Source: Crime Report
It is nearly impossible for low-income individuals to escape the vicious cycle of poverty and debt when they are actively accruing fees for criminal debt that they can’t afford to pay off in the first place.
A new report found that in many cases, low-income individuals end up being locked up in prison because they can’t pay their way out of the growing fees, and this often leads to more crime to get out of the cycle.
In a study published by the Hamilton Project of Brookings, Prof. Beth A. Colgan of the UCLA School of Law poses the idea of “graduated sanctions” where fees are accrued according to the person’s ability to pay them. This idea came after data revealed that 300,000 Americans owed a cumulative $136 billion in criminal debt in 2017, with 90 percent of it marked as “unrecoverable” because people couldn’t pay it off.
“Unless something is done to relieve a debt burden fueled by jurisdictions which use fines, fees, and surcharges to relieve pressure on their own budgets, justice-involved individuals and their families will continue to be enmeshed in a cruel spiral of joblessness, thwarted opportunity, and hardship that all too often results in committing more crimes to dig themselves out of the hole,” writes Crime Report.
The system, according to Colgan, would take into account the person’s income and basic needs to be met, and then accordingly apply the criminal justice fees.
Read Full Story: Crime Report