Thrown in jail for being poor: the booming for-profit probation industry | Money | theguardian.com

It is unconstitutional for any person to have an economic interest in the criminal justice system,,,We don’t pay judges based on the percent of fines they impose, or police officers based on the number of tickets they issue. This shouldn’t be any different.”


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The cost to taxpayers of Hayes’ eight-month jail sentence: $11,500, according to Georgia court documents.

Despite the fact that the US supreme court ruled in 1983 that offenders cannot be jailed when they can’t afford to pay their fines, an increasing number of poor, low-level offenders are doing time because they can’t keep up with fees they owe to courts and private probation companies. To some it resembles a variation on the old Victorian workhouses and debtors’ prisons, moved from Dickensian England to the modern United States.

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More than 1,000 low-level courts across the US rely on the so-called “offender-funded” probation model, signing contracts with for-profit companies that oversee probation requirements like monitoring, drug tests and fine collection. The decades-old, for-profit probation industry is deeply rooted in the south, and especially in Georgia, but courts in states as far-flung as Michigan, Montana and Washington have also embraced aspects of privatized probation.



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Those companies make offenders pay for their own probation by charging them fees. It saves the states and counties a lot of money. It also makes the companies a lot of money: Human Rights Watch estimated that private probation companies in Georgia alone rake in nearly $40m in fees a year.

While states save and companies profit, the offenders pay a lot. There is no cap on the amount of fees a private company can charge minor offenders, and the longer the probation period, the higher the fees.

In some cases, the probation fees can add up to twice as much – or more – than the court-ordered fines.



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“Private probation companies have a really perverse financial incentive in each case,” said Chris Albin-Lackey, author of the recently-released Human Rights Watch report titled “Profiting from probation”.

Company employees behave more like “aggressive, muscular debt collectors” than probation officers responsible for administering justice, Albin-Lackey says. Others have noted that the courts are to blame for looking the other way.

Thrown in jail for being poor: the booming for-profit probation industry | Money | theguardian.com

See also:  
US: For-Profit Probation Tramples Rights of Poor