American towns survive by fining poor people, and use debtors' prisons to make them pay

The Ferguson uprising was triggered by the police assassination of Michael Brown, but even before that killing, the city was a powder-keg, thanks to the practice of financing the city government by levying fines on the poor and putting those who couldn't pay in debtors' prison to encourage the rest to cough up.

The US Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that debtors' prisons are unconstitutional and has banned the practice of imprisoning indigent people who can't pay fines for petty offenses, it is still routinely practiced across America, and the practice is growing.

Fines levied on poor people are now a major source of revenue in thousands of small American cities and towns, and since poor people don't have any money to pay these fines, fines are inevitably accompanied by the threat of debtors' prison, which makes taking out predatory loans, or borrowing from poor relatives who can't afford to pay, a relatively attractive option.

The practice is especially virulent in red states where rich people enjoy massive tax breaks, starving the public coffers of the money needed for basic services: as the rich increasingly gain the political power to making taxing them impossible, public funding comes from those who have money to give, because their very poverty makes them incapable of flexing the political muscle needed to change things.

Debtors' prisons aren't just a way to discriminate against poor people: they're also a way to make poor people poorer.

In a long, deeply reported piece, the New York Times's Matthew Shaer tells the story of Corinth, Tennessee, where judges like John C. Read the rest