Debtor’s prisons are supposed to be illegal in the United States

Two separate reports out of Ferguson, Missouri, lending credence to an emerging concern I have had over the past couple or three years: the corrupted role of local government and government unions in the creation and maintenance of citizen disempowerment and poverty.

I posted about the role of government employee unions as barriers to responding to community interests.

Then there is this horrifying account of the role local government judicial system plays in destabilizing and bankrupting local families through court related fees, Ferguson and the Modern Debtor’s Prison by Alex Tabarrok.

Debtor’s prisons are supposed to be illegal in the United States but today poor people who fail to pay even small criminal justice fees are routinely being imprisoned. The problem has gotten worse recently because strapped states have dramatically increased the number of criminal justice fees….Failure to pay criminal justice fees can result in revocation of an individual’s drivers license, arrest and imprisonment. Individuals with revoked licenses who drive (say to work to earn money to pay their fees) and are apprehended can be further fined and imprisoned. Unpaid criminal justice debt also results in damaged credit reports and reduced housing and employment prospects. Furthermore, failure to pay fees can mean a violation of probation and parole terms which makes an individual ineligible for Federal programs such as food stamps, Temporary Assistance to Needy Family funds and Social Security Income for the elderly and disabled.

It is worth noting that this is a grotesquely significant class issue. If you are professional and/or wealthy enough, you can buy your way out of tickets, points, and inconvenience. Not by bundles of cash slipped under the table but right out there in the open through the municipal code. The local government is consciously choosing to financially exploit the wealthy, subjugate the poor and simultaneously undermine the rule of law. Quite a trifecta.

Then there is this report on the local corruption/travesty/mismanagement in Atlanta. A range of interest groups, urban planners, big businesses got together a few years ago and decided that Atlanta had the opportunity to create a network of connected bike trails by converting abandoned rail lines. The project is known as the Beltline. As often happens with such projects, there was a lot of excitement (who wouldn't be if you are government insider or contractor with all that money dangling around), a lot of happy talk and a lot of discussion about a wide range of benefits and no discussion of costs.

There was no conceivable business case for the multi-hundreds of million dollar project. Not wanting to burden an already overloaded city budget, the city decided to borrow the money from the Atlanta Public School School system on the theory that over the decades, the new trails would improve real estate values which would then improve tax revenue to the city and the APS. The first payments have come due and the city has failed to repay APS for the contracted instalments on the loaned money. The reason? It would be hard on the budget. They're not even pretending that there is any contractual dispute. It comes down to a simple power play against APS and the residents of the city on behalf of the big donor contractors: "We don't have the money in the existing budget so we won't pay it back to the schools".

Again, perfectly legal corruption that harms the citizens and benefits the plutocracy. No wonder the Tea Party is such a force and why trust in local (and federal) government is so low. The long echoing cry "Clean up City Hall" is alive and well.