When people are barely living from paycheck to paycheck, they often can afford to live near the giant supermarkets, with their vast selections and lower prices. It is expensive to be poor in so many ways that people with money have trouble comprehending. Over the years since, I've come to understand just how naïve that idea is, and what vicious trap poverty is. In my youth, I generally believed the tropes about poverty - that with hard work, it was possible to lift yourself out of it, all that was required was the will to do what was necessary. The geography is Missouri, South Carolina, and Oklahoma. In a feat of exceptional reporting, Profit and Punishment reveals a familiar reality to the nation's poor, anchored by the stories of three single mothers living in poverty, one in Oklahoma, one in Missouri, and one in South Carolina, who are abused by a judicial system more focused on debt collection than public safety.Īll over the country, similar schemes are criminalizing the vulnerable and the poor, with the full support of politicians in both parties. It is Charged meets Evicted, focusing on that touchstone issue of the criminal justice reform movement: the insidious use of fines and fees to raise money for broken government budgets off the backs of the poor, and the partnership those governments have formed with for-profit companies that are getting rich on the backs of people incarcerated for minor crimes.

Profit and Punishment is the most comprehensive look at the criminalization of poverty in the U.S., joining a growing and popular genre that is making a difference.

Claire McCaskill, former US Senator and analyst for MSNBC His Pulitzer Prize winning series on debtors' prisons in Missouri made a serious difference in real people's lives and his book will be a must read for a nation seeking a bipartisan path forward on criminal justice reform. Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Messenger offers the first humane, journalistic expose of an American tragedy: Modern-day debtor's prisons and how they've destroyed the lives of poor Americans.

Profit and punishment by tony messenger