Modern-Day Debtor’s Prison

Tags

criminal justice, debt, Missouri, poverty, prison, taxes

Tony Messenger has been running a mesmerizing series of columns in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the criminal justice system in rural Missouri. The latest column appeared on Friday, and they are all worth careful reading. [UPDATE: Messenger won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.]

The columns document how counties and judicial circuits around the state have turned their criminal justice systems into revenue-generating operations. A number of mechanisms have arisen to do this: Imposing high and ever-escalating court costs for probationers, requiring costly drug tests run by a private company, and incredibly enough, charging prisoners rent for the time they spend in jail.

The cumulative effect of all these tactics is that poor people — who are, of course, disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system — are serving as a new revenue stream for cash-strapped counties across the state. A dumb kid who messes up and runs afoul of the law gets pulled into “the system,” as it is so rightly called, and instead of simply serving his 30 days or whatever and putting the offense behind him, becomes a never-ending source of income for his county.

 

One can’t entirely blame the counties for this situation. Their tax bases are uncertain, especially in areas of the state with declining population (and thus sales taxes). They can’t keep raising property taxes, and in many cases have been finagled into giving property tax abatements to some of their biggest propertyholders by the promise of jobs in the future. (Boone County, where I live, has done that several times over the past few years, abating property taxes for companies that promise to locate in the county and bring new jobs.) So they look anywhere they can to make up the shortfall. Unfortunately, private companies that promise a fee for “services” like probation monitoring, drug testing, jail phone management, and the like offer a temptation that counties find hard to resist. And the disenfranchised end up bearing the cost. The subject of the most recent Messenger article is now homeless on the streets of Kansas City, not because he failed to complete his jail sentence, but because he couldn’t keep up with the mounting court costs that accumulated as a result.

We like to imagine debtor’s prisons as a long-ago horror from a novel by Dickens. Unfortunately, we seem to have re-created them in a new, corporatized, form. Any time you mix the workings of the criminal justice system and the profit motive, you are asking for abuse.

Advertisement

The Rural Poor

Tags

American literature, Chronicle of Higher Education, Kennett, literature, poverty, rural life

A friend of mine recently called my attention to this excellent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, not usually the sort of publication that one associates with societal analysis. But it’s comprehensive, it’s long, and it’s well worth the time.

The subject is the interconnection between poverty, education, and health in a rural Missouri town – Kennett, a town in the Bootheel, the seat of Dunklin County. I don’t remember much about Kennett from my childhood except that I think we drove through it once; it also had an excellent newspaper, the Daily Dunklin Democrat, locally owned, that we read and admired when I was working for the Journal-Banner. (It’s now just the Dunklin Democrat, published three days a week, and kinda-sorta locally owned.)

But Kennett is not the story here; Kennett is merely the example of a story which can be repeated a thousand times across the country. Rural poverty, rural despair, forgotten people whose sense of futility leads to addictive behaviors and self-harm.

What’s remarkable to me is that this story could have been written a hundred years ago. Read Hamlin Garland, read Sarah Orne Jewett, read Sherwood Anderson, and you’ll read these same stories from a different era, with only the superficial details changed. The intractability of rural poverty is a continuing theme in America.

In Sinclair Lewis‘ novels, the warping power of rural despair is portrayed as malevolent, and the smug inhabitants of Gopher Prairie are portrayed as co-conspirators in their own limitation. In the work of someone like Frank Norris, by contrast, the rural folk are helpless victims of larger forces, cruel fate or wicked industrialists.

I think it’s possible to be both villain and victim in one’s own story, as we see in the Chronicle article: people who know the self-destructive consequences of their actions but who do them anyway. The great dilemma of rural poverty is its self-perpetuating quality. Poor folks can’t pay much in taxes, so they are unable to finance the kinds of improvements that would attract industry or a wealthier strata of people; thus the roads grow ever more pitted, the hospitals scratch along with the barest of talent, the educational system strains for the minimum. Putting a dent in rural poverty requires outside intervention. That’s why the state legislators in Missouri (and elsewhere) who turned down the expansion of Medicaid for partisan reasons were so foolish: they were essentially condemning themselves and their own constituents to a cycle of degradation. As we watch the lights of rural hospitals blink out across the state and nation, making those impoverished areas even less desirable to live in (an inevitable consequence of the refusal to expand Medicaid), we can see the future of towns like Kennett. And it’s not pretty.