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A handful of residents from the Missouri suburbs of Ferguson and Jennings have filed a lawsuit seeking class action status that alleges the cities are operating modern-day debtors’ prisons by putting “impoverished people” behind bars.

The lawsuits, filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, were filed on behalf of 15 plaintiffs who were jailed because they could not pay fines for traffic violations and other offenses.

From the St. Louis Dispatch

“They were threatened, abused and left to languish in confinement at the mercy of local officials until their frightened family members could produce enough cash to buy their freedom or until city jail officials decided, days or weeks later, to let them out for free,” the complaint states.

The suits were filed on behalf of the plaintiffs by the non-profit legal organization Equal Justice Under Law, based in Washington, and the ArchCity Defenders, a local non-profit group; and by St. Louis University School of Law.

“We are seeking an injunction against the Jennings and Ferguson courts in order to stop them from consistently violating peoples’ rights and locking them in jail as a result of their inability to pay,” lawyer Thomas Harvey, executive director of ArchCity Defenders, said Sunday night.

Ticketing and jailing, the lawsuit suggests, has raised money for the small St. Louis County municipalities and has propelled the cities to sustain the practice.

“The … modern debtors’ prison scheme has been increasingly profitable to the (cities), earning (them) millions of dollars over the past several years,” the suits state.

On Sunday, Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III denied that the court uses revenue as a motivator for the operation.

“Profit was not a motive — absolutely not. As far as the application of fines, the setting of bails, etcetera, that’s not something determined in conjunction with city budget demands,” he said.

The issue is a longstanding one amplified by the shooting of Ferguson teenager Michael Brown. A distrust of authorities, the lawsuit suggests, came from the jailing of the cities’ poor black residents.

ArchCity Defenders has criticized St. Louis County municipalities for years. Their work intensified in the wake of the shooting six months ago of Michael Brown, 18, by a Ferguson police officer.

Harvey said some claims listed in the class-action suits were problems in other north St. Louis County municipalities, but that Jennings and Ferguson were targeted for litigation for jail conditions there that he said were particularly poor.

According to the suit, plaintiffs “are kept in overcrowded cells; they are denied toothbrushes, toothpaste, and soap; they are subjected to the stench of excrement and refuse in their congested cells; they are surrounded by walls smeared with mucus, blood and feces; they are kept in the same clothes for days and weeks without access to laundry or clean undergarments…”

Conditions in the Jennings jail are so deplorable, the suit contends, that when inmates are brought to court, “courtroom staff often walks down the hallway spraying Febreze (air freshener) because the stench emanating from the inmates is unbearable.”

The suits claim that guards at both jails “routinely laugh at the inmates and humiliate them with discriminatory and degrading epithets about their poverty and their physical appearance.”

City officials in Jennings and Ferguson have declined to comment on the suit.

SOURCE: STL Dispatch | PHOTO CREDIT: Getty

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