In St. Louis County, the home of police-shooting victim Michael Brown, a practice with a long history has become systematic: the operation of modern-day debtors’ prisons. A Debtors' Prison follows two ...

"It was an immense and solid building, erected at vast expense. I could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had ...

During the holiday season, many of us think about what we can do to help people struggling with poverty. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, on the other hand, decided just before Christmas to rescind a ...

This ACLU report presents the results of a yearlong investigation into modern-day "debtors' prisons," and shows that poor defendants are being jailed at increasingly alarming rates for failing to pay ...

Are debtors’ prisons a thing of the past? Congress banned them in 1833. The Supreme Court also held, in 1983, that incarcerating indigent individuals for failure to pay a fine is indeed ...

Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. When The Huffington Post’s Lila Pearl Shapiro wrote a critical story about Walmart’s labor practices earlier this week, the ...

Explore the history of Canton’s 19th-century “jail liberties” marker and debtors' prison laws, which allowed debtors to work and roam free.