Debtor's Prisons in 21st Century America

Women at mealtime - St. Pancras Workhouse in London

Last week Alan Pyke wrote an article posted on ThinkProgress.org about a recent court settlement reached with the city of Colorado Springs, Colorado in the wake of an ACLU suit filed over the incarceration of mostly poor and homeless individuals basically for being poor.

It's a sad testament to a 21st century America where the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest is as wide as it's ever been, and stagnant wages and crippling financial debt are a reality for millions of people.


Society has wrestled with the criminalization of poverty as a legal and moral issue since as far back as the middle ages when Europeans unable to pay off debts were taken to debtor's prisons where they could be kept for years until their debts were paid off.

Grim images of work houses (where people were locked up until they paid off debts through menial labor) in Ireland or England evoke scenes out of the books of English author Charles Dickens, who fictionalized settings, characters and scenes based on the social conditions he personally witnessed in England and France in the 1800's.

Marshalsea Debtor's Prison 1897

Dickens' views on the horrendous living conditions of the poor in the 19th century were deeply personal.

After his father John Dickens, who worked as a clerk in the Navy pay office, began to live beyond his means and accrue debts, he was imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtor's prison in London in 1824.

Dickens, who was well-read as a young boy and had attended private schools, was forced to leave school, take up residence with an impoverished friend of the family named Elizabeth Roylance, and work grueling ten hour shifts in a dilapidated rat-infested warehouse where he pasted labels onto pots of bootblack for six shillings a week.

Meager wages which went towards his room and board.


In fact, as Dickens would relate in The Life and Times of Charles Dickens, on his first day of work, a boy named Bob Fagin showed Dickens the proper way to attach the labels to the pots; Dickens later based the character Fagin from Oliver Twist off this same boy.

The remarkable yet disturbing book and PBS film Slavery By Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon shed light on the systematic incarceration and forced servitude of thousands and thousands of African-Americans at the hands of a corrupt and racist judicial system in the southern United States after the Civil War up until World War II.

To look back on the deplorable social conditions of the poor and working class in Europe and America from the Middle Ages up through the 20th century, it's almost unimaginable to think that modern municipal governments in the wealthiest democracy in the Western world still imprison people for being poor - but as the ACLU suit against Colorado Springs shows - it's true.

And not just in Colorado either.

Ferguson cop Darren Wilson & Mary Ann Twitty (r)

In the wake of the killing of teenager Michael Brown by former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, the subsequent investigation of Ferguson's municipal courts and police department by the Department of Justice found a corrupt system that was systematically targeting middle and low income African-Americans for low-level administrative violations like parking violations, moving violations and even citations for "manner of walking" as a means to generate revenue.


Remember my blog about Mary Ann Twitty's magic wand? 

Remarkable that it took global outrage over a Ferguson PD officer shooting an unarmed 17 year-old boy in broad daylight and months of subsequent protests for the federal government to unravel the tentacles of a corrupt municipal court system working in tandem with the police department to intentionally target poor people of color simply to assign fines used as a revenue stream.

Modern debtor's prisons in America have even proven deadly.

Rex Iverson died over $2,376.92

Remember the story of Rex Iverson?

He was the Utah man who was jailed for failing to appear in court over an outstanding $2,376.92 bill that he owed for an ambulance ride in 2015.

After failing to respond to notices to pay the balance, he was arrested and placed in a holding cell where he was later found dead.


The inability to pay a fine also led to the death of 55 year-old Eileen DeNino back in June of 2014.

As Alan Pyke reported in an article for ThinkProgress.org two years ago, DeNino, a mother of seven, was jailed after not being able to provide documentation that she was not able to come up with $2,000 she owed from accrued fees related to her children being truant from the Reading, Pennsylvania school system.

Can someone explain the logic of locking a mother up in jail because she can't provide proof that she can't come up with $2,000?

55 year-old Eileen DeNino died over $2,000

Like Rex Iverson, she was arrested and a judge sentenced her to be incarcerated for 48 hours.

And like Iverson, DeNino was later found dead in the Berks County Jail.  

Over $2,000 in inflated fees and court costs.

The rise of for-profit prisons in the U.S. has also contributed to an increase in people being jailed because they can't pay court costs or fines.



A tactic that plays right into the hands of private companies like Judicial Correction Services (JSC) who routinely violate the constitutional rights of Americans and incarcerate them in private facilities - for profit.

It leads to some truly sad tales.

Stories like Georgia teenager Kevin Thompson a tow truck driver employed at an auto repair shop who was jailed for being unable to pay an $810 fine (based on a JSC recommendation...) after the DeKalb County Recorder's Court handed Thompson's case over to JSC.

Cases like these are all too common even though debtor's prisons were outlawed in the U.S. in the 1830's.

But as the old adage goes, what's old is made new again.

The glimmer of hope is that organizations like the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other legal advocacy groups are continuing to focus attention and resources on egregious laws that allow local governments to jail people simply for not having enough money to pay fines.

Fines which are too often leveled at those already burdened by the economic disadvantages of existing at the lower end of the rungs of an unequal and all too frequently unjust society governed by politicians who still fancy it "the land of the free".

Rex Iverson and Eilleen DeNino would say that's a myth; and Charles Dickens would simply weep.

Mary Ann Twitty's Magic Wand & Tony Wright's Wrongful Conviction By Philly PD

Nothing to see here folks!  Ferguson Police chief Tom Jackson

Embattled Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson (pictured left) is the hands-down winner of this week's "Bury My Head In The Sand Award".

In a recent interview with CBS News he claimed that:

"There is not a racial problem in the police department. We clearly have a racial divide that is perceived by a large part of the community." 

"I challenge that anyone was harassed (by police). Racial profiling is not only prohibited, but it's illegal."

Come on dude, really?

The findings from the recently released Department of Justice report on the Ferguson Police Department initiated in 2014 after the death of teenager Michael Brown would suggest otherwise.

As widely reported, while blacks make up 67% of Ferguson's population, between 2012 - 2014 every time a person in Ferguson was arrested for "resisting arrest", they were black; people of color also made up 93% of the arrests in the same period.

Oh, and the dog bite thing too. Every single incident involving a Ferguson Police K-9 dog biting someone between 2012 and 2014, the victim was African-American. Every. Single. Time.

Now obviously all those stupid racist e-mails shared by employees of both the police department and court were disturbing and remarkably juvenile given what the folks passing them around do for a living, but Dinesh D'Souza, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and their ilk say stuff just as ignorant on television and radio all the time. 

What's far more disturbing than obnoxious jokes that demean people because of their race, is the reality that the entrenched systematic bias and intentional discrimination against people of color taking place within the department was not simply limited to a "few bad apples".

The DOJ report makes it clear that Ferguson police worked in tandem with court officials to aggressively criminalize run-of-the-mill, non-criminal municipal code violations like excessively tinted windows, broken tail lights, loose tail pipes, or routine traffic violations to intentionally boost municipal revenue.

They were able to do it with the help of people like Ferguson Court Clerk Mary Ann Twitty; one of three Ferguson municipal employees to be fired or resign in recent days as a result of the scathing DOJ report.

Ferguson Court Clerk Mary Ann Twitty (R) next to Darren Wilson

That's Twitty pictured at left with the short hair and big earrings; the smiling guy in the blue shirt with the hat?

That's former Ferguson PD officer Darren Wilson (the killer of unarmed teenager Michael Brown)  at a bar in Ferguson,

Twitty  was recently fired after being cited in the DOJ report.


Why? For using her position to help "fix" tickets and citations for friends, co-workers and relatives.

For example, according to the DOJ report an unidentified friend of a relative of Twitty's e-mailed her to ask for help with a ticket - Twitty e-mailed back: "Your $200 ticket has magically disappeared!"

Twitty not only had the magic touch, she used it on multiple occasions to make citations and tickets vanish whenever she wanted. So depending on who you are in Ferguson, and who you know, tickets can lead to your being jailed - or they can "magically disappear".

People like Twitty are the less-often seen face of America's two-tier justice system; entrenched functionaries who operate the internal "bureaucracy gears" of a legal system that views and treats defendants differently based on their ethnicity, race and socio-economic background.

Twitty represents the behind-the-scenes functionaries who work in compliance with the police department, processing all the paperwork to make sure that black Ferguson citizens were routinely issued summonses or warrants when payments on minor tickets were missed, or people failed to show up for court for the minor code violations mentioned above. Just to keep the revenue flowing.

Based on the astronomical arrest rates of black people in Ferguson, no wonder Twitty could afford to make tickets vanish at will for her friends and associates - little fiefdoms like Ferguson (we have them here in New Jersey too) are able to function because people like Twitty know how to make the system rack up the charges, fees and penalties on those who are innocent; or only responsible for minor infractions.    

Remember, these minor code violations in Ferguson were largely targeting working poor people who could scarcely afford to pay the fines they were issued; many were jailed and some lost their jobs, or cars as a result of being unfairly locked up in what is essentially, Ferguson's illegal debtor's prison.
  
My personal favorite is the "Manner of Walking" code that's ostensibly a safety requirement to ensure pedestrians walk on the side of roads or on sidewalks; but the ugly reality?

Ferguson police use it as a ready excuse to stop black people at will simply for walking.

95% of people stopped for "manner of walking" are black; former Ferguson officer Darren Wilson used "manner of walking" to stop and confront Michael Brown as he was walking back from a convenience store with a friend back in 2014. We know how that ended.

According to an article in the LA Times by Molly Hennesy-Fiske, Ferguson's "manner of walking" code is intentionally vague; so police can regularly stop black Ferguson citizens for anything - walking too slow, too fast, walking "suspiciously", with a book-bag or anything else a police officer can think of to stop and harass a person of color as a means to come up with things to charge them with.

Mary Ann Twitty and two senior police officials are the just the first three of what is sure to be a slew of people in Ferguson who will loose municipal jobs as a result of the DOJ findings - the police chief-in-denial Tom Jackson is likely on his way out, the Mayor too.

The findings and statistics in the DOJ report have made global headlines and shed light and media attention on the extent of bias within the structure of law enforcement and court systems in America.

The hard truth that America is reluctant to face, is that Ferguson is not an anomaly. It's not just secret interrogation facilities used by the Chicago PD, or rampant 'Stop & Frisk' in New York City - it is a nationwide pattern.

Tony Wright (center) with his son Tony, Jr. (left) back in the fall of 1991

One of the most disturbing examples that warrants more main stream media attention is the case of a black defendant in Philadelphia named Tony Wright.

His story was profiled in an amazing piece published in the latest issue of Rolling Stone by Paul Slotaroff.

If you haven't heard of the case of Tony Wright and the absurd miscarriage of justice he's endured as a result of the broken police culture in the city of Philadelphia, you really need to take a few minutes and read Paul Solotaroff's article on the RollingStone.com Website appropriately entitled, "Why Is This Man Still in Jail?"

I read it this morning over breakfast and I'm still trying to get my head around the facts.

Wright had a tough upbringing in North Philadelphia. At age 20 he'd finally turned his life around with the help of extended family, was on the right path and had a steady job when Philly cops knocked on his door in 1992 and asked him to come down to the station; 23 years later he's still in jail - the problem is he didn't do anything.

Philly cops, including Detectives Martin Devlin and Frank Jastrzembski used a false confession, illegal interrogation techniques, concocted false evidence and coerced two crackheads who didn't even know Wright to frame him for the brutal murder and rape of a 77 year-old woman named Louise Talley.

With the help of The Innocence Project, founded by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld in 1992 as a means to use DNA evidence and modern forensic science to help clear innocent people from crimes for which they (mostly poor black defendants) have been found guilty, Wright has been issued a new trial.

Despite DNA evidence that clearly shows Wright did not rape and kill Louise Talley (DNA taken at the scene proved the actual culprit was a violent former crackhead with a lengthy rap sheet named Ronnie Byrd who used to live in the alley directly behind Talley's Philadelphia home) and has witnesses who can prove he wasn't at the scene at the time of the attack, Philadelphia prosecutors are still determined to keep him incarcerated.

It's an incredible story that's sure to make headlines when the new trial starts. Fortunately, with the help of The Innocence Project, this time Wright will have DNA science and two top flight criminal attorneys on his side.

But as we've seen with Ferguson and with the Rolling Stone profile of Tony Wright, there are many innocent people still trapped in the bowels of a dysfunctional legal system as a result of severely broken police departments - and overzealous stubborn prosecutors like Florida's Angela Corey whose fear of bearing the responsibility for locking up an innocent person and loosing professional face overrides facts, common sense and reason. Remember the Marissa Alexander case?

Consider that Tony Wright has had DNA evidence proving that he's innocent for years and he's still locked up. What blinds prosecutors to the truth when it conflicts with a certainty that exists within their minds?  

Too bad we can't take Mary Ann Twitty's magic wand and wave it over the nation's legal system too make some of the wrongful convictions of innocent Americans disappear - the nation's collective conscience would be the better for it. 

Disparities in Justice in America - A Renewed Discussion

One nation, two justice systems? (Image courtesy - twitter@DerrickJaxn)

If anything positive can come about as result of the senseless death of Michael Brown at the hands of an overzealous police officer, it's a renewed national dialog on the disparities that exist within America's justice system.

The community outrage over the shooting and the subsequent street protests, riots and the accompanying police reaction that have captivated the nation didn't just materialize out of nowhere.

As a well-written article published in the New York Times yesterday  pointed out, the reaction in Ferguson stems from long-simmering tensions that result in large part from patterns in housing discrimination, sharp disparities in community policing and the unequal application of the law based on economics and race.

As officials from the Department of Justice prepare to undertake an independent Federal autopsy on the body of Michael Brown, egregious examples of excessive use of police force against unarmed people of color remind us that this is the 21st century and the color of your skin can often determine how a policeman will treat you.

Michael Brown was jaywalking, he was shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer.

Back on July 1st a homeless grandmother named Marlene Pinnock was walking along a highway in Los Angeles in broad daylight on her way to find a place to sleep when a California Highway Patrol officer confronted her, threw her to the ground and savagely beat her in the head with a closed, gloved fist.

Fifteen days later Eric Garner was standing on the street in Staten Island, New York where he lived selling loose cigarettes when members of the NYPD confronted him, a bystander videotaped one of the officers restricting Garner's airway with an illegal choke hold while other officers piled on top of him - Garner was pronounced dead a short time later.

These are just a few examples of violent police responses to very low-level infractions that happened in broad daylight. In each case there were witnesses who saw what happened. (How many incidents happen across America at night when there are no witnesses?)

The disparities in the application of the law impact all of us, regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality or religion. The statistics are startling. According to StopMassIncareration.net, the United States has 5% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prison population - 60% of those prisoners are black or Latino. (Give or take a few percentage points, blacks make up about 12.1% of the total US population).

A joint research project released in 2012 by the Pew Center on the States and Vera Institute's Center on Sentencing and Corrections and Cost-Benefit Analysis Unit calculated the annual cost to American taxpayers for running the US prison system was a staggering $39 billion. States on average spend 2.8 times more per prisoner than they do pupils; math that only leads to a perpetuation of the system of mass incarceration in this country - an industry unto itself that lobbies for more prison construction.

Remember it's not just a cost measured in tax dollars alone. We're talking about the creation of a massive underclass of convicted felons and ex-prisoners (many of who were imprisoned for low-level drug offenses) who re-enter society barred from voting and taking part in the civic process of electing people to represent them, face barriers and discrimination in the hiring process, lack of access to health care and are relegated to a permanent 2nd class status that leaves them on the fringes of society.

The issue of disparity stretches way beyond the prism of race; it's goes to the very heart of the US justice system and the definition of who we are as a nation. Remember the "Affluenza" case of wealthy Texas teenager Ethan Couch?

It was a big story last December when Texas District Judge Jean Boyd sentenced the then-sixteen year-old Couch to probation after he slammed into a disabled vehicle while legally drunk. He killed the driver of the parked vehicle and three people (a mother and daughter and a youth pastor) who'd stopped to help her; he also paralyzed one the passengers in his truck and seriously injured another.

Judge Boyd's bizarre reasoning was that Couch had grown up so insulated from personal responsibility as a result of being so spoiled by his parent's immense wealth - so he couldn't be held legally responsible for his actions. We all know where a poor sixteen-year-old in Couch's shoes would've ended up.    

Responsibility lies at the heart of the Michael Brown case in Ferguson. The details of the autopsy reports and the conclusion of the investigations into the shooting will tell us more about whether or not Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson will be insulated from personal responsibility for his actions.

Maybe it will also give us some insight into exactly what that blindfold covering the eyes of the symbol of justice in America (with her sword and scales) is blinding her to.