Making indigent people on trial pay for atrocious representation helps ensure they won’t be well defended – and their inability to pay up is another legal dingWe usually lay blame at the feet of wardens and corrections officers for inmate recidivism. They didn’t offer enough treatment. The staff is abusive. Prisoners are discharged without education or job skills.
But the creeping trend toward requiring indigent defendants in the US legal system to pay for public defenders proves that recidivism starts before any defendants even hit a correctional facility – and that it springs directly from the process that was designed to defend them. They receive substandard representation that essentially guarantees convictions and incarceration. They are saddled with the bills for this representation and incarceration and then it becomes a crime not to pay them.
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Source: theguardian.com