Rural once again acknowledged by Pulitzer Prize winner

I was delighted when two "rural" newspapers/journalists (by some definition) won Pulitzer prizes in 2017.   Art Cullen of the Storm Lake Times (Iowa) won for editorial writing, and Eric Eyre of the Charleston Gazette-Mail won one for his investigative reporting on the opioid epidemic in West Virginia.  Now, Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has been awarded the Pulitzer for commentary for his reporting on Missouri's debtors' prisons (or, to be more precise, county jails functioning as debtors' prisons).  Here and here are the Post-Dispatch's stories about Messenger's win; the first link compiles the Tweets about each of the columns in the series.

Many of the jails Messenger featured in the series were in rural parts of the state, including St. Francois (population 66,520), Dent (population 15,593), and Caldwell (population 1,809) counties.  The first two are in the southeast part of the Show-Me State, but Caldwell is in the even more sparsely populated northwest region.  The Post-Dispatch summarizes the series thusly:  

Messenger found defendants across the state who had fulfilled their sentences and served out their paroles only to be saddled with thousands of dollars in “board bills” for the time they spent in jail.

He said he was inspired by the stories of “people who have been abused by the judicial system all over the state for decades and nobody cared.”

The story quotes Messenger:

It’s a story about how we treat people in our state.  It’s a story I’m going to keep telling.

As for the rural angle, the Post-Dispatch observed:

Messenger started writing about court costs and other criminal justice issues, often in small-town Missouri, in 2017. He has written more than 25 columns on the subject. His Pulitzer entry submitted 10, printed between Jan. 5 and Dec. 9, 2018.

One of those stories is from November, 2018, dateline Breckenridge, population 383, and it tells the tale of a man in his late 20s, married and with four children, who is still paying $50/month on a "board bill" for two nights he spent in jail for stealing a lawnmower when he was in high school.  What was initially an $80 bill eventually ballooned to more than $3,000. 

This is the reality for a lot of poor Missourians in rural parts of the state who end up on the wrong side of the law. Long after they’ve served their time and paid their fines, they end up tethered to the court system by private probation companies that have built-in financial incentives to find probation violations, and judges who are all too willing to serve as debt collectors. Pay the bill, or debtors prison awaits.

It is a problem that threatens the independence of the judiciary, says Lisa Foster, a former judge and Department of Justice official who is a co-director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center.

“The idea that you pay for the privilege to be in jail is absurd,” Foster says. “There should never be a charge for jail.” 

But what her co-director Joanna Weiss calls the “poverty penalty” is alive and well in many rural Missouri counties.

The Post-Dispatch coverage also quotes Michael Wolff, a retired Missouri Supreme Court chief justice and former dean of the St. Louis University School of Law, who supported Messenger's nomination, regarding the stories:

It is a rare and beautiful thing when solid reporting so shocks the legal system that change becomes inevitable.  Tony Messenger is making that kind of impact.

Recall that heavy fines and fees were part of the story of Ferguson, Missouri, a story that unfolded only after the police shot and killed Michael Brown.  Read some NPR reporting on the subject here.  Ferguson is metropolitan, a suburb of St. Louis.