It was early morning when they came to get her. She had just stumbled out of bed, heading for the kitchen, turning on the TV, calling out to the kids to make sure they were OK – Marie was only three but she had had a bad chest since she was born, and now the baby had picked up this stomach bug that wouldn’t go away – and then the door bell rang.
It was bound to worry her. It was too early for any normal visitor. And besides, she was always worrying. Anxiety just seemed to grow inside her. Anxiety, depression. They said she had some kind of personality disorder. She had to have more or less constant nursing for it. But even with all her natural overdose of worry, she never guessed what was waiting for her on the other side of the frosted glass front door.
The two policemen were calm. They stood on the step and informed her that as a consequence of a committal order made in her absence by Wolverhampton magistrates court, she was now under arrest and would be committed to custody for a period of 14 days. They would wait while she finished getting dressed. Behind her, the children were crying.
She had the strength to protest. It was a mistake, she said. It was only a fine for a parking ticket and not having a tax disc. She had told them that she had these mental problems. But they’d fined her all the same, more than £400. And then she’d got burgled – her whole house was vandalised – so she’d had to move. She’d phoned the court. She had spoken to the warrant officer. She’d given him her new address and she’d told him that as soon as she got the insurance money for the burglary, she’d pay the fine. She just couldn’t afford it till then. He’d told her it would be OK. There was no need to send her to prison. She had her kids. What about her kids? There was no-one to look after Marie and Ben. The two policemen told her it was not a mistake.
Ten minutes later, Geri Andrews led her two small children out of the front door and climbed with them into the back of the police car while the lady with the grey hair who lived next door peeked out through her curtain. At the police station, she was processed: personal details on several different forms, list of property on her person, inky fingers rolled on to record cards, and then she was led down to the cells and left there with Marie and Ben, to wait, with the worry pumping through her.
Later that day, two things happened. First, a social worker came and took away her children. This caused her an extreme of distress. She tried to plead and she explained that she had never been apart from them before. She told them about her anxiety attacks and her depression and about the boy needing the medicine for his stomach. It made no difference. The social worker never even took the medicine. After they had gone, Geri Andrews cried a great deal and then a little later, when she had been slumped alone there for God knows how long, some more men in uniform came and took her away, in the back of some kind of van, all the way up the motorway, through a huge set of gates with a sign by the side that said HM Remand Centre, Risley. And there they left her.
The offence for which Geri Andrews was jailed – on January 25 of this year – was the most common single cause of imprisonment in this country. As a result of simply failing to pay their fines, 22,723 people were sent to jail in 1994 – a soaring increase of 37% since 1990, when the figure was 16,659. To put it another way, on a typical day in England and Wales, more than 60 different men and women are now put through an experience like Geri Andrews’.
The cause appears to be two-fold. First there is poverty, whose rising tide has pushed thousands of families into a debt trap: they are unable to pay for goods, so they break the law, so they are given fines which are even larger than the original costs of the goods which they could not afford; they fail to pay the fine; they go to jail. It is a sequence in which criminal justice comes perilously close to the moral depths of the old debtors’ prisons, crudely punishing the poor for nothing more than their shortage of money.
The trend is particularly striking among women, apparently because of their continuing role in managing household budgets. In the four years between 1990 and 1994, the number of women who were fined by magistrates (excluding parking tickets) rose remorselessly from 114,000 to 134,000. And overwhelmingly, they were being fined for offences of poverty. In 1994, 77% of all the women who were fined – 103,000 of them – had been charged under the Wireless Telegraphy Act: they had failed to buy a television licence.
Those whose poverty is most severe are most likely to fail to pay their fines and, despite the advice of numerous Parliamentary committees and official reports, magistrates continue to jail them. The number of women who ended up in prison for defaulting on fines rose between 1990 and 1994 by an extraordinary 68%. The Howard League recently published figures showing that more than a third of women who go to jail do so because they have been unable to pay fines for offences that would not usually warrant a prison sentence. The number of women in prison is now the highest ever recorded in this country.
The jailing of women is particularly likely to bring with it intense distress because of their dominant role at the centre of families, caring for children. However, in the case of fine defaulters, there is now powerful evidence that magistrates and their clerks are adding the stink of unfairness by taking short cuts through the law.
In a long and detailed ruling from the height of the Queen’s bench in November last year, Lord Justice Simon Brown considered a collection of 23 cases where young fine-defaulters had been jailed. His judgement was forthright. “The central problem which these cases raise – the lawfulness of the approach to committing fine-defaulters in many magistrates’ courts – is a huge one, only quite recently exposed.”
His judgement noted that magistrates and their clerks were frequently ignoring their legal duty to consider all of the alternatives before jailing a defaulter. Magistrates may order that the money be deducted from the defendant’s earnings or from income support; or they can issue supervision orders or attendance centre orders so that someone ensures that the defaulter eventually pays; or they can simply enforce the fine through the county court. In the 23 cases considered by Lord Justice Simon Brown, he found that magistrates had not only rejected all these options in favour of jailing the defaulters but had apparently never even considered them.
The judge said: “Of course there are occasions when detention is called for – when the defaulter is cocking a snook at the enforcement system and this ultimate sanction is necessary to underpin it. But it really must be a last resort.” He warned magistrates and their clerks that they must mend their ways. “Otherwise, this court will be engulfed. The message is clear.”
However, in the two months since that judgement, magistrates across the country have continued to by-pass their statutory duty to consider alternatives to prison. In some cases, they appear to be processing a never-ending supply of fine-defaulters on the judicial equivalent of a conveyor belt.
Magistrates in Liverpool heard the case of a middle-aged woman who had been fined £130 because she had no TV licence. She had failed to pay the fine. The magistrates were told that she was caring on her own for a 15-year-old daughter and for a 13-year-old son, who had become completely dependant on her as the result of injuries he had received in a hit-and-run accident. They were told, too, that she suffered from severe arthritis, and it was explained to them that her failure to pay was the result of having nothing but income support to live on. Nevertheless, they jailed her for seven days, leaving her dependant son in the care of his 15-year-old sister.
In Colwyn Bay, magistrates recently jailed two women for fine-defaulting. One was a single mother of four children who was so troubled by mental illness that she had asked to be treated in a psychiatric hospital. When she failed to pay a motoring fine, the magistrates ordered her arrest, and police went and removed her from the hospital to commit her to custody. In the second case, magistrates imprisoned a woman who had failed to pay 74 pence of her fine.
A 19-year-old mother, whose two children had already been taken into care because she was unable to cope, was fined £1,000 for failing to have a TV licence. She had a history of severe drug addiction and prostitution, although she said she was now living on income support. When she failed to pay the fine, she was taken back to court, where she was jailed for 14 days. The experience “completely flipped her out”, according to her lawyer, and she has now disappeared. She is thought to have gone to Kings Cross in London to work once more as a prostitute.
A woman in Dudley was fined £190 for failing to have a television licence. She was unable to pay, partly through sickness, and missed a court hearing because her liver had failed and she had been taken into the local Intensive Care Unit. Her sister went to court on her behalf and explained that she was seriously ill and struggling to support four children aged between four and ten. The magistrates agreed to wait until her health improved, at which point they ordered her to prison for 14 days.
A woman in Walsall was bringing up six small children on her own and failed to ensure that the eldest attended school. She was fined £20. She had also failed to pay an old poll tax bill, for which she was fined a further £85. She could afford to pay neither and she was jailed for seven days on each count. The magistrates ordered that she should serve the sentences consecutively even though she pleaded that all six of her children would have to go into care, because there was no-one else to look after them.
The mistakes made by magistrates in dealing with each of these women were recognised by the High Court, who ordered their early release as soon as they found out about them. In all these cases, and in many others, prisoners were released after the intervention of Richard Wise, a lawyer from the Stoke-on-Trent firm of Clyde, Chappell and Botham, who specialises in helping defaulters. He says that magistrates courts are failing systematically to do their job: “The real question is how it is that some of society’s most vulnerable women are ending up in prison for such pathetic things as non-payment of a parking fine. The system really must have failed if you are taking children into care because their mentally ill mothers are being banged up for such trivial matters.”
In the last 12 months, Richard Wise has acted for 135 fine defaulters and 161 poll-tax defaulters who were either in custody or on the point of being taken into custody. With every single one of them, he has succeeded in securing their freedom. In almost every single case, the High Court found that the magistrates failed to apply themselves properly to the alternatives and generally accepted inadequate legal advice from their clerks.
Part of the problem stems from the lack of legal help for defendants in these cases. There is no legal aid for these hearings and almost all of the defendants have no-one to help them or speak for them. Many of them are mentally ill (16% of them, according to a survey by Richard Wise of his own clients). Unlike habitual criminals, most of them are standing in a dock for the first time in their lives. They rely on the magistrates’ clerk to give them advice and yet the clerks are simultaneously responsible for bringing the prosecution. This appears to be a fundamental conflict of roles. There is no record of any magistrates clerks advising any defendants that their own advice as prosecutors is so weak that the defendants have only to apply to the High Court to have their work rejected.
The clerks are also under insidious pressure from the Lord Chancellor’s Department who are monitoring their success in clearing unpaid fines and who are believed to be using the results in deciding which courts should survive a round of amalgamations and redundancies. Lawyers believe this is putting undue pressure on clerks to ask for fines to be paid at unrealistic speed and then to advise that defaulters who fail to stick the pace should be jailed. Of all of the options that are open to a court dealing with a defaulter, only imprisonment immediately removes the fine from the court’s books.
Richard Wise said: “We have 22,000 people a year going to prison and on the basis of what we know about how magistrates courts are working, you would have to conclude that the vast majority of them are being sent to prison unlawfully.”
* The names of Geri Andrews and her children have been changed to protect her privacy.
