![]() Here are some other pieces we think are valuable this week: I’m going to be paying it down until I die.” “I ain’t never going to pay it down,” he said. “$11,000?” The way he said it, it might as well have been a million dollars. Could he calculate exactly what he owed? “$10,000?” he responded. “I would estimate that I’ve spent a quarter of the last year behind bars,” he told Shaer. His registration and driver’s license are expired, but to pay off those expiration fees, he needs to drive to work. It’s national,” the SPLC’s Sam Brooke told Shaer.Įven in Corinth, Lindsey is still trapped in a web of arrests and court fees, nearly all of which he can trace back to his vehicle. “This is a massive problem, and it’s not confined to the South. It went into effect in July.īut wealth-based detention is far from solved. A month later, Corinth ordered its jail emptied of anyone incarcerated for nonpayment of fines.Īnd last year, after we lobbied Mississippi, both houses of the state Legislature unanimously passed a bill prohibiting any resident from being jailed for a failure to pay court costs or fines. We sued Corinth with the MacArthur Justice Center in 2017. “It’s time someone did something about it.” “I’ve been paying these sons of b- all my life,” he told her. But soon enough, he called Wood to say he had changed his mind. “I don’t know,” Lindsey said, studying the ground. Wood caught up with Lindsey in the parking lot later that day, and after identifying herself, asked if he would consider being interviewed by the S.P.L.C. She barely had $100 herself, but she promised to drive it over after her shift was through. Thanks anyway.”įinally, around 1:45 p.m., Lindsey managed to get through to his sister. “Can you help?” Lindsey whispered into the phone.Ī few seconds of silence passed. Until his next state disability check arrived, he was broke. Lindsey had been in court for driving with an expired registration, but he hadn’t been able to afford the fines: He was suffering from hepatitis C and liver cancer, and he had spent the very last of his savings on travel to Tupelo for a round of chemotherapy. That October, she watched a 59-year-old man named Kenneth Lindsey enter the office, his lean arms hanging lank by his side, his face gaunt and pale. “All around us, people would be crying or yelling, getting more and more desperate,” Wood recalled. The space amounted to an earthly purgatory: Secure the money, and you were saved. Micah West and Sara Wood, lawyers in our economic justice practice group, told The New York Times about court sessions “where defendants were permitted to use a landline phone to make a final plea for the cash that would set them free.” As Shaer describes: We opened an investigation into Corinth’s practice of jailing of low-income defendants in 2017. “And it was the worst feeling in the world.” “I thought, ‘Because we’re poor, because we’re of a lower class, we aren’t allowed real freedom,’” Tillman recalled to Matthew Shaer for The New York Times. But a judge told her $25 would be knocked off her fine for every day she stayed in jail, so that’s what she did until her balance was down to $0. ![]() She didn’t even have $10 - and had no family member she could call for help. Jamie Tillman, without a lawyer, admitted to a public intoxication charge punishable by a $100 fine. Because he missed a hearing, he was denied the chance to pay a partial fine. He owed $1,200 to the city of Corinth for expired vehicle tags. Since the 1970s, the Supreme Court has been clear that it’s unconstitutional to jail people simply because they can’t afford to pay fines and fees.īut in states across the South - and across the country - that’s exactly what cash-strapped municipalities are doing.
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