Published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on the U.S. criminal justice system.

On June 7, 2014, Mike Tobias, a 28-year-old from Reading, Pennsylvania, was watching television at home when his brother burst into the room with an emergency phone call. Their mother, Eileen DiNino, had been discovered unconscious in her cell at Berks County Prison and taken to the hospital. “I talked to the doctor and he explained what happened,” Tobias told a reporter from the Reading Eagle. “She had blood coming from her nose and mouth when they found her and that was that.” DiNino suffered from a number of health problems, and did not have access to medications for high blood pressure, anxiety, and bipolar disorder while incarcerated. The night before, DiNino’s cellmate, Nicole Lord, said she heard DiNino complaining of pain all over her body, saying that she had been moaning, “It hurts, it hurts. I cannot breathe.” Now, the doctor told Tobias, his mother was dead.

DiNino, a 55-year-old single mother of eight, had been sentenced to a two-day stint at Berks County because she owed the local courts more than $2,000 in fines and fees related to the truancy of two of her teenage sons. She was unemployed, lived in a house owned by a relative, and her husband, Brian, who had owned a small business, passed away in 2011 from complications from hepatitis. Caring for her family was a struggle. “My brothers, despite the truancy, are good kids,” Tobias said. “They’re not out running the streets committing crimes.”

More than 1,600 parents—most of them mothers—have been jailed in Berks County since 2000 for failure to pay truancy fines. In Pennsylvania, truancy is defined as more than three days of unexcused absence from school. After that, kids and parents can be referred to court and fined $300 per additional unexcused absence, in addition to court costs. Because her sons were enrolled in different schools under different jurisdictions, two judges heard a total of 55 truancy charges against DiNino. The first, Wally Scott, cleared her after learning of her indigent financial situation. “We sat and talked for a long time in my office and I could see that she couldn’t pay the fines, that she tried to make her sons go to school but there is only so much a parent can do,” Scott said. The second judge, Dean R. Patton, ordered DiNino to document her inability to pay the truancy fees. When she failed to bring the paperwork to court, Patton sent her to jail. He later told The Associated Press that DiNino “cared about her kids, but her kids ruled the roost.”]

DiNino’s death shed light on a murky corner of the criminal justice system, one in which school administrators, the police, and the courts enforce—often with nearly untrammeled discretion—strict school attendance laws. While incarceration of truant students and their parents is relatively rare and declining in most states, these cases—typically more than 150,000 annually—commonly lead to fines, loss of custody, and probation for both juveniles and parents. Over 1,000 truant children and teenagers are removed from their homes each year and placed in foster homes, group homes, or juvenile detention centers for nothing more than absences from school. An additional 15,000 truants are placed on juvenile probation, with probation violations such as breaking curfew or missing additional days of school leading to detention or out-of-home placement.