Just thinking about making the drive to Lafayette County gives Precious Jones the kind of anxiety that causes her body to shake, knees knocking, voice trembling, tears getting ready to fall.

Michael-John Voss, left, and Precious Jones, pose for a photo outside the Lafayette County Courthouse on Jan. 16, 2019. Photo provided by Michael-John Voss.
Last summer, she had to make the almost four-hour trek to the jail there 10 times.
She couldn’t drive, so her teenage son did that. He’d drop her off at jail, where she was doing 20 days — two days at a time on the weekends — for speeding. Then he’d head farther west to Kansas City to stay with family. Sometimes he’d have to sleep a bit in the car.
On Jan. 16, she had to make the drive again.
But this time, attorney Michael-John Voss was with her.
Voss is a lawyer with ArchCity Defenders, the nonprofit public-service law firm based in St. Louis. He started representing Jones after I wrote about her a couple of months ago. Jones is an example of how poor people are treated differently in the court system than those who have more financial means. That’s particularly the case in rural Missouri, where counties charge room and board for time spent in the county jail, and then use private probation companies that have an incentive to find violations that will send defendants back to jail.
Jones is 34 and lives in the Baden neighborhood of St. Louis. She works at the United Way of Greater St. Louis. On Mother’s Day weekend in 2017 she was arrested for speeding in Lafayette County. She was going dangerously fast — 120 miles per hour — and was put in jail. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six months in jail but execution of her sentence was suspended if she served 20 days of shock time.
Jones lost her driver’s license because of the ticket, and asked Associate Circuit Court Judge Kelly Rose if she could serve her time in the St. Louis jail. Rose said no. Then, on one of those long drives to Lafayette County, her car broke down. She was late to jail. The prosecutor sought to violate her probation because of it and send her to jail for six months.
For Voss, this was a story he had seen all too often in the municipalities in St. Louis County. He and his law firm helped draw attention to a similar scheme after the unrest in Ferguson. Those efforts led to reforms handed down by both the Missouri Legislature and the Missouri Supreme Court to try to limit the number of people being tossed in jail because they couldn’t afford traffic fines.
But the scheme — or versions of it — continued in circuit courts throughout Missouri.
When most poor defendants are brought before a judge on a probation violation, after their case is adjudicated, they often no longer have attorneys. That would have been the case for Jones, had Voss not taken her case.
He argued that her alleged probation violation was not intentional. She did all the time she was supposed to do. He asked the judge to recall the warrant that had been issued for her arrest.
Rose complied.
Jones is now free. Well, as free as a person can be who is still on probation until May 2020. She still has to pay the private probation company $30 a month, and send a form certifying her address and that she hasn’t gotten in trouble.
“There never should have been a warrant issued for her arrest,” Voss says. “The same kind of abuses of due process are happening at the circuit court level that we’ve seen in the municipal courts. … The legal system works a certain way for people with money. It works a certain way for people without money. It’s designed that way.”
Jones is a perfect example.
She knows what she did was wrong. She knows she should have been punished.
Justice, however, isn’t always blind.
About a week after I wrote about Jones, who is black, a white attorney from St. Louis County was convicted in a drag-racing case in which he and a friend were going 114 and 121 mph, respectively. One of them plowed into another car, driven by 73-year-old Kathleen “Kay” Koutroubis, who later died.
The driver, Scott Bailey, was sentenced to do 60 days in jail. He’ll spread them out over 30 weekends. His attorney said he plans to appeal.
For Jones, the entire process left her stressed as she worried the past few months whether she’d lose her job and end up in jail. She thought she might get fired after I wrote about her, but instead her United Way colleagues rallied around her. Former United Way President and CEO Orvin Kimbrough wrote a letter of support that Voss gave to the judge.
“It drained me of everything,” Jones says. “They didn’t take ownership of anything they did.”
That includes sending paperwork to the Department of Revenue to reinstate her license after she served her sentence. Voss had to take care of that.
While in court with Jones, he noticed a pattern that is all too familiar. People with attorneys went first. Others had to wait. One man went to jail on a seat belt ticket. Another faced bail he couldn’t afford.
“Missouri has a debtors prison problem,” Voss says. “It has a justice problem.”
Jailed for being poor is Missouri epidemic: A series of columns from Tony Messenger
Tony Messenger has written about Missouri cases where people were charged for their time in jail or on probation, then owe more money than their fines or court costs.
The Pulitzer Prize board considered these columns when it decided to award the prize for commentary to metro columnist Tony Messenger.
In a twist of irony, one judge no longer calls them “payment review hearings.” Instead, he’s even more direct. Now they are called “debt colle…
“The jail is emptying out. People that do come in are able to bond out quickly. None of the girls here are being held for financial reasons. T…
In a case of civil contempt — such as when a judge jails a reporter for not revealing a source, or an attorney for failing to follow an order …
Even with the state’s top court making progress in eradicating the practice of putting people in jail because they can’t afford to be in jail,…
“There are a pile of cases where people owe us money,” the judge told the defendant, a painter, who said he was having a hard time finding wor…
No longer, the court said in one voice, can judges in Missouri threaten indigent defendants with jail time for their inability to be able to a…
Disparate treatment of people charged with crimes offers a glimpse into a fundamental problem in the application of criminal justice in Missou…
Weiss wants the Legislature to make it illegal for counties to charge defendants for their time behind bars.
“How can they cancel a court date then issue a warrant without even telling you the new court date?” Sharp wonders.
His bill would stop the practice in Missouri of state police agencies avoiding state jurisdiction by seeking asset forfeiture under guise of f…
"He sat in jail because he was poor," public defender Matthew Mueller said of his client.
The two defendants are Exhibits A and B of why Missouri has become the front line in a national war on poverty and the courts.
She knows what she did was wrong. She knows she should have been punished.
“It's been a hard road,” she told me recently. “Really hard.”
For decades, Missouri’s corrections budget has been rising. So has its prison population, with a “tough on crime” philosophy filling prisons w…
“We’re hamstringing the very people who we want to go out and get a job,” Lummus says. “It’s self-defeating.”
In his regular appearance on the McGraw Milhaven show on KTRS radio, Metro columnist Tony Messenger discusses his ongoing debtors' prison series.
He did his time. Then he got the bill: $3,150 for his stay behind bars.
A year-end update on some of the cases Tony Messenger wrote about during 2018.
The primary difference between the poor people who have been “terrorized” in Edmundson or Jennings or Ferguson, compared with those in Salem a…
The Court of Appeals in the Western District of Missouri determined that the practice of using the courts to try to collect board bills is ill…
Some counties in Missouri don't charge board bills. Those include the most urban counties in the state: both the city and county of St. Louis,…
I did my time and then some. This is how they get people. They keep them on probation and then if they don't pay their board bill they violate…
By 2009, Rapp was behind in her payments and the court revoked her probation. She did a couple of days in jail and her cash bond of $400 was a…
Every week in Missouri, a judge somewhere holds a crowded docket to collect room and board from people who were recently in jail. The judges c…
“I don’t see why he has to keep going to court every month,” she says. Sharon uses her Social Security income to try to keep him out of jail. …
Because Precious Jones was late to jail, prosecutor and judge seek to add to her sentence.
The Missouri Supreme Court and Missouri Legislature should revisit their 2015 and 2016 efforts to reform courts. More work is necessary.
Other than now being required to meet federal standards for that drug testing, private probation companies face nearly no oversight in Missour…
“I messed up on probation,” he says. “It was my fault.” Still, he doesn’t think it makes sense that he’s still hauled to court once a month wi…
Murr owed Dent County about $4,000 for her “board bill” for the 95 days she had been jailed.
The domestic violence victim, Gaddis says, wouldn’t make a report to police because she feared going to jail herself and losing her child.
“They make you jump through hoops,” Bote says, “and then they keep moving the hoops higher.”
William Everts stole from a church. Almost immediately, he knew it was a bad idea.
Bergen has the sort of back story that would inspire one of the movies or television episodes based in the Ozarks that seem to be all the rage…
Clark ended up spending 495 days in county jail awaiting a trial that still hasn’t come.
Pritchett first called me last year, after I wrote about a St. Francois County woman who was sent to prison for failing to pay court costs. He…
Rob Hopple had been in jail since May after falling behind on payments on an ankle bracelet. Court dates kept coming and going, with the prose…
The bills are that high because the two criminal defendants couldn’t afford to pay for an initial sentence behind bars for relatively minor of…
“The practical reality is that people are being arrested for being poor,” Mueller says. “And there’s nothing they can do about it. They just s…
At least twice in recent years, the Missouri Supreme Court has overturned harsh sentences issued by a judge after she sent people to prison so…
Branson, in early 2018, was in Desloge, Mo., now, living with her 15-year-old son, checking in with her parole officer, hoping never to go bac…
Officially, Victoria Branson’s probation was revoked because she never paid the state the past due support and the court costs, which rang up …