I won’t bother to cross post my whole essay on LiL, but several people besides me have raised the issues around Patrick’s proposed fee increases on criminals.
From the Globe’s Eileen McNamara (linked above): “Patrick might [come to his senses] if he remembers that the campaign is over, and he won. The voters did not buy what the fear-mongers were selling last fall, that a lawyer who champions a criminal’s legal rights would make a governor who is soft on crime.”
From Mark Bail over at Granby 01033: “Nobody knew where Gov. Deval Patrick’s idea for charging criminals a fee came from. Mostly they hope it’s gone. He mentioned it at a meeting with members of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, who were taken aback. So was Brandyn Keating, a member of Patrick’s working group on public safety.”
It’s a small proposal, but has important implications for the direction that Patrick might take regarding criminal justice. I thought it was something that BMG’ers might want to discuss. Have at it.
I am AMAZED Deval did this, seeing the reception Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgkins got when he proposed the EXACT SAME THING.
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Amazing!
I thought Deval would know better than to do something that won’t work, adds extra punishment, might cause a prisoner and/or his/her family to turn to crime for the money to pay for jail, and just panders to the fearmongerers.
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I haven’t heard any followup to this, so I was lying low hoping it went away.
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I don’t want to sound like a mushy “oh, the criminal is also a victim” bleeding heart liberal, but it’s really ludicrous to think the state can raise money from people who turned to crime for money in the first place. Poor criminals can barely get the legal representation they are promised under the constitution.
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Just a terrible, terrible idea.
should be forced to fork over more tax dollars to protect their rapists’ pocketbooks. But I can introduce you to some victims so that you can better explain it to them.
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And you know this, how? Les Miserables isn’t a criminology textbook; those have been exploding the myth of one-to-one causation between poverty and crime for about 40 years. This is the same kind of sloppy thinking that convinced everyone that criminals suffer from low self-esteem until it turned out that they don’t.
to some of the homeless youth I worked with for several years. Both my personal experience and a good deal of social science research makes it quite clear that had they not been poor, they would not have been in trouble with the law. Sure, some well-off kids steal, but they don’t tend to get busted for it. My friends in high school can attest to that.
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And just out of curiosity, since you brought them up, what percentage of the criminal population is rapists?
are indigent youths. it would make sense to have a multi-tiered system that takes age into account. but if you’re 25 and vandalize a car, or 55 and rip off your company’s retirement fund, then that’s a whole nother category.
Um, on what grounds do you claim
A very quick google search turns up lots of evidence to refutate that, unless of course you’ve been catching up on reading from the heritage foundation, which would surprise me no end.
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I really am not looking at prisoners as some poor misguided fools. My husband worked for CPCS–the Committee for Public Counsel Services. Criminals in MA are allowed an appeal under law, and these overworked and underpaid folks at CPCS are the ones who take on those appeals by those who don’t have the money for a private lawyer. My husband would tell me stories that would have been funny if there hadn’t been a crime involved (he didn’t do murder cases). One guy was convinced that the transcript had been doctored; upon hearing the tape he decided the tape had been doctored. They all expected miracles, and they were all not guilty. Then my husband worked for sex offenders who were appealing their rating.
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So I know the kinds of people who make up most of the general prison population and I don’t feel sentimental about them. I want to be realistic about them–and charging them for being in prison is NOT a good way to break a criminal cycle or reduce recidivism. Their prison sentence is their punishment–anything above that might be able to be challenged as cruel and unusual. And, yes, I want my tax dollars going to keeping those in jail who deserve to be in jail, rehabilitating those who can be, and treating the mental illnesses of just about all of them. As someone else said, that’s part of the people’s contract with the government.
in Madagascar during famines really has a heck of a lot of applicability to crime in Massachusetts. The crime explosion of the 1960s occurred during peak in earnings and affluence for every demographic group, as has been exhaustively documented.
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Nor do those who rely on public counsel to file their appeals represent every kind of criminal.
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It is, however, a good way for them to defray costs they have forced others to incur. Its therapeutic effects on the prisoners are not terribly relevant to the discussion. They stole money from the public purse, and they have to pay it back, whether or not that is a good learning experience for them.
Actually, I thought the first two, especially the CSM article about post-Katrina New Orleans, were the real attractions.
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I included Madagascar, though, because human motivation hasn’t changed very much since we became sentient.
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Being flip about causes of crime doesn’t change the basic fact that if people are starving, if their children are starving, and society does not offer either the opportunities to earn money legitimately, opportunities for education in order to earn a living, or some sort of aid, they will steal. I’m sure I would have been throwing garbage cans through the windows of convenience stores in New Orleans if my kids were starving.
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Now I agree that starvation is probably not at the very top of the list for reasons for crime in MA (although there are a lot more homeless and hungry here than people think), there are other hungers, especially in a society where the disenfranchised do not see a any legitimate way out of the cycle of poverty. You turn on the TV and see bratty little 16-year-old girls getting expensive sportscars and diamonds and multi-thousand-dollar parties, and the only job you can get is as a minimum wage burger flipper? Minimum wage isn’t even a living wage, especially in Massachusetts. I’m not saying that it’s
correct for people to turn to crime, I’m just saying it’s totally understandable.
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But y’know who would probably know lots more about this? Our governor’s chief of staff, Joan Wallace-Benjamin, who spent much of her career working in nonprofits whose goals were helping children and families out of poverty.
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And you still haven’t provided link(s) to people besides the heritage foundation who dismiss the link between poverty and crime.
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Steverino, you and I usually agree. I think you have a horse in this race and I can understand why you wouldn’t agree on this issue if you or a loved one was a crime victim. You keep implying that I’m soft on crime.
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I don’t really care about building moral character as much as I care about not seeing criminals come out of prison being shrewder criminals, or part of gangs. The causes of recidivism are incredibly relevant to this discussion–we have a pretty much failed criminal system because our recidivism rates are so high. That is short sighted, and far more expensive to society, both in dollars AND in lives ruined, than it would be to lose the relatively small amount of
money the state would recover from prisoners.
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And as someone did mention, what about the occasional innocent person who’s charged and jailed? Remember Tulia, Texas, where a racist narcotics agent rounded up more than ten percent of the town’s black population and, on his word alone, they were convicted and jailed? It took years to even get an investigation going, let alone reverse convictions and free the innocent (and pay a hefty settlement). How would people like that be able to afford legal representation (remember not all states mandate free appeals, and Texas was where a criminal defense attorney fell asleep during trials and that wasn’t seen as grounds for appeal) if they had to pay for the privilege of being jailed wrongly? Please don’t dismiss that as being statistically irrelevant, since we’ve talked many times before about how our democracy is supposed to protect the rights of the minority.
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If we could take the discussion away from the absolutes posed in most of these posts, we could all find common ground. For example, those guys from Enron? OJ? Bush, Cheney, and Rove? Those types of obscenely rich and powerful white-collar criminals deserve to have every single penny taken away from them. They don’t really deserve prison–they deserve poverty, with no rich contacts to get them cushy jobs. They deserve disenfranchisement, to see what it feels like. That’s a punishment fit for the crime.
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But in general I think it’s a bad idea. And, as Amber Paw pointed out so concisely, it would be challenged as unconstitutional, not only for the reasons Amber Paw state, but also since it could only be applied to prisoners sentenced after the law goes into effect (you can’t add punishment for no reason to sentences being served), which means new prisoners would have more punishment than existing ones who had committed the same crimes. That’s what my former-criminal-appeals-lawyer husband told me. That’s MA law, not someone with an emotional stake in the equal meting out of punishment for prisoners.
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As a side note, I must apologize for using a non-word in my previous post: I said “refutate,” and it’s making me nauseous thinking about it still. Ugggh.
Lynne,
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I’d like to hear more than “here is an idea we’re considering” at a speech in front of elected officials before I pass judgment, but on its face it seems odd.
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I guess I just don’t see where the idea came from, how it fits with his outlook for government and society, and what precisely it is designed to achieve.
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A timely post and hopefully there will be some more info/commentary.
of lawbreakers paying for the public services that have to be instituted to deal with their crimes. However, I certainly couldn’t endorse this particular scheme until I knew more what the scheme was to actually be. Seems like it would need to be paired with a way for inmates to make money. Could the $1.50/hr they make now (or those that work, anyway) be garnished, say, $0.25/hr until the fine is payed off? I’m sure there are many other possibilities. As I said, we need to know more before deciding whether this is a workable idea.
Any chance we could “hire” cons to do community service, above and beyond trash collection? There’s no reason why they can’t be put to work landscaping the Esplanade, or gathering the rubbish from the bins in the Boston Common. Obviously the danger level of the con is an important consideration, as are his skills. Still, it would seem that we could do better at combining community service with teaching job skills and maybe heal two birds with one band-aid.
OK, I realize I’m in the minority on this one, especially in the editorial pages, but let’s endeavor to look at it historically. Not histrionically.
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Fact: this idea ALREADY exists as a statute in the Massachusetts General Laws. Chapter 280, section 6, where Judges have discretion to assess the reasonable costs of prosecution to be paid by criminal defendants. (Not just those few who are convicted and incarcerated, but all criminal defendants who are guilty or admit to sufficient facts or even those who consent to a dismissal upon payment of the COPs fee (“cost of prosecution”);
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Fact: there ALREADY are courthouses in Massachusetts that impose the COPs fee as a matter of course. The fee offsets a significant portion of the cost of police prosecutors in several courthouses, to the tune of more than $50,000 per small town;
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Policy Question: if it’s already on the books, and already being done as a matter of discretion in some courthouses, doesn’t basic fairness militate in favor of uniform application statewide?
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Fact: Judges are notoriously reluctant to serve as “collection agencies”, even in the face of the word “shall” in statutes, and historically failed to impose or collect statutorily mandated fees, with one signifcant group of exceptions. The exceptions? Oh yeah, the courthouses in the POOREST areas of Massachusetts collected a higher portion of mandatory fees than courthouses in wealthier areas. Lawrence collects nearly 66% of every dollar mandated for collection. Brookline? About a nickel of every dollar before the statutory change:
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Fact: In 2003 (and I know this will get a rise out of AmberPaw, but that’s a different debate), the Romney administration devised an novel way to get Judges to uniformly impose and collect mandatory fees: the Trial Court’s budget depended in part on the amount of mandatory fees collected, called “retained revenue.” Interestingly, in the midst of a recession, Trial Court fee collection increased 76% in ONE YEAR. The total amount of mandatory fees ACTUALLY COLLECTED now? $40 million, or just under 10% of the Trial Court budget;
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Fact: Most criminal defendants are indigent, meaning they have less income than certain percentages of the federal poverty level. Of course, they’re “indigent” when measured against their legitimate, declared and taxed sources of income. The hidden, illicit economy, which exists tax free and which supports guns, booze, drugs and any number of discretionary expenditures, doesn’t factor into the “indigent” equation. A fee on criminal defendants, say the $40 million they’re already paying (which they WERE NOT paying in 2002 and which most people argued then that criminal defendants couldn’t pay) simply amounts to a practical tax on hidden, illicit income;
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Fact: Criminal defendants contribute to societal need to hire more police. If they have the means to pay (and a Judge must ultimately make the determination of ability to pay, after examining discretionary spending like bling, cable, internet, etc.) then please let them pay something. I agree with the observation that we need more than spending on police to break the cycle of crime, so let’s take some of the money and spend it on GED and job placement programming, etc. But no more free rides for persons who CHOOSE to engage in criminal conduct;
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Fact: A roughly $80 fee on average should yield far more than the $10 million estimated by the Governor. If he’s wrong, we’ll know in one budget cycle. If he’s right, he’s right and a lot of naysayers will need to give him his due. He’s a new Gov, he needs revenue sources beyond the tax base, and he’s willing to try this idea on for size. The way I see it, there are two sides to the debate if people agree there’s a need for more police: (1) the “let’s try it and see if it works” argument or (2) what’s the better idea to pay for $10 million of new law enforcement hires argument.
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Phew, that was therapeutic.* Please send me the bill for this session.
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*The pressures of articulating the view of the silent majority.
Well, you are right! This DOES “get a rise out of AmberPaw”. See http://www.bristolcp… At the time the “retained revenue” shell game began, I was the Press Secretary for the Massachusetts Association of Court Appointed Attorneys, a pro bono “job”…i.e…totally volunteer.
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The trial court budgets were cut by 20%, and they were told [The Chief Justice for Administration and Management, or “CJAM”, who is currently Judge Robert Mulligan] that the Courts would get to keep a percentage of the Indigent Court Courts fees assessed pursuant to G.L. c. 211D See http://www.mass.gov/…
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Guess what? The Fee charged to “indigents” is already 3x larger in this state than in ANY other state. Further, using indigent court fees to balance the budget was challenged and found unconstitutional, already, in another state.
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See: http://www.bristolcp…
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Here, in Massachusetts, we have the “Open Court Clause” which is arguably stronger, See http://www.mass.gov/… and note Article XI which states that each citizen “ought to receive right and justice freely, and without being obliged to purchase it; completely, and without any denial; promptly,and without any delay, conforably to the laws.”
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When I stated recently to the author of the infamous “retained revenue” measures that I was still of the opinion as an appellate attorney that using indigent counsel fees to balance the Judicial Branch’s operating budget, rather than general appropriations, was unconstitutional – he told me he knew i was right but that because of the lack of support and independence of the judicial branch and the fact that no one cared, it would stand.
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Not only does utilizing such fees to pay the general operating costs of the judicial branch eviscerate judicial independence and turn judges into collection agents, it violates Article XI as quoted above – and worse yet, does not fund indigent representation at all, and leads to incarceration of those who do not and cannot pay like a modern day debtors prison.
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So, yes, you “got a rise out of AmberPaw”.
Type [http:www.yoururlgoeshere this is the text to link to]
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🙂
Well, you are right! This DOES “get a rise out of AmberPaw”. See http://www.bristolcp… At the time the “retained revenue” shell game began, I was the Press Secretary for the Massachusetts Association of Court Appointed Attorneys, a pro bono “job”…i.e…totally volunteer.
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The trial court budgets were cut by 20%, and they were told [The Chief Justice for Administration and Management, or “CJAM”, who is currently Judge Robert Mulligan] that the Courts would get to keep a percentage of the Indigent Court Courts fees assessed pursuant to G.L. c. 211D See http://www.mass.gov/…
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Guess what? The Fee charged to “indigents” is already 3x larger in this state than in ANY other state. Further, using indigent court fees to balance the budget was challenged and found unconstitutional, already, in another state.
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See: http://www.bristolcp…
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Here, in Massachusetts, we have the “Open Court Clause” which is arguably stronger, See http://www.mass.gov/… and note Article XI which states that each citizen “ought to receive right and justice freely, and without being obliged to purchase it; completely, and without any denial; promptly,and without any delay, conformably to the laws.”
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When I stated recently to the author of the infamous “retained revenue” measures that I was still of the opinion as an appellate attorney that using indigent counsel fees to balance the Judicial Branch’s operating budget, rather than general appropriations, was unconstitutional – he told me he knew i was right but that because of the lack of support and independence of the judicial branch and the fact that no one cared, it would stand.
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Not only does utilizing such fees to pay the general operating costs of the judicial branch eviscerate judicial independence and turn judges into collection agents, it violates Article XI as quoted above – and worse yet, does not fund indigent representation at all, and leads to incarceration of those who do not and cannot pay like a modern day debtors prison.
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So, yes, you “got a rise out of AmberPaw”.
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Horseapples. Criminals contribute to societal need. Criminal defendants haven’t been convicted yet — and they ain’t all guilty. Those found “not guilty” are, by definition, not guilty. They are not guilty of the crime, and they are not guilty of contributing to societal need to hire more police.
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I’m not sure if you were intending to segregate defendants from convicts — if you were, and I hope you were, it wasn’t clear to me.
My bad. I used the word “criminal defendants” too broadly beyond my point. My reference was to people who actually DO the deed and are charged with a crime. Since the fee would be tagged on only as a result of disposition (i.e. “guilty”, “admission” or dismissal by consent on costs) those accused who didn’t do the deed would not be subject to the fee. Personally, I’ll count it as a moral victory that I had you till the end! And AmberPaw, you’re arguing off the topic. Let’s have that debate in another thread, but do you disagree that the illicit economy exists for adult doers of bad deeds??
You also write as if every accused was guilty until proven innocent [shall we return all fees to the acquitted, perhaps], all courts where citizens are forced to defend themselves against sometimes anonymous accusations, criminal courts, and all defendants gleaming with “bling” and bearing cell phones.
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What a twisted, class biased, out of touch and fantastic view.
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Try juvenile court.
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Try defending someone against involuntary commitment.
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Try being 14 and having a school system that fails to check you for special needs file a so-called Children in Need of Services (CHINS) petition against you – because you stop going to school because you cannot stand failing at work you cannot do, and it is so much cheaper to file a CHINS against you as a truant then assess your needs for special education pursuant to Chapter 766. And try being the parent of that child, earning $10.00 an hour and hit with panoply of fees and costs so that the Commonwealth balances its mean-spirited books on YOUR back.
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More then 1/3 of those summonsed into court and assessed fees are not even accused of criminal acts.
governments tax to supports its costs and provide needed goods and services for its citizens.
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The idea of shifting costs of the criminal justice system to lawbrakers of any stripe undermines the compact we made with each other. The so called republican party ( formerly jeffersonians, then southern democrats) does nt believe in government nor the taxes raised to support it.
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We the people oversee our court system through our (ahem) free press and legislative oversight. Shifting costs to users of the criminal justice system ( and assume that they are all guilty –a lie to say in massachusetts) means an abdication of oversight for a seemingly common sense solution. It is not a solution to anything and gives away one of our rights and obligations under the state constitution.
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What is avoided is the real lack of fiscal accountability and corruption that is ever present in the court system.
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Also lacking is the oversight of the prosecutorial function. Given the notorious convictions of innocent men in Massachusetts court system and the in your face contempt for the law from many of the elected and appointed officials in mass, I think any further erosion might make it impossible to find a way back to good government for the commonwalth.
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I think Patrick has a burden to prove he is not a republican pretending to be a democrat. His appointments of the inside republican crowd have been more than disappointing. This ill concieved idea is one more red flag on Patrick.
In Massachusetts as elsewhere, the whole concet of immunity for prosectors needs review.
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We must cut of the ability of anyone to phoney up a case, phoney dna and put people away for life or any lesser term of years. Restricting immunity is drastic but necessary until the citizen can get corruptio out of the crimial justice system. It woudl certainly save a lot more money than charging criminals.
“I thought it was something that BMG’ers might want to discuss.
I did a search…yours didn’t come up…you didn’t really write enough for me to find your post. shrug
This cuts at the core differences in purpose of government and taxation of dems vs reps.
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It is so unusual to have a dem governor suggest such a thing ( or continue it) that it defies common sense.
Hey, what about all that talk about working together without regard to partisan stripe, where good ideas are considered without political litmus tests? Was it all just blather?? This is a good idea that already exists in some form on the books. If the challenge is to fund more police, what are some better ideas that don’t involve increasing taxes? I’m waiting….
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User fees?
what really are you getting for the tax money you pay?
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it is not police but why don’t you review exactly what you need a police officer to do for you, except ride around 99 % of the time and then 1% active work.
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what about changing the whole structure of the agencies you have. Why are they doing little and taking up too much of hte tax dollar.
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It seems you have no responsibility over what your legislators are doing and then you buy into a ‘user fee’
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I don’t get it
No need to raise taxes. Rescind the foolish tax cuts from the 1990s that created the structural imbalance in the first place – this would return 3.5 million dollars to the funding of mandated services, the social compact and does not involve “raising taxes” but rescinding tax cuts that were unaffordable.
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You asked me “Amicus” and there is my answer. Why not check out this link:
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“It wasn’t spending – large tax cuts created the budget crisis” See http://www.massbudge…
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Stop being #49 in funding public higher education [the elites don’t care – they just go to private schools]. Fix the crumbling roads, bridges, and dams. Restore the 500 treatment beds cut from the recovery community [every bed cut is another prisoner waiting to cost you and me $45,000 a year]
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Government is not evil – how about a new slogan:
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“Together we can take care of one another.”
I’ve never heard of the argument phrased quite that way before, but it’s brilliant: “Don’t raise taxes, just rescind the tax cut.” I’m afraid it could catch on.
Thanks.
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After all, I taught my kids when you make a mess, you clean it up.
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When you make a mistake, you admit you mistake and fix it. That is is what strong people do.
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The only way to fix a mistake is to admit it, face it, and then not repeat it.
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Tax cuts we could not really afford, based on a mistaken assumption that the gravy train would go on for ever in terms of revenue, should be admitted, rescinded, and we can then take care of our infrastructure and build a secure future with sufficient revenue.
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Besides, what do those cuts put in the pocket of the average citizen? Not much. What do they take away from the average citizen? Safe roads, good public education, and a sustainable future.
and I am against it for many of the reasons posted here.
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R/T the realm of criminal justice/state budget/public safety/health care(addictions treatment), instead of new fees one thing I would want the Guv to look into is creating what is called “Drug Courts” where trained judges have the latitude to divert petty drug charge defendents from being sent to prison. Other states have this I believe with very good results. As we know, locking people up in jails and prisons for extended periods of time is very expensive for the state and not very smart to immerse a person in that environment when there’s a good alternative.
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I do not know a whole lot about the policy details of Drug Court Prison Diversion but what I have learned from articles and talking to folks at national conferences and such over the years, it really seems to make a lot of sense for both economic and humanitarian reasons. Does anyone else know more about this and if our Guv is pursuing it?