A former Georgia state legislator who once introduced a bill that would have benefited the private probation company he runs wants his seat back.
Clay Cox founded Professional Probation Services and sold it in 1997, but he has remained its CEO, including while serving as a Republican member of the Georgia State House of Representatives. During that time, Cox introduced legislation to loosen private probation regulations. After he left the legislature, Cox’s company, Professional Probation Services, was sued for allegedly using a “system of harassment and intimidation” to collect fines in a northern Alabama town.
“He should not be involved in the private probation business and have anything to do with the government,” said Jack Long, an Augusta, Georgia-based trial attorney who has sued multiple private probation companies. “It is an absolute conflict of interest.”
Public Office For Personal Gain?
Cox served in the Georgia State House from 2005 to 2011. He left office after deciding not to seek re-election. In March 2009, he proposed a bill to limit the ability of a state regulatory body to review probation firms’ contracts or records, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Regulators had audited some of Professional Probation Services’ contracts with local courts.
“The purpose of the bill was to get rid of some of the very minor regulations that existed at that time,” said Sarah Geraghty, managing partner for litigation at the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights. “That was very problematic, because he stood to benefit financially from this legislation.”
Cox denies that the bill would have benefited him by weakening industry regulations. In fact, Cox claims that it tried to preserve industry standards at a time when lawmakers were discussing eliminating the regulatory agency entirely due to a “very tough economic time for the state.” He points to the bill’s proposed increase of probation companies’ registration fees as evidence that it aimed to generate important revenue for the state body.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Cox withdrew the bill after the paper drew attention to it. Cox claims he pulled the bill when the funding cuts to the agency were no longer a threat.
Cox’s industry ties are especially relevant in Georgia, where private probation is more prevalent than in any other state in the country. For-profit firms handle 80 percent of the state’s active probationers, according to an April 2014 audit by the state government.
The audit found widespread misconduct among the private actors ― which advocates describe as endemic to the industry.
“Modern-day debtors’ prisons exist without for-profit probation industries, but we see them more frequently in places where the industry is prevalent.”
- Nusrat Choudhury, ACLU
Now there is a new controversy related to Cox’s work in private probation, albeit in neighboring Alabama. A federal lawsuit filed in March, and amended this week to include five plaintiffs, accuses PPS of “consistently and unlawfully” extending the plaintiffs’ probation periods.
The five former probationers also charge that PPS routinely failed to recognize their legal rights as impoverished individuals who couldn’t pay the fines and fees associated with their probation. When they could not make their payments, they claim in the lawsuit, PPS punished them with higher fines before eventually forcing them into jail. Once in jail, they had to pay the fines they owed to secure their release.
(The plaintiffs are also suing Universal Health Services, PPS’ parent company; the city of Decatur, Alabama, which retained PPS’ services; the city prosecutor and the city-appointed defense counsel.)
PPS instructed Decatur to arrest one of the plaintiffs, Samantha Malone, despite a probation order that said she still had ample time to complete her payment, according to the lawsuit. Malone, who was pregnant, was in jail for a month and forced to find “refuge” for her children, the suit alleges. None of her jail time offset the size of the fine she owed.
Cox declined to comment on the details of the lawsuit, which he said is the first one in the company’s roughly 25-year history.
“We do look forward to refuting its baseless charges,” he said.
“Modern-Day Debtors’ Prisons”
Critics of the private probation industry, including T. R. Radjabov, Cox’s Democratic opponent in the 108th district, argue that it is inherently unjust. The industry’s business model, they say, invariably encourages companies to trap poor probationers in never-ending cycles of debt, illegally resulting in jail time when they cannot pay.
The latter practice routinely draws comparisons to the debtors’ prisons of yore.
“Modern-day debtors’ prisons exist without for-profit probation industries, but we see them more frequently in places where the industry is prevalent,” said Nusrat Choudhury, an attorney in the American Civil Liberties Union’s racial justice program.
Private probation companies hawk their services to cash-strapped counties and municipalities with the promise of enforcing misdemeanor crimes and traffic violations at no cost to the local government. The companies function as commission-based debt collectors, relying on processing fees from the probationers themselves for the revenue they need to survive.
As a result, private probation officers have an incentive to cut corners by piling up fees and fines and illegally threatening impoverished clients with jail, rather than allowing them to take advantage of laws giving people living below the federal poverty line more flexible payment terms.
Being able to outsource debt collection can also make local governments more willing to aggressively enforce minor infractions like traffic violations as a source of revenue.
The susceptibility of that revenue model to abuse and racial discrimination was on full display in Ferguson, Missouri, whose municipal government effectively used black residents as a piggy bank for tax revenue, the Department of Justice found last year.
The only solution — according to Geraghty, Choudhury, Long and even the American Bar Association — is the abolition of private probation altogether.
Radjabov, a successful entrepreneur who immigrated from the former Soviet Union as a teenager, said Cox’s background in the private probation industry “raises a major concern for us in our campaign.”
He said he wants to make the industry’s abolition a “priority” if he succeeds in defeating Cox.
“Private probation business is barbaric, inhuman and requires immediate attention from the state legislators to put a stop to this madness,” he added. “To keep beating already beaten-down people is just not American.”
Before You Go
