There is no such thing as a free lunch.
You know this, right? That you’re gonna end up paying for it somewhere. Maybe they want to sell you something else. Maybe they want you to owe them a favor. Maybe they want to pick your brain for “free”. But somehow, some way, you’re gonna pay for that free lunch, guaranteed.
And yet we keep offering each other free lunches. “Save 20% on your next purchase!” “Order now and get two for the price of one!” “But wait, what if we throw in these knives? Now how much would you expect to pay?”
And it occurs to me that when we do this, two things happen: we devalue our communities and we devalue ourselves.
We devalue our communities because we end up saying things like “well, that company is making so much profit on these sales, they can afford to take a hit”. In other words “this company is swindling me and cannot be trusted so I am justified in swindling them right back”. We assert, based purely on the offer itself and our latent default cynicism, that they are dishonest, which gives us permission to be dishonest right back. And that frays the fabric of our communities, because it makes distrust the coin of the realm.
But we also demean ourselves because we know there is no free lunch so we know that somewhere, someone is paying for this modicum of largesse we are receiving. Maybe a supplier is being screwed on their price. Maybe a less legal distributor is being used. And maybe in extreme instances, prison labor or illegal deforestation or unhealthy ingredients are involved. But whatever the tactic, we know that somewhere, someone is “paying”. And yet we lie to ourselves that no one is. “There’s fat in the system” we tell ourselves “and they’ll never miss the revenue so no harm, no foul.” But we know that’s not the case and we know we’re lying to ourselves and so, on some level we think less of ourselves because we are.
Of course, all of this applies to government products and services as well. When we ourselves expect raises from our bosses to meet the increased costs of living but refuse to accept that our governments need more money for exactly the same reasons, and then elect officials who trumpet not only how they did not raise taxes but how they reduced them, we tell ourselves “they must have cut wasteful spending” or “they got rid of useless programs” or “they made some kind of cut just as I would have had to if my income was reduced.”
But we know they didn’t. And because we know there’s no free lunch, we also know someone’s paying for this somewhere.
Increasingly across America, as Tony Messenger explains clearly, thoroughly and painfully in Profit and Punishment, the free lunch of “no new taxes” is paid for by the poor in debtors prisons. Yes, you read that right. There are debtors prisons in America in the 21st century – and they work this way:
“While violent crimes like rapes and murders tend to dominate public attention, about 80 percent of the cases that make their way through the court system – more than 13 million a year – are actually misdemeanors, small crimes like shoplifting, drug possession, speeding, driving under the influence, or simple assault. The vast majority of these cases…have some sort of fee or court cost connected to them that a defendant, if convicted, must pay in order to be completely free of their legal obligations. These fines and fees often start at the time of the arrest and can continue even after a person has served their time in jail. In fact, many defendants… don’t know how much they owe the court until they plead guilty or, in some cases, after they’ve completed their sentence.”
Say you get picked up for, I don’t know, shoplifting lipstick or something. You plead guilty because A) yeah, you did it and B) you can’t afford a lawyer or bail, and you’re hoping for a suspended sentence. And let’s say you get one. And then, just when you think you’re done, you get hit by court fees. Which probably sounds like a minor inconvenience to you. And it would be, if it happened to you. But it’s not – it’s happening to America’s poor – people who don’t have the money needed to pay these fees and fines, and for whom a handful of dollars at the wrong time can turn their world upside down.
“All over the country there are people … living in poverty who do their time after pleading guilty or being convicted of minor crimes. And then they get a bill. Or they are offered time behind bars not as a punishment, but as an ‘alternative,’ because they can’t afford the fine. As a result of their financial hardship they give up their freedom.”
You know. Debtors prisons. Like the ones Charles Dickens wrote about and abhorred (partially because they were a horrific practice, and partially because his father was imprisoned in one).
So how did we get here?
“In the 2012 GOP presidential primary, all but one of the Republican candidates signed the ‘no new taxes’ pledge, which became the standard in Republican-leaning states like South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Missouri. But since they still needed to balance state budgets, what did they do? They turned to court fines and fees. Put another way, lawmakers found a backdoor tax, and poor people paid the price.”
But here’s the beauty part – and I want you to read these next words very carefully: States are losing money when they do it.
“Between 2008 and 2012, district courts in Oklahoma suffered a 60 percent cut in state funding. The rise in court fines and fees ran parallel. Between 2014 and 2015 in Oklahoma County, for instance, the number of bench warrants issued for a failure to pay fines and fees increased from 1,000 a month to 4,000 a month. This means that local governments are spending a significant amount of additional taxpayer money trying to round up poor people who owe court costs, but can’t afford to pay them, in an attempt to balance the books. Those people end up in jail, which costs taxpayers even more money.”
And
“In fact, a 2019 study jointly produced by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Brennan Center found that it often costs governments more money to try to collect court fines and fees than they bring in, meaning they are taking valuable resources away from other government services, such as public safety.”
Which makes sense, right? If you’re charging fees to people who can’t pay in the first place, which is just adding more money to a bill that they already can’t afford and then you’re incarcerating them when they, shockingly, can’t pay it – which in turn, then likely loses them whatever minimum wage job they had (because employers kind of want you to be at work and not in jail for those jobs), which then puts them on government assistance of some sort, which doesn’t leave any financial room for paying the fees you’ve assigned them. Which means you put them back in jail for failure to pay. Which then adds more to what they owe. And that’s not counting the additional costs the government has accrued for processing all these people who couldn’t pay in the first place.
Or to simplify – you’re making it harder for them to pay you, you’re making them cost you more money, you’re reducing their likelihood of ever being able to pay you, and all the while you have law enforcement officials from police officers to administrators to judges doing more work for which they must be paid by…. Um…. Who? By the fees that you assigned to poor people that you can’t collect because they don’t have any money.
Ain’t all that a kick in the head?
To be sure, it is a “kick in the head” that Messenger has explained artfully. He follows the paths of real people who are ensnared in the madness. He takes you inside the statehouses and the courthouses to hear politicians justify and vilify it. He goes into the courtrooms and the law offices for the arguments that prosecute the poor and the process itself. And he also steps back to show you that the tale he is telling you is a national one, so you can’t just dismiss it as the hillbilly shenanigans of some crackers in states far from where you live. Keeping so many threads straight for the reader is no mean feat and someone should give Mr. Messenger a prize for pulling it off, let alone pulling it off in a volume this readable. (Fun fact: Messenger did get a prize for the articles the book is based on. They call it a Pulitzer).
And sure, you can tell yourself that selling on price is totally different from a debtor’s prison – though you may want to check out Ellen Ruppel Shell’s book Cheap, which we reviewed here, before you do. For me, they are simply nodes on a continuum, a continuum that promotes the belief that I am the beneficiary of things that are not my responsibility, that I can dump the problems in someone else’s neighborhood, that there are no repercussions for our actions, that we need not be, that we should not be, held accountable.
But we should be.
Because we are.
Profit and Punishment by Tony Messenger was published by St. Martin’s Press on 12/07/2021 – order it from Amazon here, or Barnes & Noble here, or pick it up at your local bookseller (find one here).
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