In the video above, we introduce viewers to Mike. He’s not a real person. He’s an invention, a generic character of our creation, whose grueling trip through the American criminal justice system is based on facts and real-world experiences.
Mike is our guide to a hidden form of punishment: criminal justice fees. These are levied against people at every turn in their path through the system. They can be big — like the cost of posting bail — or small, like fees to see a doctor in prison. They accumulate quickly and can turn into crushing debt.
This hypothetical narrative allowed us to show the myriad ways that fees are extracted from people in the justice system.
Why should we care if a person who commits a crime has to pay for some services? In short, because the fees can be incredibly destructive.
We’re not talking about fines, those monetary punishments that judges impose on offenders. And this isn’t about restitution, which is an additional sanction intended to reimburse victims. Fees are far more insidious, functioning like predatory taxes that raise revenue for the government. They can vary from state to state, municipality to municipality, institution to institution.
And they can have severe economic consequences, particularly for people who are already broke when they enter the system — that is, most people who run afoul of the law. The resulting debts can destroy people’s credit, prevent them from voting and interfere with their ability to find employment and housing.
Regional surveys in Alabama and New Mexico have suggested that at least 38 percent of people with court debt resort to crime to help pay it off. Criminal justice reform advocates have argued that a system that extracts wealth from some of the nation’s poorest people is counterproductive and can further destabilize society.
“Court debt impacts more people and for a longer period of time than almost any other issue in the criminal justice system,” said Joanna Weiss, an executive director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center in New York. “It’s a lifelong punishment, and the consequences are felt by the entire family.”
There has been some progress in reforming these practices in recent years, with various state and local governments lowering or removing criminal justice fees.
But the problem is still widespread. The Justice Department sent a letter to local and state judges around the country last year cautioning them against imposing high fees and fines on people unable to pay them. Such costs, it said, “cause profound harm.”
Which brings us back to Mike.
We constructed his story by examining the way fees are imposed across the country. In reality, there are hundreds of thousands of people like Mike who have become entangled in our criminal justice system, and many certainly have it even worse than he does.
To help show his experience, we were invited by a reform-minded sheriff, Chris Swanson of Genesee County, Mich., to film inside his jail in Flint. We spent two days there and were allowed to interview inmates, some of whom appear in the video above. (We also staged a mock courtroom scene in a nearby courthouse.)
But we want to be clear that this video isn’t specifically about Genesee County or the State of Michigan. Criminal justice fees are a deeply entrenched national problem, and they should be eliminated.
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