Debtor's Prisons & Dickens & Newt - WHAT is going on?
PM
If Charles Dickens were alive today, he would get the Newt Gingrich
seal of approval. Not the adult Dickens, but Dickens the child laborer.
Dickens didn't clean toilets, but as a 12-year-old who would later
become the most widely read author in England - with a vast following
in the United States - Dickens was forced to work in decrepit,
unsanitary conditions.
Describing his childhood work environment to a biographer, Dickens
remembered::
The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the
way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house,
abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its
wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old
grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their
squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the
dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were
there again.
You can see Newt grinning at how misery and slave wages build character.
As a child, Dickens took this nightmarish and impoverished work
because his father was jailed in the infamous British Marshalsea
debtors' prison, and Charles' spartan wages helped pay for his dad's
basic needs while at Marshalsea - as well as contributing to the care
of the rest of his family.
Dickens grew up to deplore the exploitative working conditions of
industrializing England - and social and economic justice became key
themes in his novels and columns. He lived long enough to see the UK
start to institute civilized standards of decency toward minors and
debtors.
So, the author of "Oliver Twist" and "David Copperfield," would be -
no doubt - astonished to see that in 21st century America not only do
we have a serious effort underway to role back child labor laws, but
we also have the re-establishment of debtors' prisons.
According to ThinkProgress, we are experiencing, "The Return Of
Debtor's Prisons: Thousands Of Americans Jailed For Not Paying Their
Bills":
Federal imprisonment for unpaid debt has been illegal in the U.S.
since 1833. It's a practice people associate more with the age of
Dickens than modern-day America. But as more Americans struggle to pay
their bills in the wake of the recession, collection agencies are
using harsher methods to get their money, ushering in the return of
debtor's prisons….
More than a third of all states now allow borrowers who don't pay
their bills to be jailed, even when debtor's prisons have been
explicitly banned by state constitutions. A report by the American
Civil Liberties Union found that people were imprisoned even when the
cost of doing so exceeded the amount of debt they owed.
Sean Matthews, a homeless New Orleans construction worker, was
incarcerated for five months for $498 of legal debt, while his jail
time cost the city six times that much. Some debtors are even forced
to pay for their jail time themselves, adding to their financial
troubles.
