In
Oklahoma, criminal defendants can be assessed sixty-six different kinds of
fees, ranging from a "courthouse security fee" to a "sheriff's
fee for pursuing fugitive from justice." There's even a fee for an
indigent person applying for a public defender, even though the indigent by
definition can't pay; once they confirm their indigence by failing to pay, they
are arrested. The sums accumulate to staggering levels. Cynthia Odom, an office
worker in Tulsa, told us that she owes $170,000 and is constantly at risk of
being carted off to jail, away from her two children. Even the Tulsa district
attorney, Stephen Kunzweiler, told us, "It's a dysfunctional system."
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That's
not simply Oklahoma. In New York City, detainees were regularly held for
failure to pay a one-dollar bail. Typically, this happened when someone was
arrested on multiple charges, with $500 bail on the primary charge and
one-dollar bail on the secondary charge. But then the main charge was dropped,
and the person remained stuck in jail because the computer showed a remaining
one-dollar debt. Even if the inmates had healthy bank accounts, they couldn't access
them to pay any sum, and sometimes they had no one to ask for help; the
obstacle wasn't the money but finding a friend or relative with the time and
English-language ability to confront the system and pay the bail. One mother
missed her child's funeral because she was jailed on one-dollar bail. Some
inmates were held for days, weeks or occasionally months for failure to pay the
same amount. Finally, a group of New York University students came up with a
solution: they formed the Dollar Bail Brigade, a collection of volunteers who
would periodically go to jail and bailout inmates for one dollar. Even for
elite university students, the bureaucratic challenges can be staggering: it
took one volunteer twenty-four hours and three jail visits to pay an inmate's
single dollar of bail.
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It's
puzzling that many politicians fear that poor people are trying to milk the
system, while they don't seem to fear rich people doing the same with far more
dollars at stake. The latest fashion for smacking the downtrodden among some
lawmakers: work requirements to receive benefits such as Medicaid. In theory,
requiring certain people to work in return for benefits could be a useful way
to nudge the long-term unemployed back into the labor force. But in practice
these requirements are often just an excuse to cut off benefits. Arkansas in 2018
became the first state to impose work requirements for Medicaid. It also
required participants to log their work hours online with an email address and
a code sent by mail, and proceed through several successive web pages.
Unfortunately, Arkansas ranks forty-eighth among states in internet access, and
many Medicaid recipients have no email or internet. Even months later, in early
2019, Arkansas's Medicaid website had no clear explanation of the new work
requirements or how to reapply or input work hours. Of the first group
subjected to the requirement, 72 percent could not comply. So families lost
health insurance, and then some people were unable to get medication and, their
sicknesses flaring, lost jobs. This is a reminder that work requirements are
often a camouflaged and mean-spirited move to kick people out of the safety
net. Meanwhile, from 2007 to 2016, the state granted subsidies of $156 million
to corporations, including HP and Caterpillar, under an "economic development"
program that researchers found had almost no correlation to increased
employment.
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Some
local leaders are refusing to expand social programs even when voters demand
it. After residents in Utah and Idaho voted to expand Medicaid in November
2018, the Republican legislatures tried to roll back those votes. The ethos of
the country changed in this half century. Many Americans came to celebrate
wealth as a prime metric of success and became more judgmental of those who
lost jobs, went bankrupt, used drugs or otherwise stumbled; the acme of this
changing ethos was the election in 2016 of a billionaire president who was best
known for ostentatious living and for his reality TV refrain: "You're
fired!"
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Nicholas Kristoff "Tightrope:
Americans Reaching for Hope" (2020)
