Charging the Poor: Criminal Justice Debt & Modern-Day Debtors’ Prisons

Debtors’ prisons should no longer exist. While imprisonment for debt was common in colonial times in the United States, subsequent constitutional provisions, legislation, and court rulings all called for the abolition of incarcerating individuals to collect debt. Despite these prohibitions, individuals who are unable to pay debts are now regularly incarcerated, and the vast majority of them are indigent. In 2015, at least ten lawsuits were filed against municipalities for incarcerating individuals in modern-day debtors’ prisons. Criminal justice debt is the primary source for this imprisonment. Criminal justice debt includes fines, restitution charges, court costs, and fees. Monetary charges exist at all stages of the criminal justice system from pre-conviction to parole. They include a wide variety of items, such as fees for electronic monitoring, probation, and room and board. Forty-three states even charge fees for an indigent’s “free” public defender. With expanding incarceration rates and contracting state budgets, monetary sanctions have continued to escalate. Additionally, many states and localities are now outsourcing prison, probation, monitoring, and collection services to private companies, who add additional fees and charges to the criminal justice debt burden of defendants. The impact of criminal justice debt is especially severe on the poor and minorities as they are frequently assessed “poverty penalties” for interest, late fees, installment plans, and collection. Often they have to decide between paying criminal justice debt and buying family necessities. The deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore have prompted renewed calls for investigation of the adverse treatment of the poor and minorities in the criminal justice system. The fear of arrest, incarceration, and unfair treatment for those owing criminal justice debt creates distrust in the system. In February 2015, a class action complaint was filed against the City of Ferguson asserting that the city’s jails had become a “modern debtors’ prison scheme” that had “devastated the City’s poor, trapping them for years in a cycle of increased fees, debts, extortion, and cruel jailings.” Moreover, the Department of Justice’s report on the Ferguson Police Department presents a scathing indictment of a system apparently more concerned with revenue collection than justice. Unfortunately, as illustrated by recent lawsuits and investigations alleging debtors’ prisons in Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington, the abuses are not limited to Ferguson, Missouri. The same concerns that led to the historical restrictions on debtors’ prisons have risen again with the growth of modern-day debtors’ prisons. Similar to the prisons in London during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that were criticized for using a privatized system that charged inmates for all services, including room and board, the current justice system improperly charges the poor. It is now time to revisit these concerns and implement effective restrictions to reduce the incidence of debtors’ prisons. To remedy these concerns, my Article proposes eliminating egregious sanctions, providing courts flexibility to base fines on earning levels, and establishing procedures to enforce restrictions against incarcerating those who are truly unable to pay their criminal justice debt

Fishes of the Mountain Province Section of the Ouachita River

A survey of the fishes of the mountain province section of the Ouachita River from the headwaters to Remmel Dam using field collections, literature records, and museum collections showed the ichthyofauna to be made up of 80 species representing 16 families. Fourteen species not previously reported from the mountain province section of the river were collected in this survey. These species include Ichthyomyzon gagei, Nocomis asper, Notropis ortenburgeri, N. rubellus, Pimephales promelas, Moxostoma carinatum, Noturus taylori, Fundulus notatus, Lepomis humilis, Etheostoma histrio, E. proeliare, Percina maculata, P. nasuta, and P. uranidea. The Nocomis specimens were the first collected from the Ouachita River system and the discovery of Noturus taylori represents a major range extension

Exponentially Small Couplings between Twisted Fields of Orbifold String Theories

We investigate the natural occurence of exponentially small couplings in effective field theories deduced from higher dimensional models. We calculate the coupling between twisted fields of the Z_3 Abelian orbifold compactification of the heterotic string. Due to the propagation of massive Kaluza-Klein modes between the fixed points of the orbifold, the massless twisted fields located at these singular points become weakly coupled. The resulting small couplings have an exponential dependence on the mass of the intermediate states and the distance between the fixed points.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure

Sound radiation in turbulent channel flows

Lighthill’s acoustic analogy is formulated for turbulent channel flow with pressure as the acoustic variable, and integrated over the channel width to produce a two-dimensional inhomogeneous wave equation. The equivalent sources consist of a dipole distribution related to the sum of the viscous shear stresses on the two walls, together with monopole and quadrupole distributions related to the unsteady turbulent dissipation and Reynolds stresses respectively. Using a rigid-boundary Green function, an expression is found for the power spectrum of the far-field pressure radiated per unit channel area. Direct numerical simulations (DNS) of turbulent plane Poiseuille and Couette flow have been performed in large computational domains in order to obtain good resolution of the low-wavenumber source behaviour. Analysis of the DNS databases for all sound radiation sources shows that their wavenumber–frequency spectra have non-zero limits at low wavenumber. The sound power per unit channel area radiated by the dipole distribution is proportional to Mach number squared, while the monopole and quadrupole contributions are proportional to the fourth power of Mach number. Below a particular Mach number determined by the frequency and radiation direction, the dipole radiation due to the wall shear stress dominates the far field. The quadrupole takes over at Mach numbers above about 0.1, while the monopole is always the smallest term. The resultant acoustic field at any point in the channel consists of a statistically diffuse assembly of plane waves, with spectrum limited by damping to a value that is independent of Mach number in the low-M limit