make these institutions work well, but turning them into profit centers involves not even trying to accomplish the goals of a probation system.
rafflaw,
Good question! Here’s a Mother Jones article from 2008 that you might find interesting:
Probation Profiteers
In Georgia’s outsourced justice system, a traffic ticket can land you deep in the hole.
—By Celia Perry | July/August 2008 Issue
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/probation-profiteers
Excerpt:
Welcome to Americus, Georgia. Located 10 miles east of the peanut farm where Jimmy Carter was raised, the town has a charming city center with broad streets, a diner that still sells hot dogs for 95 cents, a Confederate flag that flies conspicuously on the outskirts of town, railroad tracks that divide white and black neighborhoods, chain gangs that labor along the roadways, and, on South Lee Street, right across from the courthouse, its very own private probation office. Middle Georgia Community Probation Services is one of 37 companies to whom local governments have outsourced the supervision of misdemeanor and traffic offenders. It’s been billed as a way to save millions of dollars for Georgia and at least nine other states where private probation is used. But to its critics, the system looks more like a way to milk scarce dollars from the poorest of the poor.
Here’s how it works: If you have enough money to pay your fine the day you go to court for, say, a speeding ticket, you can usually avoid probation. But those who can’t scrape up a few hundred dollars—and nearly 28 percent of Americus residents live below the poverty line—must pay their fine, as well as at least $35 in monthly supervision fees to a private company, in weekly or biweekly installments over a period of three months to a year. By the time their term is over, they may have paid more than twice what the judge ordered.
In his courtroom, which doubles as the Americus City Council’s chambers, Judge J. Michael Greene issues a rehearsed warning about these additional charges, though he doesn’t point out that they go to a private company; instead, he compares them to “taxes we all pay at the grocery store.” When I was there in April, he admonished the African American defendants before him, “Don’t fuss at the court clerks. If you do, you are going to jail. They have no more power over it than the nice lady at the checkout counter.”
Carla, a 25-year-old single mother who lives in public housing, has been on probation for more than three years. “I never see myself getting off of it,” she told me. “I could get off of it this year if they let the fines stay what they is and don’t increase them. But every week and every month, they go up.”
Carla’s current case is a traffic violation, issued after she rolled through two stop signs. Judge Greene placed her on probation and ordered her to pay a $200 fine plus Middle Georgia’s supervision fees. In January, she prematurely gave birth to her second child. The staples from her cesarean ripped, and she was placed on bed rest. “I couldn’t even take my baby to the doctor,” she says. Carla called her probation officer every Tuesday trying to report. “After a while I received a letter saying I ain’t reporting or calling or doing nothing I was supposed to do. And she issued a warrant.” One letter she got from Middle Georgia read, “Probation is a priviledge [sic] not a right. Probation did not levy a fine—the courts did.” She was, the letter said, $245 behind. Two months later, thanks to various penalties, that amount had shot up to $525, and her total remaining balance was $690, more than three times the original fine.
Amazing story in Georgia Elaine. How in the heck can a private corporation have the authority to jail someone???
Poor Land in Jail as Companies Add Huge Fees for Probation
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: July 2, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/us/probation-fees-multiply-as-companies-profit.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&
Excerpt:
CHILDERSBURG, Ala. — Three years ago, Gina Ray, who is now 31 and unemployed, was fined $179 for speeding. She failed to show up at court (she says the ticket bore the wrong date), so her license was revoked.
When she was next pulled over, she was, of course, driving without a license. By then her fees added up to more than $1,500. Unable to pay, she was handed over to a private probation company and jailed — charged an additional fee for each day behind bars.
For that driving offense, Ms. Ray has been locked up three times for a total of 40 days and owes $3,170, much of it to the probation company. Her story, in hardscrabble, rural Alabama, where Krispy Kreme promises that “two can dine for $5.99,” is not about innocence.
It is, rather, about the mushrooming of fines and fees levied by money-starved towns across the country and the for-profit businesses that administer the system. The result is that growing numbers of poor people, like Ms. Ray, are ending up jailed and in debt for minor infractions.
“With so many towns economically strapped, there is growing pressure on the courts to bring in money rather than mete out justice,” said Lisa W. Borden, a partner in Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, a large law firm in Birmingham, Ala., who has spent a great deal of time on the issue. “The companies they hire are aggressive. Those arrested are not told about the right to counsel or asked whether they are indigent or offered an alternative to fines and jail. There are real constitutional issues at stake.”
Half a century ago in a landmark case, the Supreme Court ruled that those accused of crimes had to be provided a lawyer if they could not afford one. But in misdemeanors, the right to counsel is rarely brought up, even though defendants can run the risk of jail. The probation companies promise revenue to the towns, while saying they also help offenders, and the defendants often end up lost in a legal Twilight Zone.
Here in Childersburg, where there is no public transportation, Ms. Ray has plenty of company in her plight. Richard Garrett has spent a total of 24 months in jail and owes $10,000, all for traffic and license violations that began a decade ago. A onetime employee of United States Steel, Mr. Garrett is suffering from health difficulties and is without work. William M. Dawson, a Birmingham lawyer and Democratic Party activist, has filed a lawsuit for Mr. Garrett and others against the local authorities and the probation company, Judicial Correction Services, which is based in Georgia.
“The Supreme Court has made clear that it is unconstitutional to jail people just because they can’t pay a fine,” Mr. Dawson said in an interview.
In Georgia, three dozen for-profit probation companies operate in hundreds of courts, and there have been similar lawsuits. In one, Randy Miller, 39, an Iraq war veteran who had lost his job, was jailed after failing to make child support payments of $860 a month. In another, Hills McGee, with a monthly income of $243 in veterans benefits, was charged with public drunkenness, assessed $270 by a court and put on probation through a private company. The company added a $15 enrollment fee and $39 in monthly fees. That put his total for a year above $700, which Mr. McGee, 53, struggled to meet before being jailed for failing to pay it all.
“These companies are bill collectors, but they are given the authority to say to someone that if he doesn’t pay, he is going to jail,” said John B. Long, a lawyer in Augusta, Ga., who is taking the issue to a federal appeals court this fall. “There are things like garbage collection where private companies are O.K. No one’s liberty is affected. The closer you get to locking someone up, the closer you get to a constitutional issue.”
The issue of using the courts to produce income has caught the attention of the country’s legal establishment. A recent study by the nonpartisan Conference of State Court Administrators, “Courts Are Not Revenue Centers,” said that in traffic violations, “court leaders face the greatest challenge in ensuring that fines, fees and surcharges are not simply an alternate form of taxation.”
Debtors’ prisons are back: how heart-warmingly Dickensian!
By Kathleen Geier
April 07, 2013
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2013_04/debtors_prisons_are_back_how_h044032.php
Excerpt:
The latest creepy relic from the darkest recesses of the Dickensian past that appears to be making a comeback these days are debtors’ prisons. Debtors’ prisons show up in a number of Dickens’ novels, most notably Little Dorrit, which is one of his masterpieces. George Bernard Shaw claimed it converted him to socialism and called it “a more seditious book than Das Kapital.” Dickens surely knew from debtors’ prisons, since his chronically impecunious father had been in one. And now, as Think Progress reports, this reviled institution is being revived, and poor people in Ohio are being thrown in the clink for being unable to pay off debts — mostly legal fees and court fines…
These people live very hard lives as it is. Jailing them for the crime of being poor is appallingly sadistic. The corpse of Charles Dickens must be spinning like a whirling dervish.
When they start bringing back the child chimneysweeps — and wouldn’t that make just the most adorable must-have conversation piece for the plutocrat who has everything? — please kill me quickly.
Great topic, Elaine. I’d read a little about it some months ago, but it appears the trend is growing substantially since then. Most troubling.
Also that is why our rights are being removed. Because for the past 20-30 years we have had far too many people refuse to stand together because they would rather lose the Bill of Rights than lose a fight on silly bull$ hit (in comparison) like gay marriage. Meanwhile Congress and the Presidents have been sneaking all sorts of insanity in through the backdoor. But go ahead and stick to your guns on making sure johnny does not eat a poptart into the shape of a gun while Obama passes draconian law.
Some Democrats are waking up though. I say Democrat because a true Liberal defends the Bill of Rights completely, even the 2nd. Because the 2nd Amendment was written to protect the other 9.
Well Swathmore allow me to introduce myself as the first of many, many more to come.
Cruz at this point is a brother to this Liberal.
I refuse to allow social issues to get in the way of 1-10. I refuse to allow my desire for single payer system to sacrifice my 4th Amendment.
I could honestly give a ratsass about ANY social issue at this point. The only single issue of importance, as should be with any intelligent American, is the Bill of Rights. Everything else is background noise, partisan bull$ hit to keep us divided while they rape our rights further every session.
Fascism is hijacking our government and people better wake up damn fast.
G. Mason, I don’t know any liberals, OWS or otherwise, that are willing to give up their rights and go along with Ted Cruz and his Tea Party Patriots.
Mrs Swathmore,
the Tea Party is becoming more open to social positions in the interest of Bill of Rights issues. Just as the Occupy crowd is. At this stage Social Issues MUST be put on the back burner. All Americans must recognize that any social issue at this stage is something that can be dealt with later. Right now we are in a crucial stage regarding our rights and freedoms.
The Bill of Rights must be defended at all cost at this point.
In order for that to happen we must set aside partisan politics. Religion, gays, etc etc are issues that should be completely ignored when forming alliances. The ONLY issues that should count are Bill of Rights issues.
Washington knows this is coming. Yes they have absolutely installed people within all political movements to track the movements themselves as well as deter Alliances. Alliances of the Tea Party and Occupy crowd are the single biggest threat to the power of the Federal Government. They know this.
They also know that partisan issues are failing to keep the political movements divided. They are seeing that gays and Religion are being deemed not as important as protecting the 4th Amendment or standing against the Patriot Act, NDAA, the UN and DHS for example.
That is why they are now using the 2nd Amendment as the wedge issue.
In no way would I claim that Sandy Hook is some sort of conspiracy, Anyone who does is doing a disservice to the movement if they do so. Even if you believe it to be true, keep your mouth shut. They want to label you as crazies and use it to keep us divided.
Instead educate the anti-gun crowd to how their 1st, 4th and 5th Amendment Bill of Rights are being removed. Once you expose how those Amendments are being destroyed it will open their eyes to the importance of the 2nd Amendment. Once that happens all bets are off the table as to what happens next.
America is teetering on the edge of awakening. We have been lied to. We have been robbed. We have slowly had the chains of tyranny quietly slipped around our necks in the interest of ‘National Security’ and guarding against Terrorism. Next they will label people defending the Bill of Rights as terrorists, traitors and or guilty of sedition. Watch and see. They smell fear at this point…. and it is their own. The time of reckoning is coming and they know it.
Remember they will only crack down further at this point. They will seek to install Big Brother more and more. All in the supposed interest of guarding against ‘Domestic Threats’.
On that note I will leave you against James Madison’s dire warning on this front.
“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. ” James Madison, June 29th. 1787, Debates in Federal Convention
Elaine,
NYS has a STAR program where families with up to $500,000 income get a big break on their school taxes for their primary residence. Auditors have found that there are many cheats who claim more than one residence or they claim vacation homes.
http://www.onthewilderside.com/2013/04/07/jail-the-star-tax-thieves/
selective excerpts:
“You might stop and think a moment, ‘Why go after taxpayers who stole thousands of dollars when no banker went to jail for stealing millions of dollars. Let’s turn that question on its head: How can we not jail middle class people who have a home for stealing thousands of dollars by claiming a fictional multiple residences, when we jail a homeless minority woman for stealing zero dollars by claiming the last permanent residence she had?’
…
“And don’t think this is a singular event. Single minotiry mother Kelley Williams-Bolar was sent to jail in Ohio for the same thing. [link in the article] The officials claim that they must jail her because she doesn’t pay taxes in that district. That is not how school taxes work. Everyone who lives in the district pays, regardless of whether they have children or not. School taxes are not tuition They are paid by the entire community. Even if you have no children, you still have to pay school taxes. You can live somewhere where you don’t pay school taxes, or even rent, and you still have the right to send your children to school.
…
“Now the connection I am making between STAR tax fraud and school attendance problems is based on more than residence. Yes, the jailing of minority single mothers was for having the wrong residence in receiving a free education for their children. And individuals who can afford two homes are going scot-free for fraudulently claiming both as their residence to reduce their real estate taxes.
“Both circumstances also involve school funding issues. The portion of the real estate taxes reduced by the STAR exemption is actually the school tax. I wonder if those homeowners wrongfully claiming a second exemption should not only be charged with falsifying the STAR tax application, but also be charged with stealing education since they are not paying their full share?
“It seems the answer to that question is “No”. If you are well-off enough to own 2 homes you can keep your ill-gotten gains as long as you stop when you get caught.
….
“It would have made more sense to apply the same logic to these 2 single-mothers. Nothing was taken. Their children were entitled to the free eduction. The only claim is that the free education was being delivered to them in the wrong building. They should have been told that, and given the opportunity to send their children to the right building.”
Darren,
“But what is the state to do when people refuse to pay their fines? What options should they have?”
Refuse? No, cannot. I spent several months, about 3 years, trying to live on $600 a month. I nearly lost my home to the county b/c I couldn’t pay the taxes. If I had been picked up and fined for anything, I might have had to spend time in jail because there wasn’t enough money for anything extra. I certainly couldn’t have afforded a lawyer to help – I’d have just been further in the hole with the lawyer taking a couple of months income.
The law of man has no mercy. People need to give it to people for their souls sake. Jailing is the only answer for a devil in a person because the devil is the one who invented jails. He thinks they are an answer, but they don’t solve any problems at all.