CHICKASAW, Ala. — Marissa Davis’ vehicle stopped working about nine months ago.
She had already had to replace the fuel pump three times. The most recent issue — the alternator or the starter, a person who looked at the car told Davis — would cost $980 to fix, money that she did not have.
Davis, a single mother of two children, needed the car for her job as a certified nursing assistant (CNA) at Mobile Infirmary, feeding patients and helping them move. Her coworkers gave her rides between her home and the hospital for a couple of weeks, but that eventually became unworkable. Without adequate transportation, she eventually lost the job.
She began to fall behind on her finances — including the sewer and trash bill Chickasaw officials regularly charged residents each month.
Soon, the city confiscated her trash bin and refused to provide her home with garbage service until she paid the balance on her trash and sewage bill. And under a 2021 ordinance, the city could bring legal action against Davis over the unpaid bill.
“It has been rough, honestly,” Davis said in a recent interview. “I have been having to keep it in my laundry room until I can afford for someone to come and take it.”
City officials say they need the money to provide the service. Nash Campbell, Chickasaw’s city attorney, said in an interview Tuesday that Chickasaw only has a sewer utility service, with nearby Prichard supplying water service.
“We have no way to cut off water if someone is not paying sewer,” Campbell said. “And right now, there is over $350,000 in current debt. That is not including what the auditors would let us write off from people just not paying sewer bills.”
Campbell said city officials asked him to find a way to compel people to pay their sewer and trash bills, since they are on the same bill.
“Looking through whatever attorney general opinions we could find, there were some opinions out there that said, ‘There could be some criminal penalties for knowingly not paying your utilities,'” Campbell said.
But Davis said she can’t pay the balance because she’s already struggling to make ends meet.
“I am just trying to find odd and end jobs to keep paying my bills, to keep my lights and water on,” Davis said. “I don’t have the extra funds to pay for the trash bill, or get another car, or anything like that.”
Bags of garbage can be seen from the front window of Marissa Davis’ home because she no longer can discard them since the city ended service after a bill delinquency located in Chickasaw, Alabama, U.S., on Friday October 18, 2024. (Andi Rice for Alabama Reflector)
Several residents are in similar situations, owing hundreds or thousands of dollars to the municipality, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that has been advocating for those unable to pay their past due bills.
Chickasaw is not alone in this practice. Valley in Chambers County also charged people for unpaid utility bills. Fayette jailed a woman for not paying a garbage bill. And while prosecuting and incarcerating people for unpaid debts has been growing, researchers and advocates interviewed for the article said they had never witnessed the system applied in this manner.
District attorneys in Valley and Chickasaw have since either dropped the charges against residents or pledged to no longer prosecute those with past due bills. The Southern Poverty Law Center, advocating on behalf of Chickasaw residents, has reached an agreement with the city to forestall prosecutions for unpaid bills.
But the prospect of spiraling costs associated with past due bills remains a possibility unless Chickasaw officials and residents come to some type of agreement.
The process
Chickasaw is an enclave of Mobile, situated in the northern part of the city. According to the U.S. Census, almost a third of the households live below the poverty line.
“It is double the poverty rate of the rest of the state,” said Micah West, a senior staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Each month, Chickasaw officials mail each household a bill for $70. $50 goes for sewage and the rest pays for garbage service. When a resident misses the deadline to pay, the city imposes an additional $25 fee for the unpaid bill.
The monthly charge, as well as the $25 past due fee, accumulates on the account until the full balance is paid. Chickasaw officials do not allow partial payments, so the balance continues to increase.
As a CNA, Davis made about $1,300 a month. After rent, electricity, water and other expenses, she had hardly any discretionary money left, either for her $980 car repair or the $1,500 the city charged for her sewage and garbage bills.
“After I counted my bills, I would probably have not even close to a full $200 after I paid everything,” Davis said.
Davis has taken a job cleaning people’s houses, which pays less than what she made as a CNA. She has been trying to find other employment, focusing on remote jobs that do not require a car for travel but has yet to find anything.
Shaquala Jackson, who moved to Chickasaw with her family in April 2021, began to receive notices from the city for sewage and garbage in June. Originally, the notices were addressed to her landlord but were then changed to her name, transferring responsibility in August.
The balance was originally $400, as Jackson recalls. The second bill that arrived was about double. By the time it became Jackson’s responsibility, the balance had ballooned to about $2,000.
Jackson is on disability, receiving roughly $800 per month in benefits. She said the city took her garbage bin and refused to service her residence.
“I started paying people to come out and pick up my trash every other week, so twice a month, I had somebody come out, and I was paying $200 a month to get them to come and pick up my trash,” Jackson said. “In the process, I ended up getting rats.”
Jackson also said police threatened her with arrest if she did not pay what she owed.
“They tried to put a warrant out for my arrest for the trash bill,” she said. “Well, I have three small kids, I can’t go to jail, and they won’t take payments from me when I try to make a payment ‘to you guys,’ so I am just going to leave.”
Jackson has since left Chickasaw because of the situation. However, while the city may not charge her for continuing to service the house, she may still be liable for the past due bills she accumulated.
West said that the threats to prosecution and potential charges are the result of an ordinance that municipal officials passed in January 2021 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. It is one of eight officially listed on Chickasaw’s website, along with rules pertaining to curfew for minors, having chickens in the backyard, as well as rules for loud noises and animals.
The ordinance states that households who fail to pay their utility bills can be charged with “theft of service.”
According to state statute, theft of service involves a person who “intentionally obtains services known by him to be available only for compensation by deception, threat, false token or other means to avoid payment for the services.” It provides for a fine of up to $500 and 10 days in jail per violation.
“Here, what this ordinance is doing is criminalizing you if you just fall behind on your bills,” West said. “Many people said, ‘I just fell behind on my bills, I am not engaging in theft.’”
Campbell said the city offered people an amnesty period that allows them to make themselves whole on their past due amounts. During those times, people must pay at least a portion of their bill to have their services restored and the late fees suspended.
“For instance, that might waive the majority of what is owed at that point,” Campbell said. But, he said, few opted to take it.
Campbell acknowledged that some people cannot afford to pay but accused others of refusing to do so.
“When we are getting to a list of a over a thousand people, in a town of 6,000, especially when I have personally seen some of the people who are not doing it, going into those city council meetings, it makes it questionable,” Campbell said.
Placing people under arrest because of unpaid bills has had a long history, but local and state officials have been increasingly using the threat of prosecution and potential incarceration as a means of compelling people to pay for past due balances, otherwise known as debtor’s prison.
On paper, incarcerating people for debt is illegal. Congress abolished the practice under federal law in 1833. Bankruptcy laws were later enacted to provide debtors with avenues to free themselves from debt. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the protections in a series of rulings from the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1970 case of Williams vs. Illinois, the justices ruled that extending the maximum term because a defendant failed to pay court costs or fines that he could not afford violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
One year later in the case of Tate vs. Short, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a person could not be incarcerated solely because the individual is too indigent to pay a fine imposed under a fine-only statute.
Then, in the 1983 case of Bearden vs. Georgia, the court outlined a process for the courts to collect fines and fees.
“This decision imposed a constitutional obligation on courts everywhere throughout the country, saying that you have to make findings,” said Leslie Bailey, director of the Debtor’s Prison Project for Public Justice, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization. “You have to ask for evidence, you have to look at the person’s income, you have to look at whether they have tried and been unable to make payments — and you cannot take away their liberty unless you determine that they are intentionally flouting the obligations, they are willfully refusing to pay.”
But people continue to be incarcerated because of their inability to make payments on their obligations. Courts will not incarcerate people for not paying debt, Bailey said, but they may do so for failing to appear for their court case involving the debt.
There is also no standard by which judges should determine whether a person is financially able to pay a debt. That is needed to determine whether an individual is willfully reneging on the debt payment.
“This seems, to me, to be the next example in a long story,” Bailey said.
Residents in Valley, Alabama faced prosecution for unpaid garbage bills. The district attorney has since decided against continuing to prosecute the cases.
As for Chickasaw, this was the second instance that officials have attempted to charge people with a criminal offense because of poverty.
“We had done some similar work in the city of Chickasaw back in 2016 when they were prosecuting people when they fell behind on their water bills,” West said. “We had raised a series of concerns with the city back then about their practices.”
That was also the result of an ordinance that stated that people could be charged with a criminal offense for not paying the utility bill. City officials later rescinded the ordinance.
SPLC also sent a letter to the city attorney and council members over the garbage bills and reached an agreement to withhold prosecutions over the bills. Campbell said the city and SPLC continue to have conversations about the issue.
However, some residents, including Davis, have yet to have their garbage utility restored, and it is unknown when city staff will offer them their garbage cans back to resume service.
Davis, for her part, relied on friends and loved ones to visit and help with reducing the pile of garbage currently accumulating in her laundry room. Each time someone visits, they will take a couple to dispose of at their residence.
This article originally appeared in the Alabama Reflector, an independent, nonprofit news outlet. It appears on FOX54.com under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
