"The Marshall Project’s Eli Hager says debtors’ prisons are “any prison, jail, or other detention facility in which people are incarcerated for their inability, refusal, or failure to pay debt.” They’ve been outlawed by Congress since 1833 (Dickensian times), at least in theory. In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled in Bearden v. Georgia that judges must first consider whether a suspect is “willfully” refusing to pay a fee before locking him or her up for failure to pay. Still, modern judges routinely sentence poor Americans to jail for not paying fines or fees."

The American Conservative

July 19, 2018