I hate the over use of the term Dickensian to describe modern social conditions, but this is pretty much it. When you reinstitute debtor's prisons, you're essentially reinstating an institution and its associated societal cruft desribed in such novels as Oliver Twist. It's a massive step backwards for American society, and quite frankly, utterly disgraceful.
I thought "debtor's prisons" referred to being locked up for private debt, not fines and fees owed the government.
There's nothing new about breaking the law and going to jail when you can't pay the fines. You'll typically sit in jail at a given rate until the debt is paid (for example, $50/day, and there's multipliers for working while in jail)
The article made reference to a 1983 US Supreme Court case Bearden v. Georgia which held that states may not imprision a person if he is legitimately unable to pay a fine or restitution.
For regular debt owed the government you can't usually be jailed, if it's not as a result of fraud: the IRS can try various ways to coerce you into paying, but they cannot jail you for an outstanding debt that you really can't pay. Instead they resort to negotiating repayment plans, garnishing wages, etc.
The funny thing is that when someone is locked up for not paying their debt, the government very likely ends up having spent more money doing that than just leaving that debt alone.
Because we all know that deterrence is so effective. We should put a jaywalker in the stockades in the town square every day as a warning to the other pedestrians out there.
The problem with your suggestion (deterrence to "encourage" others to pay up faster), these folks can't pay up faster. You ever been to one of these small towns? There's no money, a several hundred dollar fine is a month or more of labor for the ones that have a job. They have to forgo food, insurance, electricity, water or some other essential in order to pay off these debts. You want them to pay faster? Get rid of the fucking speed traps and corrupt officials that screw them.
I responded to an unfounded assertion with an unfounded assertion, it wasn't a suggestion. The point I was very obliquely trying to make is that if you choose policy based on consequences, you don't control the universe so you might not like the results. I agree that the best course of action would be to demolish the parasitic government, but for moral reasons, not to achieve specific consequences.
Wow. This is actually modern day slavery, exactly as implemented in countries like Pakistan and India[1]: you owe a debt, and you are held in servitude until you pay it back, while racking up new bills the entire time you're there.
Yes, it is. And contrary to the assertion of the article, this sort of thing happens pretty much in every town in the US.
If you owe the court money and you don't pay ... you'll be thrown in jail. Can't pay the fine? Jail. Behind on your alimony payments? Jail. The government always gets paid.
The worst part is that the people who get caught up in this are not exactly model citizens. Not exactly a clear case for sympathy.
Following the rulings in Tate and Bearden, the state cannot imprison a defendant who has been convicted of a crime that has a sentence of a fine and is legitimately unable to pay. To do otherwise would allow the conversion of a sentence from fine to imprisonment based entirely on the financial status of the offender. However, if the court determines an offender can pay and is refusing to, then all bets are off.
>the state cannot imprison a defendant who has been convicted of a crime that has a sentence of a fine and is legitimately unable to pay.
That's assuming the court is obligated to evaluate the person's ability to pay. A person could be in the system for months or years before the court conducts an evaluation.
The issue with child support is that the state child support agencies often rely on bureau of labor figures to determine what someone with a particular job "should" be making, and don't consider variance in wages or cost of living when levying child support rates. So while the payments might be reasonable according to some bureaucrats rule book, they aren't reasonable in the real world (a common issue is men with large child support obligations wanting to start another family).
There have been numerous cases of actors whose child support obligations were set at the peak of their career and yet the CSA still expects them to be making the same money.
> The worst part is that the people who get caught up in this are not exactly model citizens. Not exactly a clear case for sympathy.
Are you saying you fail to sympathize with them because those people are poor?
The U.S. have a reputation of giving everyone the same chance to make their own fortune, regardless of status. When you're thrown into prison, unable to pay back the debt that got you there in the first place, this is like the opposite of that reputation. There's no way out.
Whatever happened to "Give me your tired, your poor?"
> Are you saying you fail to sympathize with them because those people are poor?
These people aren't in trouble because they're poor.
They're in trouble because they're criminals, mentally unstable, deadbeat dads, lazy, or just plain stupid.
They're the worst we have to offer as a society. Because they're the worst, it's very difficult to sympathize with them.
That said, debtor prisons are barbaric and they're barbaric even when applied to the worst elements. Even though these people are scum, they should not be treated this way!
I could not agree with this more. If there was one law I would pass it would be this - any fines / fees / property seizures get passed on to the state, and ideally distributed evenly amongst the people of the state. The police should not be a funding mechanism.
it would mitigate it but then you'd get the states pressuring the municipalities to jack up the fines. probably better than the current situation but not a panacea
In some cases that would be true. But in a number of cases I think there's a fairly particularized local bad incentive that gets mitigated at the state level via dilution (and also looks worse, if anyone has to look at it). Texas did something like this with traffic fines. Due to extensive abuse of small municipalities who were trying to extract windfall profits from the fact that they happened to be located along an interstate in Middle-of-Nowhere, West Texas, the state did the state version of "nationalizing" to the revenue from traffic tickets: changed the law so all ticket revenue gets sent to Austin. This has mostly solved the problem: these small municipalities no longer have the incentive to ticket a bunch of people.
In this case I think it's mostly due to different local vs. state incentives. At the local level, if you happen to live in a 750-person municipality along a freeway, ticketing people aggressively is popular, because it raises money for the municipality, mostly from outsiders passing through. But if Austin takes control of ticketing revenues, it gets much less popular: the average Texan does not want aggressive ticketing on the West Texas interstates.
This is revealing and utterly heart-wrenching. It's sad to hear that things like this exist in countries as wealthy as the United States.
I hope some smarter reader comes here and says this article isn't an accurate representation of the truth, because as it stands now I almost am not able to take it.
It happens more often than most of us, privileged as we are, think. The legality of an action isn't determined by law (black letter or case), but by law plus petition. The poorest and weakest members of society generally don't have the financial wherewithal to effectively see court challenges through, and public-minded legal groups only have so many lawyers and so much bandwidth.
These kinds of practices don't require local municipalities to be full of bad actors, but desperate ones. The private firms, on the other hand....
I obviously wasn't asking for the pedantic, condescending answer, so how is this an acceptable answer? Downvote me all you like; I was asking a legitimate question about how this fits the HN newsworthy criteria. "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics..."
I realize there'a lot of patting ourselves on the back here that we're not as backwards as some random person/place, but it's not why I came to HN.
There's no particular reason why it should have been front page material -- just the time of day it was submitted and the provocative title helped, I guess. I found it interesting and am a longform journalism fan. I thought others on HN might find it interesting so I submitted it. I have no particular political agenda [1] and don't necessarily agree with all the content of this piece, but it made me think about a challenging subject and seemed like it could launch an interesting discussion.
Sorry it's not your cup of tea, just trying to add some variety to the HN submissions.
[1] The only other longform piece I've submitted -- A Death at Tough Mudder -- is about the circumstances surrounding a participant's death at a spartan race. I don't read longform to pat myself on the back when I find articles I agree with. I read it to take a break from all things tech related and to learn about new things.
No worries. Thank you for submitting it. It is interesting and I personally don't mind it. I was more commenting on the tendency (it seems to me) of HN to upvote different things than it used to. I also partly wanted to experiment and prove that the comment would be downvoted as I predicted. HN tends toward cliquishness, it seems to me.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to be condescending! What I was trying to say (not just to you) was the best way to change what is on the front page is by voting visiting the "newest" page and for stories that are interesting.
I think that a lot of people never bother to checkout the "newest" page to vote on stories that they want to see. If there are a lot of people who agree with you and they put in some effort to promote stories that are interesting, then perhaps you can effect some change.
I myself posted a link about SpaceX delaying their latest launch, that was scheduled to happen in a few hours.
Not a single upvote! Personally, this suggests to me that no one is actually visiting the "newest" stories as it is something I would have thought would merit at least one upvote!
It's not the pedantic answer, it's the answer. The content doesn't get here without up votes. So other people disagree with you on its relevance, or you and others that consider it irrelevant aren't doing your job and flagging it. In nearly every thread either clearly political or tangentially political someone like you asks this question. Just flag it and be done with it.
"He asked to see her license. [She] didn't have one."
The article started off with the theme in the title: she can't pay the fine for a traffic ticket. This would be pretty damning if you needed to drive to get to work. But she hasn't worked in a decade. Presumably because of injuries from a car wreck.
Then she's driving without a license. I'm sorry, but you can't thumb your nose at the law like this. You don't have the right to drive around unlicensed. She's on disability, she doesn't have a job to drive to, nor the income to pay the fine ... so she must adapt her life to live without a license: walk to the store, ride with someone else to go to further places. Anyway, the story goes on from there about how she can't afford to pay the fines and the fees and ...
I'd like more information before I can really make judgement about this person. What are the details of this 1997 (did I math that correctly?) car wreck? Is she at fault? Were there any settlements involved? What kind of injury does she have that keeps her from working? Can she learn to do something that doesn't affect her disability? Specifically, what injury prevents her working but allows her to drive?
I get that the world is unfair to the poor. I know that these collection systems for fines with private companies involved are abhorrent. I understand that a societal shift is needed to help with many lives that are so much less than ideal. What I don't understand is how, when someone makes a colossal mistake (especially one that we've all been educated about), anyone else would blame everyone but the mistaken.
For me, this whole story hinged on that one time she got caught driving without a license: there's no reason she should have been unaware of the consequences.
This article is not about her. It's about the government of Harpersville, Alabama and their de facto debtor's prison system. It's immaterial what she did because nothing excuses throwing someone in jail indefinitely for not paying a fine they can't afford, driving up their debts by charging them for every day they spend in jail, denying them due process, etc.
Then it's a shame that the author led with this particular woman.
My opinion on the "debtor's prison" subject is that non-payment of fines should never result in jail time. Other punishments perhaps (revocation of license, liens against property, etc), but never jail time. Nor should interest and penalties be permitted to eternally inflate those original fines. And the privatization angle ... these companies need to be heavily regulated. I could go on and on about that one...
>For me, this whole story hinged on that one time she got caught driving without a license: there's no reason she should have been unaware of the consequences.
Consequences such as, "People wound up in jail for months without ever seeing a judge."
Do you expect these kinds of consequences in the United States?
The lady in this case may have fared slightly better, with her time in jail coming in at seven weeks: "Ford spent seven weeks in jail, during which time her debt grew into the thousands. She did not, however, see the inside of a courtroom."
You're completely missing the point. Putting her in years of indentured servitude to the state and some third party contractor doesn't mitigate the chance that she'll hit you while driving uninsured at all.
In fact, while scrambling to get the money, she's going to be forced to make the decision often between driving and hoping she doesn't get caught, or not paying her fee and going to jail.
It's amazing that someone could read this horrible tale and can only see how it affects themselves. How much oppressive klepto-state will you support to prevent the slightest chance that the situation of the poor might affect you and yours?
>It's amazing that someone could read this horrible tale and can only see how it affects themselves.
We with wealth don't like it when radical wealth imbalance affects our lifestyles. We like to pretend that we earned our wealth purely through honest, good, hard work, and that everyone can be where we are if they just try. We also like to pretend that everyone gets equal treatment under the law, so why not subject that person to the same treatment I would be subject to?
You completely missed the point. First the anecdote was merely a segue to the core thesis of the article - that is the dubious way certain counties levy and collect fines. Second the article didn't actually claim the woman was innocent because again, that wasn't the point. You seem to have stopped reading after the first paragraph.
I'd like more information before I can really make judgement about this person. What are the details of this 1997 (did I math that correctly?) car wreck? Is she at fault? Were there any settlements involved? What kind of injury does she have that keeps her from working? Can she learn to do something that doesn't affect her disability? Specifically, what injury prevents her working but allows her to drive?
Why are you trying to judge the person? This whole article is about many more people than just her, but also specifically about the problems presented by private probation companies as a whole.
What I don't understand is how, when someone makes a colossal mistake (especially one that we've all been educated about), anyone else would blame everyone but the mistaken.
Was there any statement that she should not have been fined? Was there a cry that the legal system was unjust for pulling over people driving without a license? This is a story about people being taken advantage of. I saw no claims they were entirely innocent, just that they were put into a system that exacted much more punishment that they were likely due, and most likely legally due.
For me, this whole story hinged on that one time she got caught driving without a license: there's no reason she should have been unaware of the consequences.
For you, this whole story, about multiple people, officials, and cities, including the death of some individuals while they were incarcerated for failure to pay a fine, hinges on single person's single traffic stop and whether she was aware of the consequences? Which consequences would those be, the ones where she is supposes to pay a fine, or the ones where she goes to jail because she is incapable of paying that fine and stays there for over 100 days without seeing a judge?
I grew up very poor; my family had no car. During the entirety of my childhood, we either walked to the store, or paid the local "taxi service" (in smaller places, it's not a traditional taxi, but someone who operates out of home/small office answering calls) $5 for a ride (it'd probably be $15-20 today, but the idea that you can't survive without a car is a bit silly, even in small towns)
The article is not about the fact that you can't survive without a car. However, having a traffic violation send you to jail for several years is an excellent intro for an article about modern debtors' prisons and the whole support apparatus around them.
$745 for a traffic ticket sounds a bit too much. Punishment for any crime should be proportional to the crime committed. I don't think anyone is asking for no punishment for violating traffic rules, but proportional punishment is hardly the intent of justice system in her town.
Punish her to make sure that she does not repeats the same mistake again, which is what a lot of places in America do daily, without anyone needing to write an article about it.
Not all disabled people are cripples. Just because you occasionally see someone with an obvious physical injury in a wheel chair does not mean that is representative of the vast majority of disabled who have hidden disabilities.
For example, many physical conditions vary from day to day - one day she may be well enough to drive, the next she will have to rest in bed. Then there are the millions with mental disabilities who may even function perfectly well most of the time except for the days they try to kill themselves. Sure they 'could' work, but no employer would ever take them on, so they must live on disability.
Perhaps they can't sit for more than an hour, but can make short trips. However, I completely feel you.
I have CF, and I can't tell you how many people have told me I should get on disability instead of being being a developer. As if work is a penalty in life, and anyone who can get out of it should.
You can be handicapped in locomotion but still able to drive. You can also have one of those fliers and not be able to collect disability so you never have to work again. The point is, how can someone who is capable of driving be given money that is meant for people incapacitated and unable to contribute to society?
Maybe they can only do light physical activity - or even sit up at all - for an hour or two? Maybe they have a debilitating mental illness but still need to get to therapy and doctors' appointments? Maybe they've got Downs Syndrome but are high-functioning enough to drive (it happens!)?
Not saying I disagree necessarially, but if she has no license doesn't that mean insurance wont pay up if she crashes into someone and causes serious injury?
This, this and a hundred times this.
I'm sick of being pushed into feeling sorry for people in a shitty situation, for whatever reason but mostly for being bad at making (life) decisions.
I got rear-ended recently by a driver who ran off the 'crime scene'. He was probably uninsured, but we'll never know since I didn't catch his license plate. I just bought a brand new car and damage was substantial. I ended up taking the hit. I'm not poor, but I ain't rich either. Driving uninsured (and without license!) means you're screwing other people for being in a shitty situation.
Did you read the article? Do you understand the difference between not being poor and able to pay your bills and then being poor and not able to pay the bills?
