Wednesday, November 21, 2007
AN UPDATE ON THE JAIL "INMATE PROCESSING FEE"
We thought we would be finished with this topic by now. However, there seems to be an ever shifting explanation of what, who, where, when, why, and how. Therefore, this situation invites further scrutiny and commentary.
Although Sheriff Nash's website has not been modified to remove the accusations against Dorchester County Council regarding the alleged political motivation for the Audit that lead to the discovery that an embezzlement had occurred and that processing fees were not being returned to those arrestees who were subsequntly acquitted, it was modified on November 17, 2007 to include the following language:
Since the Attorney General has raised a question concerning the legality of charging the booking fee, my command staff and I decided it was best to suspend the practice until we could get further legal clarification. Additionally, the fund that the booking fee was supposed to be deposited into is the same fund which we believe to have been embezzled by my former Jail Captain. We are still in the process of reviewing these records.
According to the most recent edition of The Summervile Journal Scene, Sheriff Nash admitted that there was no record of an inmate receiving a refund in the last two years. Additionally, he is quoted as saying, "If there are some former inmates out there that have been found not guilty, and would like a refund, then they need to ask for one." The Summervile Journal Scene goes on to say, "Nash explains that when an inmate is booked if they have any money it's confiscated* and upon leaving the facility, they're cut a check for anything over $15 they had on their possession. If they had no money when they entered, they don't hunt down the inmate for payment" (emphasis added).
Sheriff Nash's website has also been modified to state "Failure to pay the fee merely restricts the inmate from commissary privileges. If the inmate is later found guilty of all charges, he may apply for a refund. However, very few, if any, inmates have ever applied for a refund" (emphasis added).
We think the foregoing statement contains an error and that the word "guilty" should be "innocent." In any event, regardless of whether the website contains errors, Sheriff Nash's present position(s) directly contradict his previously reported statements in which he claimed that he made efforts to locate those who were acquitted and to return their "booking fee." In other words, this is just another statement that cannot be said to be "the whole truth." More important, because many, if not most, of the inmates in the Dorchester County Jail are there as a result of getting behind on their child support--a civil violation--they would never have had their guilt or innocence adjudicated. And most important, even assuming arguendo that the assessment of the processing fee was lawful, it should be up to the Sheriff to make sure that those whom he concedes are due a refund receive that refund. Sheriff Nash caused the problem by not having adequate monitoring procedures in place and, therefore, ought to correct the problem without further imposition on those who were inconvenienced by his policies.
* We disagre as to whether the seizure was a "confiscation." Rather we think it was both an unlawful fine and a "conversion." Black's Law Dictionary defines "conversion" as "an unauthorized and wrongful exercise of dominion and control over another's personal property, to the exclusion of, or inconsistent with the rights of, the owner," whereas, the Wikipedia entry on "Confiscation" states:
Confiscation, from the Latin confiscatio 'joining to the fiscus, i.e. transfer to the treasury' is a legal seizure without compensation by a government or other public authority. The word is also used, popularly, of spoliation under legal forms, or of any seizure of property without adequate compensation.Scope and history
As a punishment, it differs from a fine in that it is not primarily meant to match the crime but rather reattributes the criminal's ill-gotten spoils (often as a complement to the actual punishment for the crime itself; still common with various kinds of contraband, such as protected living organisms) to the community or even aims to rob them of their socio-economic status, in the extreme case reducing them to utter poverty, or if he is condemned to death even denies them inheritance to the legal heirs, thus punishing the entire bloodline (in the primitive logic of the blood feud). Meanwhile limited confiscation is often in function of the crime, the rationale being that the criminal must be denied the fruits of their fault, while the crime itself is rather punished in some other, independent way, such as physical punishments or even a concurring fine.
Such rich prizes often proved too much temptation for the authorities to refrain from abuse out of greed, especially when taxation was relatively low-yielding, not permanent (often requiring assent from estates etc. at a political cost) and aroused far more resistance than 'making criminals pay'.
