Debtors Prison

It's illegal, it was outlawed in 1830, but it drives profits for outsourced prisons, so bring em on.  People are going to jail for owing money they can't pay, and they can't even get a public defender to represent them, in fact they don't even get a trial, they can be sent to jail by a mayor! 

"Roughly a third of U.S. states today jail people for not paying off their debts, from court-related fines and fees to credit card and car loans, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Such practices contravene a 1983 United States Supreme Court ruling that they violate the Constitutions's Equal Protection Clause.

Some states apply "poverty penalties," such as late fees, payment plan fees and interest, when people are unable to pay all their debts at once. Alabama charges a 30 percent collection fee, for instance, while Florida allows private debt collectors to add a 40 percent surcharge on the original debt. Some Florida counties also use so-called collection courts, where debtors can be jailed but have no right to a public defender. In North Carolina, people are charged for using a public defender, so poor defendants who can't afford such costs may be forced to forgo legal counsel.

Some cities, meanwhile, have joined states in reviving the use of debtors' prisons. Philadelphia courts in 2011 sought to collect on court-related debt from 320,000 people, involving obligations they owed dating back to the 1970s.

Some judges have had enough. An Alabama circuit court judge last year rebuked a municipal court and private probation company for incarcerating people over their criminal justice debt, calling the arrangement a "judicially sanctioned extortion racket."