Giving Compass' Take:

• Anna Wolfe and Michelle Liu discuss Mississippi's modern debtors prisons where inmates work low-wage, sometimes dangerous jobs to pay off debt. 

• How can funders advance the rights of incarcerated people? 

• Read about supporting criminal justice reform.

Mississippi appears to be the only state where judges lock people up for an indefinite time while they work to earn money to pay off court-ordered debts. While there is no comprehensive data, legal experts who study fines, fees and restitution say Mississippi is unusual at the very least.

“We don’t know of any other states that have a program quite like Mississippi’s,” said Sharon Brett, a senior staff attorney with Harvard’s Criminal Justice Policy Program.

A handful of states experimented with restitution programs starting in the 1970s, but abandoned them as expensive and ineffective.

Not Mississippi. Judges have sentenced hundreds of people a year to four restitution centers around the state, almost always ordering them to stay until they pay off court fees, fines and restitution to victims, according to four years of government records analyzed by Mississippi Today and The Marshall Project.

People sent to the centers had been sentenced for felonies but didn’t commit violent crimes, according to the program rules. When we tracked down the cases of more than 200 people confined there on Jan. 1, 2019, we found that most originally got suspended sentences, meaning they did not have to go to prison.

They didn’t usually owe a lot of money. Half the people living in the centers had debts of less than $3,515. One owed just $656.50. Though in arrears on fines and court fees, many didn’t need to pay restitution at all — at least 20 percent of them were convicted of drug possession.

But people spent an average of nearly four months — and up to five years — at the centers, working for private employers to earn enough to satisfy the courts. Meanwhile their costs continued to balloon, since they had to pay for room and board, transportation to their jobs, and medical care.

Our investigation with The Marshall Project found:

  • The inmates work at low-wage, sometimes dangerous jobs, such as slaughtering chickens or gutting catfish at processing plants. Private citizens hire them to work as handymen and landscapers at their homes.
  • When they can’t get jobs, sometimes for medical reasons, they sit in the centers, accruing $330 a month in room and board costs. Some of them say the centers don’t offer programs to deal with addiction or earn high-school diplomas.
  • Just a quarter of all money earned by the inmates went to pay restitution, with the remainder going to the corrections department and the courts, according to state data from July 2014 through June 2018. In some cases, the courts added unrelated debts, such as child support. One man’s charge for meth possession turned into debt totaling $72,500.
  • Inaccurate and confusing record-keeping by the state makes it hard for workers to know if they are making progress toward paying off their debts and how soon they might be eligible for release.
  • Black people are overrepresented at restitution centers, accounting for 49 percent of inmates, compared with 38 percent of the state population, according to our analysis of center data for January 2019. More than 60 percent of people in prison in Mississippi are black.

Read the full article about Mississippi’s debtors prisons by Anna Wolfe and Michelle Liu at The Marshall Project.