A COUPLE of months ago I wrote an article about the use of fees and fines in the criminal-justice system, particularly the fees imposed by private-probation companies. It's easy to see the promise of such companies, particularly for states such as Georgia, which has a lot of counties (156—more than any state other than Texas), many of which have very little tax base to pay for services. Private-probation companies take the hassle and cost of supervising misdemeanants on probation away from local government. Over a two-year period they directed over $200m into county coffers. Supporters will argue that is money that counties may otherwise not have seen: misdemeanant probationers, because their crimes generally are not all that dangerous, receive less supervision than more dangerous offenders, and so often fall through the cracks. It works like this: say you get a $200 speeding ticket, and you don't have the money to pay it. You are placed on probation, and for a monthly supervisory fee you can pay the fine off in instalments over the course of your probation term. The devil, as ever, is in the details, as a great Sunday story from the Atlanta Journal Constitution makes clear. Those supervisory fees vary markedly: in Cobb County, for instance, just north of Atlanta, the government charges a $22 monthly fee. Private companies charge $39, and often add extra costs on top of that to cover drug testing, electronic monitoring and even classes they decide offenders need. Fees often rise and even multiply when probationers cannot pay—and remember, these are people, for the most part, who could not come up with a hundred bucks and change to pay the initial fee; you have to expect they'll have some trouble paying.

Even worse, people who fail to pay the fines imposed by these private companies can find warrants for their arrests sworn out and the period of their probation extended. I spoke with an attorney for a couple in Alabama who say they were threatened with Tasers and the removal of their children if they did not pay the company what they owed. In 2012 a court found that the fees levied by private-probation companies in Harpersville, Alabama, could turn a $200 fine and a year's probation into $2,100 in fees and fines stretched over 41 months. A judge in Richmond and Columbia counties ruled such probation extensions illegal last autumn.

Not surprisingly, private-probation firms have been hit with a raft of lawsuits. Many have criticised these companies for bringing back debtors' prisons by jailing people unable to pay privately-imposed fines, in direct violation of Bearden v Georgia, a Supreme Court case from 1983 that found that jailing someone for nonpayment of fines due to an inability to pay (rather than willful withholding of funds) violates the Equal Protection clause. The judge in the Harpersville ruling called that town's private-probation practices "a debtors' prison" and "a judicially sanctioned extortion racket." The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is looking into allegations that the company illegally added fees. Later this year Georgia's supreme court will decide whether private-probation firms can force probationers to take and pay for classes, and whether they can order arrests when fees go unpaid.

Private probation companies promised they could do as well or better than the state at supervising misdemeanants, for less cost to the taxpayer. In many cases those promises have proven hollow. The AJC tells the story of Kathleen Hucks, who was walking her dogs on Memorial Day when a policeman stopped to speak with her, and found that she owed a private-probation company $156 from her probation four-and-a-half years ago. Although her probationary period had long since ended, she was thrown in jail (at a cost taxpayers of more than $1,000) until her husband could raise the $156 Ms Hucks owed. Clifford Hayes was arrested over a years-old $847 private-probation debt, over which he was threatened with eight months in prison, also at a far greater cost to the taxpayer than what he owed. As for supervision, attorneys I spoke with for my article said that it often amounts to little more than stuffing cash into a private-probation company's payment kiosk in a county courthouse.

Look, there is absolutely nothing wrong with slimming down government, and even outsourcing some of its functions when private companies can do it better and more cheaply. But this is not lean, efficient government. This is a private company using government's punitive power to extract money from Georgia's poorest and least powerful. Ordering debtors jailed at taxpayer cost is not cheaper and better; it is more expensive and worse. And when private-probation firms order probationers to take expensive classes or pay for electronic monitoring that no judge requires, when it extends a probationer's term beyond what a judge ordered so it can collect its fees, they avail themselves of the state's power without any of its responsibilities or legally-required transparency. That is a long way from justice.

Read on:The new debtors’ prisons