Despite being blatantly unconstitutional, citizens are commonly being jailed for their inability to pay tickets and fines, wreaking havoc on people’s lives (and costing the state far greater sums than the unpaid tickets), ACLU Ohio reveals:
The resurgence of contemporary debtors’ prisons sits squarely at this intersection of poverty and criminal justice. In towns across the state, thousands of people face the looming specter of incarceration every day, simply because they are poor.
For Ohio’s poor and working poor, an unaffordable traffic ticket or fine is just the beginning of a protracted process that may involve contempt charges, mounting fees, arrest warrants, and even jail time. The stark reality is that, in 2013, Ohioans are being repeatedly jailed simply for being too poor to pay fines.
The U.S. Constitution, the Ohio Constitution, and Ohio Revised Code all prohibit debtors’ prisons. The law requires that, before jailing anyone for unpaid fines, courts must determine whether an individual is too poor to pay.
Union, is a Canadian citizen who got his start working on Wall Street for a firm that represented equities traders. After 9/11, Jaffer started to volunteer for the ACLU representing fellow immigrants rounded-up by federal law enforcement. He went on to take a full-time job with the group and ended up leading the ACLU’s legal challenges to Obama’s program of killing suspected enemies of the state. According to the CBC, Jaffer’s motivation is a fear that Obama will eventually turn the drone program against Canada and order Hellfire missiles to rain down on Canadian towns and cities -
