Explores modern-day debtor’s prisons affecting low income communities who struggle to pay traffic fines.

To Prison for Poverty documents the system that enables private probation companies to profit from charging excessive fees to low income people who can't pay small fines like traffic tickets. If they can't pay, they go to jail. 

Many people think that debtor’s prisons disappeared from American society just as surely as horse-based transportation. But in fact, people who are too poor to pay fines are still being threatened with incarceration -- and even imprisoned -- today. Add private, for-profit companies to the mix, and you've got a system that abuses those who can least afford it, with disastrous effects on poor people and communities of color.