Pay or Stay: The Fight to Abolish St. Louis’s Debtors’ Prisons

Scroll to see a collection of research, stories, and reflections from ArchCity Defenders.

Introduction

Debtors’ Prison – 1. A prison for someone unable to pay their debt. 2. A relic of the Dickensian past. 3. A method by which St. Louis County’s many municipalities extract money from poor and Black people.

Debtors’ prisons were abolished by Congress nearly 200 years ago. In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court made it clear: Judges cannot send people to jail because they are too poor to pay their court fines.

Despite this, many towns in St. Louis have used their police and municipal courts to arrest and jail thousands of poor and predominantly Black people for their inability to pay. These towns generated millions of dollars in revenue, while causing countless people to lose their jobs, vehicles, time with their family, and their sense of individual liberty.

After the killing of Mike Brown in 2014, people took to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest not only his death, but the chronic harassment and abuse perpetrated by the legal system.

In the years that followed, unprecedented public pressure, litigation, and advocacy efforts mounted to address the injustice. One series of major civil righs lawsuits spearheaded by ArchCity Defenders (ACD) alleged debtors’ prison practices against seven St. Louis municipalities: Jennings, Ferguson, St. Ann. Normandy, Edmundson, Maplewood, and Florissant.

Each case took years—some, nearly a decade—to resolve. Tragically, several plaintiffs didn’t live to see their conclusion. In total, the cases settled for $20,201,000 and impacted tens of thousands of people, but they also helped raise awareness of the courts’ abuse, put municipalities in check, and curtailed unconstitutional jailings.

As of the publication of this site on July 25, 2024, court operations have scaled back compared to 10 years ago. But history is not in the rearview mirror just yet. Those ensnared in the trap of municipal courts and police still face a system that punishes and exacerbates poverty, with no benefit to public safety or community wellness.

“Pay or Stay” is a collection of research, stories, and reflections from ACD’s mission to combat the criminalization of poverty, of which the fight to abolish debtors’ prisons has been a huge part. Whether you’ve never heard of a debtors’ prison or whether you’ve been in one, we hope that you’re moved, that you learn something, and that you feel inspired to share what you discover with others.

Table of Contents

1. Municipal Court White Paper: “In the Rearview Mirror: St. Louis’s Municipal Courts After a Decade of Reform and Regress”

2. Video Interviews

3. Class Action Lawsuit State At a Glance

4. “Who Profits?”: A Report Identifying Sources of Extraction and Corrupting Financial Incentives in and around Municipal Legal Systems

In the Rearview Mirror: St. Louis’s Municipal Courts After a Decade of Reform and Regress

In 2013, the municipal courts of St. Louis City and County collected $61,152,087 in fines and fees, 46% of the statewide total despite being home to only 22% of Missourians. In 2023, the City and County courts collected $17,819,458,49 in fines and fees, 31% of the statewide total and 71% less than a decade prior.

How did we get here?

ArchCity Defenders’ 3^rd municipal court white paper explains key legislative, litigation, and advocacy efforts that have shifted the region’s legal landscape; presents data on revenue, ticketing and warrant trends; and highlights how municipal courts continue to harm poor and predominantly Black people. Finally, it reiterates calls by local organizations and legal scholars since 2014 to consolidate St. Louis’s municipal court system.

Video Interviews

The daily violence inflicted by the municipal courts went under the radar for so long because the voices of those suffering at its hands were not deemed worth listening to. Let’s change that narrative.

Class Action Lawsuit Stats At a Glance

Scroll to learn more about where each of the debtors’ prison lawsuits were filed.

DISCLAIMER: Some members of the public feared that due to the large class sizes in each lawsuit, individual payouts would be negligible compensation for the harm done. While we agree that no amount of money can repair the trauma endured, relationships lost, and lives upended, the settlements were proportioned by the number of hours each class member spent detained in jail. For those who spent the longest in jail, their compensation was significantly greater. For many, it was a life-changing sum.

While municipalities never admitted wrongdoing, the litigation put them on notice for routinely ignoring and violating the rights of thousands of people at traffic stops, in court rooms, and in jails. The first debtors’ prison class action lawsuit that settled, Jenkins v. Jennings, included the most terms for injunctive relief of all the cases and was considered a blueprint for the cases that followed. Some of the court-ordered changes include that the court must ask about an individual’s ability to pay after a person is convicted of an offense, the end of “pay dockets,” and forgiveness of fines and fees. In practice, this litigation was effective in bringing municipalities into closer compliance with existing legal requirements. For example: the courts are already legally required to make a meaningful inquiry into someone’s ability to pay assessed fines and fees, and it is unlawful to put someone in jail because they cannot pay those costs. Overall, the most notable impact of these cases was to significantly curtail the unconstitutional practice of jailing thousands of poor, and primarily Black, people in the St. Louis region.

Fant v. Ferguson

Date filed: February 8, 2015

Settlement amount: $4,500,000

Number of class members: 15,017

Jenkins v. Jennings

Date filed: February 8, 2015

Settlement amount: $4,750,000

Number of class members: 2,000

Thomas v. St. Ann

Date filed: August 9, 2016

Settlement amount: $3,125,000

Number of class members: 35,000

Baker v. Florissant

Date filed: October 16, 2016

Settlement amount: $2,890,000

Number of class members: 85,000

Webb v. Maplewood

Date filed: November 1, 2016

Settlement amount: $3,250,000

Number of class members: 27,000

Davis v. Normandy

Date filed: September 10, 2018

Settlement amount: $1,300,000

Number of class members: 23,000

Thomas v. Edmundson

Date filed: December 12, 2018

Settlement amount: $386,000

Number of class members: 10,000

Who Profits?

Identifying Sources of Extraction and Corrupting Financial Incentives In and Around Municipal Legal Systems

Introduction

In 2014, following the killing of Michael Brown, Jr. and amidst the mass protests that resulted, St. Louis’s municipal legal systems fell under intense scrutiny. Ten years later, there is widespread agreement that this scrutiny was deserved and long overdue. What was first publicly catalogued in a white paper by ArchCity Defenders has since been verified by a Department of Justice investigation, inquiries by the Missouri Supreme Court, exhaustive media reporting, and litigation involving dozens of municipal courts: that by 2014, municipal police, courts, and jails across St. Louis had evolved into a pay-to-play system that criminalized poor residents and exploited them for money. None know this more intimately than the low-income and disproportionately Black residents exposed to this system for many years.

To date, public focus on the economic extraction at the core of this system has been largely limited to those municipalities that derived a significant part of their income from municipal fines and fees. This is understandable, as these court-imposed costs have in some ways been the most direct and egregious form of extraction. But there is also a broader scheme at work, one in which municipal ordinance enforcement strips the poor residents who have and still do constitute a significant portion of municipal defendants in St. Louis-area courts of what little wealth or income they possess. There is little evidence this system of ordinance enforcement makes us safer, but it does serve to enrich various system actors. Combined, these processes facilitate a massive transfer of resources from poor and working-class people in St. Louis to a relatively small number of institutions that police and exert control over their lives.

The animating question for the treatment that follows is a simple one: who profits?

The aim, therefore, is to view the system of municipal policing, courts, and jails through this lens and explore a range of processes that produce extractive and perverse financial incentives that continue to corrupt the institution of justice in the St. Louis region. The following sections provide an overview of these processes generating revenue for (1) the municipalities themselves, (2) the Missouri Department of Revenue, (3) the private municipal bar, (4) towing companies and other private entities involved in municipal enforcement, and (5) jails and a sprawling compliance industry embedded in the municipal court system.

This is not intended to be an exhaustive exploration of the above structures, but rather an introduction to the subtle but harmful economic impact of these structures on some of the region’s most vulnerable residents.

Municipal Revenues

Revenue collected directly through court fines and fees is at the core of the extractive municipal scheme. Funds generated through ticketing and related fees and court costs flow directly into the coffers of municipal governments. Numerous studies and reports have revealed the extent to which municipal operations became dependent upon this court revenue by the mid-2010s, not coincidentally after other bases of income (namely local taxes) were in decline. In 2013, prior to the scrutiny brought on by the Ferguson Uprising, 81 municipal courts across St. Louis City and County collected more than $61 million in revenue.

While these revenues have fallen significantly from their peak a decade earlier, municipal courts in St. Louis City and County still generated nearly $18 million from fines and fees in 2023.

In many cases, the underlying municipal charges are fundamentally poverty offenses. That is, municipalities seek to impose financial punishment for ordinance violations that themselves arise from extreme financial hardship. A single mother who continues to drive herself to work and her children to school even though she cannot afford to maintain insurance on her vehicle; a young man who saved for months while working two jobs to afford a car, but struggles with the cost of maintenance and registration; a disabled veteran so afraid to face the growing debts stemming from a single ticket that he is now forced to contend with multiple warrants for missed court dates—these scenarios, which mirror real-life client experiences, reveal the ways in which municipal courts routinely serve to punish people for their poverty. Ironically, the financial sanctions that they impose only exacerbate these desperate situations. For many low-income St. Louisans, these funds are desperately needed to pay rent, buy food, or cover the cost of childcare. Instead, the few funds families possess are stripped away through punitive policing and court practices to fill city budget holes or, in some cases, to supplement the incomes of municipal employees.

The profit motive behind these court revenues has sometimes been made explicit by the municipal officials overseeing the scheme. This was the case in the City of Edmundson, where the city’s mayor sent a now-infamous memo to the city’s police department in 2014:

“I wish to take this opportunity to remind you that the tickets that you write do add to the revenue on which the P.D. budget is established and will directly affect pay adjustments at budget time. . . . As budget time approaches, please make a self evaluation of your work habits and motivations, then make the changes that you see that will be fair to yourself and the city.”

–John Gwaltney, Mayor of Edmundson

For those of us who represent clients in the municipal courts, the profit motives are clear. There are cities – notably the City of Clayton – who have made it a priority to shift municipal court enforcement to a compliance model. Under that type of model, an individual who had a ticket for driving without insurance, for example, can get the ticket dismissed if they can demonstrate that they now have the insurance. But those examples are far and few between. Instead, the much more common experience is one where the municipal prosecutor and judge are simply unwilling to compromise on anything that would diminish the money-making apparatus of the court. As one municipal prosecutor told us recently: “I have some municipal courts that allow me some leeway but some other municipal courts that care a lot about how much money is coming in from my recommendations.”

In other instances, the financial motivations are less direct but still tied to economic incentives. In cities like Bel-Nor and Calverton Park, for example, officials have been clear about their reliance on municipal enforcement to protect the property values of homeowners and punish those who are seen as a threat to those property values. In 2018, following a wave of residential citations in Bel-Nor, the city’s mayor explained, “It’s trying to get everybody on the same page for what the expectation is for keeping up your property in the city of Bel-Nor.”

While this may sound innocuous, it can still have the effect of privileging those who are most economically stable while imposing financial hardship on those who are least able to bear it. As Bel-Nor resident Nancy Cambria wrote in an op-ed responding to the city’s actions,

“I want [Bel-Nor] to remain diverse. I want it to remain pretty and maintained. And I want it to thrive. Preserving the housing is critical. But I don’t want people ostracized in the process. I want people to feel included and part of a real community. . . . I asked the group to consider doing away with punitive fines and consider more inclusive, supportive and creative solutions that don’t ostracize its vulnerable residents in the courts – or put others in jeopardy of leaving or walking away.”

–Nancy Cambria, Bel-Nor resident

Calverton Park provides another striking example. In fiscal year 2022, Calverton Park had the highest per capita rate of municipal fines and fees—$166 per resident—of the 88 municipalities in St. Louis County. Noting that 75% of the homes on the west side of the city are rental properties, Calverton Park’s mayor made his motivations clear in a 2023 interview: “We’re trying to retain homeownership versus home rental.”

This class exclusion is sometimes exacerbated by racial animus, but still expresses itself through municipal policing and courts. The opulent city of Ladue made national headlines in 2010 when its former police chief alleged that the then-mayor encouraged him to stop and ticket Black motorists so that “those people” would see what happened and avoid coming to Ladue. The city denied the allegation and said that “those people” referred to people involved in criminal activity. But the annual vehicle stops data collected by the State of Missouri, then and now, reveal stark racial disparities in the rates of stops, searches, and arrests for Black drivers.

In the examples of Bel-Nor, Calverton Park, and Ladue, we see municipal schemes less concerned with taking money to fund their own operations than with imposing costs on some residents and visitors as a means of protecting specific economic interests. This, too, represents an important form of extraction from vulnerable St. Louisans that further enriches some and further impoverishes others.

What does this mean for an actual person?

Our client Taylor has been getting fewer and fewer hours at work just as she has taken in an older family member, and is behind on paying her insurance and has not gotten her tags updated on her car. She gets pulled over and receives a suite of tickets: no insurance, expired vehicle license, vehicle license obstructed. She must miss another shift of work to come to court (loss of $180). When she comes into court, the Judge asks her if she had insurance or if her car had tags, and she says no and that she pleads guilty. The judge does not tell her she can speak with the prosecutor. She is assessed $318 ($225 for violation of financial responsibility ordinance, $50 expired vehicle license, plus $43 in court costs on each).

She is given a payment plan to pay $100 each month. She pays the first month but doesn’t make it up to the court by the second payment date. For failing to appear, the court puts an in-state suspension on her license. She gets pulled over again, and, although she has insurance now, gets another ticket for Driving While Revoked. She also stopped paying her car insurance to try to pay off the tickets, so she has a No Insurance ticket. She misses work again to attend court (another loss of $180) and is assessed $661 ($225 for violation of financial responsibility ordinance and $350 for driving while suspend, plus $43 in court costs on each).

Department of Revenue and Administrative Costs

In Missouri, the Department of Revenue keeps track of your driving record via “points” that accrue on your license upon a conviction of a traffic offense. For example, a conviction for speeding adds three points to your license. Driving without insurance adds four points to your license. And if you are found or plead guilty to Driving While Revoked or Suspended, you have 12 points added to your license.

If you accumulate a total of eight or more points in 18 months, the Department of Revenue will suspend your driving privilege for 30 days, with each subsequent points suspension lasting for a longer period (60 days for second, 90 days for third). If you accumulate more than 12 points in 12 months, your license will be revoked. (The Missouri Department of Revenue has an in-depth guide to their points system here: MO DOR Points Explained.)

The points system is a major way that municipal charges spiral. For families that must transport children or for many people who need to travel across town to keep their jobs – particularly given the stunning lack of adequate public transportation in the region – not driving is not a realistic option. Each guilty plea to driving while suspended means the suspension of a license, which means the next time the person is pulled over they then get more tickets, which means more points, which means more suspension, and so on and so on.

The Missouri Department of Revenue collects fees any time someone needs a newly issued identification card or driver’s license. Those who have accumulated enough points on their license to have their license suspended end up having to pay a reinstatement fee once the suspension period has expired. Although the cost of reinstatement varies, it is usually around $45. Missouri collected $17,535,637 in license fees in fiscal year 2023 and $18,670,276 in fiscal year 2022.

Missouri law also authorizes courts to collect “court costs” in a vast number of cases. Mandatory court costs can range from $12 to $45 and require payment at various stages of litigating a single charge.

For people of means, these costs are trivial. But for poor defendants, they can quickly become onerous. Many costs can be waived in cases of indigence, but only if a person knows that they can request such a waiver.

What does this mean for an actual person?

Last year, Toni’s landlord raised her rent and Toni fell behind on her bills. During that time, Toni was unable to make her monthly insurance payments. Later, Toni was pulled over because a headlight on her car was out. Despite telling the officer that she could not afford to get the light fixed, the officer issued Toni two tickets, one for defective equipment, and another for failure to provide proof of financial responsibility. Throughout the next few months, Toni would get cited for these same charges in various municipalities. Each time she was cited, Toni attended her court appearance and pleaded guilty to the charges.

A week ago, Toni received a notice in the mail that her license has been suspended due to accumulating over 8 points in 12 months. Toni’s license will be suspended for 30 days. Unfortunately for Toni, she relies on her car to get her to and from work and to get her kids to and from school. Toni sees no option other than continuing to drive even though her license is suspended. The following week, Toni is pulled over yet again for her headlight. When the officer runs Toni’s license, he notifies Toni that her license is suspended and that he will be issuing her a ticket for driving while suspended.

Toni does not have to appear in court for several more months. When she does, she tells the judge that her license is no longer suspended but admits that she was driving during the 30 days that she was suspended. The judge then enters a guilty plea and Toni pays a fine to the court of $300. A week later, Toni is shocked when she receives a notice in the mail that her license has now been revoked! This is particularly shocking to Toni because the judge did not tell her how her plea would affect her driving record.

For Toni, this revocation means that she will be unable to drive legally for an entire year. A conviction of driving while revoked will result in another 12 points being added to Toni’s license. Once the revocation period has ended, Toni will be eligible to have her driving privileges reinstated. To have her privilege reinstated, Toni will need to pay DOR a $20 reinstatement fee. Toni will also have to retake her driving test and submit proof to DOR that she is maintaining current insurance for two years following her revocation (form SR-22).

Private Municipal Bar

A subset of the legal community profits greatly from the current municipal court system. Those lawyers, by and large, have a vested financial interest in keeping or increasing municipal court enforcement regardless of its impact on low-income communities.

The most noticeable beneficiaries work directly with the municipalities as their prosecuting attorneys, city attorneys, and part-time municipal judges. In the aftermath of the Ferguson uprising, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch famously displayed a web of interconnected attorneys that served both as prosecuting attorneys and judges, sparking outrage at these apparent conflicts of interests. As the report warned, “These dual, or in some cases triple and quadruple roles – judge in one place; prosecutor or city attorney in another; and private lawyer representing defendants in still another – mean the lawyers regularly appear before each other, switching places in court. . . . It’s a practice that wouldn’t fly at the state court level – and which critics say raises questions about how justice is served in these small communities.”

But this practice continues, essentially unabated, to this day. At least half of the lawyers identified in that 2015 article are still active in the municipal system and serving duplicative roles. Two examples: Tim Engelmeyer is paid to serve as the Municipal Judge in Creve Coeur, Lake St. Louis, O’Fallon, and Weldon Spring; the City Attorney in Valley Park; and the prosecutor in Chesterfield, Clarkson Valley, Des Peres, Wildwood, Valley Park, St. Charles, Fenton, Green Park, and Twin Oaks. Charles Billings is a private criminal and traffic defense attorney; and is paid to serve as the municipal judge in Des Peres, Fenton, and Manchester. These are far from the only examples of such overlapping roles.

The law firm Curtis Heinz Garrett & O’Keefe likely remains the most egregious example. The firm currently has 11 of its attorneys working as prosecutors and city attorneys for 31 St. Louis County municipalities. While the Department of Justice devoted dozens of pages detailing the constitutional and procedural violations of the Ferguson prosecuting attorney during that period, the actual attorney in question – Stephanie Karr – remains as the municipal prosecutor across many North County cities including Hazelwood, Calverton Park, and Florissant and city attorney for multiple municipalities.

The financial benefit is not limited to those moonlighting as prosecutors and judges. There is also the municipal defense bar. When someone receives a charge for a municipal ordinance violation, that person will be summoned to appear in municipal court. If that person appears in court, they are typically only given two options: 1) plead guilty or 2) set the case for trial. However, if that person retains an attorney to represent them on their case, that attorney will typically work out a deal with the prosecuting attorney whereby their charge will be reduced to a lesser offense in exchange for the city receiving a fee and court costs.

For example, a person may have been issued a ticket for speeding, a charge that carries points against their license if they were to plead guilty to it. With an attorney representing them, that person will likely be able to receive a recommendation from the prosecuting attorney whereby their speeding charge is reduced to a non-moving violation, such as littering, in exchange for money. This is, of course, only available to people who can pay for private representation. Although some municipalities allow for non-represented persons to speak with the prosecuting attorney regarding an amended charge, these municipalities are in the minority.

Occasionally, there is reporting and public outcry concerning financial gain and conflicts of interest involving particular attorneys. Most recently, attorney Sam Alton came under scrutiny when it was discovered he was making more from his “side gigs” with various municipalities than he was from his high-ranking role as Wesley Bell’s deputy in the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s office. Alton recently announced that he will be leaving Bell’s office, although he did not cite this moonlighting controversy as the reason for his departure. The truth is that there is nothing remotely exceptional about his situation, and the hyperfocus on these individual cases serves to obscure the broader systemic failure to prohibit this conduct.

What does this mean for an actual person?

Damon recently applied for a new job but was denied when a background check revealed that Damon had warrants for traffic related charges in various municipalities. All these charges were issued years ago when Damon could not afford insurance or up-to-date registration for his vehicle. Due to Damon’s work schedule, he was unable to attend court and his various cases went into warrant status. With the prospect of a new job that pays much more than his current one, Damon decided to hire a traffic attorney.

During Damon’s consultation with his attorney, the attorney explains that Damon does not need to worry about points on his license because the Prosecuting Attorney will amend all of Damon’s moving violations to non-moving violations. The attorney explains that this will likely be the case in all of the municipalities that Damon has charges in, since amended recommendations are almost always offered to attorneys, whereas they are rarely offered to people who are unrepresented. Even Damon’s old charges for Driving While Suspended and for No Insurance will be amended since Damon now has a valid license and insurance.

Throughout the next few months, Damon appears in court and pleads guilty to his charges which have all been amended to non-moving violations such as littering and illegal parking. For the benefit of having his charges amended, Damon of course pays a fee to his attorney. For each of his 15 charges, Damon paid his attorney a flat fee of $45. To recall the warrants that Damon had, 4 warrants in 4 municipalities, his attorney charged him $150 per warrant recall. In total, Damon will pay $1,275 to his attorney to get his charges and warrants cleared out.

Damon will also have to pay the individual municipalities fines and court costs assessed after his guilty pleas. In total, Damon’s cases in his 4 municipalities total to $3,500 in fines and court costs. This is also after Damon’s attorney managed to get some of his cases dismissed outright. For each outstanding court debt, Damon enters into a payment plan. For a few of these plans, the Judge tells Damon that if he cannot afford the payment that month, he will have to appear in court and ask the judge for more time. In one such case, Damon was supposed to be in court on Thursday night. Due to Damon’s work schedule, he knew that appearing for night court would be difficult, so he decided instead to visit the court earlier in the week to speak with the judge. Much to Damon’s surprise, he learns that the judge for that municipality is only present at that court twice a month! Damon would need to appear on his scheduled date or else he would go warrant again and not be able to ask the judge to recall the warrant for at least two more weeks.

Damon calls his attorney and asks how it is possible that a judge could only work two days a week. Damon’s lawyer explains that the job of this municipal judge, along with the prosecuting attorney and some court staff, is part-time and not his primary employment.

Sure enough, when Damon appears some weeks later in a different municipality to make a payment on his case, he sees the judge that he met at the other municipality. But this time, the judge is sitting in an office labeled “prosecuting attorney.”

The next time Damon meets with his attorney, Damon inquires as to whether having the same attorneys serve in various roles all over the county ever creates any conflicts. “It does,” his attorney states, “but nobody seems to care.”

Towing and Other Private Companies

Although ordinance enforcement is traditionally carried out by publicly-funded municipal police, there are for-profit businesses that receive large amounts of money from people who are subjected to such enforcement. This generates profit for such businesses and drains vulnerable residents of much-needed income.

Examples of this include red light camera companies; private security companies that provide wealthy neighborhoods with commissioned officers to do neighborhood patrols; and third-party collections companies that collect municipal debt (for a fee).

The most prominent example of private revenue generation by municipal enforcement is the private towing industry.

People are often shocked to learn how easy it is for the police to legally tow your car. Police can (and do) take individuals into custody whenever they have probable cause to believe that individual committed a crime, no matter how minor the crime is. Under current case law, police can take a car into custody even if it is not posing a safety hazard on the road, or even if it is lawfully parked. Our clients routinely tell us that they begged police officers to let a friend or family member come pick up the car. But there are few situations where the police must let another individual take possession of the car. Instead, they often call a private towing company.

These companies generally do not have formal contracts with municipalities. And there are not provisions that can accommodate, for example, for when the citizen whose car has been towed is indigent and unable to pay the fees required for the vehicle’s release. Instead, the tow companies are often seeking to be the tow company of choice through informal ties, like making conspicuous donations to Backstoppers, the police nonprofit.

Municipal police departments have also begun to tow cars from houses and private property. ArchCity Defenders has filed suit against Calverton Park for a towing scheme in which the mayor and police chief drive around the small town, writing down when residents’ registration tags expire, and then towing the cars from private property almost immediately after those tags expire with nearly no process.

Once the cars are towed, individuals must pay escalating funds to get them out. Even if someone is immediately able to go retrieve their car, it can still cost hundreds of dollars. If cars are there for too long, they can be sold at auction.

What does this mean for an actual person?

Jerome has municipal warrants out for failing to appear in court to resolve traffic charges. He is pulled over and taken into custody. Despite Jerome asking the police if a relative can come pick up the car, the vehicle is towed to a local company’s lot. Jerome can get a ride from someone the next day, and they tell him the charge is $250 just for the towing and $70 a day after that. They tell him they can’t release the car to him unless he has insurance paperwork and proof of ownership. In between gathering the funds by borrowing money from relatives, getting his paperwork, and the business closing on a Sunday, it’s $550 for Jerome to get his car back.

Jail Revenues & Private Compliance Industry

Prior to the Ferguson Uprising and the resultant publicity, litigation, and reforms by the Missouri Supreme Court, municipal jails routinely held a staggering number of individuals. Between 2011 and 2014, St. Ann jailed over twenty thousand individuals for a total of over a million hours of incarceration time. One individual was locked up by St. Ann 10 times, spending 2,297 hours (the equivalent of 94 days) in jail for nonpayment of municipal fines that had been converted to cash bail. Maplewood jailed over 7,000 individuals for municipal offenses and held them for close to 500,000 hours.

In more recent years, it is rare (though not unheard of) for municipalities to incarcerate individuals based on municipal warrants, generally issued when there has been a failure to appear. Today, if individuals are arrested, they are generally released quickly with a summons to appear.

But municipalities have found other ways of generating income from their jails. Using the infrastructure left over from the debtors’ prison era, local municipal jails have made contractual arrangements to begin or expand their capacity to hold federal prisoners in exchange for payment. During the height of its municipal jailing in 2014, St. Ann generated $267,769 in revenue from its jail, serving as a detention hub for many surrounding municipalities. By 2017, the city’s revenue had plummeted to $52,574. But as of 2023, St. Ann had discovered that it could instead hold federal prisoners to the tune of $325,000 in budgeted revenue – more money than ever before.

But jail is no longer the primary threat to most municipal defendants. Those who have pleaded guilty to a charge are often sentenced to court-supervised probation. In Missouri, probation services are largely a privatized, for-profit industry. RSMO 559.600 empowers circuit, associate circuit, and municipal judges to enter contracts with private entities who oversee the probation of individuals that have pleaded guilty or were found guilty of misdemeanor offenses.

The costs of these “services” are borne by the individual defendants. The typical supervision charge is $60 a month – a cap set by the State of Missouri. This doesn’t include the cost of other mandated services (that are not subject to the $60 cap) which individuals must complete to successfully end probation. These mandated services not only take a tremendous amount of time, but often impose a heavy financial burden on those who are attempting to comply with the conditions of their probation.         

For example, to have a moving violation such as speeding amended to a non-moving violation, some courts require that the person complete a Driving Improvement Program (DIP). These classes range from $25-$50.

A person who is put on probation for a drug or alcohol related charge may be required to participate in drug screenings during the entirety of their probation. These drug screenings are costly, with evaluations ranging from $75-$375. Each individual drug test, meanwhile, will cost the person on probation $20-$55 per test. If the person is unable to afford the drug screening, they risk revocation of their probation.

Other examples of court-ordered services are anger management classes, theft offender programs, parenting classes, and domestic violence prevention programs.

Individuals on probation for Driving While Intoxicated (DWI) or Driving Under the Influence (DUI) are typically ordered to complete the Substance Awareness Traffic Offender Program (SATOP). In Missouri, over 16,000 individuals are ordered to complete this program annually. The costs of SATOP typically range from $200-$1,500 depending on the assessed risk of the individual in the program. One hundred and fifty facilities in Missouri currently provide SATOP screening services while 170 facilities provide a variety of SATOP programs.

Empower Missouri, a nonprofit focused on justice advocacy, also pointed out in a recent report that the use of private probation often leads to conflicts of interest. Many municipalities require the use of specific probation providers. For example, both Florissant and Sunset Hills require services with the private probation provider Connection, Inc. Empower Missouri pointed out that in one interview, a judge admitted to receiving gifts from a private probation provider. These gifts were offered to incentivize the judge to use the company’s service over another. In addition to imposing burdensome costs, such conflicts limit the freedom that a person might have to seek out the probation provider that will best suit their needs.

What does this mean for an actual person?

Last year, Jeff was evicted from his home and became unhoused. During the eight months that Jeff spent unhoused, his living situation ranged from staying with friends to staying in shelters and even sleeping on the street. Luckily for Jeff, he is now housed due to help from a local agency that was able to provide him with housing and help him find work. However, during those eight months that Jeff was unhoused, he was charged in municipal court with drug possession, petty larceny, public intoxication, and resisting arrest. Jeff was able to find an attorney to represent him on these matters and the attorney worked out a deal with the prosecuting attorney where the court would suspend sentence on these charges if Jeff would agree to participate in drug and alcohol screening and treatment, take anger management classes, and take a theft offender program. Jeff accepted the conditions of his probation, as he did not want convictions for these charges affecting his ability to find work in the future.

Jeff is currently working two part-time jobs to pay his bills. Prior to taking the plea deal, Jeff’s attorney went over some of the costs of probation, but his attorney also informed him that he would not know exactly how much all of the services would cost until after Jeff was evaluated.

Jeff initially paid $75 for his drug and alcohol treatment evaluation. Following his evaluation, it was determined that even though Jeff is now sober and has been for several months, he is still at “high risk,” so Jeff was ordered to participate in random drug and alcohol screenings. Currently, Jeff is getting called about once a week to show up to a testing site and pay $50 for a drug and alcohol screen. This has caused Jeff to miss work several times, and each time Jeff tries to call the testing center to say that he cannot come in due to work, they tell him that they will report the test as positive if he does not show up.

On top of those expenses, Jeff now must save up even more money for his anger management class ($30) and for his theft offender program (10-hour course, $195). Even though Jeff’s probation lasts two years, he was only given 60 days to complete these classes.

Due to the unforeseen expenses of Jeff’s weekly drug screens, Jeff has now fallen behind on rent. Jeff fears that to keep up with the conditions of his probation, he may wind up unhoused again and fears that all of his hard work getting housed and sober will have been for nothing.

The Big Picture

The examples of economic extraction outlined in this brief report speak to the very nature of the municipal legal system that exists throughout the St. Louis region. As is true with any complex system, the mundane intricacies of municipal policing, courts, jails, probation, and related legal administration can make it very challenging to appreciate the global impact of these components as they come together in shaping the lives of real people.

The client narratives woven throughout the above sections are based on the actual experiences of clients that we have met throughout the years and whose stories we have come to know. Our organization has worked with hundreds of low-income St. Louisans for fifteen years, and municipal courts have been and continue to be one of the biggest barriers to financial stability. If we piece together all of the above narratives, let’s consider what the total costs might be for a person who is forced to contend with the various systems and institutions that we have described. In such a scenario, a single person could plausibly face all of the following costs stemming from a single municipal ordinance violation:

For the vast majority of St. Louisans, this is a significant sum. And for many, it is an insurmountable burden that can have destabilizing impacts for years. And yet, a sum of this value is neither extreme nor unusual. All of these costs are regularly imposed upon municipal defendants without hesitation. Meanwhile, these funds are transferred to a set of identifiable recipients: the charging municipalities and their private partners in municipal enforcement, a private municipal bar that operates on all sides of the system, the state agency empowered with the administration of licensing and vehicle registration, and an expansive industry of incarceration, probation, and compliance.

Viewed through this lens, municipal legal enforcement in St. Louis can be seen as a massive system of wealth redistribution, with tens of millions of dollars every year flowing directly from ordinary St. Louisans to a select list of government entities and private special interests. The fact that the St. Louisans most frequently and negatively impacted are poor and Black makes this scheme even more outrageous and indefensible.

It is critical that we understand this extractive dynamic as one that is fundamental to the municipal court system in St. Louis. This system, which very often punishes poverty in the first instance, also operates in ways that enrich some while perpetuating and deepening that poverty for our most vulnerable communities. If we want to reverse these harms that have been done over decades and reduce poverty in St. Louis, we need to be honest about who pays and who profits in our system of municipal ordinance enforcement. And we need to bring that system to an end.

Credits

“In the Rearview Mirror” was written by Angelo Vidal, Communications Specialist at ArchCity Defenders; Z Gorley, Director of Communications at ArchCity Defenders; Blake Strode, Executive Director of ArchCity Defenders; William Waller, Managing Attorney at ArchCity Defenders; and Jacki Langum, Deputy Executive Director at ArchCity Defenders.

The “Pay or Stay” video series was produced and directed by Johnny Wu Gabbert, Deputy Director of Communications at ArchCity Defenders, with interview and editing support from Natalie Dinh, Thea Bartz-Willis, and Z Gorley.

“Who Profits” was written by ArchCity Defenders Executive Director Blake Strode, Managing Attorney Maureen Hanlon, and Staff Attorney Rudy Angulo.