Francisco Starks, left, and his daughter, Brooklyn Woolfolk, embrace after Starks survived the tornado that hit the candle factory in Mayfield, Ken. Photo provided and used with permission.
Brooklyn Woolfolk was excited to see her dad.
The 18-year-old from Mayfield, Kentucky, hadn’t seen Francisco Starks in at least five years. Starks has been serving a state sentence on low-level felony burglary charges. He limped up to Woolfolk, leaning on a crutch, the morning after deadly tornadoes whipped through Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky, killing dozens in their path.
Starks was one of the survivors of the devastation at the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory, where at least eight employees died. Starks worked there, in a manner of speaking. He was one of seven detainees from the Graves County Jail who worked at the factory to help pay off their fines and fees heaped upon them by the criminal justice system.
The jailer responsible for the men — Deputy Robert Daniel — died in the tornado, after helping make sure Starks and his fellow detainees were somewhat protected as the factory was collapsing around them.
As a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Tony Messenger has spent years in county and municipal courthouses documenting how poor Americans are convicted of minor crimes and then saddled with exorbitant fines and fees. If they are unable to pay, they are often sent to prison, where they are then charged a pay-to-stay bill, in a cycle that soon creates a mountain of debt that can take years to pay off. These insidious penalties are used to raise money for broken local and state budgets, often overseen by for-profit companies, and it is one of the central issues of the criminal justice reform movement. In “Profit and Punishment,” Messenger has written a call to arms, exposing an injustice that is agonizing and infuriating in its mundane cruelty.
“The deputy probably saved his life,” says Madison Leech, who is Starks’ attorney. “The deputy was a hero. But the system shouldn’t have had him there in the first place.”
The system Leech is referring to charges defendants thousands of dollars in fines and fees, including pay-to-stay fees for the privilege of being in jail. In Graves County, the charge is $15 per day. Kentucky is one of several states, most of them in the south, that lets defendants who can’t pay off their court debt serve extra time in jail, with each day counting $50 toward their debt, or $100 if on work release.
