Until last month, scores of destitute people—virtually all of them African Americans— languished in the city jail of Montgomery, Ala., for unpaid traffic tickets they couldn’t pay off, sentenced to one day in jail for every $50 they owed. They could earn another $25 credit daily by providing free labor, scrubbing blood and feces off jail floors and cleaning buildings.
But on May 1, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction barring the imprisonment of three debtors for non-payment of fines, citing a 1983 Supreme Court decision that prohibited imprisonment for debt, in a lawsuit that had been filed on their behalf by Alec Karakatsanis ’08 and Phil Telfeyan ’08, two Harvard Law School graduates who brought the case through Equal Justice Under Law, a nonprofit civil rights firm they launched in March to challenge the profit motive in the criminal justice system.
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