Courts as Creditors

I teach my students that the days of the debtor's prison and the workhouse are long past; the only debt you can go to prison for are domestic support obligations.  But it turns out that there's another jailable offense:  failing to pay the court.  The New York Times has a story about Florida's practice of issuing writs of bodily attachment or "blue writs" for failure to appear in court.  The jail time under one of these writs is supposed to be at most 48 hours (plus a $20 fine!), but a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU found that some individuals were imprisoned longer.  Florida's state constitution (like many other state constitutions) specifically forbids imprisonment for debt (excluding fraud), and there's a line of US Supreme Court cases holding that the Equal Protection Clause bars imprisonment solely because someone is unable to pay a debt. 

Technically it is jail time for failure to comply with a court order (much like failure to comply with a domestic support obligation); in that sense it's just plain old civil contempt.  But the wide-scale use of civil contempt to force payment for court fees strikes me as novel.  It's certainly been used before to effectuate things like turnover orders, but there's something very awkward about the courts in the role of creditor.

Comments

[Kristina M]

Please see here: http://aclumich.org/issues/due-process/2009-03/1353

Also, at least in my state, prisoners, once they are freed, are levied with a substantial fine; a bill for their time served (they serve time, and then they pay for the time they served). If they fail to pay the debt, they are sent back to prison as a parole violation.

We still have debtor's prisons. They are alive and well. We just changed the names.

[Fraud Guy]

And, if you want to contest your imprisonment, you have to pay a filing fee for your motion--oh, wait, you are in because you didn't have the money in the first place.

[catleg]

Nevada will prosecute a casino marker as a criminal bad check even though in order to write a casino marker you have to fill out a credit application, are assigned a credit limit, and they keep track of this activity in a casino-industry credit bureau called Central Credit. The saddest part is that you can get extradited to Nevada from other states which do not have similar laws in effect.