Fwd: New ACLU economic inequality work

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from my iPad Begin forwarded message: From: arp <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: March 30, 2015 at 7:01:38 AM PDT To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>, Sandler, Herbert <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: FW: New ACLU economic inequality work I prepared this update for Ford, but I thought you would be interested in it. We talked about it over dinner.. From: Anthony Romero Sent: Saturday, March 28, 2015 7:48 AM To: arp; Karen Goldman Subject: Fwd: New ACLU economic inequality work Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: New ACLU economic inequality work From: "Walker, Darren" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> To: Anthony Romero <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> CC: "Abregu, Martin" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>,"Briggs, Xavier" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Wow. Very impressive. Copying Xav, too. Congrats, Anthony! Darren Sent from my iPhone On Mar 27, 2015, at 6:39 PM, Anthony Romero <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi Darren, I hope you are well. I wanted to give you an update about some emerging ACLU work on inequality – as I know that is an emerging priority for the Foundation. In the coming months, we will release a major, first-of-its-kind national investigative report on thinly veiled debt collection tools that criminalize poverty. It is being compiled by our human rights research unit and will analyze this problem in more than twelve states, covering hundreds of incarcerated individuals and more than one million debtors (including individuals who owe medical bills, student loans, missed credit card payments, auto loans, payday loans, mortgage foreclosure deficiencies, revolving debt accounts at stores, and rent-owned stores). For example, private debt collection agencies—which buy debts from hospitals, consumer companies, and other entities—sue debtors in small claims courts, often providing the debtor with little to no notice of the suit. They do this knowing that most defendants don’t know their rights, and that these courts proceedings which are already manned by low level judges also provide limited due process protections, such as a right to legal representation. There, they obtain civil debt collection judgments, and ask the court to declare the debtor in civil contempt, resulting in the jailing of debtors until they pay the unpaid debt. In fact, at the companies’ request, judges often set bail at the amount of the unpaid debt, plus interest and legal fees, without determining if the debtor even knew about the lawsuit, let alone their ability to pay it back. Clearly, judges should not be doing the work of private debt collectors. Our new investigation focuses on the egregious behavior of debt collection companies that are effectively usurping low-level courts to enforce dubious claims against poor people with private debts. This will be a blockbuster report and we expect future litigation and advocacy to be driven by its findings. Some promising avenues for advocacy and litigation include: seeking judicial rules for courts that are abusing civil contempt; requiring that companies provide proof of the debt when they sell it to debt collection agencies; the availability of same-day lawyers in the courthouse; challenging civil contempt procedures in which bond or bail is set at the amount of debts rather than at an amount that would secure compliance with the allegedly violated court order; incentivizing private defense attorneys to take on debt collection cases by pushing statutes that would enable them to collect attorneys’ fees when their client prevails; and pushing the FTC to crack down on abusive debt collection companies. This project is the latest effort in the ACLU’s long, rich history of fighting inequality—pushing to dismantle structural discrimination in many areas such as voting, education, and criminal justice, among others. For example, as you know, in 2012 we filed class-action lawsuit against Morgan Stanley, accusing it of discrimination for encouraging a subprime lender to target black homeowners in Detroit. This landmark suit was the first connecting racial discrimination to predatory lending in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. As the New York Times reported<http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/12/29/court-filing-illuminates-morgan-role-in-lending/?_r=0> in late December, documents produced in the case reveal Morgan Stanley pushed the lender into riskier and more onerous mortgages while dismissing questions about the ability of homeowners, such as our clients, to make payments. We have also fought back against practices that involve incarcerating people for unpaid fees associated with the criminal justice system, like parking tickets. Across the country, in the face of mounting budget deficits, states are more aggressively jailing poor people for failing to pay their legal debts. This unconstitutional trend imposes devastating human costs, wastes taxpayer money, undermines our criminal justice system, and creates a two-tiered system of justice. The March 2015 U.S. Justice Department’s report on Ferguson, MO., provides a horrifying glimpse of what can happen when police and the courts treat the poor as mere revenue sources. To cite one example—and some good news—we brought a case in Georgia on behalf of DeKalb County teenager Kevin Thompson, who was unlawfully jailed for days because he was unable to pay $838 in fines and fees stemming from a routine traffic ticket. In this short video, Nusrat Choudhury, the lead attorney on the case, describes the plight poor people like Kevin face. http://youtu.be/t966dPWgsGI​ <image003.jpg><http://youtu.be/t966dPWgsGI> Taking on Modern-day Debtors' Prisons - YouTube Watch now...<http://youtu.be/t966dPWgsGI> As Nus mentions, Kevin scraped funds together week by week, but it wasn’t enough, and instead of looking at his ability to pay—as is required by law—a judge sent him to jail. A key factor in this case is the role that a private probation company, Judicial Correction Services (JCS), plays in these types of misdemeanor cases in the county. Hired by the court to oversee probation, JCS charges probationers fees for collecting debt payments, which in turn increases their overall debt. When poor probationers report difficulties with paying, company officers don’t explain that the court may waive fines, fees, or costs, or convert them to community service upon a showing of financial hardship. Instead, many JCS officers pressure probationers for payments by increasing reporting frequency, charging probationers with probation violations, and even threatening them with jail. Once charged with a violation because they can’t pay, poor probationers are brought before judges, who have demonstrated a pattern of jailing people for failure to pay without making any meaningful inquiry into the willfulness of non-payment or the availability of alternatives to incarceration, as is required by law. For-profit probation companies like JCS operate in at least 12 states. This is a vicious and unfair cycle that exploits and exacerbates inequality. And of course it’s unconstitutional, and has been since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled more than 30 years ago that jailing people merely because they cannot afford to pay court fines is contrary to American values of fairness and equality embedded in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. We are starting to turn this practice around. In the Georgia case, for example, the county just agreed to a settlement, which includes a monetary payment to Kevin and the county’s pledge to make significant policy changes to protect the rights of the poor. These changes include the adoption of instructions for judges to avoid sending people to jail because they are unable to pay court fines; training and guidance to court personnel on probationers' right to counsel in probation revocation proceedings; the right to an indigency hearing before jailing for failure to pay fines and fees; and revision of forms to let people charged with probation violations know of their right to court-appointed counsel in probation revocation proceedings, and their right to request a waiver of any public defender fees they cannot afford. These policy changes will serve as a model in the fight against debtors’ prisons in Georgia and across the country. I look forward to keeping you updated on our debtors’ prison initiative as well as our broader economic and racial justice work. In the meantime, please let me know if you have any questions or want more information. Warmly, Anthony [cid:[email protected]]