QUESTION:
People experiencing homelessness and poverty disproportionately interface with the criminal justice system, producing an additional layer of criminality around fines and fees because people cannot pay. Will you eliminate fines and fees for people who fall below a certain income level?
ETHAN KNIGHT:
It’s an issue I’ve been focused on for years. By way of background, we talk about eliminating cash bail, which is something I’m all for, but that’s really in Multnomah County an illusory promise of what impacts people’s lives and livelihood. I’ve always thought the fines and fees piece was a far more significant issue.
Most of those fines and fees are mandated by the state, so I would certainly recommend that my deputies — if there’s an ability-to-pay issue — ask for them to be waived. But a lot of them are mandated by statute, so I think what we really need to do is go to the Legislature and talk about removing them, means testing them. Look, the person who gets arrested for drunk driving who makes a lot of money needs to pay fines and fees. But a majority of folks don’t. And it’s not just paying them; it’s the judgment that is problematic. It’s the judgment that trails people when they try to reenter, to get Section 8, and all these different things. So I would go to the state Legislature and ask what we can do to discharge judgments.
Another thing that I think is important that is a little outside of the district attorney’s purview, but I’ve done a lot of work on it in providing low-income legal services, is ensuring people have access to civil legal aid when they need it. And the DA’s office can be a good portal for folks who are finishing up their probation terms, to get them access to legal aid to make sure those things don’t trial them.
I would do everything I could, legally, to have those fines and fees not be imposed on people who can’t pay. But I would go to Salem and look there to reform the law, because there’s where the change needs to happen.
MIKE SCHMIDT:
I was proud to be the first candidate in this race to talk about eliminating cash bail for very similar reasons and how it impacts people. I was proud to be a part of working on legislation to eliminate driving while suspended just based on failure to pay for fines and fees.
In 2017, I helped write legislation through the governor’s office that highlighted the need to examine fines and fees in our system after what we saw happened in Missouri, in terms of the powder keg of overcollecting fines and fees and over-targeting certain communities with more fines and fees really blew up their entire criminal justice system.
One of the ideas that I’ve had is a sliding scale for fines and fees where it would be based on inability to pay. Fines are often an alternative to an incarcerative sanction, so I’m not sure complete, wholesale elimination would be the way to go, but taking into account somebody’s ability to pay and not making it crippling absolutely makes sense.
I think any way we can get money out of our criminal justice system is a positive. Making things like communication between people who are incarcerated and their families more accessible, to get rid of having people having to pay for, for example, an (electronic monitoring) ankle bracelet. That can be a pretty expensive, prohibitive cost to put on somebody pretrial.
I want to look at this issue in terms of what are we trying to accomplish with people — the point is not to make the debt so crippling that they lose all hope and never have a way to get out of it. I attended a clinic for expungements where I got to see a woman get almost a decade’s worth of fines and fees erased in exchange for having 10 years of no arrests, having a job and trying to do everything right. Instead of making people wait 10 years, I’d like to see that cut in half to five years, because that’s what the research says, that after five years of not committing a new crime, you’re no more likely than anybody else to commit crimes.
Street Roots interviewed the candidates for Multnomah County district attorney. Both candidates recieved three questions specific to their campaigns, along with six common questions they both answered. Read their responses to more of our questions.
This article appears in Digital Edition.