“Inmates get out of jail but then the whammy hits,” said Messenger at a book signing in Springfield. That’s because nearly every municipality in Missouri charges inmates daily for their stay in jail on top of the other fees and fines they may owe. One of the main characters in his columns and book is Brooke Bergen, who was arrested several years ago in Dent County for shoplifting an $8 tube of mascara.īy the time she served a year for the misdemeanor, she owed the court $15,000 for her stay in jail. The former News-Leader columnist used his Pulitzer-prize winning columns on the topic as the basis for the book. In his new book, “Profit and Punishment: How America Criminalizes the Poor in the Name of Justice,” Messenger lays out how America criminalizes the poor through never-ending court fees. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger found that is happening all the time in Missouri and in the rest of the country. In America, you are not supposed to go to jail just because you are poor.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |