Yeah Baby! Debtor’s Prisons Are Back!
by digby
Matt Taibbi said something interesting on CNN the other day when he was asked about whether or not people understood the origins of the financial crisis:
What I’m finding, as I travel the country, is that more and more people actually do understand what happened. And the reason that they understand is because they are personally confronting some aspect of the financial services industry, whether it’s because, you know, I met somebody in Kentucky a little while ago who lost 20 percent or 30 percent of his pension fund value, because the state had invested in mortgage-backed securities, or whether they’d been wiped out by credit card debt or they’re being foreclosed upon, people are being forced to get an education in all these things and they’re slowly coming around to what happened in the last 10 or 15 years, but it’s a very, very gradual progress.
I thought of that when I read this story and wondered whether some of those people were among those mentioned in this story:
As a sheriff’s deputy dumped the contents of Joy Uhlmeyer’s purse into a sealed bag, she begged to know why she had just been arrested while driving home to Richfield after an Easter visit with her elderly mother.
No one had an answer. Uhlmeyer spent a sleepless night in a frigid Anoka County holding cell, her hands tucked under her armpits for warmth. Then, handcuffed in a squad car, she was taken to downtown Minneapolis for booking. Finally, after 16 hours in limbo, jail officials fingerprinted Uhlmeyer and explained her offense — missing a court hearing over an unpaid debt. “They have no right to do this to me,” said the 57-year-old patient care advocate, her voice as soft as a whisper. “Not for a stupid credit card.”
It’s not a crime to owe money, and debtors’ prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found.
Not every warrant results in an arrest, but in Minnesota many debtors spend up to 48 hours in cells with criminals. Consumer attorneys say such arrests are increasing in many states, including Arkansas, Arizona and Washington, driven by a bad economy, high consumer debt and a growing industry that buys bad debts and employs every means available to collect.
Whether a debtor is locked up depends largely on where the person lives, because enforcement is inconsistent from state to state, and even county to county.
In Illinois and southwest Indiana, some judges jail debtors for missing court-ordered debt payments. In extreme cases, people stay in jail until they raise a minimum payment. In January, a judge sentenced a Kenney, Ill., man “to indefinite incarceration” until he came up with $300 toward a lumber yard debt.
“The law enforcement system has unwittingly become a tool of the debt collectors,” said Michael Kinkley, an attorney in Spokane, Wash., who has represented arrested debtors. “The debt collectors are abusing the system and intimidating people, and law enforcement is going along with it.”
I’m sure the federal and state governments can divert some of that sacred Homeland Security money to devote to some of this. It’s about justice, after all. And moral hazard. It’s vitally important that the plebes understand that it’s wrong for them to avoid responsibility for their bad decisions. (Some people, of course, are too important to our system, so that’s different.)
One can’t help but wonder what would happen if people with bully pulpits were drawing attention to this kind of thing (and place the proper blame) in order to speed up the enlightenment process that Taibbi has been seeing. Oh well, we have blogs …
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