"I had the misfortune of writing a check that bounced. I paid for the check and fees, and picked up the check at the establishment that I owed. However, unknown to me, they had already reported it to the court system.
"Next thing I know, I'm under arrest. The cuffs were placed on me so tightly I had red marks around my wrists until the next day. I was mortified."
Andrew Patterson, 65, of Munster was recently awakened at 5:30 a.m. by a police officer with a warrant for his arrest. The civil warrant was for non payment to St. Joseph College for a class he signed up for but later dropped.
"I was handcuffed, arrested and placed in the backseat of a squad car," he said. "I had to spend a work day and a night in the county jail before they could verify that this debt had been discharged in a bankruptcy proceeding."
Critics claim this routine practice is getting out of hand, and bill collectors are wrongly using law enforcement to collect their debts while jamming jails with non-criminals.
Yes, "debtors' prisons" were condemned more than a century ago, and it's not a crime to be in debt. But thousands of Americans -- and hundreds of Northwest Indiana residents -- are getting tossed in the clinker after not showing up in court to make bill payment arrangements or to plead their case in front of a judge.
"Nobody is thrown in jail for not paying (their bills)," said Porter Superior Judge David Chidester. "People are jailed because they fail to appear for three consecutive court appearances and they are held in contempt of court for failing to appear."
Most defendants, however, don't know this legal formality and many "collections attorneys" don't suggest it because they represent creditors, not debtor-defendants. This is the rub regarding debtors who don't realize they can go to jail for dodging, missing, or conveniently ignoring debt-collection legal matters.
http://www.post-trib.com/news/davich/26 ... 22.article