2017 marks the 175th anniversary of Pennsylvania's 1842 statutory ban on debtors' prisons, which implemented the prohibition that has long-existed in the Pennsylvania Constitution. But today, courts still imprison thousands of Pennsylvanians each year because of their poverty.

People who have criminal charges, ­municipal code violations or traffic citations collectively owe millions of dollars in fines, costs and restitution. Long after these defendants have served jail time or completed probation—and even in minor summary cases where the punishment for the underlying offense includes no jail or probation—some Pennsylvania judges do not hesitate to use their contempt powers to jail those who fail to pay, regardless of their poverty. The result is that a poor defendant's failure to have $100 can be the difference between spending months in jail or walking free.

Courts that routinely jail such defendants have turned one individual's punishment into a form of collective punishment, as defendants plead with friends and relatives to give or lend them money to avoid jail. In one central Pennsylvania county's Court of Common Pleas, the presiding judge's first question to defendants who had failed to pay was whether they brought any money to court. The second question was how much money friends or family could post that day to keep them out of jail. Defendants were incarcerated until the money was posted, and in at least one case I observed, that meant keeping a defendant in jail until his fiancée's Friday pay day. In another case, in which I ultimately provided representation, a defendant was incarcerated for five months until he contacted us and we filed a successful petition for a writ of habeas corpus. He had been jailed because he did not have $800—and he was certainly not in a position while incarcerated to make and pay that money.