Economic Exploitation By the Criminal Justice/Abusive Debt Collection System #poorlivesmatter

• In Event: Roundtable: Class Inequality in Criminal Justice Policies and Practices

Abstract

The notion of a criminal justice-industrial complex refers to the many businesses that derive profits from sales to the criminal justice system, and hence have a vested interest in more of the same unjust policies. The government has been seen as the seller, but the spread of fines and fees generated by petty violations provide revenue that governments are working to expand. As the DOJ report on Ferguson makes clear, this means that the police see citizens as revenue streams and courts do not become a check on government power. Private probation and parole systems further compound bad practices through revenue sharing agreements with governments. The emerging criminal justice system thus needs to be understood as including predatory lending-like and abusive collection practices – and the governments that profit from this arrangement are part of the criminal justice-industrial complex. But governments can only really target the poor, who are having a difficult time raising effective opposition; those with resources would not tolerate mass citations because they were riding on a bicycle with a friend or did not have proper bicycle safety gear.

Author

• Paul Leighton, Eastern Michigan University