Why Texas Courts Will Stop 'Nickel-and-Diming' the Poor

The Justice Department’s 2015 report examining police practices in Ferguson, Missouri, revealed the ways that the local government’s dependency on money from court fines and fees turned law-enforcement officials into de facto tax collectors and citizens into deliberate sources of revenue for the city.

But while Ferguson put this practice on the map, it’s hardly isolated there. In the years since the report’s release, officials elsewhere have examined how their own fines and fees, to varying degrees, burden residents—particularly poor ones. This is the case in Texas, which last month marked a turning point: To reduce the disproportionate impact these debts have on low-income people, the Republican-led state legislature passed a law to curtail the practice of jailing those who can’t pay court-imposed bills.

Debtors’ prisons were outlawed nationally in 1833, but their essential function nevertheless in states people who couldn’t pay their debts for minor, ostensibly fine-only offenses—like public intoxication, missing a stop sign while driving, or letting a dog run loose where it’s supposed to be leashed.