Pay up or go to jail: how a Mississippi town resurrected the debtors' prison
Source: The Guardian
Pay up or go to jail: how a Mississippi town resurrected the debtors' prison
Ed Pilkington in New York
Wednesday 21 October 2015 15.42 BST
Qumotria Kennedy, a 36-year-old single mother with teenage kids from Biloxi, Mississippi, was driving around the city with a friend in July when they were pulled over by police for allegedly running a stop sign. Though Kennedy was the passenger, her name was put through a police database that flashed up a warrant for her arrest on charges that she failed to pay $400 in court fines.
The fines were for other traffic violations dating back to 2013. At that time, Kennedy says she told her probation officers a private company called Judicial Corrections Services Inc (JCS) that she was so poor there was no way she could find the money.
She worked as a cleaner at the baseball field in downtown Biloxi, earning less than $9,000 a year well below the federal poverty level for a single person, let alone a mother of two dependent children. Her plea fell on deaf ears: a JCS official told her that unless she paid her fines in full, as well as a $40 monthly fee to JCS for the privilege of having them as her probation officers, she would go to jail an arrest warrant was duly secured to that effect through the Biloxi municipal court.
Nor was Kennedys inability to pay her fines as a result of poverty taken into account by the police officer when he stopped her in July, she said. Discovering the arrest warrant, he promptly put her in handcuffs and took her to a Gulfport jail.
There she was told that unless she came up with all the money by now the figure had bloated as a result of JCSs monthly fees to $1,000 she would stay in jail. And so she did. Kennedy spent the next five days and nights in a holding cell.
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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/21/mississippi-debtors-prison-poverty-lawsuit
w0nderer
(1,937 posts)fasttense
(17,301 posts)Now if you embezzled money through a Wall Street firm nothing would happen to you.