Debtors' Prisons: Life Inside America’s For-Profit Justice System

This is beyond fucked up and truly worries me that law officials are allowed to take advantage of communities like this. Once you're caught in the system, it is set up so that most will fail to get out and move on with their lives. This is modern day slavery.

This is why it's important to vote! I'm over our corrupt Justice system, a Congress who does nothing and even more corrupt elected officials.

In the end America is a business and the human being is its greatest resource. Unfortunately, the government will always find ways to exploit that resource.

I would like to thank vice on the excellent work they did to bring this issue to light.

Part 1

VICE’s Justice series examines the winners and losers of the for-profit criminal justice system. Imprisoning people for being poor has technically been illegal in this country for two hundred years, but it is still a reality. Municipalities with small, low-income populations and correspondingly low tax bases regularly pay their salaries, and pad their budgets by issuing “quality of life” and traffic fines to people for minor offenses—and sending them to jail if they can’t pay.
VICE examines the ways these local governments have turned broken-windows policing into profit, and meets the people who are fighting back.

Part 2

In part two of VICE's investigation into modern-day debtor's prison practices, we explore the phenomenon of private probation companies. To avoid paying for probation services, thousands of courts currently outsource probation to for-profit companies which charge people exorbitant fees for their own probation. Failure to pay is treated as a violation of probation, punishable by jail time, which extorts cash from already-struggling people.