Did you know the Supreme Court outlawed debtors' prisons in the United States? Did you know that Texas law requires judges to hold a hearing when someone cannot pay a fine, to assess someone's finances and if found indigent, to offer community service instead? Did you know that a Texas judges' instruction manual specifies these things very clearly?
If you didn't, well, don't be ashamed. Neither do plenty of Texas judges who've been sentencing poor people in Texas to jail for being too poor to pay their fines and leaving them, when they get out, still having to pay "additional charges" tacked on over and above the fines themselves.
Entire families often would wind up in debtors' prisons with the head of the household.
This according to an extraordinary, detailed and horrific article on Buzzfeed today.
In El Paso, where 1 in 5 people live below the poverty line, judges at the municipal court regularly send people to jail without holding a poverty hearing or offering community service. BuzzFeed News reviewed 100 of the court's case files for people jailed for at least five days last year. Not a single one indicated that the judge had considered - or even inquired about - the defendant's ability to pay before locking them up.
At least the judges highlighted by the article aren't being willfully defiant of the law. For what little consolation it might be, they are simply woefully ignorant.
In defense of locking people up without assessing their ability to pay - or without offering community service - many judges demonstrate outright ignorance of the law. "There's no requirement for us to ask" defendants if they have the money to pay, said Judge Davis.
Not only is it illegal for these judges to do what they are doing, but it makes no sense either financially...
El Paso spends about $375,000 a year to jail people for unpaid fines.
... or as a deterrent.
It's possible that jailing people could send a message to others to pay their fines, but in interviews with judges and other officials from 18 traffic courts across Texas, that rationale never came up.
Beyond that, sending people to jail often causes them to lose their job and puts extra burdens on the person's family and/or society. When they get out they often can't get their driver's license renewed until they pay the court fees and additional charges - which the person can't do because they no longer have a job, or sometimes a driver's license to look for one.
Forty-five years after the Supreme Court declared, based, ironically, on a Texas case
the Constitution prohibits the State from imposing a fine as a sentence and then automatically converting it into a jail term solely because the defendant is indigent."
and up to six years after
exposes revealing that debtors' prisons still exist around the country, the processes (and non-processes) that allow them to exist are still in place. One might think that by now there would have been court cases making their way through the judicial system that would have put a stop to most, if not all, of this insanity.
But no. You can still go to debtors' prison. In 2015.