During remarks on criminal justice reform delivered Thursday, the nation’s chief prosecutor Loretta Lynch spoke out against law enforcement’s dogged pursuit of enforcing fines, saying such strategies have resulted in a system of punishment previously declared illegal by the Supreme Court–most recently in 1983.
Lynch criticized the fines, court fees, and administrative costs that have been increasingly levied by local officials on defendants accused of minor infractions like traffic violations–penalties brought to the nation’s attention last year by the Black Lives Matter movement and demonstrations against systemic police abuses in Ferguson, Mo.
“In a city—in a country—where we have ruled that debtors’ prisons are unconstitutional, too many of our citizens are simple in jail because they don’t have the money to get out,” Lynch stated, adding that “we cannot cloak it in the language of fees and fines and make it right.”
She noted that on the other side of the income spectrum, “people that do have the means can avoid the system,” and described the result as a “criminalization of poverty.”
The Justice Department prominently documented these problems earlier this year, when it published an investigation of the Ferguson Police Department.
It turned up one case in which a 67-year-old woman on a fixed income was taken to jail and fined over $1,000 after she missed a payment on a prior trash-removal citation. The Attorney General on Thursday cited another example, of a Ferguson woman jailed twice for her inability to pay two 2007 traffic tickets worth $152. The outstanding fines paid by the woman in 2015 totaled $550.
“Quite a profit. Quite a markup!” Lynch stated, ”Was she buying furniture? What was going on?”
“A debt must be capable of being paid if it is not instead a lifetime yolk of servitude,” she also noted, at one point.
In 1983, the Supreme Court, in Bearden v. Georgia, ruled that a person can only be incarcerated in the US for missing a payment on a criminal fine, if that failure was the result of “willful” action.
