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NORTH CAROLINA POVERTY RESEARCH FUND 24 Court Fines and Fees: Criminalizing Poverty in North Carolina state. This reflects narrow legislative and court system interests and priorities. We can do better, for all North Carolinians. Conclusion Over the last two decades, the North Carolina General Assembly has levied a very broad and costly array of fees against even indigent defendants that are meant to help finance the operation of the criminal justice system and supplement government revenues. This “user fee” program works massive hardship upon low income Tar Heels and their families. It frequently locks them into a cycle of punishment and debt from which they cannot escape. As one public defender put it, “Clients enter the criminal justice circle of hell. Every day there are cases where poor people get harsher treatment. It puts the poor in a tough place and it keeps them there.”129 The broad and growing user fee program raises a cascade of constitutional problems. It often converts the courts into tax collection agencies, in violation of an appropriate separation of powers. It deprives many poor defendants of the essentials of due process, frequently leading to incarceration and other punishments based merely on their poverty. It also regularly denies equal protection of the laws to the poorest members of society and burdens other protections secured by the bill of rights. And the harsh and bullying enforcement scheme designed to secure payment, and to eliminate fee waivers, is a rank violation of the independence of the North Carolina judiciary. The cost and fee program is also frequently Kafkaesque in operation. Under it, we take relatively minor offenses, minor enough that they typically don’t implicate jail time, and we assess charges against defendants that we know can’t pay. We then penalize them for not paying and impose further charges and harsher sanctions for their non-compliance. Each successive step is built on a defiance of logic and candor, a knowing miscalculation. It is cynicism on stilts. The oddness arises, in major part, from the decision to try to fund the judicial system by user fees wrung from the most unlikely group of donors—criminal defendants who are largely indigent. It crushes lives for modest offenses and forces judges into roles that cast doubt on their independence and essential fairness. It also ignores the reality that all citizens have potent interest in a strong, fair, functioning justice system. Citizens ought to pay for it, like they do police, or the fire department, or, for that matter, the legislature. Until the mistaken course is legislatively corrected, North Carolina courts can embrace a significant list of ameliorative steps, discussed above, to diminish the hardship and constitutional impropriety of the imposed fee system; recognizing, as Justice Hugo Black put it 75 years ago, “there can be no equal justice where the kind of trial a person gets depends on the amount of money he has.” 129 Mani Dexter interview with the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund, August 21, 2017.