
“With the keen eye and compassionate heart of an award-winning journalist, Messenger shows us that Ferguson is everywhere, putting a human face on the millions of Americans being crushed every year by cash register injustice.” “Messenger is one of the few columnists―maybe the only one―in America whose beat is the poor who are preyed upon by public officials”


In his new book Profit and Punishment: How America Criminalizes the Poor in the Name of Justice, he exposes the tragedy of modern-day debtors’ prisons, and how they destroy the lives of poor Americans swept up in a system designed to penalize the most impoverished. Louis Post Dispatch has spent years covering the stories of the people affected. The cycles of poverty and incarceration can span generations, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Messenger of the St. When this poverty intersects with a broken criminal justice system, it becomes criminalized.

The wealth gap in America creates any number of problems-but perhaps the most pressing is its expansion of poverty.
