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Guilty of Being Poor


Eric Ruder
Dissident Voice
April 25, 2009


http://www.infowars.com/images/jail.jpg


The jailers of the 19th century — even in the pre-Civil War South — largely abandoned the practice of imprisoning people for falling into debt as counterproductive and ultimately barbaric. In the 1970s and ’80s, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that incarcerating people who can’t pay fines because of poverty violates the U.S. Constitution.

Apparently, though, some states and county jails never got the memo. Welcome to the debtors’ prisons of the 21st century.

“Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son,” the New York Times wrote in an editorial.

“When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which helped get her out last week after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments. That is both barbaric and unconstitutional.”

The details of Nowlin’s case are even more alarming than the Times editorial suggests. Not only was Nowlin under orders to pay a fine stemming from someone else’s actions, but she had been laid off from work and lost her home at the time she was ordered to “reimburse” the county for her son’s detention.

Despite her inability to pay, she was held in contempt of court and ordered to serve a 30-day sentence. On March 6, three days after she was incarcerated, she was released for one day to work. She also picked up her paycheck, in the amount of $178.53. This, she thought, could be used to pay the $104, and she would be released from jail.

But when she got back to the jail, the sheriff told her to sign her check over to the county — to pay $120 for her own room and board, and $22 for a drug test and booking fee.

Even more absurd, Nowlin requested but was denied a court-appointed lawyer. So because she was too poor to afford a lawyer and denied her constitutional right to have the court provide one for her, she couldn’t fight the contempt charge that stemmed from her poverty. And her contempt conviction only added to her poverty, as the fines and fees she was obligated to pay now multiplied.

“Like many people in these desperate economic times, Ms. Nowlin was laid off from work, lost her home and is destitute,” said Michael Steinberg, legal director of the Michigan ACLU. “Jailing her because of her poverty is not only unconstitutional, it’s unconscionable and a shameful waste of resources. It is not a crime to be poor in this country, and the government must stop resurrecting debtor’s prisons from the dustbin of history.”

Michigan isn’t the only place where you can be imprisoned for the crime of involuntary poverty. The same Catch-22 ensnares poor defendants daily in courtrooms across the country.

In 2006, the Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) filed a suit on behalf of Ora Lee Hurley, who couldn’t get out of prison until she had enough money to pay a $705 fine. But she couldn’t pay the fine because she had to pay the Georgia Department of Corrections $600 a month for room and board, and spend $76 a month on public transportation, laundry and food.

She was released five days a week to work at the K&K Soul Food restaurant, where she earned $6.50 an hour, which netted her about $700 a month after taxes. Hurley was trapped in prison for eight months beyond her initial 120-day sentence until the Southern Center intervened. Over the course of her incarceration, she earned about $7,000, but she never had enough at one time to pay off her $705 fine.

“This is a situation where if this woman was able to write a check for the amount of the fine, she would be out of there,” Sarah Geraghty, a SCHR lawyer, told the Atlanta Journal Constitution while Hurley was still imprisoned. “And because she can’t, she’s still in custody. It’s as simple as that.”

Georgia also lets for-profit probation companies prey on people too poor to pay their traffic violations and court fees. According to a 2008 SCHR report entitled “Profiting from the poor”:

In courts around Georgia, people who are charged with misdemeanors and cannot pay their fines that day in court are placed on probation under the supervision of private, for-profit companies until they pay off their fines. On probation, they must pay these companies substantial monthly “supervision fees” that may double or triple the amount that a person of means would pay for the same offense.

For example, a person of means may pay $200 for a traffic ticket on the day of court and be done with it, while a person too poor to pay that day is placed on probation and ends up paying $500 or more for the same offense.

The privatization of misdemeanor probation has placed unprecedented law enforcement authority in the hands of for-profit companies that act essentially as collection agencies. These companies, focused on profit rather than public safety or rehabilitation, are not designed to supervise people or connect them to services and jobs. Rather, they charge exorbitant monthly fees and use the threat of imprisonment and a variety of bullying tactics to squeeze money out of the men and women under their supervision.

For too many poor people convicted of misdemeanors, our state is not living up to the constitutional promise of equal justice under law.

In Gulfport, Miss., the municipal court started a “fine collection task force” to crack down on people who owed fees for misdemeanors. According to the SCHR Web site:

The task force trolled through predominantly African American neighborhoods, rounding up people who had outstanding court fines. After arresting and jailing them, the City of Gulfport processed these people through a court proceeding at which no defense attorney was present or even offered.

Many people were jailed for months after hearings lasting just seconds. While the city collected money, it also packed the jail with hundreds of people who couldn’t pay, including people who were sick, physically disabled and/or limited by mental disabilities.

The disregard of the justice system for the rights of poor people to equal protection and due process is cause for outrage. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise in an era when the government spends billions bailing out banks while letting foreclosures and unemployment ruin the lives of working people.

We need to build a movement, like the working-class struggles of the 1930s, that can demand an end to the inhuman practice of incarcerating people for no other crime than finding themselves at the bottom of the social ladder.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/04/guilty-of-being-poor/

You know every time I think I can move on without creating a new thread, something despicable happens and I can't do anything else but post about it.

that sux...community service for the kid would be better ...pay the fines that way ...why jail em? grrr

Yeah that's pretty shit. Not really a conspiracy though...Just a really shit policy.

^wait a few years, soon, any story deissenting with or defaming the government wud be labelled CONSPIRACY, since that OBVIOUSLY never happens and sum1 OBVIOUSLY made it up to try and make the government look bad.

How is this a conspiracy in any way shape or form?

Gee I don't know maybe the government is making money off of jailing citizens for longer than they should be or in many cases when they shouldn't be at all?

And maybe the banks which are already wealthy beyond imagination are getting a free ride from the government as long as they continue to follow the rules of the game? The money-making game that was well thought out and created by those who seek to control?

Originally posted by NuclearWinter
Gee I don't know maybe the government is making money off of jailing citizens for longer than they should be or in many cases when they shouldn't be at all?


It's unlikely the government is making any money locking people up. For a start it removes the people from being productive citizens...Then there's the fact that it costs something like $100,000 a year to keep someone locked up once all the costs of guards, building maintainence, food etc are all taken into account.

Originally posted by jaden101
It's unlikely the government is making any money locking people up. For a start it removes the people from being productive citizens...Then there's the fact that it costs something like $100,000 a year to keep someone locked up once all the costs of guards, building maintainence, food etc are all taken into account.

And do you have an alternative theory as to why they would keep people beyond their initial sentences simply because they haven't payed off their fines yet? And not only that, but they weren't allowed to when they had the chance?

Money seems to be the ultimate goal here. What we really need is a thorough study of the prison systems profits. Not their losses, but their profits.

Prisons for Profit

Corporations are running many Americans prisons, but will they put profits before prisoners?

A grim new statistic: One in every hundred Americans is now locked behind bars. As the prison population grows faster than the government can build prisons, private companies see an opportunity for profit.

The controversy over private prisons is boiling over. The hot question: should incarceration be incorporated?

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/419/video.html

At Leavenworth, Kansas, within a perimeter of razor wire, armed prison guards in uniform supervise hundreds of medium- and maximum-security federal prisoners. Welcome to one of America's growth industries- private sector, for-profit prisons. Here in the shadow of the federally-run Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks and the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) runs a short-term detention facility for medium- and maximum-security prisoners. Under contract to the U.S. Marshal's Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the CCA Leavenworth facility is not an anomaly but part of a trend. In the last decade, from juvenile detention centers to county jails and work farms to state prison units to INS holding camps for undocumented aliens, private interests have entered the incarceration business in a big way. Where there are people detained, there are profits to be made.

The prospect of a privatized prison system raises difficult and disturbing questions beyond those associated with a solely state-operated prison system. It has been, after all, a common assumption that the criminalization and punishment of certain behaviors-the deprivation of physical liberty and even of life itself-are not amenable to private sector usurpation. Some of the arguments that inform this assumption are ethical, some legal, and others practical, but all are being challenged by a growing group of special interests.

Surprisingly, private prisons are nothing new in U.S. history. In the mid-1800s, penny-pinching state legislatures awarded contracts to private entrepreneurs to operate and manage Louisiana's first state prison, New York's Auburn and Sing Sing penitentiaries, and others. These institutions became models for entire sections of the nation where privatized prisons were the norm later in the century. These prisons were supposed to turn a profit for the state, or at least pay for themselves. Typically, privatization was limited: The state leased or contracted convict labor to private companies. In some cases, such as Texas, however, the corrections function was turned over wholesale to private interests which promised to control delinquents at no cost to the state. As the system spread, labor and businesses complained that using unpaid convict labor constituted "unfair" competition. Of equal concern to reformers-but of less weight to politicians-was the issue of prisoner abuse under the private corrections regime. Anecdotal evidence from across the country painted a grim picture: While state officials remained indifferent or were bought off by private interests, prisoners suffered malnourishment, frequent whippings, overwork and overcrowding. A series of investigations of state prisons confirmed the tales of horror and produced public outrage. As with anti-trust legislation and the progressive reforms which followed, public pressure impelled government regulation of private sector abuse. By the turn of the century, concerted opposition from labor, business, and reformers forced the state to take direct responsibility for prisons, thus bringing the first era of private prisons to an end.

But as the twentieth century stumbles to an end, the hard lessons of a hundred years ago have been drowned out by the clamor of free market ideologues. Again, privatization is encroaching ever further on what had been state responsibilities, and prison systems are the target of private interests. The shift to privatization coalesced in the mid-1980s when three trends converged: The ideological imperatives of the free market; the huge increase in the number of prisoners; and the concomitant increase in imprisonment costs. In the giddy atmosphere of the Reagan years, the argument for the superiority of free enterprise resonated profoundly. Only the fire departments seemed safe, as everything from municipal garbage services to Third World state enterprises went on sale. Proponents of privatized prisons put forward a simple case: The private sector can do it cheaper and more efficiently. This assortment of entrepreneurs, free market ideologues, cash-strapped public officials, and academics promised design and management innovations without re- ducing costs or sacrificing "quality of service." In any case, they noted correctly, public sector corrections systems are in a state of chronic failure by any measure, and no other politically or economically feasible solution is on the table.

This contemporary push to privatize corrections takes place against a socioeconomic background of severe and seemingly intractable crisis. Under the impetus of Reaganite social Darwinism, with its "toughness" on criminal offenders, prison populations soared through the 1980s and into the 1990s, making the U.S. the unquestioned world leader in jailing its own populace. By 1990, 421 Americans out of every 100,000 were behind bars, easily outdistancing our closest competitors, South Africa and the then USSR. By 1992, the U.S. rate had climbed to 455. In human terms, the number of people in jails and prisons on any given day tops 1.2 million, up from fewer than 400,000 at the start of the Reagan era.

While incarceration statistics have skyrocketed, crime rates have increased much more slowly. In fact, from 1975 to 1985, the serious crime rate actually decreased by 1.42 per cent while the number of state and federal prisoners nearly doubled. The number of people sent to prison is actually determined by policy decisions and political expediency. Politicians of all stripes have sought cheap political points by being "tough on crime." They throw oil on the fire of public panic by portraying the urban underclass (read: young, black males) as predator. Ignoring the broad context of economic policies that have effectively abandoned large segments of the population, they have instituted mandatory minimum sentences, tighter or no parole schedules, and tougher "good time" regulations. Adding to the overpopulation these putative measures wrought, the War on Drugs-which aimed its frenzy at the inner city-stuffed the nation's already over crowded prisons with a large crop of mostly African-American and Latino nonviolent offenders. In state after state, budgets have been stretched to the breaking point by the cost of maintaining and expanding this massive correctional archipelago. In California, the nation's largest state prison system, the corrections budget increased seven-fold during the 1980s to $2.1 billion annually at the end of the decade-and the system was still operating at 180 percent of capacity. The huge costs associated with the choice to deal with social problems by mass imprisonment are a fundamental part of the drift toward private prisons. The converging trends (rampant free-marketism, higher prison population, and escalating costs) are part of a larger trend-the sharpening of Reaganite class war and the social meanness that accompanied it. The last time the U.S. faced such an influx of prisoners was after the Civil War when freed blacks, who were previously punished and controlled within the slave system, were sent to formerly all-white prisons. The present situation is not perfectly analogous, but once again, policy-makers faced with burgeoning and unruly minority resistance of their own making seem to have chosen a similar course: "Lock 'em up and throw away the key."

Punishment is not only a crucial and ever-larger state function, it is also big business. Private ownership and/or operation of prisons, while an increasingly significant part of the corrections system, represents only a fraction of the "prison-industrial complex." The cost of corrections-in cluding state, local, and federal corrections budgets-ran to more than $20 billion a year in the early 1990s. The cost of constructing enough cells just to keep up with the constant increase in prisoners is estimated at $6 billion a year. This figure does not address existing overcrowding, which is pandemic from city jails to federal prisons. The public sector imprisonment industry employs more than 50,000 guards, as well as additional tens of thousands of administrators, and health, education, and food service providers. Especially in rural communities where other employment is scarce, corrections assumes huge economic im portance as a growth industry which provides stable jobs.

The punishment juggernaut of the Reagan-Bush years also spawned an array of private enterprises locked in a parasitic embrace with the state. From architectural firms and construction companies, to drug treatment and food service contractors, to prison industries, to the whole gamut of equipment and hardware suppliers-steel doors, razor wire, communications systems, uniforms, etc.-the business of imprisonment boasts a powerful assortment of well-or ganized and well-represented vested interests. Privatized prisons, then, are not a quantum leap toward dismantling the state but simply an extension of the already significant private sector involvement in corrections. The public-private symbiotic relationship was well-established long before 1984, when CCA first contracted with the INS to operate detention centers for illegal aliens. With private firms already providing everything from health care to drug treatment, the private management of entire prisons was a natural progression, especially given the tenor of the times.

The growing private prisons industry-several dozen companies contracting with state entities to provide and/or operate jails or prisons-is oligopolistic in structure. CCA and Wackenhut Corrections Corporation dominate the upper tier, control more than half the industry's operations, and run 29 minimum- and medium-security facilities with more than 10,000 beds. Beneath the big two is a tier of lesser players: a cluster of smaller regional companies, such as Kentucky-based U.S. Corrections Corporation and Nashville-based Pricor; and small corrections divisions of international concerns, including construction giant Bechtel Corporation. The boom has created a shadier realm of speculators ready to turn a quick profit from the traffic in convicts. Compared to the big three, these smaller companies are undercapitalized, inexperienced, understaffed, and are more likely to fail eventually. Run by hucksters, fast-talking developers, and snake-oil salesmen, they sell for-profit prisons-disguised as economic development-to depressed rural communities desperate to bolster their budgets and local economies. The pitch is simple: Prisons are overcrowded! Build a prison and the prisoners will come to you! You'll reap the benefits in terms of jobs and increased tax revenues! Reality is a bit more complex. Quirks in the federal tax codes remove exemptions for prison bonds if more than ten percent of prisoners are out-of-state, if state prison officials are reluctant to have their prisoners housed out-of-state, or if large cities with severe overcrowding are unwilling or unable to pay to transport local prisoners hundreds of miles. In short in the trade in convict bodies, supply and demand don't always match. Prisons built on a speculative basis are a risky venture-at least for the towns or counties involved; the speculators take their money off the top.

Dostoevsky once remarked that he measured the quality of a society by the quality of its prisons. In the present case it may be as appropriate to judge us by their quantity, too. In either case, the judgment would be harsh indeed.

http://mediafilter.org/MFF/Prison.html

Originally posted by NuclearWinter
And do you have an alternative theory as to why they would keep people beyond their initial sentences simply because they haven't payed off their fines yet? And not only that, but they weren't allowed to when they had the chance?

Money seems to be the ultimate goal here. What we really need is a thorough study of the prison systems profits. Not their losses, but their profits.

Prison systems don't make profits. They don't do anything profitable.

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Prison systems don't make profits. They don't do anything profitable.

Wrong. Privatized corporate controlled prisons do make profits. And profits go straight to the corporations which own them.

Government controlled prisons also make profits. This is not pleasantville. In these types of prisons most if not all of the revenue from the fines and charges that are racked up during an inmates stay in jail are payed for if not by the prisoner themselves than by the state through taxing the citizens, etc., and all of that revenue left over after paying for the expenses of the prisoners has to go somewhere. And it would be ignorant for a person to believe that all of the extra revenue left-over only goes towards the benefit of the other prisoners and for improving the conditions of the prisons. In fact, it is a well known fact that the conditions of many of the United States prisons has been deteriorating for a long time now.

Harry Reid: Paying Income Tax is Voluntary


May 1, 2009


“Our system is a voluntary system,” declares Reid. Yeah, sure. Don’t try this at home unless you want a SWAT team to drop by.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7mRSI8yWwg&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.infowars.com%2Fharry-reid-paying-income-tax-is-voluntary%2F&feature=player_embedded

Don't you know who controlls the World , not your military or your Governments, but these Bankers along with their Nasty Secret Societies.

The Bankers & The Secret Societies they represent rule the world, so when you see a Banker know who they are and what they represent. They caused all the Global Wars, all for the sake of power and Material Possesion , not for freedom or the people but for their secret agendas and their secret conquest for Global resources.

So the next time you see a country going to War realize that it's not for freedom but for resources and tyranny, kind of like what we are seeing now. Economic Crises & Bio Warfare of it's citizens (Pig FLU) come on these Bankers are making it so obvious.