Minneapolis Star-Tribune digs into lawsuits to reveal ‘debtors prisons’
We learn in our American history classes that debtors’ prisons disappeared back when tea parties really involved tea.
Or did they?
A single word that Chris Serres and Glenn Howatt of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune found in a database of tens of thousands of debt collection lawsuits led to a story, In Jail for Being in Debt, detailing how creditors in Minnesota and several other states – with the aid of creditor-friendly state laws and equally friendly judges – were having people arrested and jailed for not paying their debts. This, even though most state constitutions expressly forbid debtors’ prisons.
The word was “warrant.” Serres and Howatt found it occasionally in one field of the database containing records of five years’ worth of debt collection lawsuits in Minnesota. Following up with consumer advocacy lawyers, Serres learned that people were being arrested with some frequency for falling behind on court-ordered payment plans. Later, Serres found this also happened in some other local areas, including Evansville, Ind., and parts of central Illinois.
The existence of modern-day debtors’ prisons seemed to be known to almost everyone in official Minnesota, though not the public. “The consumer lawyers knew about it, the judges knew about, it, the police knew about it, the sheriff’s deputies knew about it,’ he said. “They all thought it was odd we were writing about it.”
Lessons: The story is often in the needle, not the haystack. And don’t be deterred if official sources tell you something never happens or isn’t a big deal.
“If I found out something I’d never heard of, I figured there was a story,” Serres says.
Serres and Howatt encountered two other surprises over the course of reporting and writing the story and the aftermath: people who had been jailed over their debts were so angry that they were willing to talk on the record and even be photographed, and the Web comments posted after the story (now 679 of them) were generally more sympathetic to the collections agencies than to the people who were jailed.
“People were bothered that public money was being used to enforce private debts,” Serres said. “We heard a lot of that from our conservative readers, actually, which surprised me.”
Much of what Chris Serres’ is covering in the Star Tribune’s ongoing series on debt collection is important information for consumers to know.
However, we do believe that the story about debtors prisons mischaracterizes that this is a problem created by, and unique to debt collectors. While the Star Tribune focused on people who were arrested because of a missed court date pertaining to a rightfully owed debt, the reality is that court orders to enforce judgments are fairly common as a means to enforce state law for a wide variety of matters including personal injury, child support and orders to testify in court. If reforms to Minnesota law regarding the use of bench warrants are considered necessary, then any such reforms should be applied to all situations requiring the use of this process and not only to a specific industry as the Star Tribune seemed to indicate.
ACA International, headquartered in Minneapolis, is the leading trade association for over 5000 third party debt collectors, asset buyers and debt collection attorneys.
Please note that you have listed one of the journalists as “Howatt” (first paragraph) and as “Mowatt” (second paragraph). The correct name is “Howatt.”
Thank you, Beth. I appreciate the copy editing… and, obviously, we needed it. Thanks for helping out.
It is salutary to note that in all revolutions the first target of the mob is invariably the debt collectors. Let the good times roll.