Source: www.courthousenews.com | Original Post Date: October 30, 2015 –
AUSTIN, Texas (CN) – Austin, Texas is the latest city to face a federal class action accusing it of reinstituting debtors’ prisons by jailing people who are too poor to pay fines for traffic tickets and petty misdemeanors.
Such lawsuits have mushroomed in the past year, in the aftermath of the protests of the white-on-black police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Ferguson and several neighboring cities were accused of targeting black drivers for traffic stops, and jailing them, and “debtors’ prisons” lawsuits have sprouted all over the United States. They typically challenge the constitutionality of a local jurisdiction’s practice of jailing people who cannot afford to pay fines for petty offenses, and attribute it in part to racial discrimination.
