Might low pay be a civil rights issue?
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New Hampshire has no state-set minimum wage, so it abides by the federal government’s woefully low $7.25 per hour rate. State legislators killed bills last month that would have established state-issued minimum wages—livable wages. It can’t be ignored that Pendleton would probably still be alive if he made enough money to afford his bail. The federal government has recently come to accept that that the criminal justice system’s policies around bail and court fines are exacerbating the nation’s poverty and incarceration crises.
“When bail is set unreasonably high, people are behind bars only because they are poor,” said U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch at a White House convening last December. “Not because they’re a danger or a flight risk; only because they are poor.”
After dressing down Ferguson, Missouri, for the city’s reliance on fining low-income residents into jail and to death, the U.S. Justice Department realized that Ferguson was no anomaly. Many cities and their court systems have been imposing exorbitant fines and fees on people who’ve been arrested for the pettiest of crimes, like jaywalking. Lynch said at the White House in December that it has become “painfully clear” that “in so many instances, an individual’s access to justice has become predicated on their ability to literally pay for it.”
This point is made more disturbing by the fact that cities are increasingly using criminal justice debt—court fines and fees—to service municipal debt, with low-wage individuals bearing the brunt of these economic burdens. A report from the White House’s “Council of Economic Advisors on Fees, Fines, and Bail” points out the ways this has built up over time:
