ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ

Each of them owe their respective counties at least that much for extended jail stays.

The bills are that high because the two criminal defendants couldn’t afford to pay for an initial sentence behind bars for relatively minor offenses. They are examples of rural Missouri judges turning county jails into de facto debtors’ prisons that the director of the state public defender’s office, Michael Barrett, is out to expose.

Bergen’s story starts at a Walmart in Salem.

In April 2016, she was accused of stealing a tube of mascara. According to the police report, Bergen, who is 30, said she “threw away the package and forgot to pay for the mascara.� She was arrested for shoplifting. The mascara she allegedly stole cost $8.74.

Bergen was sentenced to a short jail stint, probation and a fine. Dent County Circuit Court Judge Brandi Baird scheduled a probation hearing to make sure she was paying her court costs.

Regular readers will recognize Baird’s name. She’s the subject of , where she sentenced Leanne Banderman to jail after she couldn’t afford the county’s “board bill� for a jail stay that, like Bergen, was over a shoplifting case. Matthew Mueller, the senior bond litigation counsel for the public defender’s office, filed the case.

Bergen stole even less makeup — from the same Walmart — than Banderman did.

But when she didn’t show up at a probation hearing, she was sent to jail. When she fell behind in payments, she got sent to jail again. Next month, she is to appear before Baird again, to explain how she’s going to pay the jail bill that has now climbed higher than $10,000.

This is a problem all over Missouri, says Barrett, who is Mueller’s boss.

“Whoever thinks the system is primarily about justice or public safety is delusional,� Barrett says. “It’s about extracting money from the pockets of poor persons — particularly in rural areas — by jailing them without regard to whether they can even afford to pay these excessive fines and fees in the first place. It’s all a clear violation of the Eighth Amendment. Like our founders feared, many judges have become tyrants — exploiting individual liberty to operate modern-day debtor prisons; and then they have the audacity to go after the lawyers for the poor who seek to challenge their rackets. If anyone thinks these cases are an anomaly, I’m prepared to give them a hundred more; and then as many more after that until people start realizing that incarceration is driven more by the illegal exploitation of poverty than it is by public safety.�

Take Smith, who lives in Belton.

He was scheduled to be in Caldwell County Circuit Court last week in front of Judge Jason Kanoy over his own $10,000 jail bill. In 2011, Smith was sentenced to 90 days in jail for being $1,765 in arrears in child support. He agreed to pay $353 a month to get caught up.

The sentence, by the way, was for time served. This is what happens when you’re poor and are arrested. You go to jail right away. And in a system that has the second-most underfunded public defender’s system in the country, you sit there, awaiting time before a judge, unable to make bail.

When Smith got out of jail, he was given a bill for his time there for $2,560. He fell behind in payments and was put in jail for six months. The next board bill was for $7,900.

Last week, Judge Kanoy scheduled a hearing for Smith to give an update on any progress he’s making on his now $10,840 bill.

In effect, this is the rural version in ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ of what has been happening in many municipal courts in St. Louis County for decades. Poor people get hauled before the court for minor offenses, and before they know it, they owe the sorts of fines they’ll never be able to pay down and face warrants for their arrest and constant court dates before a judge who is serving as a collection agent for a cash-strapped government.

It is common practice in most parts of rural Missouri for judges to hold “payment review hearings� where they haul in defendants month after month to explain their status on what Mueller argues before the appeals court should be a civil debt.

But if the defendants miss a hearing, they go to jail. If they can’t afford to pay, they go to jail. And every jail visit is another nail on the coffin that buries them in inescapable poverty, and none of this is specifically outlined in statute.

It is — as the Eastern District of the Missouri Appeals Court wrote in a 2011 case involving a St. Francois County grandmother over a probation violation — “a never ending merry-go-round of having her probation revoked and being placed on a new term of probation until these amounts are paid.�

In August, Smith agreed to a $50 per month payment on the bill he owes for jail time. At that rate, it will take more than 18 years for him to pay it off.

It’s a collection racket on behalf of the long arm of the law that rivals a payday loan scheme, with one important difference:

If you don’t pay, you go to jail.