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NORTH CAROLINA POVERTY RESEARCH FUND 16 Court Fines and Fees: Criminalizing Poverty in North Carolina DeVine of Orange County was more frank. “The whole scheme is meant to intimidate judges.”83 The law’s primary public spokesperson, Senator Randleman, indicated it was designed to make sure judges “seriously consider their action.”84 The North Carolina scheme mirrors components of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines passage and implementation that were held unconstitutional by federal courts. The Feeney Amendment (to the federal guidelines) made courts declare reasons for departures from the guidelines and demanded the Sentencing Commission compile a list of all downward departures imposed, with the names of the judges who imposed them. The reporting requirement was deemed a clear “violation of the separation of powers.”85 Larger Impact of Fines and Fees Fines and fees inflict disproportionate harm North Carolina’s system of fines and fees raise serious questions about the neutrality of the criminal justice system. Poor people pay more and are more likely to suffer collateral consequences than their better-off neighbors. Fines and fees take on a racial cast as well. Because a higher percentage of African Americans, Hispanics and other minorities are poor, the burden of court costs falls on them more squarely. Additionally, the criminal justice system is pervasively racialized: minorities, especially African Americans, are stopped, searched, arrested and incarcerated at higher rates than whites.86 Structurally discriminatory practices such as the over-policing of minority neighborhoods, the school-to-prison pipeline, mandatory sentencing and racial profiling combine with bias to ensure that criminal punishment is concentrated in poor, minority communities.87 Cities with larger shares of African Americans rely more heavily on fines and fees from petty offenses to raise municipal revenue.88 African American men serve longer sentences than white men convicted of the same crime.89 African Americans are more likely to receive harsher plea deals,90 be charged higher court fees and be jailed for nonpayment of fees.91 Seen in this light, court costs are an extension of our nation’s long history of racial control through the criminal justice system: a practice that extends through convict leasing and, more recently, mass 83 Pat DeVine interview with the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund, August 7, 2017. 84 Fain, “Budget Language Targets Court Fee Waivers for Poor Defendants.” The law was introduced into the budget anonymously and has no official sponsors. 85 United States v. Mendoza, 2004 WL 1191118 (C.D. Cal. 2004) (holding various portions of the Federal Sentencing Act constitutional, with the exception of the Department of Justice reporting on individual judges sentencing practices, which the court held violated separation of powers.) 86 See Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness; Benns and Strode, “Debtors’ Prison in 21st-Century America”; Kahn and Kirk, “What It’s Like to Be Black in the Criminal Justice System”; Makarechi, “What the Data Really Says About Police and Racial Bias”; Rothwell, “How the War on Drugs Damages Black Social Mobility.” 87 See Harris, Evans, and Beckett, “Drawing Blood from Stones: Legal Debt and Social Inequality in the Contemporary United States”; Pew Charitable Trusts, Collateral Costs; Shannon and Uggen, “Visualizing Punishment.” 88 Kopf, “The Fining of Black America.” 89 Schmitt, Reedt, and Blackwell, Demographic Differences in Sentencing: An Update to the 2012 Booker Report, 2. 90 Rolnick Borchetta and Fontier, “When Race Tips the Scales in Plea Bargaining.” 91 Bastien, Ending the Debt Trap: Strategies to Stop the Abuse of Court-Imposed Fines and Fees, 5.