Harpersville’s Cautionary Tale Harpersville is a small town in Alabama’s Shelby county that was hit hard by the US economic recession.163 Struggling to pay for basic services, Harpersville leaned increasingly heavily on its Municipal Court to generate revenue. The court contracted with JCS, which works with at least 100 Alabama courts, to collect money from offenders on long-term payment plans. Ultimately, Harpersville’s attempts to use its criminal court as a money maker landed the town in serious trouble. In 2012, JCS and the Harpersville Municipal Court were hit with a lawsuit alleging illegal and abusive collections practices. The plaintiffs allege along with other abuses that the town’s Municipal Court “abrogated its judicial responsibilities and has allowed JCS to operate as a quasi-judicial agency” in violation of state law.”164 JCS commissioned R. Bernard Harwood Jr., a former Associate Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, to produce a report on the allegations at issue in the Harpersville litigation. Harwood found no merit to any of the allegations against JCS, arguing that in each case all responsibility for alleged abuses lay squarely with the court and not JCS.165 But in a blistering 2012 ruling, county Circuit Court Judge Hub Harrington blasted both the company and the court. Judge Harrington accused the Harpersville court of running a “debtor’s prison” and a “judicially sanctioned extortion racket” and labeled its performance “disgraceful.” Along with other abuses “so numerous as to defy a detailed chronicling in this short space,” his ruling found that the Harpersville court had allowed JCS to issue orders for probationers to appear in court independent of any judicial authority—and then incarcerating those who failed to comply with those “orders.”166 The county sheriff seized the court’s records.167
163 The town’s sales tax revenue plummeted from $408,000 to $330,000, between 2009 and 2010. 164 Burdette et al. v. Town of Harpersville et al., Circuit Court of Shelby County, Alabama, No. cv-2010-900183, Third amended
complaint, July 17, 2012. See also Ethan Bronner, “Poor Land in Jail as Companies Add Huge Fees for Probation,” New York Times, July 2, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/us/probation-fees-multiply-as-companiesprofit.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all& (accessed December 4, 2013). 165 Judicial Correction Services, “Statement in Response to a Baseless Lawsuit in Childersburg, Alabama,” August 29, 2012, http://fairprobationservices.com/content/statement-in-response-to-a-baseless-lawsuit-in-childersburg-alabama/ (accessed December 6, 2013). 166 Burdette et al. v. Town of Harpersville et al., Circuit Court of Shelby County, Alabama, No. cv-2010-900183, Ruling, July 11,
2012, on file with Human Rights Watch.
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