Ishikawa diagram water and sanitation series#

(She has since paid off the debt incurred from them.) She always taught her six children to do the right thing, to follow the law, but even in Montgomery she couldn’t seem to avoid or pay off her tickets. It got so bad, she quit the job and moved to Montgomery. Teon Smith told me about how police ticketed her multiple times in a county just north of Montgomery on her way to work at a casino.

Ishikawa diagram water and sanitation series#

Martez Files, who lives outside the Black Belt, has a degree from Brown University and a new tenure-track job at the University of Pittsburgh, and yet he said he cannot crawl out from under the debt resulting from a series of tickets he got in Alabama. Marquita Johnson fell behind on her court debt and spent 10 months in jail. Many of those fines were later erased, but she doesn’t believe she’ll ever pay off her remaining balance. A legal service found that the state had mistakenly charged her more than $20,000 in fees for, among other things, crimes she did not commit. Lane Norris told me she left prison after serving 14 years (nine of them in solitary), only to be hauled before a judge five times for fines and fees she accrued during her incarceration. Many told me stories of family and friends who had. A 2016 study showed that the median assessment for a felony in Alabama doubled between 19, to $2,000.Īs I traveled through Alabama in April, I asked almost everyone I met - gas station attendants, Starbucks baristas and grocery store clerks of all races - if they knew anyone who had been affected by court fines and fees. And often, that means creating revenue from fines and fees. New Jersey, by contrast, got 29 percent.) Strapped for cash, all levels of government look for money anywhere they can get it.

(Even Mississippi, which also has low property taxes, got roughly 12 percent from property taxes. In 2019, property taxes accounted for just 7 percent of state and local revenue, the lowest among the states. Taxes on most property, for example, are exceptionally low. As a result, today, Alabama has one of the cruelest tax systems in the country. Over a century ago, wealthy landowners and businessmen rewrote the Constitution to cap taxes permanently. While almost every state in the country, both red and blue, levies fines and fees that fall disproportionately on the bottom rung of the income ladder, the situation in Alabama is far more dramatic, thanks to the peculiarities of its Constitution. For poor people, this system is a trap, sucking them into a cycle of sometimes unpayable debt that constrains their lives and almost guarantees financial hardship.

Often, you don’t even have to break the law you’ll pay fees to pull a public record or apply for a permit.

If you appear in drug court, you will face more fees, sometimes dozens of times a year. If you’re on probation, you’ll pay a fee to take your mandatory urine test. If you’re assigned to a pretrial program to reduce your sentence, each class attended incurs a fee. In states like Alabama, almost every interaction a person has with the criminal justice system comes with a financial cost.