Debtors prisons don't make sense for normal debts, but a fine for embezzlement is not the same thing at all. The $13,000 isn't really a debt as much as it is a punishment. The real question is whether the corrections system passed up an effective opportunity to garnish normal wages - but I can imagine a lot of practical issues with that approach.
I've little doubt the situation in Mississippi is dodgy, but these aren't debtors prisons. These are strange ordinary prisons.
EDIT Hah, nevermind turns out I didn't know what a debtors prison was. Thanks fenomas.
No, there's forfeiture for that.
If you refuse; the assets should be seized from you and the fine paid that way.
If you are unable to, then the fine is, ipso facto, excessive.
In either case penal slavery is not an appropriate answer.
A criminal fine that it is impossible to pay with the person's actual means without impairing access to the basic necessities of life when the fine is imposed (including reasonably anticipated future income if the required mechanism of repayment allows it to be paid over time from future income), and no matter whether it is characterized as restitution or otherwise, no matter how it relates to past criminal gains, is excessive, and penal slavery (whether or not permitted by the 13th Amendment, which sets the bounds of what is legal but not what is moral) for inability to pay such an excessive fine compounds the injustice with gross violation of the most fundamental of human rights, and even more incarceration without penal slavery for inability (as opposed to refusal and obstruction when the means we're available) to pay would be piling injustice upon injustice.
A society that puts people in jail for not having $13000 to pay is not a "functioning society".
>Because a debt arising from a criminal conviction requires the convicted person to have engaged in a wrongful act in the first place. Mere failure to pay a civil debt does not.
If the convicted should go to jail, they should go to jail from a conviction for the wrongful act itself -- not for not being able to pay the debt created by it.