Woman jailed for being poor

Although the United States abolished debtors' prison in the 1830s, postdemocratic America has seen the revival of this hated practice.

A woman from Escanaba, Michigan, has been jailed because she is too poor to reimburse the court for her teenage son's sentence in juvenile detention.

Making people pay to be sentenced to jail or detention is itself a practice that gained height with the class-charged incarceration boom of the '90s. It's fundamentally wrong, as the punishment for the crime is supposed to be only jail (unless there's some additional penalty).

When the judge sends you to jail, that's the penalty. The punishment isn't supposed to also include paying for the jail stay. Running a jail is a cost the county has to pay.

It's unclear what crime was committed by the teenager in this story. One thing is for sure: There's a whole system in place designed to throw the book at young people as well as adults for things that weren't even illegal 30 years ago. With the laws these days, the average American probably breaks the law monthly without even knowing it.

The mother in the Michigan case was initially found in contempt of court because she couldn't pay for her son's detention. She had also been denied a court-appointed attorney, even though the Constitution requires her to be provided with one.

When she finally got paid at work, the jail took that money too - and kept her incarcerated. So it sounds like a vicious cycle: Can't pay, go to jail, rack up more jail bills, can't pay again, stay in jail, and so on. It's a nifty little racket the system has.

The ACLU of Michigan has taken up the woman's case. The Michigan ACLU also successfully represented a disabled man recently whose probation was extended because he was too poor to pay the supervision fee.

(Source: http://aclumich.org/issues/due-process/2009-03/1353)