Vol. 73/No. 17      May 4, 2009

Edwina Nowlin, an unemployed Michigan resident, was released after 28 days in jail, only after the American Civil Liberties Union protested. In Nowlin’s case, the judge sent her to jail because she couldn’t pay the $104 a month she was charged for her son’s “lodging” at Bay Pines Juvenile Detention Center in Escanaba.

Until a few years ago cops in Gulfport, Mississippi, routinely conducted sweeps of the city’s Black neighborhoods, arrested people with unpaid fines, and jailed them. The practice continued at least until 2007 when city officials reached an agreement with the Southern Center for Human Rights and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund to implement an “Amnesty Week” and “community service” in place of fines in some cases.

The Florida court system is a leader in the modern-day debtors’ prisons. According to a study released by the Brennan Center for Justice, 839 people were arrested last year in Leon County, Florida, for failure to appear after not paying court fees and fines or “falling behind in a payment plan.”

Florida officials told the New York Times that to get around constitutional prohibitions on jailing people “solely” over fees and fines they cannot pay, technically they jail them for violating court orders.

Valerie Gainous, who narrowly escaped going to prison in Florida, even after paying restitution for writing bad checks, said she would try to keep up with the payments for additional fines “to keep from going to jail for being poor.”  
 
 
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