We are proud to welcome back to Columbia Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Messenger, who will be discussing his vital new book, Profit and Punishment: How America Criminalizes the Poor in the Name of Justice. It’s a raw and shocking account of how the U.S. criminal justice system has been designed to penalize the most impoverished in our society. James Patterson described Tony’s book as: “Crucial evidence that the justice system is broken and has to be fixed.”
This is going to be a fascinating and important discussion which will be of interest to anyone who cares about social justice in America - or the lack of it.
In PROFIT AND PUNISHMENT: How America Criminalizes the Poor in the Name of Justice, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Messenger exposes the tragedy of modern-day debtors prisons, and how they destroy the lives of poor Americans swept up in a system designed to penalize the most impoverished.
As a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Tony Messenger has spent years in county and municipal courthouses documenting how poor Americans are convicted of minor crimes and then saddled with exorbitant fines and fees. If they are unable to pay, they are often sent to prison, where they are then charged a pay-to-stay bill, in a cycle that soon creates a mountain of debt that can take years to pay off. These insidious penalties are used to raise money for broken local and state budgets, often overseen by for-profit companies, and it is one of the central issues of the criminal justice reform movement.
In the tradition of Evicted and The New Jim Crow, PROFIT AND PUNISHMENT is a call to arms, shining a light on a two-tiered system invisible to most Americans. Messenger introduces readers to three single mothers caught up in this system: living in poverty in Missouri, Georgia, and South Carolina, whose lives are upended when minor offenses become monumental financial catastrophes. As these women struggle to clear their debt and move on with their lives, readers meet the dogged civil rights advocates and lawmakers fighting by their side to create a more equitable and fair court of justice. In this remarkable feat of reporting, Tony Messenger exposes injustice that is agonizing and infuriating in its mundane cruelty, as he champions the rights and dignity of some of the most vulnerable Americans.
TONY MESSENGER is the metro columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 2019, Messenger won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for his series of columns on debtors' prisons in Missouri. In 2016, Messenger was awarded a Missouri Honor Medal, the highest award bestowed by the University of Missouri's School of Journalism. That same year he won a National Headliner for editorial writing. In 2015, Messenger was a Pulitzer finalist for his series of editorials on Ferguson, and won the Sigma Delta Chi award for best editorials of the year, given by the Society of Professional Journalists. Messenger lives in Wildwood, MO with his wife and two children. He has four grown children and eight grandchildren. Profit and Punishment is his first book.
