Kevin Thompson spent five days in a Georgia jail because he couldn't pay a traffic ticket.

He's not the only one. More than three decades after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to jail people who were too poor to pay court fines, civil rights activists are accusing local governments in Georgia and elsewhere of doing just that, blaming a rise in cost-saving partnerships between municipal courts and for-profit private probation companies.

Thompson's case is emblematic of the criticisms against the industry. The 19-year-old was pulled over in July for driving with a suspended license, according to court papers. He was fined $810. But he lives in DeKalb County, where authorities contracted a private probation company to see to it that offenders make good on payments for tickets and misdemeanors punishable by fines, rather than processing the debts in-house.

Typically in systems like DeKalb County's, if an offender is found guilty and can't pay his or her fine on the spot, he or she is referred to the private probation company, which will usually establish a payment plan and oversee the person until the fine is paid in full. If the person falls behind on their payments, they become subject to having their probation revoked and in some cases could face jail time.

For Thompson, the suspended license meant he couldn't continue his job as a tow-truck operator. Without income, he struggled to pay his fine. He was given 30 days under the supervision of a company called Judicial Correction Services to come up with the money, but Thomspon was​ ​only able to submit $85 – $30 of which the company retained for its own fees. So his probation was withdrawn, he was sentenced to nine days in jail and spent five of them locked up.

“I don't want anyone to to have to go through a situation where they can’t pay a fine and they have to be afraid to go before a judge because they think they’re going to jail,” Thompson says. “If you can’t pay a fine, they must have something else, other than jail.”

Thompson's experience ​attracted the attention of the ACLU, which last week filed a lawsuit arguing in part that the Supreme Court's 1983 Bearden v. Georgia decision was meant to protect poor people from falling into just those types of traps. The group says the private probation system preys upon the poor, who are less likely to have extra money on hand to pay fines in a timely manner and more likely to end up in jail as a result.

According to Thompson's lawyer, Nusrat Jahan Choudhury, the system failed him in that it did not properly inform him of his rights to an attorney – the company's probation officer allegedly told him a public defender would cost him $150, when the fee was actually $50 and could be waived entirely if Thompson could prove he could not afford it. Likewise, neither the probation company nor the court put forth any alternatives – such as community service or an extension of the deadline – as required by Bearden v. Georgia.

These failures, Choudhury says, are the result not just of individual shortcomings but of an entire system in which for-profit companies, with a lack of oversight from municipalities that contract them, aim to collect the most money possible from the poor, through a probation program overseen and enforced by officers disincentivized from seeing that indigent people – those determined to be too poor to pay fines – are protected from incarceration.

“DeKalb County and JCS engaged in a top-down debt collection scheme that focused on collecting money from people who were too poor to pay on sentencing at the expense of protecting poor people’s rights” Choudhury, also a staff attorney at American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Program, says. “Being poor is not a crime, and in this case DeKalb County and JCS created a two-tiered system of justice – one that punishes the poorest of the county more harshly than those of means.”

Public Service or Profit?

Chris Albin-Lackey, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, says Thompson’s case illustrates the larger problems with the partnerships between local governments and for-profit probation companies. His organization last year issued a scathing report on the practice, which it says has ballooned to more than 1,000 courts across the country.

“The theory behind the business model of private probation companies is they will provide supervision for misdemeanor offenders for courts that can’t or don’t want to pay for their own probation services,” Albin-Lackey says. “The implementations is where things really break down.”

A Georgia audit on its misdemeanor probation system published last year found that very few contracts specify how a probation unit is to determine whether a probationer is potentially indigent. A number of basic oversight measures – how many cases are opened and closed, for instance – are also often left unspecified.

Nevertheless, growing popularity of the system reflects an increasing dependence on court systems to help municipalities balance their books through fines for low-level offenses like traffic tickets and disorderly conduct.

“A lot of courts are really hiring private probation companies because they are looking for a debt collector,” Albin-Lackey says.

Florida was the first state to experiment with private probation companies, but the industry flourished in Georgia – where about 80 percent of misdemeanor probation is run by for-profit companies – after the state cut its services to handle misdemeanor probation in 1991, shifting the responsibility to county and local governments.

Now, at least 13 states allow localities to outsource the collection of misdemeanor fines to for-profit probation agencies, Choudhury says. The practice is particularly robust in the South – in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi – but has spread as far as Montana, Washington and Utah. Typically, the private companies – which include big conglomerates like JCS and Sentinel Offender Services, but also many small companies – give local governments a deal they can’t refuse: an offer to collect over time the fines offenders can’t pay on the day of sentencing without any charge to the municipality.

“From [the government's] perspective, they think they’re getting something for nothing,” Albin-Lackey says.

What the probation companies get is the ability to collect additional fees for their supervision services directly from the offenders. The for-profit institutions are allowed to impose additional administrative fees for as long as it takes offenders to pay fines, meaning that people may ultimately pay thousands of dollars for tickets that were initially just a fraction of that amount.

While local contracts often spell out exactly how much a probation company can charge for certain services – like administrative fees, but also for ankle monitors or drug testing – those numbers are often arbitrary and vary across districts. Companies are known to hike those fees without notice or approval.

The industry is extremely opaque, and Georgia is an exception in that it has a regulatory scheme at all. The state requires probation companies to report the money sent back to the courts – nearly $100 million in 2012, according to the Human Rights Watch report. The companies do not, however, have to report how much money they are recouping off additional fines and fees. By reverse-engineering a specific fee that the companies were required to disclose, Human Rights Watch roughly estimated that the for-profit probation industry in Georgia netted at least $40 million off the extra fees. In other states, that number remains entirely a mystery.

“A lot of courts have no idea how much money their probation companies are extracting for themselves from these misdemeanor offenders,” Albin-Lackey says.

Under Scrutiny

Thompson’s is not the first lawsuit that alleges wrongdoing on the part of a private probation company and the local governments that employ them.

”It seems like a lot of attorneys are starting to see this as an area to bring suits,” Albin-Lackey says.

Jack Long, a Georgia attorney, has represented a number of clients claiming abuse by the private probation system. One case of his, on behalf of 13 plaintiffs, made it to the Georgia Supreme Court, which upheld the constitutionality of private probation collecting services but limited their ability to extend the sentences of the offender.

“[Municipalities] are giving a private company the ability to tax their citizens in these fees that are completely unregulated,” Long says. “Nobody complains because the people who are getting sucked into this are on the low socioeconomic end of society.”

When complaints are made, the response is mixed. A county judge in Alabama shut the entire private probation system in Harpersville, calling it a "debtors prison" and a "judicially sanctioned extortion racket." When contacted about the lawsuit, DeKalb County spokesman Burke Brennan said the county does not comment on pending litigation. Judicial Correction Services did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Another lawsuit in Alabama – also against Judicial Correction Services – is ongoing.

Georgia’s DeKalb County, where Thompson’s suit is filed, is considered to be one of the most notorious private probation systems in the country. Human Rights Watch estimated that JCS collects $1 million in annual revenues there, making the the system, it is believed, one of the country's most lucrative. In one 2013 episode recorded in the Human Rights Watch report, 600 probationers were summoned with little explanation to the recorder’s court, where a JCS employee confirmed verbally for a judge, without presenting proof, that each of the probationers had unpaid fines for which a warrant had been issued. Those who could not pay their fees entirely were told they faced arrest – prompting chaos in the courtroom – and some 60 people ultimately ended up in jail.

When contacted about the lawsuit, DeKalb County spokesman Burke Brennan said the county does not comment on pending litigation. Judicial Correction Services did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The Future of Private Probation

Regardless of the conclusion of Thompson’s lawsuit, the debate over the role of private probation companies in Georgia is likely to continue.

“One advantage is they can service rural areas more financially efficiently than a governmental probation unit could,” explains Dale Allen, chief probation officer at the publicly run Athens-Clarke County Office of Probation Services, pointing to the start-up, personnel, contracting and other costs that a smaller municipality would struggle to bear. Allen worked for private probation companies before his current role in the government unit, which reports quarterly numbers – including the fees it charges, the cases it opens and closes, and its use of alternative methods.

“Transparency overall is the biggest issue in the state of Georgia. I think the perception – right or wrong – is that private probation is not transparent,” Allen says.

The concern over transparency contributed to Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal vetoing a bill last year that would have allowed private probation companies to be even more secretive.

“I favor more transparency over private probation services,” the Augusta Chronicle quoted him as saying, and he noted that the language appeared to be a preemptive response to the lawsuits against the industry. His veto came not long after the state audit of the system illuminated its lack of oversight.

Deal has made criminal justice reform a priority, and the task force he formed is expected to release a new report this month on changes recommended to the probation system. As reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among the proposals will be a requirement that private companies disclose the revenue they take in with their supervision fees, as well as more safeguards in the local court system to prevent the very poor from being jailed because they are unable to pay the fines.

What reforms Georgia is able to take on could be a model for other states that, for better or for worse, are considering expanding their use of private misdemeanor probation systems.