Making Poor People Pay for Their Court Costs

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/opinion/making-poor-people-pay-for-their-court-costs.html

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To the Editor:

Re “Is It a Crime to Be Poor?,” by Nicholas Kristof (column, June 12), about modern debtors’ prisons:

Beyond the harm to people and their communities, making poor people pay for their court costs — and even for their liberty before standing trial — leads to an ever-growing system and ultimately greater net costs.

By forcing judges and others to raise their own revenues, state and local legislatures incentivize detention and conviction. These “user pay” practices may not have started mass incarceration, but they are certainly sustaining it, impeding more just and fiscally sound approaches to public safety.

Because so many of those in the system are unable to pay, they stay in jail or go back to it. In many places it appears that this costs the jurisdiction more than if it replaced user fees with direct funding of the courts, district attorneys and public defenders.

In New Orleans, the Vera Institute is testing this hypothesis by quantifying the fiscal and human costs of its criminal justice user-pay system in preparation for an approach to funding that does not incentivize unnecessary incarceration.

JON WOOL

Director, New Orleans Office

Vera Institute of Justice

New Orleans