New ACLU publication looks at how “debt collection industry uses prosecutors and judges as weapons against millions of Americans who can’t afford to pay their bills.”
via Common Dreams – Threatened with arrest for a case involving a few dollars in debt held by a collection agency?
This is not a science fiction, nor a scenario from the United States more than 185 years ago when debtors prisons were still allowed. Rather, it’s a part of the current justice system where, in states across the country, state courts and local prosecutors abet debt collectors in arresting and jailing some of the tens of millions of Americans who have debt held by private collection agencies.
The injustice is laid out in new report from the ACLU, “A Pound of Flesh: The Criminalization of Private Debt.”
“The private debt collection industry uses prosecutors and judges as weapons against millions of Americans who can’t afford to pay their bills,” said report author Jennifer Turner, also a principal human rights researcher at the ACLU. “Consumers have little chance of justice when our courts take the debt collector’s side in almost every case—even to the point of ordering people jailed until they pay up,” she said.
Governmental Services Corporation Watch 