In England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 10,000 people were imprisoned for debt each year.[11] A prison term did not alleviate a person's debt, however; an inmate was typically required to repay the creditor in-full before being released.[12] In the Kingdom of Great Britain and the later United Kingdom, debtors' prisons varied in the amount of freedom they allowed the debtor. With a little money, a debtor could pay for some freedoms; some prisons allowed inmates to conduct business and to receive visitors; others (including the Fleet and King's Bench Prisons) even allowed inmates to live a short distance outside the prison—a practice known as the 'Liberty of the Rules'—and the Fleet even tolerated clandestine 'Fleet Marriages'.
Life in these prisons, however, was far from pleasant, and the inmates were forced to pay for their keep. Samuel Byrom, son of the writer and poet John Byrom, was imprisoned for debt in the Fleet in 1725, and in 1729 he sent a petition to his old school friend, the Duke of Dorset, in which he raged against the injustices of the system. Some debtor prisoners were even less fortunate, being sent to prisons with a mixture of vicious criminals and petty criminals, and many more were confined to a single cell.
The father of the English author Charles Dickens was sent to one of these prisons (the Marshalsea), which were often described in Dickens's novels.[13] He became an advocate for debt prison reform, and his novel Little Dorrit dealt directly with this issue.[14]
The Debtors' Act of 1869 limited the ability of the courts to sentence debtors to prison, but it did not entirely prohibit them from doing so. Debtors who had the means to pay their debt, but did not do so, could still be incarcerated for up to six weeks, as could those who defaulted on debts to the court.[15] Initially, there was a significant reduction in the number of debtors imprisoned following the passage of the 1869 Act. By 1870, the total number of debtors imprisoned decreased by almost 2,000, dropping from 9,759 in 1869 to 6,605 in 1870.[16] However, by 1905 that number had increased to 11,427.[16]
Some of London's debtors' prisons were the Coldbath Fields Prison, Fleet Prison, Giltspur Street Compter, King's Bench Prison, Marshalsea Prison, Poultry Compter, andWood Street Counter. The most famous was the Clink prison, which had a debtor's entrance in Stoney Street. This prison gave rise to the British slang term for being incarcerated in any prison, hence "in the clink". Its location also gave rise to the term for being financially embarrassed, "stoney broke". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens
The grotesque criminalization of poverty in America
Ryan Cooper, The Week
If you are arrested for a serious crime, you're supposed to be taken to jail and booked. Then there's some sort of hearing, and if the judge doesn't think you will skip town or commit more crimes, you are either released on your own recognizance, or you post bail, and you are free until a pre-trial hearing. After that, you either go to trial, or plead guilty and accept punishment.
But for a great many people, this is not how it works. As a new report from the Prison Policy Initiative demonstrates, over one-third of people who go through the booking process end up staying in jail simply because they can't raise enough cash to post bail. For millions of Americans in 2016, poverty is effectively a crime.
This flowchart lays out the basic reality for people who get booked. A very small minority (4 percent) are denied bail, while about a quarter are released without bail. Thirty-eight percent manage to make bail, while 34 percent can't scrape together the cash:
People who can't make bail (let's call them "bailed-in") make little money, with a median pre-jail income of $15,109 — less than half the median income for the general population. Unsurprisingly, African-Americans have it the worst, with the lowest median income and the largest difference between the bailed-in population and their non-incarcerated cohort:
This makes a complete mockery of the criminal justice system's pretense of fairness and impartiality. There are a dozen other ways it is rigged in favor of wealth and social status, of course, but most of these are more subtle and underhanded. Here there are people openly sitting in jail, being punished without conviction or a guilty plea, simply because they don't have enough money.
Jail is an absolutely horrible place. The living conditions are hellish, prisoners and guards are frequently abusive, and medical care is atrocious. Particularly for people who haven't been arrested before, being booked for the first time is so traumatic that suicide — typically within the first 24 to 48 hours — is the single leading cause of death in jails.
Jail is a big business, both for bail bondsman and for cash-strapped counties in the South (some of which are notorious for stopping out-of-state black people on any imaginable pretext so as to hold them up for bail money). Many court dockets, particularly in poor, populous locations, are completely swamped with cases without remotely enough resources to process everyone according to the rules of due process. One quick and easy shortcut is to load up the accused with as many charges as possible, demand a gigantic bail, and rely on fear and economic pressure to secure a guilty plea. (Some 97 percent of cases which are not dismissed are settled by plea bargaining.)
It's hard to say how many legally innocent people are jailed in this way. At any given moment, roughly 646,000 people are in American jails, but there is also tremendous churn in and out of the jail system — 11.4 million admissions in 2014 alone.
The fact that millions of these people probably sat in jail for lack of money is nothing less than a moral abomination.
Many if not most of the people who end up in jail have committed crimes, some of them violent. But a society's commitment to due process and the rule of law can be measured by how it treats its least sympathetic members. It's easy to endorse constitutional treatment for the drug-addicted daughter of middle-class parents. But accused murderers deserve the same exact consideration.
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