I have picked two articles written by St. Louis Post Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger on Missouri's Debtor Prisons from 2018-2019. Please summarize the context of both of his series and provide a reflection as it relates to the history of corrections.Thank you so much and have an awesome day!

FIRST ARTICLE (Copied and pasted, link issues)

Messenger: St. Louis woman did 20 days in jail for speeding; now rural Missouri judge wants her for 6 more months

"FULL TEXT

It was Mother's Day weekend in 2017.

Precious Jones was in a hurry to get to her sister's house in Kansas City.

Too much of a hurry.

Jones, 34, lives in the Baden neighborhood in north St. Louis. Headed west on Interstate 70, she got pulled over by the Missouri Highway Patrol for going 120 miles per hour. She was given a ticket and sent on her way. She missed her August court date in Lafayette County.

"It slipped my mind," she says.

Jones straightened it out. She turned herself in to local police, paid the bond on her outstanding warrant, and called the court to set up a new court date. She took driver education classes and did community service. She hired a local attorney. He told her that if she agreed to pay a higher fine, the points on the speeding ticket wouldn't be assessed against her driver's license.

In May, Jones pleaded guilty to the Class B misdemeanor of speeding at least 26 mph over the speed limit. She didn't expect what came next.

Associate Circuit Court Judge Kelly Rose gave her a six-month jail sentence and two years probation. The jail sentence would be suspended if Jones did 20 days "shock time" in jail, on consecutive weekends. "She just threw the book at me," Jones says. "I could have gotten this deal myself. Why did I pay $300 for a lawyer?"

Because of the conviction, Jones' driver's license was suspended, and would stay that way until she paid all her court fines and did her time. She asked the judge if she could do her weekends in jail in St. Louis. The judge said no.

So, this summer, she begged for rides, and every Friday for 10 weeks was dropped off at the Lafayette County Jail. On one day in May, she was an hour late to jail. Jones had gotten a job working for the United Way in St. Louis. She works until 6 p.m. Making it to Lafayette County by 10 p.m. was no easy task. In June, on one of the days she was supposed to be in jail, her car broke down.

Jones called the jail, which documented the call.

The next day she made it to Lafayette County. The jail kept her for her full two days.

By July, Jones figured she had paid her debt. She did all of her time, and she paid all of her fines, including a bill for her jail time.

In September, she got a notice from Lafayette County in the mail. There was a warrant out for her arrest. Because she had been late to jail, even though she stayed and did her full time, prosecutor Kristen Hilbrenner was seeking to revoke her probation.

The attorney in her case, James Worthington, of Higginsville, withdrew, saying he wasn't retained to work on a probation violation case. So now, Jones has a warrant out for her arrest, with a $2,500 bond attached to it, and she's facing a six-month jail sentence.

For a speeding ticket.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," Jones says. "They are just not going to let me go."

Jones is an example of a widespread problem in Missouri's rural courts, in which in too many situations, especially when the defendant is poor, the system seems to look for reasons to cite probation violations in misdemeanor cases, and tie people to the court system for years, in an effort to increase local revenue. If Jones ends up doing more jail time in Lafayette County, she'll be billed for that time, and could end up owing thousands of dollars. And if she can't afford to pay it, she'll be summoned by the judge across the state every month to explain herself. For Jones, that will be quite a hardship at the moment.

Despite the promise from her attorney and the court, as outlined in court records, that the speeding ticket wouldn't carry points against her license, nobody told the Department of Revenue. So Jones' license has been suspended. She gets rides or takes the bus to get to work or wherever she needs to go. She's called the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union, in hope that somebody will help get her out of a new jail sentence that she can't believe is even an option.

"I'm losing everything," Jones tells me. "They keep coming back for more. They're trying to milk me for all I've got."

CREDIT: By Tony Messenger, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

SECOND ARTICLE (Copied and pasted, link issues)

Messenger: St. Louis woman had a bad break up in 2006. Camden County still keeps putting her in jail because of it

"FULL TEXT

Alicyn Rapp was dropped off in the shadow of the big red barn in Camdenton, the one that houses a souvenir and T-shirt shop at the intersection of Missouri Highways 5 and 54.

"I had no money, no car and no phone," Rapp remembers. "I had no way to get back home to St. Louis. I was stranded.

A stranger bought her a hot dog at Sonic and let her use her phone. Her dad would be able to come get her in a couple of days. She found a cheap motel and the good Samaritan paid for her room.

That was in July.

Rapp, 36, had just been let out of Camden County Jail. She had been picked up on a warrant from a case for which she long ago served her time. Her troubles stemmed from a bad breakup. In 2006.

Rapp believes she might have the oldest ongoing case in Camden County. She met a guy that summer at Lake of the Ozarks. Things moved fast. She moved in with him in the loft above his window-tinting business. They drank a lot. They fought. Then he cheated on her. That's what the police report says. It also says she hit him and trashed his loft. Rapp says he hit her first. Police charged her with domestic violence and property damage, both misdemeanors.

A warrant was issued for her arrest, but Rapp had already moved back to St. Louis, where she grew up. She's a south city Catholic girl. There was St. Gabriel's for elementary and middle school, followed by Bishop DuBourg for high school.

By the age of 14, she was fighting addiction, mostly alcohol and meth. In 2004, she caught her first drug possession case and went to prison. Since then, she's done three stints in prison -- all for drug possession -- and has found herself in nine different county jails.

Only one case remains on her record. Camden County. She was arrested in 2007, went through a couple of attorneys and by 2008 pleaded guilty. Her sentence was one year in jail, but it was suspended. She received two years of probation and a bill for the nine days she spent in jail. Altogether, her court costs came to about $1,200.

By 2009, Rapp was behind in her payments and the court revoked her probation. She did a couple of days in jail and her cash bond of $400 was applied to her costs. Then again in 2010. Revocation. Jail. Another bill for jail time. And 2012.

This is the pattern that creates de facto debtors prisons in rural Missouri. Poor people who can't afford to pay their costs -- even after doing their time on misdemeanor charges -- end up with even larger bills by spending more time in jail on probation revocation or contempt of court for missing hearings. Camden County collects more in socalled "board bills" than any county in the state except for neighboring Laclede County. The practice has earned the lake area jail there a motto often repeated by its inmates.

"It's legendary," says Rapp. "Come on vacation, leave on probation, come back on revocation.

Since 2006, this has been Rapp's life. In 2013, she tried to put an end to the cycle. She was in the Chillicothe Correctional Center, doing 120 days for possession of meth, and she was trying to turn her life around. Her record has been clean since then, though she knows her battle with addiction will last a life time.

"I am writing you requesting time served in lieu of fines and/or jail time to run concurrent with my current sentence ..." Rapp wrote the Camden County Circuit Court. "I am trying to change my life and I would like a clean slate to start over."

The prosecutor in Camden County was willing to grant the request. The judge said no, not unless Rapp also paid the $1,639.70 in outstanding bills.

So when Rapp walked out of prison, she was picked up by Camden County deputies, who drove her back to the county jail, and then added a bill for mileage to her ever increasing jail costs. In 2015, still behind in payments, she got picked up again.

"I sat in Camden County Jail for 18 days, waiting to go to court just for them to release me with a new payment schedule," she says. "It's ridiculous."

On Monday, she had a court date again to discuss her payments with the judge, the fifth one to handle her case since it began in 2006. She didn't go.

She is living with her husband in Woodson Terrace these days. Her car doesn't work. Next week she starts training for a job with Jack in the Box. The idea of scraping together the money to find a way to make it to Camden County just to tell the judge she can't afford a payment makes no sense to her.

"It's been 12 years, for God's sake," Rapp says. "I've lost jobs, my house, cars, my children. I've done enough time. I've paid them enough money. With this hanging over my head, I'm never going to get a clean start. When is it going to stop?

CREDIT: By Tony Messenger, St. Louis Post-Dispatch"