How Private Probation Companies Make Money From the Those They Trap in the Justice System
By Aaron Cantú
January 20, 2014
| Marietta Conner watched the judge expectantly. The
63-year-old assistant minister had just pled guilty to “fail[ing] to
yield to a pedestrian”—a criminal misdemeanor in Georgia—and did not
have enough money to pay her $140 fine. The judge ordered that she be
put on probation. But instead of county probation, Conner was assigned a
private probation company supposed to mimic normal court probabation:
meet with her once a month through a probation officer, collect payments
and confirm her work and address. In the end, the company sapped Conner
of well over the original amount of the fine, and even dangled an
arrest warrant over her head when it erroneously claimed she had missed a
payment.
Conner was lucky. She knew someone at the
Southern Center for Human Rights who helped her escape the trap the
correctional corporation tried to put her in. Yet for hundreds of
thousands of others on probation through a private company, the
experience routinely entails prolonged harassment, indebtedness and even
imprisonment—and sometimes all with the blessing of a judge.
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