CHICKASAW, Ala.—Shaquala Jackson’s three-year-old daughter screamed. A rat was scurrying across the bathroom floor.

“I grabbed the kids and ran out of the house,” she said. 

Jackson said that was the day she knew she and her three young children could no longer live in Chickasaw, a small suburb just outside Mobile. The rats, she knew, were likely a result of the trash piling up in the carport adjacent to her rented home. But there was little Jackson felt she could do to fix the root problem.

The city wouldn’t pick up her trash. And it had charged her with “theft of service” over monthly garbage bills she couldn’t pay. 

Jackson’s case is one of more than 180 incidents where Chickasaw residents have been criminally charged over past-due garbage bills since city leaders passed an ordinance allowing the practice in March 2021. The ordinance provides a mechanism for city officials to issue a criminal summons or arrest a resident who falls behind on bills for garbage or sewer—the most basic municipal environmental services—provided by the city’s utilities board. Conviction under the ordinance could result in an order of restitution payments, a fine of between $25 and $500, and jail time of up to 10 days, according to the law’s text. 

That’s on top of the $25 penalty issued for every month of nonpayment, according to a recent bill provided to Inside Climate News. Monthly garbage fees in Chickasaw are $20 and sewer fees are $50. The tab mounts quickly when people get behind—and city policy does not allow them to make partial payments to start catching up.

An investigation by Inside Climate News that included interviews with more than a dozen impacted residents and an analysis of court records shows that the ordinance—passed by an all-white city council—disproportionately harms women and Black residents. People facing disabilities, the analyses found, are also affected by the city’s policy. 

Legal experts with the Southern Poverty Law Center who reviewed Chickasaw’s municipal court documents say the town’s practice of prosecuting its citizens over unpaid bills violates both state and federal law. In a letter sent to Chickasaw’s city attorney on Sept. 11, lawyers for the organization demanded that the city rescind its ordinance and halt the practice of taking residents’ garbage cans over nonpayment. 

“Our review of the City’s billing practices, its theft of service ordinance, nearly 200 criminal case files, and conversations with dozens of Chickasaw residents indicate that the City’s practices violate multiple constitutional provisions and state and federal laws,” the letter said.

Chickasaw officials did not respond to Inside Climate News’ requests for comment. Micah West, an attorney for the SPLC, said the anti-poverty nonprofit has not yet received a response to its letter. 

Both Alabama and federal law prohibit jailing residents over debts, according to legal experts. 

Alabama’s Constitution, for example, provides “that no person shall be imprisoned for debt.” An Alabama Attorney General’s Office opinion from 1990 also addressed the issue of utility bill debt, concluding that “a municipality may not penalize those who fail to pay their garbage fee.” Alabama law also includes a mechanism for cities and other local governments to waive fees for elderly residents facing financial hardship. 

Even so, this isn’t the first time an Alabama community has criminally charged a citizen over garbage bills. In 2022, the city of Valley garnered national headlines after its police officers arrested 82-year-old Martha Menefield for failure to pay a $77 trash bill, placing her in handcuffs at her own home. Soon, dozens of similar cases within Valley were brought to light. After intervention from lawyers at SPLC and other organizations, the local district attorney agreed to end the practice. 

Now, though, West is concerned that the criminalization of getting behind on utility bills may be more common than experts previously realized. Inside Climate News found cases in at least three other places.

“We can see now in Chickasaw that Valley was not an isolated incident,” he said. “We think that cities throughout the state of Alabama are prosecuting people who fall behind on their garbage bills.”

‘There Was a Blind Man There’

On a Sunday earlier this month, Jose Young stepped out onto his front porch to talk. Behind him, a crimson University of Alabama “A” hung on the door. Young wore casual clothes—a T-shirt and some basketball shorts. He was sorry he wasn’t dressed better, he said, but he’s been suffering from phantom pains, an ongoing challenge stemming from an injury after he was run over years ago, leaving the Black man with an amputated leg and other physical disabilities. 

“This is crazy,” Young said of his situation with the city, even before he began to explain it in earnest. “It’s all crazy.” 

Young said his garbage problems began when his fiancée was diagnosed with cancer and had to quit her job. That change left the family struggling to make ends meet.

Soon, the couple attempted to pay what they could to begin catching up on their utilities, which then amounted to a couple hundred dollars. Then came the roadblock. Partial payments would not be accepted, city officials told Young, he said. So the unpaid bill, now with additional late fees, kept adding up. Young’s bill had bloated to $1,935 by September 2023, according to documents reviewed by Inside Climate News.

“All bills with a $125 balance or more are DUE IMMEDIATELY or Services will be Disconnected,” Chickasaw’s utility bills state. “If services are disconnected, additional late fees and reconnection fees will apply and must be paid, in full, along with the balance on the account before services can be reconnected. … We do not make payment arrangements.”

It wasn’t long before Young received a criminal summons in the mail, requiring him to appear before a judge or face a warrant for failure to appear. 

Young said he explained his situation to the judge. He felt unheard. 

“I’ve never seen a place where you couldn’t make partial payments,” he said. “That was crazy to me.”

Young said that when he went to his appointed court hearing, the courtroom was full of others in similar situations. 

“There was a blind man there,” Young said. “They had to help him up to the bench and everything. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ.’”

He believes that inability to pay a bill should never land you in jail. 

“If I was illegally dumping trash or dumping something toxic, that may be a crime,” he said. “But this? It’s crazy. I’m 51 years old, and I never had a criminal record until this.”

‘I Just Couldn’t Pay That Much’

Shaquala Jackson said she’ll never go back to Chickasaw. She’d moved there in 2021 when a fellow church member offered her a property that accepted funding from Section 8, a housing assistance program. 

The garbage problems began when Jackson, a Black mother of three, received a notice that the bill had not been paid. Jackson said she’d been told upon moving in that the utilities were to be included in the rent. Jackson contacted the landlord, who assured her that the issue would be resolved. Soon, though, Jackson’s trash can was taken and she received another bill. This time, she said, the utility account had been shifted from her landlord’s name to hers—unpaid balance of over $1,000 included. 

Jackson was stunned. She said she immediately contacted the city. An employee told her the bill was her responsibility and they did not accept partial payments. 

“I just couldn’t pay that much,” Jackson said. “Not all at one time.”

So Jackson’s trash began to pile up in the carport just outside her home. Three young children, she said, produce more trash than you realize.

The last straw came when her three-year-old screamed in the bathroom.

“It’s a big cock-a-roach,” her daughter yelled. 

Jackson soon realized it was no cockroach. It was a rat, something her daughter had never seen before. 

She got her children out and soon left Chickasaw for good. 

Jackson said her children are traumatized by that memory. 

“They’re still terrified,” she said. “Every place we move to now, they ask, ‘Are we going to see a rat? Are the rats going to eat us?’”

‘It Felt Like Extortion’

Kelia Coleman, a Black mother of five boys, said she spends every day in fear of losing her freedom and her ability to take care of her children.

Each time a police cruiser passes by her home, she’s reminded of the criminal charge hanging over her head—theft of utility services—in the wake of what she says has been a nightmare of a misunderstanding. She doesn’t know whether or when a judge will issue a warrant for her arrest over her outstanding garbage bill. 

Coleman’s family moved to Chickasaw about four years ago from Mobile. When they moved in, she and her husband contacted the city about beginning garbage services, which she believed would be bundled with her water service as it had been at her previous home. 

Only years later did Coleman find out that her family’s trash fees had gone unpaid and unbilled, she said, increasing to over $1,000. When Coleman reached out to begin paying off the balance, she said she was told that partial payments were not acceptable. 

“I did not have $1,000 to pay them all at once,” Coleman told Inside Climate News. 

Around 44 percent of Americans say they don’t have enough savings to pay an unexpected $1,000 expense, according to recent survey data. In Chickasaw, the problem is even worse, with nearly a third of residents living below the federal poverty line, according to census data—a rate more than double the national average. 

Once Coleman’s trash can was taken away around a year ago, trash quickly started to pile up. Her husband began hauling it away when he could, paying to drop the trash off in neighboring majority-Black Prichard’s public-access landfill. But it’s hard to keep up. 

“It’s too much,” Coleman said. “It’s very hard for us with five small sons and no garbage pickup.”

After the trash began to accumulate, enforcement officials told Coleman that if the garbage wasn’t cleaned up, she would be fined. Infuriated, Coleman said she again demanded a payment plan. City officials relented, she said, but told her she still wouldn’t receive a garbage can until the full unpaid balance was resolved.

“My mouth dropped,” she said. “It felt like extortion.”

On top of the practical problem of garbage service, Coleman said the criminalization of her debt has left her mentally paralyzed and frightened her children. 

“I try so hard, and Chickasaw just always finds a way to knock us down.”

— Kelia Coleman

“They are threatening to lock me up and take me away from my kids for not paying something that I don’t have instead of working with me on it,” she said. “It’s gotten to the point where my kids are terrified of police and have full-on anxiety attacks when they see them coming.” 

The situation has left Coleman depressed much of the time, overwhelmed with the trash and the fear of jail. 

“I try so hard, and Chickasaw just always finds a way to knock us down,” Coleman said. 

The Role of Race

Chickasaw’s municipal court records demonstrate that Jackson and Coleman’s experience as Black women isn’t unique in the town of just under 6,500 people. 

An Inside Climate News review of court records confirms that women and, in particular, Black women are arrested over nonpayment of garbage fees more than other demographic groups. Black women comprise just 25 percent of the town’s population but account for around 37 percent of trash prosecutions. Women as a whole are also more frequently charged under Chickasaw’s theft of service ordinance. While they make up about half of the town’s population, women constitute more than 61 percent of those charged. 

Jackson said she’s not surprised that race plays a role in the way Chickasaw treats its residents. 

“I was always told that Chickasaw was a ‘No Black Zone’ for many years,” she said. “So maybe they just want to get the Black people out of ‘their’ area.”

Chickasaw began as a company town in the first half of the 20th century, housing white workers—and only white workers—for local shipbuilders in the modest houses along its narrow gridded streets.

By 1980, despite advances in racial integration in other parts of the country, Chickasaw remained an all-white, exclusive enclave. That year, for example, a federal judge ruled that the city and its housing authority had illegally barred African Americans from public housing through the adoption of a Chickasaw citizenship requirement that one public official said would keep neighboring, majority-Black Mobile from using Chickasaw’s public housing as what he termed a “dumping ground for social undesirables.” At that point, the court found, local officials knew “the City of Chickasaw had a reputation as a Caucasian town and that no Negroes had lived in Chickasaw since World War II.”

In the decades since that suit, Chickasaw has seen Black residency within its limits climb substantially. Now, more African Americans live in Chickasaw (around 49 percent of the total population) than whites (about 44 percent of residents). Despite that change in the city’s demographics, its political leadership has remained largely the same. Today, all of Chickasaw’s city councilors are white, as is its mayor. 

Jackson said she thinks the town’s history is baked into its present. She hopes, though, that city leaders will step up and do what she says is right: ending the prosecution of its citizens, Black and white, over an inability to pay for trash service. 

Cuffed Over Garbage

Joseph Uptagraft thought it must be some kind of confusion. 

Uptagraft, a white mechanic and father of four, was working at his shop in Theodore when his wife called. He couldn’t believe what she told him.

“Police officers had come up to my house and told my wife that they had a warrant for my arrest,” he said. Uptagraft left work and went straight to the police department, where he was told he was being arrested for theft of utility over a past-due garbage bill that Uptagraft said he’d simply overlooked. The bill had accumulated to over $1,000 including late fees, he was told. Uptagraft said he’d never been served with any summons to notify him of a court date. 

“They put cuffs on me behind my back,” he said. Uptagraft was transferred to nearby Saraland, then to Mobile Metro Jail, where he was booked and spent several hours before being released. 

Chickasaw’s statute provides options of fines, jail time or both for those convicted of theft of utility service. It also provides the government with the option of either simply summoning an alleged offender to criminal court or, based on the “amount and severity of alleged violations,” arresting them, according to the statute’s text. 

“That’s a hell of a way to tell somebody they’re past due on their bill,” Uptagraft said of the arrest. “How do they think someone in jail will manage to get it caught up?”

Uptagraft said he’s sickened by what he views as hypocrisy among those who have served city leadership.

In 2012, water service to Chickasaw City Hall was turned off by Prichard water officials after Chickasaw officials refused to pay a $24,000 water bill. 

“They can’t charge us with theft of services when they’ve done the same thing,” Uptagraft said. 

He also pointed to a recent fine issued to the city by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management over an open burn of trash. Following a citizen complaint, state regulators said they found city workers had conducted an open burn of “among other things, tire, appliances, electronics and garbage on the Lagoon Road property.” ADEM fined the city $5,000 over the incident. 

“ADEM got onto them and fined them,” Uptagraft said. “So they go after us, but do they think they’re above the law?”

‘I Wouldn’t Plead Guilty’

Barbara Lowell was 44 years old when she broke her neck swimming at Orange Beach. Since then, she said, she’s been living on a fixed income, using the Social Security Disability checks of a few hundred dollars she receives each month to meet her basic needs. 

Lowell, a white woman, said she’s always struggled to pay her city utility bill, which includes charges for garbage and sewer, but the real issues began when she missed a couple of months’ payments of around $70. 

“They don’t take partial payments, so you have to pay in full,” she said. “And I just couldn’t do that.” 

Following Lowell’s missed payments, either city officials or garbage workers took her trash can, leaving the resident with nowhere to place her garbage. Lowell said that she soon received a notice to appear in criminal court, where she said she was advised to plead guilty in order to receive a payment plan. Lowell refused.

“They wouldn’t work out a plan or anything because I wouldn’t plead guilty,” she said. 

“They don’t take partial payments, so you have to pay in full. And I just couldn’t do that.” 

— Barbara Lowell

In the case of Valley, which was also issuing criminal charges for unpaid trash fees, impacted residents filed a class action lawsuit against the city and its garbage contractor. Plaintiffs alleged that the criminalization of unpaid garbage bills was effectively a racket, with the local government acting as the enforcer of a private company’s interest. 

In December 2023, Trump-appointed federal District Court Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr. dismissed that claim, calling citizens’ arrest and jailing “very disturbing” but ruling that the suit was ripe to be dismissed because Amwaste, the garbage company in question, and the city had not “reached an understanding” to jointly deprive residents of their rights. The case is currently on appeal. 

It’s not clear what role, if any, the private company contracted to provide Chickasaw’s trash services has played in that city’s criminalization of unpaid garbage fees. A-1 McDuffie Sanitation, the firm, did not reply to requests for comment. 

For her part, Lowell said she’s struggled to find somewhere to dispose of her household garbage. 

“It’s been three years since I’ve had a garbage can,” she said. “Why can’t I have a garbage can? They’re holding it hostage.” 

Lowell initially tried to burn her trash but abandoned the effort when she felt that the resulting fumes were toxic. 

Now her neighbors are allowing her to place trash in their can when there’s space. 

Lowell said the city’s policy of making criminals out of those who’ve fallen behind on their utility bills is immoral and unfair. 

“This is a place with a lot of older people. Good people. Hardworking people,” Lowell said. “This is stuff we shouldn’t have to worry about.”