Lucylastic
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http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/21/mississippi-debtors-prison-poverty-lawsuit
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.
Qumotria Kennedy and her daughter Victorya Ricks, 17, fold laundry and watch TV in the evening. Photograph: William Widmer/ACLU
Nor was Kennedy’s 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 JCS’s 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.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-rise-of-americas-debtor-prisons/
For teenager Kevin Thompson, a traffic ticket ended up costing him not only his driver's license, but also his freedom.
In his account of the experience, Thompson says he was ordered to pay $810 in fines by Georgia's DeKalb Recorders Court, an amount that was out of reach for the low-income auto shop and tow truck worker. Instead of working with Thompson to find another way to pay, such as through community service, the court handed off Thompson to a for-profit probation company called Judicial Correction Services (JCS). JCS told Thompson he had 30 days to pay the fine, but also gave him erroneous legal information, such as overestimating the cost of a public defender.
Thompson notes that the court later took up a JCS officer's recommendation to incarcerate him, resulting in a five-day stint in jail for failing to pay the fine.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/09/23/3704358/debtors-prisons-lawsuits/
http://www.npr.org/2014/05/21/313118629/supreme-court-ruling-not-enough-to-prevent-debtors-prisons
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/debtors-prison/462378/
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What these cities lack in tax receipts, they collect through fines and fees stemming from minor municipal violations. These include vehicle violations such as expired registration, speeding, or seat-belt tickets, and other offenses like “saggy pants” or property-upkeep tickets (everything from chipped paint to trash-can violations). Simply put, these are not serious crimes. And, to make matters worse, such laws are unevenly enforced. City governments, incentivized by their own budget goals and shortfalls, encourage local police to increase the number of citations in order to drive up revenue. Municipal courts are the mechanism for collection.
Qiana Williams is a 37-year-old single mother and long-time resident of St. Louis. Her story is representative of the damage that the broken municipal justice system can have on the lives of the individuals sucked into it. According to Williams, her problems began at the age of 19 when she was ticketed for driving without a license. A couple of months later, after missing a court date, she was arrested and held on a $250 bond, an amount that she could not afford to pay. It eventually became clear that she was unable to pay the bond, even with the threat of continued detention, and she was released—without ever appearing before a judge and with the underlying fine still outstanding, she recalls.
Since that time, Williams has spent more than four months total in jail in a spiral of unpaid tickets, warrants, and ever-increasing fines that she could not pay because she lacked the necessary income. Hopeful that she would be able to lift herself and her family out of this cycle and pay off her tickets with a college degree, she enrolled in school. She was just 12 credits shy of her degree when she was arrested again for unpaid traffic tickets, she said.
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Arresting and Jailing Civil Debtors in America? OMG! W... - 
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