Paying to Be Punished
Paying to Be Punished: A Statutory Analysis of Sex Offender Registration Fees is a new article appearing in the Journal of Criminal Justice Ethics that identifies and quantifies the imposition of a registration fee on offenders who are legally compelled to pay these registration costs, regardless of whether they are still currently under community supervision.
More than half of the states in the US allow their jurisdictions to charge fees for the “privilege” of registering, even those who are no longer on probation. Florida is such a state and several Counties are now charge money to register.
Setting aside the constitutionality of charging a “fee” for something people have no choice in doing or to people who already served their punishment and shouldn’t be hit with new penalties, is the obvious snowball effect that happens when policies like these are implemented. With chronic under-employment (or unemployment) being characteristic of those on the registry, sometimes even a nominal fee is a hardship.
Duval County, Florida, for example, charges people required to register a $25 fee each time they have to register. Failure to pay that fee is a Class D offense (Ord. 2017-665-E, § 32) that is punishable by up to sixty days in jail, plus additional fees.
If you can’t register because you don’t have the fee, you get a registration violation which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of six months on probation with GPS monitoring. Guess who is expected to pay the cost of GPS monitoring (which is generally more than $100/month)? The same person who couldn’t afford the $25 to register in the first place.
Adding obstacles to the registration process creates a dangerous vicious circle. To the community it reduces compliance with registration and consumes resources that could be spent on preventing actual crime (that now has to be spent on arresting, prosecuting and supervising people who couldn’t pay a fee). To the registrant, making compliance impossible puts them in a cycle of violating that’s impossible to emerge from.
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This began decades ago with charging $80 a day for county jail.
You cant pay, they place you for collections, your credit is screwed making it even more difficult to be gainfully employed. Now you are more likely to fall back on criminal behavior.
Its job security for all the pikers sucking on the federal, state, county and local tit, with their well paid & benefitted, tax money funded law enforcement jobs
I Hope you dont mind but I have to let out a rant here. I do understand America has some of the dumbest most criminal imbeciles in the world as its governance (cortez/pelosi are examples). I also understand some blindly follow these idiots and even go as far as to defend them. (my apology to you) .
My wife is an international justice and as such she has trained in the American justice system etiquette by the American government, and UN sponsorship and she even shakes her head and laughs..Every justice in her country I have spoken too laughs.. Pretty bad when justices in 3rd world country’s can see the obvious hypocrisy of the American system.. Its even worse when they are correct. how is it they can see the elephants in the room but no one else can? Does it really take someone who speaks English as a third language to point the obvious out to morons that barely speak it as an only language?
At least for crying out loud has even one person in the judicial system picked up a Websters dictionary or any English dictionary and bothered to learn the English language? How have you accomplished getting an entire legislature and supreme court toilet that is either 110% criminally negligent or 110% criminally ignorant? Maybe it is 220% both? Hey lets keep piling on after the fact restrictions on citizens dumb enough to approve them while neglecting congresses 200 million plus dollar sex horror trafficking slush funds..and lets not talk about what congress and some of your high ranking justices do when visiting third world country’s …sick ..sick…sick…
“penal” in English adjective- of or relating to PUNISHMENT given by law.
“civil” related to legal disagreements between people or businesses as regards to financial, rather then criminal activities..Example plaintiffs seek financial compensation.
Internationally accepted United States English Dictionary.
Just when you thought debtors prisons were a thing of the past. Now that low level drug offenders are making room in prisons, they’re going to try and fill that space with as many RSOs as possible. Under Bush I expected RSOs to be in FEMA camps, and that’s probably not out of the question considering our dwindling rights as of late, but I can see an endless swath of cells eternally replete with sex offenders with no hope of getting out. Ever.