Being black or brown and poor is a crime
A debt that has a never ending revolving door for minority groups.
In the article, “Modern Day Debtors’ Prisons” The ACLU states, “State and local courts have increasingly attempted to supplement their funding by charging fees to people convicted of crimes, including fees for public defenders, prosecutors, court administration, jail operation, and probation supervision”. The courts have gone to drastic lengths to collect unpaid fines and fees for traffic offenses and other low offenses by locking up people who are too poor to pay them.
They lock them up without providing any hearings to determine their ability to pay or offering alternatives to payment such as community service.
“The simple fact is that violations of such ordinances only lead to jail time for certain people in certain places”
The prison industry is the creditor and the debtors are the minority groups of people that are incarcerated due to violations that they couldn’t afford to pay for. These groups of people are being punished for being poor and therefore, there leaves a never-ending revolving door to the prison system for generations to come. In On the Geneaology of Morals Nietzsche advances his thesis that the origin of the institution of punishment is in a straightforward (pre-moral) creditor/debtor relationship. Nietzsche states, “Precisely among criminals and prisoners the genuine pang of conscience is something extremely rare; the prisons, the penitentiaries are not the breeding places where this species of gnawing worm most loves to flourish…” Nietzsche lists eleven different uses (or “meanings”) of punishment; one utility it does not possess, however, is that of awakening remorse. The psychology of prisoners shows that punishment “makes hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation”.Criminals aren’t viewed to have a conscience and the prisons have no room for a conscience because they are punishing the prisoners not looking to rehabilitate them. Prisons use incarceration as a tool to punish prisoners for the debt that they owe and therefore are given an amount of time to uphold that debt. This goes to show that prisons are a form of punishment that is forced upon mainly minority groups when they break a law or policy. According to NBC News, Of the 2.3 million Americans currently incarcerated by the country’s sprawling criminal justice system, more than 40 percent are black and overwhelmingly poor. Mass incarceration has been an extremely disruptive force in black families separating many fathers in many cases the ultimate provider of the family to only lead into a domino effect of being too poor to pay bills which leads to being incarcerated. Prisons are a form of social death and by the looks of it the only crime that most of these men are committing is being a poor black man in America.
One example of this is from The Atlantic, Quinn Williams is a 37-year-old single mother and long-time resident of St. Louis. Her story is representative of the damage that the broken municipal justice system can have on the lives of the individuals sucked into it. According to Williams, her problems began at the age of 19 when she was ticketed for driving without a license. A couple of months later, after missing a court date, she was arrested and held on a $250 bond, an amount that she could not afford to pay. It eventually became clear that she was unable to pay the bond, even with the threat of continued detention, and she was released without ever appearing before a judge and with the underlying fine still outstanding, she recalls. Since that time, Williams has spent more than four months total in jail in a spiral of unpaid tickets, warrants, and ever-increasing fines that she could not pay because she lacked the necessary income. Hopeful that she would be able to lift herself and her family out of this cycle and pay off her tickets with a college degree, she enrolled in school. She was just 12 credits shy of her degree when she was arrested again for unpaid traffic tickets, she said.
Minority groups will continue to be the debtors in a creditor world where it is systematically set up from during times of slavery till now where people of color are put at a disadvantage in life. Prisons are used as punishment of taking away the freedom of people who can’t pay their debt. Nietzsche states, “The anger from the injured creditor, of the community, give him back again to the wild and outlawed condition from which he was previously protected: it expels him from itself, and now every kind of hostility may vent itself on him”. Nietzsche is stating that the community is a privilege to be a part of and when you break that law you don’t get protected from that community anymore. Therefore, the punishment is getting kicked out of the community and being sent to prison in this case. That is why black communities are broken up and you will find more black men in prison than in the actual population because their communities are being targeted for being poor. The prison industry is taking pleasure and not to mention profiting from minority groups being locked up for the debts that they owe due to the violations that they have. Power is in the 1% in the U.S. you are free if you have money the rest of the world has to suffer. This shows that you can buy anything with money including your own freedom and for those who can’t get punished for it.
There is no place in this country for a justice system that lets rich people buy their freedom while poor people are locked up or lose their driver’s licenses because they can’t afford to pay money to courts. This system is dangerous and needs to stop before the whole population is behind bars and then we will live in society where the rich thrive and the poor suffer. Where freedom you won’t be born with but be born without, showing future generations that there is no life to live, no autonomy, and no hope. The momentum for change will continue even as the current Justice Department declines to lead by encouraging fairness and equal treatment of rich and poor.
