By Julian White-Davis, Photo and Publishing Editor
Thrett Brown, a young man of seventeen years, walks through the streets of Tacoma, Washington, after moving from Louisiana with his mother and sisters. It’s the mid-nineties, and Brown is immersed in the gang scene. The war on drugs is in full swing.
Now, nearly two decades later, many men and women are being released from sentences that began in that era. They are thousands of dollars of debt to the government from their imprisonment in the form of legal financial obligations, or LFOs.
A new state law poses some hope of relief, yet faces challenges when it comes to publicity.
Brown, a current resident of Tacoma and leader of many prominent social justice and entrepreneurship organizations in the area, is one of these people.
He is the founder of Numbers 2 Names (N2N), an organization of storytellers; an activist for social justice and the formerly incarcerated; and the executive director of the Young Business Men and Women Organization (YBMW) for the at-risk youth population.
Brown is also hired as a motivational speaker and workshop expert in anger management and family communication for teens and parents. When he first moved to Tacoma, however, Brown himself fell into a adrenaline-filled, dangerous lifestyle.
“I got turned on to a little more aggressive mannerisms and things, and then stuff started fading out, and I just got deeper in and deeper in,” Brown said. “I got immersed in drugs and a fast-paced life.”
Brown was incarcerated at age 21 under charges of possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver and unlawful delivery of a controlled substance. This had a potential sentence of eight years in prison. However, he was only charged with four.
“I was just an accomplice in a drug activity,” Brown said.
From the moment he was arrested, the government began tallying up all of the fines he accumulated during his stay in prison. Some call this debt a sort of rent for incarceration, but it encompasses many more fines and costs than that.
“They are the extra penalties above and beyond jail or prison that courts order on defendants,” ex-public defender and Vashon resident Bailey deLongh said. “That includes things like fines, fees, costs and restitution. Every crime has a statutory fine that may or may not be levied. The fees and the costs are things like court costs, defense costs, sheriff’s fees or DNA processing fees.”
Brown accumulated over $5,000 in LFOs in his four years, and even while he was in prison, they grew at a 12 percent interest rate.
Ex-convicts who have served prolonged sentences can be left with debts in the six digits with no means of paying them off.
The accessibility of criminal records on the internet allows employers to easily see if a potential employee was incarcerated. This makes it incredibly difficult for anyone who has been in the prison system to get a second chance and make enough money to even consider paying off their LFOs.
“I’ve got bills; I’ve got phone bills,” Brown said. “Are you really trying to stress on me about some clerk fine? You want me to pay the judge? I thought he was already being paid!”
In the past, if someone were to not make the payments on their debts, they would be at risk of being called back into court and potentially sent back to prison for violation of parole.
The growing awareness of this downward spiral of prison and debt prompted Washington state lawmakers and lobbyists to create a bill that allows low-income ex-convicts to convert their LFOs into community service hours or even be waived completely, among other benefits.
The bill, HB 1783, was signed into law on March 27 and has a variety of other benefits attached to it which make it easier for people who have been incarcerated to reintegrate into society.
In addition to the community service conversion, the law eliminated the 12 percent interest rate on these debts and established that if one were to not be able to pay their debts for lack of finances, they could not be jailed as punishment.
It also disallowed the forced seizure of the owed money from those in need-based public assistance programs.
In order to get any of the LFOs waived, ex-convicts need to go through an extensive process, including going before a judge and presenting a case as to why they deserve to be spared the debts.
“I haven’t approached a judge yet,” Brown said. “I’m working with a friend of mine to make sure that I can get the most thorough information possible. A lot of the processing part is just overwhelming.”
Brown is worried that this cumbersome procedure will deter many people from capitalizing on the new law.
“It’s not designed to be a one, two, three-step process,” Brown said. “It becomes what most prisoners are terrified of — paperwork and runarounds and waiting. They say, ‘I’d just rather have my LFOs.’”
This is the beginning of many problems facing the implementation of the law.
“A lot of people don’t know about it,” Brown said. “This is not stuff that their parole officers or people in the system are telling them because now we’re talking about salaries.”
DeLongh also brought up the fact that judges have the leeway to either implement the law or not.
“It’s not clear whether all of the courts in the state will follow the law,” deLongh said. “Getting that information out may be hard. There are only a certain number of superior courts, but there [are] a lot of other courts, and getting the word out to those judges and making sure that they comply is harder.”
DeLongh is working with a national organization called Showing Up for Racial Justice to create a factsheet to hand to out to various judges that describes the law in full.
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Brown and deLongh worked together to get the bill passed and agree that the law was an important step in the process of making it easier for ex-convicts to reintegrate into society. However, they believe that more needs to be done in order to make any substantial change.
“It feels like a pacifier,” Brown said. “It’s something to make people sit down and calm down a little bit. But the system knows that a lot of people can’t or won’t take advantage of it. I feel like the only way that it could serve a purpose would be if they sent information to the people about LFOs.”
Brown’s ideal solution is to deduct the amount of money that the inmates would have made working in the prisons at minimum wage. He made between 17 and 35 cents an hour while incarcerated, but was working 40-hour weeks. The government would essentially be recrediting them for the hours that they were working.
“I would estimate that it would [cover] at least 70 percent of what their actual debt would be,” Brown said. “After that, it could be the responsibility of the people who were formerly incarcerated or incarcerated now to pay off the remaining balance.”
The next step in the process is to spread the word about LFOs so that more people are aware of their implications and the fact that there are ways they can be waived. With the difficulty of getting a sustainable job after being incarcerated, it’s nearly impossible for ex-convicts to get enough money to pay them off and get a fresh start. Some, however, find ways to succeed in spite of their LFOs.
Now, 13 years after being released, Brown is a student at Tacoma Community College for business and communication degrees and is also a community advocate for the formerly incarcerated.
“[These people] have families; they have lives that have been disrupted,” deLongh said. “It doesn’t do us any good not to recognize that people can be different and that people can change.”