Why We Should Get Rid of Court Ordered Debt for Low-Income People

image from SottoLaw

Guest Post By Avni Desai

Imagine you’re a single parent working as a mechanic and making regular installment payments to the SF court on a couple of traffic tickets you got a couple years ago for speeding and jaywalking. A few months into the payments, your child is diagnosed with a medical condition. As your child’s sole caretaker, you have to leave work to take care of your kid. This sudden loss of income means you can’t continue paying your traffic tickets and the court suspends your driver’s license. The fines are handed off to Alliance One, a private debt collection agency, with an extra $300 (civil assessment) tacked onto your dollar amount owed because of your “failure to pay” as you’d planned. You need to travel to El Cerrito and to and from the doctor’s office to make sure your child is taken care of. The SF court refuses to hear your case until you pay the full fine amount and they tell you you can’t get your license back until the full amount of fines and fees is paid, even if you start making payments again. Without a license, you can’t work. Without work, you can’t pay your fines and get your license back.

This is a real life situation that many low-income people have to face and it inhibits them from getting out of the terrible cycle of poverty. That’s why a group of folks started Debt Free SF, and organization fighting to end court ordered debt for low-income people.

Read more about the issue below and get involved by signing this petition and following them on Facebook.

Issue Brief: Court-Ordered Debt in San Francisco

Court-ordered debt is an obstacle that is preventing too many low-income people from being able to support themselves and their families. This includes traffic tickets and so-called ‘quality of life’ citations. The inability to pay your fine or appear in court results in a vicious cycle of debt and poverty.

License Suspensions and Employment

Low-income people with traffic court debt essentially face a permanent license suspension and find themselves locked out of the workforce as a result. Many jobs require driving as a core function, such as delivery or transport, or as a necessary component of the work, such as travel between job sites. For many other employers, a valid driver’s license is seen as an indicator of reliability, and applicants without one are simply screened out of the applicant pool. The impact is that too many people are ready and able to work, yet they’re stuck relying on income support because they cannot access stable jobs.

License Suspensions and Reentry

The problem of license suspensions is particularly severe for people who have been involved in the criminal justice system. For example, a past arrest or incarceration may have caused a person to fail to appear at a court date on a driving ticket. Unfortunately, once the initial court date has been missed, an additional assessment of $300 is added to the ticket, and the full amount must be posted as “bail” before that person can appear before a judge or make a written request to excuse the failure to appear. In this way, having money becomes a precondition to due process. It is extremely difficult for people reentering society from jail or prison to collect this amount of money up front.

Burdening people in the process of reentering the community is directly at odds with San Francisco’s progressive reentry policies and goals.

Quality of Life Citations

San Francisco has more anti-homeless laws than any other city in California—23 ordinances banning sitting, sleeping, standing, and begging in public places. Political disputes over these laws are well known. Ticketing for violation of anti-homeless laws is on the rise. Since 2011, the SFPD has nearly tripled the number of citations issued for sleeping, sitting, and begging from issuing 1,231 tickets in 2011 to 3,350 in 2013 (Coalition on Homelessness).

Most homeless people can’t and don’t pay the fine. Some try to resolve their fine through confusing requirements of documenting hours spent receiving social services or doing community service. Some had tried to resolve it through the courts, but had missed their initial court date, resulting in additional fines and fees. Others with serious mental are unable to process the arduous steps. Many aren’t informed of alternate options. As a result, many don’t know how to resolve this issue and therefore don’t do anything,

Housing is also affected by citations, as unpaid fines damage credit. This can disqualify applications for housing. This is an incredibly difficult system and the process of navigating it is punishment enough.

Seeking Relief

We need a path forward, so that low-income residents can have their debt eliminated and people can get back to work.

Debt Free San Francisco is a coalition working to eliminate the impacts of court-ordered debt on our communities, and urges the City and County of San Francisco to go beyond SB 405 by ending the practices that result in crippling debt. Debt Fee San Francisco is made up of Community Housing Partnership, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, Coalition on Homelessness, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, All of Us or None!, and Bay Area Legal Aid. Check out their Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/debtfreesf/.