Author Archives: Henry Lesnick

American Schools Are STILL Racist, Government Report Finds

Posted on by
click the image for video

click the image for video

Public school students of color get more punishment and less access to veteran teachers than their white peers, according to surveys released Friday by the U.S. Education Department that include data from every U.S. school district.

Black students are suspended or expelled at triple the rate of their white peers, according to the U.S. Education Department’s 2011-2012 Civil Rights Data Collection, a survey conducted every two years. Five percent of white students were suspended annually, compared with 16 percent of black students, according to the report. Black girls were suspended at a rate of 12 percent — far greater than girls of other ethnicities and most categories of boys.

At the same time, minority students have less access to experienced teachers. Most minority students and English language learners are stuck in schools with the most new teachers. Seven percent of black students attend schools where as many as 20 percent of teachers fail to meet license and certification requirements. And one in four school districts pay teachers in less-diverse high schools $5,000 more than teachers in schools with higher black and Latino student enrollment.

Such discrimination lowers academic performance for minority students and puts them at greater risk of dropping out of school, according to previous research. The new research also shows the shortcomings of decades of legal and political moves to ensure equal rights to education. The Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling banned school segregation and affirmed the right to quality education for all children. The 1964 Civil Rights Act guaranteed equal access to education.

“This data collection shines a clear, unbiased light on places that are delivering on the promise of an equal education for every child and places where the largest gaps remain,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement. “In all, it is clear that the United States has a great distance to go to meet our goal of providing opportunities for every student to succeed.”

Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder plan to announce the survey results on Friday. The information, part of an ongoing survey by the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, highlights longstanding inequities in how schools leave minority students and students with disabilities at a disadvantage. For the first time since 2000, the new version of the survey includes results from all 16,500 American school districts, representing 49 million students.

“Unfortunately, too many children don’t have equitable access to experienced and fully licensed teachers, as has again been proven by the data in this report,” said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union. “This is a problem that can and must be addressed.”

Daria Hall, K-12 policy director at the Education Trust, an advocacy group, also called for action. “The report shines a new light on something that research and experience have long told us — that students of color get less than their fair share of access to the in-school factors that matter for achievement,” she said. “Students of color get less access to high level courses. Black students in particular get less instructional time because they’re far more likely to receive out of school suspensions or expulsions. And students of color get less access to teachers who’ve had at least a year on the job and who have at least basic certification. Of course, it’s not enough to just shine a light on the problem. We have to fix it.”

Though 16 percent of America’s public school students are black, they represent 27 percent of students referred by schools to law enforcement, and 31 percent of students arrested for an offense committed in school, according to the survey.

Students with disabilities make up one-fourth of students referred to law enforcement or arrested, although they represent 13 percent of the student population. Students with disabilities are twice as likely to be suspended out of school than peers, with 13 percent of such students being sent home for misbehaving. One of four boy students of color who have disabilities and one in five girl students of color who have disabilities were suspended. Students of color include all non-white ethnic groups except Latino and Asian-American.

These numbers will likely add pressure to dismantle the so-called school-to-prison pipeline, which feeds troubled students into the justice system. The push to ease discipline sometimes causes tension with schools’ efforts to beef up security after school mass shootings, like the one in Newtown, Conn. Last week, a set of reports 26 academics pointed to a few local studies that found that disparate discipline outcomes did not happen as a result of certain ethnic groups acting out more than others.

According to the new data, disparities begin as early as preschool. Black students make up 18 percent of preschool enrollment, but they comprise 48 percent of preschool students receiving more than one suspension out of school. White students, representing 43 percent of preschool students, only receive 26 percent of out-of-school suspensions more than once.

Randi Weingarten, who heads the American Federation of Teachers union, noted that despite a recent Education Department Equity and Excellence Commission report calling for measures to remedy discrimination, little has been done. “It is shameful that not a single recommendation has been implemented,” Weingarten said. “We don’t need more data to tell us we need action.”

source: huffington post

Major Conduit in School to Prison Pipeline End-of-Month Hunger Hurts Students on Food Stamps

Posted on by

3707947_orig

ILLUSTRATION BY TIM LAHAN

It’s the beginning of a new month, and that’s a good thing in America’s schools, because life seems to get worse there as a month goes by. Students get in more trouble toward the end of the month than at the beginning.New research suggests that’s especially true for students from families on food stamps, perhaps because life at home gets more stressful as benefits run out. Modifying the food-stamp program so that benefits are paid out twice, rather than once, a month could help eliminate these cycles.As Sir Thomas More noted in the 16th century, money has a tendency to burn a hole in one’s pocket. Social Security beneficiaries illustrate this truth; they splurge a little when they receive their monthly checks. And among households in general, spending tends to decline between paydays.The behavior may extend to benefits under the food-stamp program, now formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. In 2011, almost one in seven Americans received support from SNAP. About half of the roughly 45 million beneficiaries are children.

The average monthly benefit for a family of four is about $500, and the funds can be used only for buying food. Gone are the old paper food stamps, which often stigmatized shoppers at the checkout register. SNAP benefits now come in the form of an electronic card that looks and operates like a debit card.

Bulk Buying
Families that use food stamps naturally tend to buy more food at the beginning of the month, after receiving their benefit. In fact, more than a quarter of beneficiary households redeem their entire monthly allotment within the first week of receiving it, the Agriculture Department’s Food and Nutrition Service, which oversees the SNAP program, has found. More than half the families take just two weeks to use up their full benefit. And 86 percent of families redeem more than half within the first half of the month.

Presumably, bulk purchasing toward the beginning of the month need not mean that families run out of food before the month is out — especially since most families are supposed to supplement food-stamp benefits by buying some food with their own income. In reality, however, it often does. Research by economist Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago has found that caloric intake among food-stamp beneficiaries is 10 percent to 15 percent lower, on average, at the end of the month than at the beginning.

About 40 percent of food-stamp households make only one major grocery-shopping trip per month,research by Parke Wilde of the Agriculture Department and Christine Ranney of Cornell University has shown. And among those households, caloric intake drops substantially over the month.

For the other households, who shop more frequently, caloric intake remains steady through the month.

(Note that these studies were conducted before the 2009 stimulus legislation, which temporarily increased SNAP benefits. It is possible that the results would be different or less pronounced today, but I suspect the same broad pattern still exists.)

A recent analysis by Lisa Gennetian of ideas42, a new nonprofit research organization dedicated to real-world applications of behavioral economics, suggests that the decline in food at home and the associated increase in family stress may be causing problems at school. (Full disclosure: I serve on the board of directors of ideas42.)

Gennetian and her co-authors linked SNAP beneficiary data with disciplinary records for all fifth-to-eighth graders in Chicago’s public schools. Among students from SNAP families, disciplinary problems such as fighting, vandalism or weapons possession increased by almost 50 percent in the final week of the month compared with the first week, the researchers found. (For non-SNAP families, disciplinary events also rose, but significantly less.)

Snack Programs Help
Strikingly, the researchers did not find an increase in disciplinary events among SNAP families in schools with after- school snack programs. They conclude: “The most plausible explanations for students’ inability to adhere to proper school behavior include hunger caused by reduced consumption of calories and/or increase in household stress due to exhausting all forms of liquid assets.”

So one approach that could address the school disciplinary problem is to expand after-school snack programs. But a more comprehensive strategy worth exploring would be to split the SNAP benefit into two semi-monthly installments. Then food purchases and caloric intake might be smoother over time. With the electronic cards, this would be pretty easy to do.

It could be inconvenient for families that have a difficult commute to a supermarket and therefore want to make only one trip a month. This is a complex problem, and would benefit from research. On the one hand, more shopping trips are time- consuming and the travel involved can use up resources better spent on food itself. On the other hand, the single-trip families seem to be the ones running low on food, and it’s plausible that their children are among those getting in more trouble at school.

Right now, federal law prohibits splitting SNAP benefits into two installments, but the rule is waivable for demonstration purposes. So perhaps a city (Chicago comes to mind) would like to test the possibility that two monthly components would help reduce disciplinary events at school. To do the study right, we would need to compare the current system to two alternatives: a higher level of benefit, still paid out once a month, and the same level of benefit, but split into two monthly payments. If the problems associated with once-a-month benefits persist even with higher payments, but diminish with more frequent ones, there’d be good reason to try adjusting the system.

(Peter Orszag is vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup Inc. and a former director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama administration)

Source : bloomberg view

Black Preschoolers More Likely To Face Suspension

Posted on by

The racial disparities in American education, from access to high-level classes and experienced teachers to discipline, were highlighted in a report released Friday by the Education Department’s civil rights arm.

PRESCHOOL SUSPENSIONSWASHINGTON (AP) — Black students are more likely to be suspended from U.S. public schools — even as tiny preschoolers.

The racial disparities in American education, from access to high-level classes and experienced teachers to discipline, were highlighted in a report released Friday by the Education Department’s civil rights arm.

The suspensions — and disparities — begin at the earliest grades.

Black children represent about 18 percent of children enrolled in preschool programs in schools, but almost half of the students were suspended more than once, the report said. Six percent of the nation’s districts with preschools reported suspending at least one preschool child.

Advocates long have said get-tough suspension and arrest policies in schools have contributed to a “school-to-prison” pipeline that snags minority students, but much of the emphasis has been on middle school and high school policies. This was the first time the department reported data on preschool discipline.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration issued guidance encouraging schools to abandon what it described as overly zealous discipline policies that send students to court instead of the principal’s office. But even before the announcement, school districts have been adjusting policies that disproportionately affect minority students.

Overall, the data show that black students of all ages are suspended and expelled at a rate that’s three times higher than that of white children. Even as boys receive more than two-thirds of suspensions, black girls are suspended at higher rates than girls of any other race or most boys.

The data doesn’t explain why the disparities exist or why the students were suspended.

“It is clear that the United States has a great distance to go to meet our goal of providing opportunities for every student to succeed,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement.

“This critical report shows that racial disparities in school discipline policies are not only well documented among older students, but actually begin during preschool,” Attorney General Eric Holder said. “Every data point represents a life impacted and a future potentially diverted or derailed. This administration is moving aggressively to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline in order to ensure that all of our young people have equal educational opportunities.”

Nationally, 1 million children were served in public preschool programs, with about 60 percent of districts offering preschool during the 2011-2012 school year, according to the data. The data show nearly 5,000 preschoolers were suspended once. At least 2,500 were suspended more than once.

Daniel Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies for the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, said the findings are disturbing because the suspended preschoolers aren’t likely presenting a danger, such as teenager bringing a gun to school.

“Almost none of these kids are kids that wouldn’t be better off with some support from educators,” Losen said. “Just kicking them out of school is denying them access to educational opportunity at such a young age. Then, as they come in for kindergarten, they are just that much less prepared.”

Losen said it’s appropriate to discipline a 4-year-old, but a more appropriate response might be moving them to a different educational setting with additional services.

“Most preschool kids want to be in school,” Losen said. “Kids just don’t understand why they can’t go to school.”

Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, a think tank that specializes in social issues affecting minority communities, has been advocating against the overly zealous use of suspensions against African-American students. Unfortunately, she said it didn’t surprise her to hear that even younger black students were being kicked out of school at a high rate.

“I think most people would be shocked that those numbers would be true in preschool, because we think of 4- and 5-years-olds as being innocent,” she said. “But we do know that schools are using zero tolerance policies for our youngest also, that while we think our children need a head start, schools are kicking them out instead.”

Kimbrelle Lewis, principal of Raleigh-Bartlett Meadows Elementary School in Memphis, said she’s never suspended a child in her school’s preschool program and would only consider it in an “extreme circumstance.” She said her district provides behavior specialists and other services to children with discipline problems so strategies can be worked out with teachers and parents if preschoolers need additional support.

If there are racial disparities among preschoolers disciplined, “I do think it’s something to look it. I think it’s a conversation to have,” said Lewis, who served on a committee with the National Association of Elementary School Principals looking at issues affecting younger school children.

Source: Mintpress News

College Recruiters Guilty Of Avoiding Low-Income, Minority Schools

Posted on by

Without visits from recruiters, low-income students never discover college campuses that exist beyond their hometowns.

By Katie Rucke, Mintpress news

 

A prospective student views a booth at a college admissions fair in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. (Photo/COD Newsroom via Flickr)

A prospective student views a booth at a college admissions fair in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. (Photo/COD Newsroom via Flickr)

During a time when more and more low-income high school students are working to obtain a college degree, college recruiters are less likely to visit low-income schools with large minority student-body populations than other high schools, according to a new report in the Los Angeles Times.

For example, The Webb Schools, a private high school in Claremont, Calif., attracted 113 college recruiters, including from Ivy League schools for its some 106 students in the senior class. Jefferson High School on the other hand, a low-income public school with 280 seniors in South Los Angeles, only had visits from eight college recruiters.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, “Among schools in affluent communities: La Canada High School hosted 127 visits from recruiters between August and November. Palisades Charter on the Westside, 133; the private Marlborough School, a girls campus in Hancock Park, 102.

“Corona del Mar, a public school in Newport Beach, had 85, sometimes booking as many as six in a single day. On Oct. 10, for example, representatives of Pepperdine, Yale, Lehigh, Washington State, Columbia and Whitworth, were there between 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., according to college coordinator Mary Russell. The recruiters meet with students in a special lounge recently refurbished with parent donations.

“By contrast, Pasadena High School had 20 visits over the fall semester; Compton High, five; Hoover High in Glendale, 15; Santa Ana High, five; Belmont High near downtown Los Angeles, about 25; Roosevelt High in Boyle Heights, 20.”

Though college recruiters failure to visit a high school doesn’t mean that those students won’t be accepted into the school, recruiters are often a way many low-income students discover college campuses that exist beyond their hometowns. During these visits, recruiters can also discover those star academic students.

Counselors and education experts say that without these visits, some students may not understand how to properly fill out college entrance and financial aid paperwork as well.

Shaun R. Harper, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, called the findings “shameful.” And Gregory Wolniak, director of New York University’s Center for Research on Higher Education Outcomes, who has studied how high school alumni enrollment networks help students get into college, said that “Having visits from schools can serve to compensate for some of those family background differences.”

“Underserved communities have trouble getting resources and access to things like that,” said Jefferson Principal Michael Taft. He added that his school is no longer able to keep a full-time counselor on staff due to budget cuts, which has reduced the number of college recruiters that visit the school, as there is no one to encourage them to visit a low-income, predominantly minority public school.

Although recruiters are limited in the amount of time they have to visit high schools, Robert Springall, admissions dean at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, said that recruiters should be careful not to lock themselves in “a circle of colleagues and schools,” explaining “it doesn’t necessarily give you great opportunities to discover completely new schools.”

 

Ian Haney López on the Dog Whistle Politics of Race, Part One

Posted on by

What do Cadillac-driving “welfare queens,” a “food stamp president” and the “lazy, dependent and entitled” 47 percent tell us about post-racial America? They’re all examples of a type of coded racism that this week’s guest,Ian Haney López, writes about in his new book, Dog Whistle Politics.

Haney López is an expert in how racism has evolved in America since the civil rights era. Over the past 50 years, politicians have mastered the use of dog whistles – code words that turn Americans against each other while turning the country over to plutocrats. This political tactic, says Haney López, is “the dark magic” by which middle-class voters have been seduced to vote against their own economic interests.

“It comes out of a desire to win votes. And in that sense… It’s racism as a strategy. It’s cold, it’s calculating, it’s considered,” Haney López tells Bill, “it’s the decision to achieve one’s own ends, here winning votes, by stirring racial animosity.”

Ian Haney López, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, is a senior fellow at the policy analysis and advocacy group, Demos.

Don’t miss: Part two of their conversation »

Producer: Candace White. Segment Producer: Robert Booth. Editor: Sikay Tang.

source: http://billmoyers.com/episode/ian-haney-lopez-on-the-dog-whistle-politics-of-race/

Criminal Justice System Is Criminal

Posted on by

Tale of Two Teen Says it All

 

Texas teen driving drunk kills four but gets probation

after parents’ wealth blamed–they spoiled him.

Ethan-Couch

A Texas judge agreed with defense attorneys’ claims that a 16-year-old who killed four people while driving drunk had been given whatever he wanted by his wealthy parents and had never learned to accept responsibility for his
actions.

 

 

 

 

Read More

Bronx Teen Walking Home Thrown In Violent New York Jail For Years without Ever Having Been Convicted

He Says It Happens Every Day

http://youtu.be/yIlSqk_pfbA

Bronx resident Kalief Browder was walking home from a party when
he was abruptly arrested by New York City police officers on May 14, 2010. A
complete stranger said Browder had robbed him a few weeks earlier and, consequently, changed the 16-year-old’s life  forever.

Read More

Marijuana Prohibition Was Racist From The Start. Not Much Has Changed.

Posted on by

The Huffington Post  | by Nick Wing

   click on the tittle below to watch video 

Marijuana Laws: Racist From The Start?

 

As the nation’s nearly 80-year history of pot prohibition slowly begins to crumble, starting with Colorado’s recent implementation of taxed and legalized recreational marijuana, critics of the increasingly popular policy shift are jumping to denounce the move. A number of white pundits and newspaper columnists have been among the most vocal, claiming that marijuana must remain illegal, despite their own prior use of it, because it supposedly makes people dumber.The columns themselves served as the most persuasive evidence of that point. And while such a correlation between pot use and intelligence has yet to be proven, one must be willing to ignore the racist roots of marijuana prohibition and the manner in which this unjust system of anti-drug enforcement still plays out today to make such a shallow argument in the first place.

In a column for The Fix, Maia Szalavitz reminds us that Harry Anslinger, the father of the war on weed, fully embraced racism as a tool to demonize marijuana. As the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a predecessor to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Anslinger institutionalized his belief that pot’s “effect on the degenerate races” made its prohibition a top priority. Here are just a few of his most famous (and most racist) quotes:

typeBetween Anslinger’s ruminations on the need to keep marijuana away from minorities — especially the entertainers! — were countless other fabrications about the health effects of pot. It was “more dangerous than heroin or cocaine” and “leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing,” he claimed.“If the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with marijuana, he would drop dead of fright,” Anslinger declared in a line that underscored the type of extreme anti-marijuana hysteria that served as a catalyst for the 1936 propaganda film “Reefer Madness.”

Anslinger was also a liar. As the drug war got going in the early 20th century, the bureau published surveys showing its efforts to combat drug use had led to dramatic declines over the decade of the 1920s. But drug historian David Courtwright, through a Freedom of Information Act request, got his hands on the actual surveys and found the data to have been fabricated. He also found a private memo from Anslinger admitting the numbers were made up. Nevertheless, Anslinger used that success to argue for an expansion of the drug war to weed in 1937. (The incident is covered in the book This Is Your Country On Drugs, by HuffPost’s Ryan Grim.)

Meanwhile, states throughout the south began implementing drug laws as part of the explicitly racist Jim Crow system, with southern lawmakers being quite open about the racist motivations behind the laws.

Sure, this was more than 75 years ago, but how much has actually changed today? The feds have stripped Anslinger’s offensive language from their official mission statements, but we are left with anti-drug policies that are hardly less racist in their application.

According to a 2013 study by the American Civil Liberties Union, blacks across the nation were nearly four times more likely than whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession in 2010, despite data that suggested they use the drug at about the same rate. In some states, blacks were up to six times more likely to be arrested. This disparity isn’t new, and plays into broader arrest data: A study published in the journal Crime & Delinquency this month found that by the age of 23, nearly 50 percent of black males have been arrested, compared to 44 percent of Hispanic males and 38 percent of white males.

In all, around 750,000 people are arrested for marijuana each year, with more than 650,000 of them for possession alone. (The U.S., of course, incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other nation in the world.)

As Tressie McMillan Cottom writes in Slate, these commonplace arrests for simple marijuana possession have rippling effects, especially in minority communities. Anyone convicted of possession or sale of a controlled substance under federal or state law forfeits their eligibility for any [federal] grant, loan, or work assistance, meaning that a dimebag could cost a hopeful teen his shot at an affordable higher education.

And though the anti-marijuana hyperbole of the “Reefer Madness” era may no longer be believable today, our current anti-drug policies remain bolstered by arguments that have little, if any, factual basis. According to federal authorities, marijuana fully deserves its current standing as a Schedule I substance, alongside heroin, LSD, ecstasy and a “Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas”-length list of inorganic -dines, -mines, -dols and -ates. By definition, then, the government considers marijuana to have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” It is among the “most dangerous drugs of all … with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence.”

Opponents regularly cherry-pick studies that support these conclusions about weed, while simultaneously ignoring others that may counter them, or at least lead to further questions about whether marijuana is accurately scheduled. Anti-pot crusaders also stubbornly insist that it is a “gateway drug,” despite countless studies that have been unable to prove any direct causation between using weed and trying harder drugs.

Regardless of what individual studies have found, the fact of the matter is that the federal ban on marijuana has discouraged the type and volume of research that will likely need to be done before any absolute conclusions can be made about weed. Until then, very little is certain — except for the racial undertones of the war on pot.

US: For-Profit Probation Tramples Rights of Poor

Posted on by

Minor Offenders, Charged Huge Fees, 
End up Jailed

(New York) – Every year, US courts sentence several hundred thousand misdemeanor offenders to probation overseen by private companies that charge their fees directly to the probationers. Often, the poorest people wind up paying the most in fees over time, in what amounts to a discriminatory penalty. And when they can’t pay, companies can and do secure their arrest.

The 72-page report, “Profiting from Probation: America’s ‘Offender-Funded’ Probation Industry,” describes how more than 1,000 courts in several US states delegate tremendous coercive power to companies that are often subject to little meaningful oversight or regulation. In many cases, the only reason people are put on probation is because they need time to pay off fines and court costs linked to minor crimes. In some of these cases, probation companies act more like abusive debt collectors than probation officers, charging the debtors for their services.

“Many of the people supervised by these companies wouldn’t be on probation to begin with if they had more money,” said Chris Albin-Lackey, senior researcher on business and human rights at Human Rights Watch. “Often, the poorer people are, the more they ultimately pay in company fees and the more likely it is that they will wind up behind bars.”

Companies refuse to disclose how much money they collect in fees from offenders under their supervision. Remarkably, the courts that hire them generally do not demand this information either. Human Rights Watch estimates that, in Georgia alone, the industry collects a minimum of US$40 million in fees every year from probationers. In other states, disclosure requirements are so minimal that is not possible even to hazard a guess how much probation companies are harvesting from probationers in fees.

Human Rights Watch research in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama revealed numerous egregious cases that illustrate the abuses related to outsourcing probation supervision as it is practiced today.

  • In Augusta, Georgia, a man who pled guilty to shoplifting a US$2 can of beer and fined US$200 was ultimately jailed for failing to pay more than US$1,000 in fees to his probation company. At the time he was destitute, selling his own blood plasma twice a week to raise money.
  • In another Georgia town, a company probation officer said she routinely has offenders arrested for non-payment and then bargains with their families for money in exchange for the person’s release.
  • In Alabama, the town of Harpersville shut down its entire municipal court after a judge slammed the municipality and its probation company for running what he called a “judicially sanctioned extortion racket.”
  • The Mississippi Delta town of Greenwood, an impoverished community of 15,000, had more than 1,200 people on probation with the private firm Judicial Corrections Services as of August 2013. Many were guilty only of traffic offenses. The town’s municipal judge told Human Rights Watch that “maybe one or two” of those had warrants out for their arrest. The real figure was close to 300.

These cases are not mere aberrations. Not all company probation officers behave unethically, but they are all subject to perverse financial incentives that encourage abusive behavior. And courts that view probation companies as an easy way to boost collections have troubling incentives not to ask hard questions about the tactics those companies employ.

Probation companies operate on an “offender-funded” basis that is financially appealing to many courts and local governments. They offer to provide probation supervision for low-level, misdemeanor offenders at no cost to the taxpayer. Instead, their contracts stipulate that judges should order probationers to pay them various fees as a condition of their sentence of probation. Many companies’ profits are entirely dependent on their ability to collect these fees from probationers.

In Bearden v. Georgia, the US Supreme Court has ruled that a person on probation cannot be jailed simply because they cannot afford to pay a criminal fine. But many courts effectively delegate the responsibility of determining whether an offender can afford to pay fines and company fees to their probation companies. This presents a clear conflict of interest because company profits, along with the quarterly bonuses of some company probation officers, depend entirely on their ability to collect fees.

“Probation companies have a financial stake in every single one of the cases they supervise,” Albin-Lackey said. “Their employees are the last people who should be entrusted with determining whether an offender can afford to pay company fees.”

In some cases, courts sentence offenders to probation because they think they require supervision and monitoring. But in many cases, people are sentenced to probation purely so that courts can task their probation companies with monitoring an offender’s efforts to pay down fines and court costs over time. These offenders would not be on probation at all if they could afford to pay these costs immediately and in full at the time of their sentencing.

Many are guilty only of minor traffic violations like driving without proof of insurance or seatbelt violations. While these offenses often carry no real threat of jail time in and of themselves, a probationer who fails to keep up with payments on their fines, court costs, and company fees can be locked up.

“Courts sentence several hundred thousand people to probation with private companies every year but many do almost nothing to guard against abusive practices,” Albin-Lackey said. “Perversely, some of America’s poorest counties are golden business opportunities for the industry precisely because so many residents struggle to pay off their fines.”