How common is debt imprisonment in the US today?

Imprisonment for unpaid debts might seem Dickensian, a relic of harsher times. But thousands of people serve jail time each year in the U.S. for failure to pay fines, fees, and other court costs, often resulting from lower-level violations such as traffic tickets.

Harvard researchers have brought attention to the plight of such debtors in a new paper, “Forgotten But Not Gone: a Multi-state Analysis of Modern-Day Debt Imprisonment,” published in PLOS ONE. Theirs is a first attempt to quantify the magnitude and prevalence of imprisonments for court debts in the U.S., for which no standardized record-keeping exists.

via phys.org