Matt Marcinkowski
Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is one of the few columnists—maybe the only one—in America whose beat is the poor who are preyed upon by public officials. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2019 for his stories about rural white Missourians thrown into debtors’ prisons to finance their local justice system; earlier, he was a Pulitzer finalist for editorials on how urban Black residents are jailed for traffic fines to fill their North County municipalities’ coffers. In his first book, published this month, Profit and Punishment: How America Criminalizes the Poor in the Name of Justice, Messenger explains that the problem exists in all 50 states. He focuses on three single mothers abused by the criminal justice system, in Norman, Oklahoma; Columbia, South Carolina; and Salem, Missouri. While being jailed for misdemeanors, they lose their jobs and, without their paychecks, are evicted from their homes. Best-selling author James Patterson called Messenger’s debut “crucial evidence that the criminal justice system is broken and needs to be fixed.”
What compelled you to write Profit and Punishment? More than anyone else, Brooke Bergen inspired me because what happened to her was so unjust. Her father died when she was an infant. She married young and divorced. After her mother died, she moved to Salem, Missouri. Then her baby girl died. In her grief, she went to a Walmart in the middle of the night and allegedly shoplifted an $8.74 tube of mascara. She was jailed and fined and ordered to appear before a Dent County judge every month [on] a misdemeanor [for which the] police in St. Louis wouldn’t have even applied for warrants. Brooke couldn’t leave the county because she was tethered to the court. She ended up owing more than $15,000 in board bills [a jail’s room and board fees] and fines by the time she died this year at the age of 32 of a drug overdose.
Which states were the most concerning? The most egregious cases to me are from rural Missouri, where people were jailed because they couldn’t afford to pay their board bills and literally were put in debtors’ prisons. The county using private probation companies that drug test their clients and then use those tests to add to jail time adds to the problem. In some venues, the courts take away their driver’s licenses, so they can’t get to work and are fired. Nearly 600 cities and counties in America collect more than 10 percent of their operating budgets from fines and fees. One Missouri lawmaker calls it “policing for profit.”
Are these violations of the 8th Amendment prohibiting excessive fines? The Missouri Supreme Court ruled two years ago that it’s illegal to jail people because they couldn’t pay their board bills. But the justices didn’t rule on the constitutionality of the problem. There is bipartisan effort here and across the U.S. for criminal justice reforms. A big part of the problem is the state legislatures using the courts to fund their governments through fines and fees.
FYI: Profit and Punishment will be released on December 7.
