Despite well-known examples of municipalities running debtors' prisons, like Ferguson, MO and Biloxi, MI, there are not even state data that can be used to rigorously assess the scope of debt imprisonment practices. To address this data gap, we've gathered millions of records through hundreds of open records requests across the country. We've documented over a hundred thousand instances of individuals being jailed for failing to pay court debts over the last decade in Texas and Wisconsin alone. Hundreds of thousands of warrants for failure to pay from Oklahoma and Delaware suggest that the practice is widespread.

We, the Stanford Debtors' Prisons Project, are an interdisciplinary team of researchers and journalists at Stanford University. We are committed to combining the academic rigor of statistical analysis with the explanatory power of data journalism.