Guest Comment on Telephone Fees Assessed Inmates
We received the following great comment from Professor Neil Sobol of Texas A&M. Instead of simply letting it sit in the Comments field, I thought I would post it directly here and encourage anyone interested to read Professor Sobol’s article. Thanks!
Telephone fees assessed inmates are just one example of a myriad of charges assessed to criminal defendants that are used to help fund declining state and local budgets. Often the fees go beyond simple reimbursement of expenses and are unrelated to the underlying offenses. In the case of telephone charges (as Congress members described in an October 20, 2015 letter to the F.C.C.),“ up to 60 percent of what prisoners’ families pay to receive phone calls from their incarcerated loved ones has nothing to do with the cost of the phone services provided.”
Fees assessed to inmates are just one component of the growing problem of criminal justice debt that currently affects millions of individuals. Criminal justice debt includes fees, fines, and restitution. Monetary charges can be imposed at any stage criminal proceedings: pre-conviction, sentencing, incarceration, or probation.
Unfortunately, the use of the charges can be abusive. The Department of Justice’s scathing report on the Ferguson Police Department describes a system where the city, the police, and courts were more concerned with collection of revenue than public safety. Moreover, the abuses relating to criminal justice debt described in the report are not limited to Ferguson.
The impact is most severe on poor and minorities (and their families) who often have to choose between paying for family necessities and their criminal justice debt. Failure to pay criminal justice debt can result in arrest and incarceration. I have written an article, Charging the Poor: Criminal Justice Debt & Modern-Day Debtors’ Prisons, 75 Maryland Law Review (forthcoming 2016), that addresses the unfortunate resurgence of debtors’ prisons based on incarceration of those unable to pay criminal justice debt. For those interested, the draft is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2704029