LAW OFFICE OF JOSHUA COHEN SLATKIN

September 2015 Newsletter

Legal Financial Obligations and Inequality

Contact Info.:
310-627-2699
jcohenslatkin@gmail.com

September 2015

Greetings!

Please enjoy my office's newsletter discussing how

legal obligations contribute to inequality within our
society. Please be sure to download the images to this
e-mail so you can view the client testimonial and see
the pictures.
"Do the crime, pay the fine." A little different, right?
Many are unaware that when convicted of breaking the
law, not only do people "pay" for their crimes by doing
time, but they are also forced to pay up financially. The
costs include court processing, defense attorneys,

My Practice Areas
Wage and hour claims
involving meal and rest
break violations and
unpaid overtime.
Workplace
discrimination involving
gender, age, race and

paper work, and anything else associated with their

incarceration and supervision. In fact, anyone
convicted of any type of criminal offense is subject to
fiscal penalties or monetary sanctions. (If you have
ever paid a traffic ticket, for example, you have paid a
monetary sanction.)
Legal debt is important. It affects many peopledisproportionately poor people and people of color-and
it has malicious consequences. And the U.S. criminal

disability

justice system affects more and more people: 1 in 37

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more than 700,000 people leave prison each year; and

Worker Misclassification
as 1099 independent

U.S. adults has spent time in state or federal prisons;

there are an estimated 16.1 million current and former
felons in the United States. The debt is accumulating at

contractor

an unimaginable rate.

Personal injury (Auto

Studies of Court Fees Across the United States

accidents and other

types of personal injury

The shooting of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 in

Ferguson, Missouri generated much discussion about

cases)
DUIs and other criminal
matters

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criminal justice policy in the United States. In a report

analyzing all the issues in Ferguson, Missouri by the
Department of Justice ("DOJ") who was charged with
investigating the shooting of Michael Brown, the DOJ
found and highlighted that costly penalties for municipal
violations (which saddle individual's convicted of
crimes with criminal debt to the court/state) was a
large part of the racial inequality within the justice
system that plagued Ferguson, MO. In Ferguson,
penalties were assessed regardless of an individual's
ability to pay, and then put individuals who could not
afford to pay their debt on payment plans that carry

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high fees. Every missed or partial payment was

treated as a "failure to appear" offense, which may
then result in a warrant.

www.jcslaw4you.com

A study by Marc Meredith (associate professor of

political Science at Penn) found that the issue with
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legal financial obligations that the poor face in

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United States. Meredith researched the role criminal

Ferguson was found and documented across the

debt played in Alabama. The researchers found that
the individual fines and fees might not seem overly
burdensome, however, they do accumulate to form a
substantial amount of debt. For example, it seems
quite reasonable to charge someone convicted of a
crime $30 for the investigation of their criminal history
and $21 to help fund the Alabama Solicitor General's
Office. However, these seemingly modest finds
associated with a single conviction often added up to
$2,000 or more which is substantial considering that
the median annual income for ex-felons is very low (in
Alabama the median income for ex-felons is under
$10,000) so you can imagine how the financial
obligation of fines and fees negatively and
disproportionately impact the poor. This study in
Alabama found that these individuals were forced to
choose between paying court costs and buying
essentials.
Recent research indicates a general increase in court
costs over time, leaving more and more individuals
with outstanding criminal debt. Failure to pay the

criminal justice debt may result in an individual having

his or her license suspended or even spending time in
jail. In some states, including, without limitation,
Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky
and Tennessee, restoration of voting right is
conditioned on the payment of these legal financial
obligations.
Why we should care?
As a result of interest and surcharges that accumulate
on these financial penalties, this portion of a person's
sentence becomes permanent legal debt, carried for
the remainder of their lives. And because so many
who are arrested and convicted are poor, unemployed,
homeless, or suffer from mental or physical illnesses,
the fines just pile up-unable to be erased through
bankruptcy-and tie them, indefinitely, to the criminal
justice system. For them, debt is a life sentence.
Law-abiding citizens (or those lucky enough to have
never been caught and convicted) should care about
this criminal justice practice: it is done in our names.
The imposition of legal debt leads people convicted of
crimes into further political, social, and economic
marginalization. It is unproductive. Monetary sanctions
attached to felony convictions are not efficient,
effective, or ethical. Alexes Harris, in her writing of
"The Cruel Poverty of Monetary Sanctions," concludes
that the most sensible policy is to abolish all nonrestitution monetary sanctions for criminal offenses.

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