Clennam (from “Little Dorrit”) in Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison
One doesn’t expect to hear debtors’ prisons mentioned in the 21st century, but the horrifying facts coming out of Ferguson, documented in a recent Department of Justice report, reveals that some Americans are still living in a Dickensian world. The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus remarks that “community policing” has become “community fleecing” as poor communities—not only Ferguson–are treated as sources of revenue. More bluntly, Ta-Nahisi Coates compares the Ferguson police to an officially sanctioned gang plundering the populace. Here’s Marcus:
The 102-page report depicts a department — indeed, an entire city bureaucracy — more focused on raising revenue than protecting public safety. Ferguson used its police force and court system to make ends meet — on the backs of poor and minority residents.
As described in the report, Ferguson police, under pressure to bring in fines to boost the city’s coffers, pile on multiple, often bogus, charges for minor infractions. Then they top that up with additional charges, fines, fees and even jail time for those who fail to pay promptly and in full.
Police see residents, especially African Americans, “less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue,” the investigation found.
And then there’s imprisonment for debt:
Most disturbing, Ferguson residents are at risk of being jailed not for committing crimes or posing a danger to the community if released before trial but because they can’t pay fines or post bonds on arrest warrants for offenses as minor as traffic tickets.
“There have been many cases,” the Justice report noted, “in which a person has been arrested on a warrant, detained for 72 hours or more, and released owing the same amount as before the arrest was made.” Asked why time in jail is not tracked as part of a case, “a member of court staff told us: it’s only three days anyway.”
Imagine if you were imprisoned for “only three days” over a parking ticket.
Marcus points out out that debtors prisons are supposed to be illegal in the United States although it wasn’t until 1983 that the Supreme court ruled against “punishing a person for his poverty.” When a man was ruled as having violated his probation by not paying a fine, the Court ruled that the equal protection clause had been violated.
The Ferguson story stands out for the contempt its governing institutions have for its Black citizens. The lack of respect shows up most clearly in racist e-mails but it’s in evidence everywhere. The casual indifference behind that “only three days” signals that Black lives do not matter. In fact, one sees a contradiction at work. On the one hand, the authorities see Ferguson residents as takers looking for “free stuff” (to borrow Mitt Romney’s phrase). At the same time, they themselves are takers, regarding the residents as ATM machines to balance the city’s ledgers.
So why haven’t people been pushing back against this state of affairs? Why did it take the police killing of an unarmed black man to lead to protests and a DOJ investigation? Why don’t people vote since their votes would cause politicians to take them more seriously. Al Sharpton voiced his shock at low voter turnout when he visited Ferguson during the protest marches and Obama expressed the concern more generally in his Selma speech. Wasn’t this what civil rights protesters fought and sometimes died for?
Dickens helps us understand why the downtrodden don’t become politically engaged through the good-hearted Plornish in Little Dorrit. A plasterer who spends a week in Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, Plornish lives in a London slum called Bleeding Heart Yard. He is so focused on just getting by that he doesn’t see the larger picture. Dickens describes Plornish as
one of those many wayfarers on the road of life, who seem to be afflicted with supernatural corns, rendering it impossible for them to keep up even with their lame competitors. A willing, working, soft hearted, not hard-headed fellow, Plornish took his fortune as smoothly as could be expected; but it was a rough one. It so rarely happened that anybody seemed to want him, it was such an exceptional case when his powers were in any request, that his misty mind could not make out how it happened. He took it as it came, therefore; he tumbled into all kinds of difficulties, and tumbled out of them; and, by tumbling through life, got himself considerably bruised.
When Arthur Clennam, the novel’s protagonist, asks Plornish about life in Bleeding Heart Yard, he gets a confused account. Plornish resents how the wealthy constantly berate the poor for being “improvident,” perhaps for taking an occasional trip to Hampton Court (which he essentially describes as a mental health excursion). He also knows that those in the Yard don’t have a lot to show for all their hard work. He doesn’t hold anyone responsible for this state of affairs and figures that no one would listen to him if he did. Fatalistically, he believes that even well-wishers can’t change anything. Ultimately he settles into the stance that, if you’re not going to help him, then at least stop taking away the little that he has. Dickens masters the rhythms of working class speech as he sets forth Plornish’s reasoning:
They was all hard up there, Mr Plornish said, uncommon hard up, to be sure. Well, he couldn’t say how it was; he didn’t know as anybody could say how it was; all he know’d was, that so it was. When a man felt, on his own back and in his own belly, that poor he was, that man (Mr Plornish gave it as his decided belief) know’d well that he was poor somehow or another, and you couldn’t talk it out of him, no more than you could talk Beef into him. Then you see, some people as was better off said, and a good many such people lived pretty close up to the mark themselves if not beyond it so he’d heerd, that they was ‘improvident’ (that was the favorite word) down the Yard. For instance, if they see a man with his wife and children going to Hampton Court in a Wan, perhaps once in a year, they says, ‘Hallo! I thought you was poor, my improvident friend!’ Why, Lord, how hard it was upon a man! What was a man to do? He couldn’t go mollancholy mad, and even if he did, you wouldn’t be the better for it. In Mr Plornish’s judgment you would be the worse for it. Yet you seemed to want to make a man mollancholy mad. You was always at it—if not with your right hand, with your left. What was they a doing in the Yard? Why, take a look at ’em and see. There was the girls and their mothers a working at their sewing, or their shoe-binding, or their trimming, or their waistcoat making, day and night and night and day, and not more than able to keep body and soul together after all—often not so much. There was people of pretty well all sorts of trades you could name, all wanting to work, and yet not able to get it. There was old people, after working all their lives, going and being shut up in the workhouse, much worse fed and lodged and treated altogether, than—Mr Plornish said manufacturers, but appeared to mean malefactors. Why, a man didn’t know where to turn himself for a crumb of comfort. As to who was to blame for it, Mr Plornish didn’t know who was to blame for it. He could tell you who suffered, but he couldn’t tell you whose fault it was. It wasn’t his place to find out, and who’d mind what he said, if he did find out? He only know’d that it wasn’t put right by them what undertook that line of business, and that it didn’t come right of itself. And, in brief, his illogical opinion was, that if you couldn’t do nothing for him, you had better take nothing from him for doing of it; so far as he could make out, that was about what it come to.
Convincing Plornish that his life matters would be an important first step toward persuading him to become more engaged in civic life. That’s why, throughout America’s urban communities, building respect is key, both self respect and respect between the people and the police. That first step is difficult, however, when so many people are telling our Bleeding Heart residents that their poverty is their fault.
