[JURIST] The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) [advocacy website] on Friday filed a lawsuit [press release] in federal court that effectively challenges debt collection practices that have resulted in the jailing of many low-income people. The ACLU brought the case [complaint, PDF] in the US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia [official website] after a teenager, Kevin Thompson, was issued a traffic ticket, but could not pay the $838 in court fines and probation company fees associated with it. When he failed to pay, Thompson was jailed for five days. The ACLU contends that the debt collection practices have an especially negative impact on racial minorities. The group charges violations of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment [text], alleging that the county and the for-profit Judicial Correction Services Inc. (JCS) “teamed up to engage in a coercive debt collection scheme that focuses on revenue generation at the expense of protecting poor people’s rights.”

Kevin Thompson indicates [ACLU blog of rights] that even after he was released from jail, he feared future arrest “for no good reason.” However, this type of discrimination is not a new phenomenon. In 2012, the New York Times detailed a similar instance [NYT report] involving a 31-year-old woman residing in Alabama, who received a driving offense three years prior and was jailed three separate times as a result. In 2010 the Brennan Center for Justice [advocacy website] at the New York University School of Law examined fee practices in 15 states and found [report, PDF] that these states have imposed fees that effectively “create[d] new paths to prison for those unable to pay their debts and ma[de] it harder to find employment and housing as well as to meet child support obligations.”