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NORTH CAROLINA POVERTY RESEARCH FUND 11 Court Fines and Fees: Criminalizing Poverty in North Carolina Jailed for failure to appear During the writing of this report, Joe was charged with littering, a fine-only offense. He failed to appear at his hearing and was arrested in Mecklenburg County. Unable to come up with $1,000 for the secured bond, he spent three weeks in jail waiting for his hearing. His wife was due to give birth while he was locked up. Jasmine, a 16-year-old in Durham, was cited for littering when she tossed aside a Mountain Dew bottle. She put the citation in her backpack and forgot about it. Several weeks later, the officer that cited her sat in her driveway until she came home, arrested her for failure to appear, handcuffed her and took to her to jail, where she was held on a $500 bond. Failure to appear in court can be a result of fear of arrest, inability to pay, lack of notice, misunderstanding, scheduling conflict, transportation issues or the unpredictability of life on the margins. In North Carolina, if your bus delivers you late or you don’t hear your name called in court, you risk a $200 failure to appear fee and the possibility of arrest. Typically, people who miss a hearing are not “serially delinquent.” A study in Rhode Island found that defendants on average had appeared at three hearings before missing the one that generated the warrant for their arrest.1 1. Rhode Island Family Life Center, Court Debt and Related Incarceration in Rhode Island from 2005 through 2007, 12. It is important to note, as one former public defender we interviewed reminded us, that while defendants are regularly jailed for failure to pay fines and fees, they are even more frequently incarcerated for other poverty-related reasons. Although often well-intentioned, conditions of probation like participating in community service or substance abuse treatment programs require resources—money, transportation, time—which are often in short supply for poor people. When defendants can’t comply with those terms, jail is a real possibility. We don’t know how many people are in jail in North Carolina because of their inability to pay fines and fees, but the number is not trivial. A recent estimate found that approximately 18% of inmates in the Mecklenburg County Jail were there because of nonpayment.59 Court observers have witnessed defendants being jailed for nonpayment in counties across the state, from the most urban to the most rural. A judge can send a defendant to jail at a hearing or can issue a bench warrant in the defendant’s absence. Defendants can be arrested and jailed unexpectedly, thrusting families into emergency mode without warning. Whether ordered to do time or awaiting a hearing after arrest, defendants might remain locked up for weeks. The dread of going to jail for nonpayment of fines and fees haunts poor defendants. One person we interviewed identified “fear” as his main feeling about fines and fees. He observed that people who owe court debt are forced to make hard decisions and end up getting in more trouble trying to come up with the funds. “A majority of us will pay with money we don’t have instead of going to jail,” he stressed.60 Time behind bars often erases any progress defendants make toward climbing out of debt. One defendant, on the verge of re-arrest for court debt, described the effect. “I lost my job twice, they gave it back to me before, I don’t think they will this time. I try so hard but I’m losing everything over and over again. After awhile you just feel like giving up and putting a bullet in your head.”61 Job loss, untreated physical or mental health conditions, eviction and homelessness, anxiety, humiliation and other harms can occur after even a short period of incarceration. 59 Gordon, “His Sentence Carried No Jail Time. So Why Did He Keep Ending Up There?” 60 Alex Poulos interview with the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund, October 31, 2017. 61 Rhode Island Family Life Center, Court Debt and Related Incarceration in Rhode Island from 2005 through 2007. 16.