Pay the Rent or Face Arrest
Human Rights Watch
One summer evening in Little Rock, a middle-aged couple named Steve and Angela were preparing for Bible study class when there was a knock at the door. Steve answered and found two police officers standing outside with a warrant for their arrest. Angela fainted on the spot. The couple had been two weeks late paying the rent and when their landlord ordered them out within ten days, they had not moved fast enough. In Arkansas, that is a crime.
Arkansas is the only US state where tenants can end up as convicted criminals because they did not pay their rent on time. The state’s unique “failure to vacate” law sees tenants charged as criminals purely on their landlords’ say-so, without any independent investigation by prosecutors. Tenants who run afoul of the law face fines—sometimes in excess of the rent they could not pay to begin with—as well as possible jail time, and can be saddled with a criminal record. On top of all that, the law is written in a way that tramples on tenants’ due process rights, punishing those who do not plead guilty with harsher sentences.
Proponents of the criminal evictions law say it is a useful tool to remove abusive tenants who refuse to move out even though they cannot or will not pay their rent. Arkansas landlords inevitably have their fair share of tenant horror stories, just like landlords everywhere do. But roughly a third of all Arkansans are renters. Working families hit with job losses or other sudden economic distress; longtime renters who were only a week or two behind; and even people whose only “crime” was getting on the bad side of a vindictive landlord are all hauled into criminal court.
The only questions legally relevant to a judge are, “Did you pay the rent on time?” and “Are you out?” Human Rights Watch met tenants in the hallways outside their courtrooms who seemed stunned and sometimes outraged—but mostly incredulous to learn that, just by staying in their homes while waiting for their day in court, they had actually committed a crime.
For all practical purposes, the criminal evictions law operates as if the renter bears strict and absolute liability. Although the law refers to situations where the renter “willfully” refuses to vacate a property, when it comes to determining criminal guilt, the judge only assesses if the two constituent acts of the offence—failure to pay on time and failure to leave the property within ten days of notice—have been met.
The law also turns prosecutors into the personal attorneys of aggrieved landlords—at taxpayer expense. At the same time, for some tenants, the law has the practical effect of criminalizing economic hardship at a time when many are struggling to cope with the impacts of a bad economy.
The law imposes fines that can exceed the rent payments tenants could not scrape together in the first place, potentially plunging people even deeper into financial distress. Human Rights Watch saw one woman sentenced to probation even though she said she had been in the hospital after suffering a stroke when the eviction notice was served against her.
The criminal evictions process is initiated by the landlord filling out an affidavit, and many counties issue arrest warrants and file criminal charges purely on the say-so of the landlord, without any further investigation.
Again, we see the law specifically written to protect corporate interests, while criminalizing poverty, and proving yet more "customers" for the Prison Industrial Complex. People who pass these laws claim they will be rarely abused. But even if true, how do you overlook this kind of abuse:
For instance, one Little Rock attorney’s website advises landlords that the state’s criminal evictions law can be used to circumvent federal laws that bar them from evicting active duty service members while they are serving overseas. A landlord who uses the civil evictions process to do the same thing could find themselves facing federal criminal charges.
...some courts regularly impose guilty verdicts and hand down fines that can exceed US$400. In at least one city—Jacksonville— tenants charged under the law are subjected to pretrial detention.
We are sliding back into the 19th Century, a Dickensian nightmare reborn.