Between Modern Debtors’ Prison & Modern Peonage (Pt. 2)

This is Part 2 of a two-part international & interdisciplinary workshop exploring economic discrimination in criminal justice systems around the world. [Part 1 (Fri, Sept 13, 2024) is here: https://crimlrev.net/2024/09/14/betwe...]

Criminal justice systems the world over are run through with economic discrimination: from the pre-trial stage (bail, and cash bail in particular) to the trial or bargaining stage (from a lack or scarcity of public defender services to fees for available public defenders, along with various other fees, charges, and hidden taxes) to the sanction stage (fines, more fees, surcharges, restitution, etc.). What’s more, each time an economic sanction isn’t paid, further economic—or non-economic—sanctions are triggered, including imprisonment and a panoply of “collateral” sanctions such as ineligibility for or loss of drivers’ and occupational licenses and public services.

The result is the systemic criminalization of poverty across the entire criminal justice process—wholly apart from the long-familiar roster of individual criminal offenses punishing poverty explicitly or implicitly (vagrancy, loitering, etc.) which has traditionally attracted the lion’s share of judicial and scholarly attention.

The phenomenon of criminal justice systems operating as modern debtors’ prisons cuts across countries and legal systems in the Global South and North. In countries from India to Germany, prison–literally–is imposed as punishment for failing to pay a fine. The practice of using economic penalties as a source of government revenue is also widespread. The Kenyan judiciary finances itself partially through court fees. In the United States, local governments enrich themselves through a net of punitive economic sanctions so dense and wide that many ensnared in it—and notably those living from paycheck to paycheck and, disproportionately, racialized individuals—find it impossible to escape. In effect, they live in a state of perpetual penal peonage that resembles less a modern debtors’ prison (whose occupants, some two centuries ago, enjoyed enough public empathy to result in its demise) and more a form of modern slavery.

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The workshop proceedings will appear in a special issue of the Modern Criminal Law Review [https://crimlrev.net]. For a collection of supplemental materials, please consult MCLR+ Resources “Economic & Poverty Sanctions.” [https://crimlrev.net/mclr-resources-2/]

Participants include:

Gustavo Beade, Universidad Austral de Chile, Law
Morten Boe, Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Crime, Security & Law, Freiburg, Germany
Sarai Chisala-Tempelhoff, Gender and Justice Unit, Malawi
Patricia Faraldo Cabana, University of A Coruña, Spain, Law
Jean Galbraith, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Mao-hong Lin, National Taipei University, Taiwan, Criminology
Chikondi M. Mandala, Gender and Justice Unit, Malawi
Abhinav Sekhri, Advocate, Delhi High Court & Independent Scholar, New Delhi
Robert Stewart, University of Maryland, Criminology
Brieanna Watters, University of Minnesota, Sociology

Part 2: September 21, 2024 @ 12pm (EDT)

Abhinav Sekhri, Welcome and Introduction 00:00
Sarai Chisala-Tempelhoff & Chikondi M. Mandala, “Beyond the Bars: Unmasking Malawi’s Journey with Economic Sanctions in the Criminal Justice System” 02:27
Abhinav Sekhri, “The New Indian Criminal Codes: A Missed Opportunity to Restore Fairness” 25:31
Mao-hong Lin, “Location, Relocation, and Dislocation: Sanctioning the Poor through Service in Taiwan’s Criminal Legal System” 57:58
Patricia Faraldo Cabana, “On the Affordability of Fines, or Why Fines Were Made Affordable for Low-Income Offenders” 1:28:49