Punished for Being Poor?

In the aftermath of the death of Michael Brown and subsequent events in Ferguson, the Justice Department revealed a shocking bit of news: Missouri police departments were systematically issuing trivial fines and court costs against their very poorest citizens to raise revenue for local government functions. Ta-Nehisi Coates described this at the time as “plunder made legal,” and on Friday, one neighboring municipality agreed to pay $4.7 million to 2,000 citizens who had faced such abuse. Perhaps the worst part of the Missouri grift lay in the revelation that this system was keeping some of the state’s very poorest citizens from any possibility of ever emerging out of a bottomless spiral of destitution, homelessness, and debt. Ferguson and other municipalities were essentially criminalizing being poor. Missouri was not alone in this, though, and this past week there were brand new revelations about another state’s pernicious tactic for turning poverty into a crime in a scheme just as damaging as the one that the Justice Department rightfully pilloried in the Show Me State.