Debtors’ prisons on the rise as COVID-19 ravages the southern United States
On July 6, 55-year-old Charles Anderson spent his last day in Marion County Jail. He was arrested 28 days prior for unpaid debts regarding his failure to make monthly payments and fees associated with three court cases dating back to 2003. Upon his arrest, he was jailed with three other men in a 6-by-10-foot cell.
After a long period of unemployment, Anderson found a job working as a carpenter two weeks prior to his arrest. He had intended to resume payments toward the court-ordered debts that have haunted him from a 2003 conviction on methamphetamine trafficking.
On June 9, in the town of Winfield, a police officer pulled Anderson over for running a stop sign on his way to help his new boss fix a flat tire. The officer then issued him a ticket for driving without a seat belt and a warning for failing to adhere to the stop sign. However, he was arrested and taken to jail in Hamilton, which was built in 1979 and meant to house 86 men and women, but it is often overcapacity at more than 120 people. According to Anderson, he was fed nothing but white bread, bologna and peanut butter for the 28 days he was incarcerated.
According to the arrest report, Anderson was arrested on three counts of “failure to pay.” Like so many others before him, he was ultimately charged with failing to appear at a payment review hearing, which in his case was held in November 2018.
Anderson was only able to be free of Marion County’s debtors’ prison because Linda Jacobs, his indigent 72-year-old mother, cashed her monthly $1,400 Social Security check on July 3, arriving at the circuit clerk’s office in the county seat of Hamilton on July 6 and paid $1,000 toward his court-ordered debts totaling more than $2,500. As a result of his arrest, his vehicle was towed, and his mother had to pay more than $200 to retrieve it.
Jacobs, in an attempt to raise the necessary funds, placed the family’s tractor, Bush Hog mower and a small boat up for sale. She even offered to sell her three Yorkshire terriers, but Anderson rejected that.
In an interview with AL.com on July 2, Jacobs noted, “I offered to pay $300, and they called and told the judge, and the judge said he had to pay $1,000 to get out. They take away your freedom, they lock you up, and you pay or they keep you locked up. It’s not right.”
Marion County in northwest Alabama, according to a 2019 United States Census Bureau report, has a population of 29,709, of which 94 percent are white, 3.9 percent black, 2.7 percent Hispanic or Latino, 0.4 percent American Indian and 0.3 percent Asian. The median household income is $35,930, and it has an unemployment rate of 3.1 percent (up from 2.2 percent in May), according to a 2021 Alabama Department of Labor report.
As a result of the coronavirus pandemic and declining hourly wages, several people remain incarcerated in Marion County Jail because they dared to commit the crime of being poor and have neither family nor friends with the financial resources to purchase their freedom. Prior to the pandemic, Alabama was rated among the poorest states in the country; in the city of Birmingham, the poverty rate is over 28 percent.
One man arrested in Winfield, Alabama, has been jailed since March on three counts of failure to pay court-ordered debts. According to a court document, he would be released from custody immediately upon payment of $2,819.70. Another man met a similar fate, being held in custody since he was arrested in April for failure to pay “court costs, fines and restitution of: $4,182.56.”
The incarceration of people over unpaid debts, particularly when these “debtors” do not have the wherewithal to pay, violates federal laws and constitutional protections against the operation of debtors’ prisons. From the colonial era to the 1830s, the United States regularly jailed people for failure to pay their debts.
Imprisonment for indebtedness was so commonplace that two signatories of the Declaration of Independence, James Wilson, later an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and Robert Morris, a personal friend of President George Washington, were sentenced for failure to pay loans.
However, debtors’ imprisonment could turn into a life sentence for those without positions which grant certain privileges. In myriad jurisdictions, debtors were not to be freed from bondage until funds were acquired in full, or they had worked off the debt through years of penal labor. As a result of economic turmoil which ravaged Southern and Northern states and colonies alike, many languished in prison, dying even more impoverished than they were prior to their arrest.
After the War of 1812, so many Americans were indebted that prisons held five times as many people on charges of debt than actual crimes. Between 1821 and 1849, 12 states outlawed debtors’ prisons. With the advent of bankruptcy law, citizens were granted a means of escaping insuperable debt, while creditors were made to share some of the risk associated in lending funds. Bankruptcy laws were revised in 1841, 1867 and 1898, eventually requiring payment of as much debt as the debtor could afford while absolving the balance.
Over the course of the 20th century, the US Supreme Court affirmed that it was a violation of constitutional rights to incarcerate those too financially straitened to repay their debts. In 1970, in Williams v. Illinois, the high court decided maximum prison terms could not be extended on account of the defendant failing to pay court costs or fines. In 1971, in Tate v. Short, it was ruled that defendants who are too destitute to pay their fines may not be jailed. Most significantly, the 1983 decision in Bearden v. Georgia compelled judges to distinguish between debtors who are “too poor to pay” and those who have the financial ability but “willfully” refuse to do so.
Federal imprisonment for debt was abolished in 1833, although some, particularly Southern states were allowed to continue imprisoning debtors, even leasing prisoners, who could not buy their freedom, out to plantation owners, effectively continuing slavery after the Civil War.
In places like Marion County, the justice system has a consistent stream of low-income people in and out of jail for failing to pay their debts. “In my opinion, [it is a] debtors’ prison because I owe money and you’re [going to] lock me up for it,” Charles Anderson told the media. Reflecting the impact of the social crisis on the thinking of workers, Anderson continued, “How is this the United States, where we’re supposed to have more freedoms than anywhere else in the world, and we’re incarcerating people for not having money?”
Marion County Sheriff Kevin Williams, in an interview with AL.com on July 7, said he does not draft the laws but is tasked with enforcing them, including issuing arrests for unpaid debts in accordance with judges’ orders. “If you’re sitting here and you can’t pay your fines, but you’re court-ordered to pay them, how do you fix that? How do you make them pay other than to throw them behind bars?”
According to court records, debtors have remained jailed for weeks or months in the Marion County Jail due to indigence. Marion County has incorporated a practice which relies on failure-to-appear charges, issuing arrest warrants to people with unpaid debts before demanding payment for their release. Moreover, court records also reveal many people never receive a letter informing them of their payment review hearings.
Hamilton resident Daniel Ables, another victim of this vendetta against the working class, sat in Marion County Jail for more than four months without an appearance before a judge to have his case heard.
On February 22, a Marion County deputy arrested the 41-year-old Hamilton resident on an outstanding warrant for failing to appear at a March 2020 hearing regarding a plan to pay down his court-ordered debts pertaining to a 2009 drug case. Typical in Marion County, Ables’ arrest warrant had two boxes checked. The first of which stated, “[y]ou may release the accused person without taking the accused person before a judge or magistrate,” and the second, “[i]f the person posts a cash bond in the amount of $1915.60 with the court clerk.” However, the “bond” equaled the exact total of all the defendant’s fines, fees and restitution owed at the time.
When interviewed by AL.com during a jailhouse phone call, Ables said if he were wealthy, this would not have happened. “It’s extortion. That’s pretty much what it is, is it not? They’re [going to] lock me up and hold me here for a year or some crap just because I can’t pay? What would you call it?”
Ables’ family members tried for months to raise the amount of money the county was demanding for his release but found themselves too short. Shortly after his arrest, Ables’ girlfriend offered to pay $700 toward his court-ordered debts but was informed if the amount was not the full $2,000, he would remain jailed.
District Attorney Scott Slatton confirmed via email that Ables was cleared to be released after he had requested “judicial review as to why Inmate Ables had been in jail for 5 months.”
A Zoom hearing was held on the morning of July 8 to review Ables’ case. His required monthly court-ordered debt payment was reduced from more than $100 to $60, or $20 for each of the three cases on which he still owes fines, fees and restitution. According to three court filings, Ables is not required to begin making the payments until October.
After a review of the case, Slatton claimed going forward, his office “will seek judicial review of any inmate being held for [‘failure to appear’] for payments longer than the quarter in which they should have appeared on a docket.” After 137 days, Ables was released from Marion County Jail custody, paying nothing to secure his release following the hearing.
In response to a query on why some people remain in jail for longer than 90 days awaiting a court hearing, Williams directed all inquiries to the judges on their respective cases and the circuit clerk’s office.
When the inquiries were followed up, Marion County Circuit Judge Daryl Burt, who signed the orders stating that Anderson and Ables could be released if they paid off their court-ordered debts, did not respond to myriad requests for comment, including from Circuit Clerk Denise Mixon.
Cody Cutting, an attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights who litigates cases related to the criminalization of poverty in the southern United States, said there is no justification for the imprisonment of impoverished, like Anderson, and is unequivocally unacceptable. “If someone who is arrested can avoid incarceration by paying if they’re able to pay their entire court debt, but someone who is unable to pay that court debt through no fault of their own is forced to languish in jail for months, that violates the Constitution.”
The Southern Center for Human Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center have found that judges in Alabama consistently jail people for “failure to pay” without conducting inquiries or investigation into a debtor’s ability to make payments.
“It could not be clearer that it is unconstitutional to jail someone for failing to pay a fine if the ability to pay that fine is beyond that person’s control,” Cutting said. “In spite of how clear that constitutional command is, it’s completely apparent that jailing people for being poor is common practice in courts across the South.”
COVID-19 surge explodes Biden’s claim of “independence” from pandemic
On July 4, President Joe Biden gave a speech in which he effectively asserted that the COVID-19 pandemic was over in America. Biden said the United States was “declaring our independence from a deadly virus… We can live our lives, our kids can go back to school, our economy is roaring back.”
It was a theme Biden has repeated in speech after speech. On May 13, he said America was nearing the “finish line” of the pandemic. On June 15, he said: “America is headed into the summer dramatically different from last year’s summer: a summer of freedom, a summer of joy, a summer of get-togethers and celebrations. An all-American summer that this country deserves after a long, long, dark winter that we’ve all endured.”
In reality, since Biden’s announcement of “independence” from COVID-19, cases have surged seven-fold and hospitalizations and deaths are rising as the dangerous Delta variant of the disease has become dominant. In the epicenters of the current pandemic outbreak—Arkansas, Louisiana and Florida—cases are at the highest level since January and are on track to set new records.
Throughout 2020, then-President Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that the pandemic would “disappear.” Trump’s lies were aimed at eliminating all social distancing measures that had been imposed to contain the spread of COVID-19, with the aim of getting workers back on the job to increase the profits of the financial oligarchy.
Biden’s lying declarations of “independence” from the pandemic had the same aim: to justify the abandonment of restrictions on the spread of COVID-19. “Take your mask off. You’ve earned the right,” Biden declared in May.
And just as Trump’s insistence on reopening businesses and schools fueled a massive resurgence of the pandemic, the Biden administration’s encouragement of Americans to abandon mask-wearing and social distancing has fueled what may become the greatest outbreak of the pandemic to date.
“Almost the same number of cases were reported today (70,264) as this day last year (71,600),” stated Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University on Sunday.
But the worst is yet to come. Last Wednesday, the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub, a consortium of researchers working in consultation with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), released a model showing that the number of daily US COVID-19 deaths could surge to 4,000 by October—the highest level of any period of the pandemic.
While this is the worst case scenario in the model, the study’s authors stress that the current surge of the pandemic is in line with their earlier worst case projections. “What’s going on in the country with the virus is matching our most pessimistic scenarios,” noted Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, who helps run the modeling hub.
This is an extraordinary warning. Despite the availability of vaccines, death rates could again reach the levels seen last fall—a predictable result of the policies of the Biden administration and other governments around the world.
CNN led its Sunday “State of the Union” program with an interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to Biden. The moderator began with the question: “Do you think it’s really possible it could get that bad, 4,000 deaths a day?”
While Fauci did not answer the question directly, he gave a blunt warning: “We’re going in the wrong direction.”
Separately from the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub, epidemiologist Eric Topol told New York Magazine that a likely scenario would lead to US cases surging to 250,000 a day—nearly four times the current rate. “We’re tracking right with the UK,” he said. “They got to 50,000-plus cases. And if you multiply that by five, for the population difference, we’d get to 250,000—that’s easy extrapolation. That could be where we’re heading.”
Topol warned ominously that 10 percent of those infected could experience major “long COVID” symptoms lasting weeks, months or even the victim’s entire life. As he put it, “[T]he ones that can’t work, the real, significant brain fog, the ones that really are suffering—it’s probably one out of 10.”
In the face of this disaster, with hundreds of thousands of people dying and tens of thousands suffering debilitating long-term symptoms, the US ruling class is demanding the continuation of its murderous “herd immunity” policy.
In an interview on NBC News Thursday evening, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky doubled down on the Biden administration’s demand that schools fully reopen this fall, months before any children under 12 will be eligible to be vaccinated.
Asked, “Is there any consideration, any scenario in which you might want to reverse yourself on reopening schools?” Walensky replied, “I remain emphatic that our schools need to open in the fall. They need to open for full, in-person learning.”
Asked if the “CDC is not recommending people who are fully vaccinated wear masks?” Walensky bluntly stated, “We are not.”
In its total indifference to the defense of human life in the face of the pandemic, the Biden administration is carrying out the common policy of the ruling classes throughout Europe, the Americas and virtually every other part of the world.
This is perhaps expressed most nakedly by the government of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. In a tweet this past weekend, UK Health Minister Sajid Javid said the public must not “cower” from the disease, instead learning to “live with” the pandemic.
Epidemiologist Deepti Gurdasani, a leading author of the Lancet study condemning the UK government’s promotion of “herd immunity through mass infection,” denounced Javid’s statement, saying, “Caring isn’t cowardice. Removing protections from people when almost half of our population hasn’t been vaccinated to bow to ideology is.”
The UK is, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, carrying out a “test case” for whether it is possible to “enjoy something approaching pre-pandemic life in the face of fast transmitting versions of the virus.”
The Journal elaborated: “The experiment should give a strong signal of whether COVID-19 can be relegated to the status of a manageable, seasonal menace such as influenza and whether lockdowns and social distancing can be consigned to the past.”
This “experiment” is being repeated around the world, including in the United States. As former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb made clear last weekend, “The assumptions built into those models is no mitigation, no mandates for masks, no closures of businesses.” He added. “I think that’s likely to be the norm.”
In response to the total intransigence of governments on abandoning all social distancing measures and enforcing the full reopening of schools and businesses, the financial markets have surged, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average hitting a record of 35,000 on Friday.
From the start of the pandemic, the response of governments around the world has been animated entirely by the aim of preserving the wealth and privileges of the financial oligarchy, at the expense of preserving human lives.
In response to the murderous “herd immunity” policies of the ruling class, workers must demand urgent measures to stop the spread of the disease, including the closure of all non-essential production facilities, work locations and schools, with full compensation for lost wages and trillions of dollars in additional health care spending to ensure the ability to test, track and isolate every case.
All students must be provided broadband internet and high quality computers, and additional teachers must be hired to ensure the best possible remote learning until the pandemic is brought under control.
As scientists have repeatedly made clear, COVID-19 can be contained and must be contained if millions more lives are to be saved.
The senseless and preventable deaths of 626,000 people in the United States and over four million around the world—according to official figures that drastically underestimate the real toll—stand as an unanswerable indictment of the capitalist system and demonstration of the necessity to replace it with socialism.
Biden's Baleful Border Betrayal
Blaming the border crisis on the 'climate crisis'.
Is there anything the left won't blame on their fantastical scapegoat, climate change? Don't bet on it. Their latest dodge is blaming the border crisis, which they created, on the climate crisis, which they invented.
A Politico article is headlined, "It's Not a Border Crisis. It's a Climate Crisis." That's a convenient twofer. Never let an opportunity to blame a crisis on climate change go to waste. Well played.
But to the left, I guess the border catastrophe isn't a crisis. How could you support open borders and think that the invasion by invitation is a crisis? How could America-resenting leftists regard the influx of millions of new Democrat voters a crisis? It would be like the Democrats being apoplectic over federal spending. Nope. Not gonna happen. If only these migrants knew that leftist policies are on the way to turning this country into a socialist state — you know, the kind they're escaping from.
But let's quit playing games. This is very serious and getting more so every day. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that June border apprehension numbers reached a 21-year high, with more than 188,000 arrests and more than 1.1 million this year to date.
Even more troubling: This is not a seasonal spike as Democrats have been saying. The numbers of crossings usually rise in the spring and then recede in the summer, but the numbers are still increasing. At this rate, we'll break the 2006 record. President Joe Biden and his faithful party continue to deny, obfuscate and deceive, but none of their rationalizations hold water — and they know it.
This is a crisis purely of their making; reversing President Donald Trump's border policies, emasculating Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and rolling out the red carpet for illegals is hardly going to deter attempted crossings. Indeed, we can trace these endless crossing spikes directly to these and Biden's other wanton policies of scrapping the "Remain in Mexico" policy, ending border wall construction and supporting the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
Not that you would expect the left to be consistent, but they sure are fair-weather opponents of COVID-19. Just as they never objected to maskless left-wing rioters or fleeing Texas Democrat lawmakers, they seem wholly indifferent to the hazards of COVID-19-infected migrants. No, actually, they are worse than indifferent. Here, they are COVID-19 enablers, given their plan to end Title 42, the law Trump invoked to refuse entry to immigrants with the virus. This, despite knowing and even admitting that this action will cause a new influx of migrants and possibly result in Homeland Security having to process up to 1,200 family units a day. COVID-19 infection rates in emergency shelters for migrant youth are reportedly between 15% and 20%.
You don't have to be a cynic to know that Democrats are pushing amnesty for reasons other than human compassion. And their methods are brazen and obscene. They are trying to sneak a "pathway to citizenship" into their reckless $3.5 trillion budget plan ostensibly to support families and generate job growth. Never mind their audacity in pretending to be pro-jobs when their endless government handouts are keeping people from seeking employment and exacerbating the plight of businesses starved for workers. Never mind that amnesty will encourage even more migrants to stampede toward our border. But to include amnesty provisions in an infrastructure bill is insultingly deceitful.
Could an unintended consequence of Biden's border disaster be a reconciliation between the Bushes and Trumps? Don't be silly. Let's not get carried away. But it is noteworthy that George P. Bush, Texas land commissioner and nephew of former President George W. Bush (no immigration hawk by anyone's estimation), has sued the Biden administration for ending border wall construction in his state. "Farmers and ranchers are long accustomed to illegal activity, but it's reached a point where it's not sustainable, and we need help from the federal government," said Bush.
Well, what do you know! Isn't it interesting, by the way, that in opposing the wall, Democrats claimed it was cruel and ineffective. How can it be cruel if it is ineffective? Why go to the trouble of tearing it down if it wasn't working? Oh, that's right. It was working. Kudos to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for his initiative to build a wall, and bravo to all those cruel people who donated $400,000 to the project in the first week. I wonder if they think it will be ineffective.
As the left and Democratic elected officials continue their scorched-earth assault on reasonable and sane public policies, hopefully more states and private individuals and entities will exercise self-help to combat this lunacy.
David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His latest book is "Guilty by Reason of Insanity: Why the Democrats Must Not Win."
Biden Official Orders Immigration Judges to Stop Using ‘Illegal Alien’ Term
President Joe Biden’s administration has ordered federal immigration judges to stop using the terms “alien” and “illegal alien” to describe illegal aliens living in the United States.
On July 23, Acting Director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) Jean King, appointed by the Biden administration in January, issued a memo titled “Terminology” that orders immigration judges and adjudicators to stop using the terms “alien” and “illegal alien.”
Instead, King writes that judges and adjudicators to use the terms “noncitizen,” “migrant,” “undocumented noncitizen,” or “undocumented individual.”
Likewise, judges and adjudicators are ordered to use the terms “unaccompanied noncitizen child” and “UC” when referring to Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs).
“This Policy Memorandum clarifies proper terminology at the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), and directs EOIR staff, including adjudicators, to use language that is ‘[consistent] with our character as a Nation of opportunity and of welcome,'” King writes.
Center for Immigration Studies’ Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge, said the move is “just one small step removed from telling [immigration judges] how to rule” in that ordering an illegal alien deported “denies that alien ‘opportunities in the United States and is not ‘welcoming’ in the least.”
Already, the Biden administration has barred the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency from using the terms “illegal alien” and “assimilation.” Rather, ICE agents have been ordered to use “noncitizen” and “integration.”
Similarly, staff at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) were ordered in February to stop using the terms “illegal alien,” “alien,” and “assimilation.”
The term “alien” is regularly used as a legal definition to describe a foreign national in the United States. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) codified the term into law and defines it as “any person not a citizen or national of the United States.”
Despite objections from the Biden administration over the terms “illegal alien” and “assimilation,” the terminology was readily used by civil rights icon Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-TX) who advocated for legal immigration reductions to boost the quality of life, wages, and job opportunities for America’s working and middle class.
In a 1995 op-ed for the New York Times, for instance, Jordan blasted “policies that permit the continued entry of hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens and blur distinctions between what is legal and beneficial and what is illegal and harmful.”
Jordan similarly referenced the need for a national assimilation policy, which she called “Americanization.”
“Immigration imposes mutual obligations,” Jordan wrote. “Those who choose to come here must embrace the common core of American civic culture. We must assist them in learning our common language: American English.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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