ROUGH AUDIO: MUSIC ANGELA WEYKER: Why do I have to stress going to jail versus whether I pay my electric or feed my family? ALEC: Unfortunately, the profiting off of the poor is ubiquitous in local American courts. ALEC: And one of the most insidious components of that is private probation PHIL: Private probation is attractive for all the wrong reasons. PHIL: You have a company with a profit motive and a county that wants to save money. And neither group is thinking of the needs of the citizens of that county. ALEC: So when I heard about the explosion of these privatized probation officers throughout Tennessee I thought this might be a good place to investigate....l CARD: In 2014, Alec Karakatanis and Phil Telfoyan started a non-profit legal firm with seed money from Harvard University. Sound up: Murphreesboro PHIL: The overall mission of EJUL is to fight inequality in the justice system as it relates to rich vs poor. PHIL: If we hear about a constitutional concern we will try to investigate and bring a lawsuit, so there’s really no limit on our geographic scope at this point. The face to face interaction is the only way to bring the kinds of cases we bring. ALEC: We wanted to give our interns the experience of what it’s like to build one of these cases ALEC: So in Murphreesboro we quickly decided that this would be a great place to challenge the concept of privatized probation. ALEC: Right down the street from the courthouse there was an office - Providence Community Corrections, INC which we call PCC inc. ALEC: There stories were all very similar - they were convicted of minor, misdamenor offenses, or traffic offenses and they were told that if they couldn’t afford to pay what they owed the court they’d be placed on private probation with this company and then they went to this company and found out the company made all of its profits off of them ALEC: Every time these people would go into the probation office, the company would demand money from them, and it would tell them that it would violate their probation and send them to jail if they didn’t bring any money and almost all of these people are impoverished. ALEC: There’s clear law in Tenneessee and around the country that if you arek too poor to pay you cannot be forced to pay through threats of jail and you cannot be jailed just for being poor. ALEC: Half of the battle is going to these places and sitting there and going door to door. ALEC: And then the other half of the battle is taking those stories of injustice and translating them into legal claims that the courts are going to be willing to hear. PHIL: The way our process normally works is once we’ve heard a lot fo the stories that we’ve heard in Murphreesboro, we start to put together a group of plaintiffs, when we have a group of plaintiffs, we put together a lawsuit. ALEC: When you think of a probation officer you think of someone who helps decide what conditions should be placed on a person who then monitors the person and supervises them to make sure they’re compliant with those condiions, once the probation officer decides to report to the court, the probation officer then becomes the most important witness against you at a probation hearing. ALEC: SO think about how perverse it is for the person who plays that important role in each of those stages a person financial stake in the outcome of all those decisions PHIL: So to save a buck you’ve got unconstitutional violations, you’ve got the for profit motive influencing how justice is run, or how we’ve being seen, not being run. END ALEC: When you think of a probation officer you think of someone who helps decide what conditions should be placed on a person who then monitors the person and supervises them to make sure they’re compliant with those condiions, once the probation officer decides to report to the court, the probation officer then becomes the most important witness against you at a probation hearing. ALEC: SO think about how perverse it is for the person who plays that important role in each of those stages a person financial stake in the outcome of all those decisions PHIL: So to save a buck you’ve got unconstitutional violations, you’ve got the for profit motive influencing how justice is run, or how we’ve being seen, not being run. PHIL: they say if you squeeze a rock hard enough water will come out. Well that’s kind of PCCs theory. They threaten, they yell, they say we can send you to jail. PHIL: In part because my law partner and I are frugal people we try to bring that philosophy to EJUL. We try to save money everywhere we can. We almost never stay in hotels, we sleep on couches and floors, for food we cook big pasta dishes and rice and beans...k ALEC: So the lawsuit includes individual probation officers who implementsed the scheme and Rutherford county who dsigned the contract and the company itself.