From the Editor
by Paul Wright
Since our inception in 1990 the Human Rights Defense Center has focused on the financial exploitation of prisoners and their families in particular and poor people in general by the American criminal justice system. A sad commentary on the state of political affairs in the USA today is that what was an outrage back then can only be thought of as the “good old days” today in terms of financially exploiting people enmeshed in the criminal justice system.
A lot of our news coverage and advocacy focuses around prison slave labor, the cost of phone calls, video calls, commissary items and similar issues. This month’s cover story takes a look at fines and fees imposed on criminal defendants at the front end of the criminal justice system. This trend started in the 1980s as a Libertarian idea which was basically to shift the cost of the police state onto the backs of the policed. One criminologist noted that mass incarceration is the most thoroughly implemented social experiment in American history. The big question with massive social experiments is who is going to pay for them? In an era of tax cutting for the wealthy and corporations, we knew who wasn’t going to pay for it.
Making the poorest people in America pay for the privilege of being surveilled, policed, arrested, prosecuted, caged and even killed by the government was the solution to this. Given the immense cost of running the biggest police state in world history it is unlikely that fines and fees alone would pay for the massive expenditures required to have millions of cops, judges, prosecutors and guards policing and caging several million people each year. But what it has done, very well, is it further impoverishes and immiserates an already poor population and provides the excuse to surveil and criminalize people because of their poverty.
Recent years have seen some modest efforts at challenging these fines and fees, debtors’ prisons and other forms of financial exploitation but while some progress has been made, much more remains to be done.
Other factors driving up the cost of running the police state range from un/underfunded pension funds, rising costs of living that make it increasingly difficult to hire and retain prison and jail guards on low wages, increasing medical costs, bloated and inefficient policing and staffing models and much more. All of which calls into question the long-term stability of the American police state. What happens if you build a police state but can’t hire enough people to run it? Or can’t afford to hire enough people to run it?
I would like to thank everyone who donated to our annual fundraiser, it is greatly appreciated and goes a long way towards supporting the work and advocacy we do on behalf of prisoners and their families. It is not too late to donate if you have not done so already.
We are working on a number of exciting projects here at HRDC ranging from new books to podcasts and will be rolling them out in the coming year so stay tuned!
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