Tomorrow morning at 10am ET, the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security will hold a hearing titled "A Fine Scheme: How Court-Imposed Fees and Fines Unjustly Burden Vulnerable Communities." This hearing should be live-streamed at this link.
Via email, I received notice that Alexes Harris will testify, and that her essay “Monetary Sanctions as a Pound of Flesh” was just published today as part of the Brennan Center's Punitive Excess series. Here is a paragraph from that essay:
The system of monetary sanctions reinforces our two-tiered system of justice: one for people with financial means and one for people without. Within a society riven by so much inequality, a system of punishment based on economic resources can never be fair or just. This “coerced financialization” perfectly and purposefully places the freedom of poor and racially marginalized people on a perpetual layaway plan. It’s a system so fully embedded in our criminal legal system that the American Rescue Plan Act, passed by Congress in March 2021 to alleviate the financial pains of the Covid-19 pandemic, allowed private collectors and courts to seize the $1,400 stimulus grants from people burdened with unpaid penal debt, either public or private.
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