Tag: news

Obamacare Not So Affordable, Debtors’ Jails May Be Making Comeback, Ship Trapped in Antarctic Ice: P.M. Links

  • if you like your ice shelf you can keep itMassachusetts and Vermont, who
    used the same contractor for their healthcare exchanges as the
    federal government, are
    looking     at ways to withhold payment and reviewing their legal
    options in trying to recoup their losses. A USA Today
    analysis, meanwhile,
    finds     that in more than half of the counties in the 34 states
    serviced by the Affordable Care Act-mandated federal exchange there
    are no affordable plans for couples over 40 who don’t qualify for
    subsidies. Some experts are
    concerned     that Obamacare could turn into Medicaid in the way
    that it limits the availability of doctors.
  • Civil liberties groups
    warn     that judges across the country are throwing people in jail
    for outstanding debts, bringing back de facto “debtors’ prison”
    despite a prohibition on the practice.
  • The Milwaukee school district has 15 vacant school buildings
    that cost it up to $771,000 a year to maintain. It hasn’t used some
    of them in more than a decade, but
    refuses     to sell any to charter or private schools.
  • California school districts are
    preparing     for new regulations related to transgendered students
    set to take effect on January 1, and are also preparing for the
    possibility it’ll be delayed by a court order just a few days after
    that.
  • A likely US drone strike
    killed     three suspected militants in the North Waziristan region
    of Pakistan, according to unnamed intelligence officials in the
    country. Separately, Pakistan
    insists     it will raise the issue of US drone strikes in the
    country with UN Human Rights Council.
  • Six African Union peacekeepers from Chad were
    killed     in the Central African Republic by “anti-balaka”
    Christian militias. The UN, meanwhile,  is
    scrambling     to send more peacekeepers to South Sudan, where
    violence broke out after a failed coup earlier this month.
  • Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan says he
    thinks     he’s the target of a new corruption investigation in
    Turkey, but that investigators would leave “empty handed.”
  • A Russian ship, carrying 74 people on a scientific expedition,
    has been
    trapped     by ice off the coast of Antarctica, according to the
    Australian Maritime Safety Authority

Follow Reason and Reason 24/7 on
Twitter, and like us on Facebook.  You
can also get the top stories mailed to
you—sign
up here. 

Have a news tip? Send it to us!

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/26/obamacare-not-so-affordable-debtors-jail
via IFTTT

Stocks Surge For Sixth Straight Session

Despite the mainstream media's premature exuberance over the 10Y yield breaking above 3.00%, it didn't (according to Bloomberg) but that didn't stop it from closing as close as it can get to the high yields of the year (and back to July 2011 levels) at 2.9905%. The USD drifted getly lower with GBP and EUR strength the biggest drivers. Commodities saw Gold and even more Silver jump at the open then drift while copper and oil limped higher. Volume in stocks was 20% below last Boxing Day which provided the perfect recipe for a VIX smack-down, slow meltup rally to new record-er highs.

 

The 10Y Yield did not (sorry not) cross 3.00% today (quite yet)…

 

The last 2 times 10Y was at 3%, S&P was at 1340 (and fell considerably after) and 1650.

 

It's been quite a run off the debt-ceiling lows…

 

But the last few (post-Taper) days have been remarkable with among the best runs in 3 years…

 

VIX was slammed back under 12% briefly (to 9-month lows) buy bounced for the rest of the day…

 

As VIX has been slammed 30% lower in the last 6 days – its biggest collapse since the start of the year…

 

Commodities saw gold and silver jump at their open then drift…

 

 

Charts: Bloomberg

Bonus Chart: WTFTWTR…


    



via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/pUluAZWlZo4/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Stanford Study: It's Ridiculously Easy To Match Metadata to People

Stanford University researchers Jonathon Mayer and Patrick
Mutchler were skeptical when President Obama told
the nation that the NSA is just collecting metadata and thus
not violating Americans’ privacy — so they investigated how
easy it would be for someone to match metadata, which includes
information about a caller’s location, length, and number calls,
with a caller’s identity. They found it is
“trivially” simple to do, even for those with limited funds and
software.

Mayer and Mutchler, computer scientists who study technology
policy, decided to run an experiment testing the ease with which
one can connect metadata to names. For the experiment, volunteers
agree to use an Android app, MetaPhone,
that allows the researchers access to their metadata. Mayer and
Mutchler say that it was hardly any trouble figuring out who the
phone numbers belonged to — and they did it in a few
hours.

From their
blog:

So, just how easy is it to identify a phone number?

Trivial, we found. We randomly sampled 5,000 numbers from
our crowdsourced
MetaPhone dataset and queried the Yelp, Google Places, and
Facebook directories. With little marginal effort and just those
three sources—all free and public—we matched 1,356 (27.1%) of the
numbers. Specifically, there were 378 hits (7.6%) on Yelp, 684
(13.7%) on Google Places, and 618 (12.3%) on Facebook.

What about if an organization were willing to put in some
manpower? To conservatively approximate human analysis, we randomly
sampled 100 numbers from our dataset, then ran Google searches on
each. In under an hour, we were able to associate an individual or
a business with 60 of the 100 numbers. When we added in our three
initial sources, we were up to 73.

How about if money were no object? We don’t have the budget or
credentials to access a premium data aggregator, so we ran our 100
numbers with Intelius, a cheap consumer-oriented service. 74
matched. Between Intelius, Google search, and our
three initial sources, we associated a name with 91 of the 100
numbers.

The researchers conclude that, “If a few academic researchers
can get this far this quickly, it’s difficult to believe the NSA
would have any trouble identifying the overwhelming majority of
American phone numbers.”

The study confirms what numerous critics of the NSA have been
saying. A professor speaking on behalf of the ACLU, for instance,

said in an August court hearing testifying against the
program:

Although officials have insisted that the orders issued under
the telephony metadata program do not compel the production of
customers’ names, it would be trivial for the government to
correlate many telephone numbers with subscriber names using
publicly available sources. The government also has available to it
a number of legal tools to compel service providers to produce
their customer’s information, including their names.

Some government officials also aren’t buying the story that bulk
collection of
“just metadata” is harmless. In his
preliminary injunction against the program last week,
Judge Richard Leon said:

The Government maintains that the metadata the NSA collects does
not contain personal identifying information associated with each
phone number…[but] there is also nothing stopping the
Government… using public databases or any of its other vast
resources to match phone numbers with subscribers.

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/26/stanford-study-its-ridiculously-easy-to
via IFTTT

Stanford Study: It’s Ridiculously Easy To Match Metadata to People

Stanford University researchers Jonathon Mayer and Patrick
Mutchler were skeptical when President Obama told
the nation that the NSA is just collecting metadata and thus
not violating Americans’ privacy — so they investigated how
easy it would be for someone to match metadata, which includes
information about a caller’s location, length, and number calls,
with a caller’s identity. They found it is
“trivially” simple to do, even for those with limited funds and
software.

Mayer and Mutchler, computer scientists who study technology
policy, decided to run an experiment testing the ease with which
one can connect metadata to names. For the experiment, volunteers
agree to use an Android app, MetaPhone,
that allows the researchers access to their metadata. Mayer and
Mutchler say that it was hardly any trouble figuring out who the
phone numbers belonged to — and they did it in a few
hours.

From their
blog:

So, just how easy is it to identify a phone number?

Trivial, we found. We randomly sampled 5,000 numbers from
our crowdsourced
MetaPhone dataset and queried the Yelp, Google Places, and
Facebook directories. With little marginal effort and just those
three sources—all free and public—we matched 1,356 (27.1%) of the
numbers. Specifically, there were 378 hits (7.6%) on Yelp, 684
(13.7%) on Google Places, and 618 (12.3%) on Facebook.

What about if an organization were willing to put in some
manpower? To conservatively approximate human analysis, we randomly
sampled 100 numbers from our dataset, then ran Google searches on
each. In under an hour, we were able to associate an individual or
a business with 60 of the 100 numbers. When we added in our three
initial sources, we were up to 73.

How about if money were no object? We don’t have the budget or
credentials to access a premium data aggregator, so we ran our 100
numbers with Intelius, a cheap consumer-oriented service. 74
matched. Between Intelius, Google search, and our
three initial sources, we associated a name with 91 of the 100
numbers.

The researchers conclude that, “If a few academic researchers
can get this far this quickly, it’s difficult to believe the NSA
would have any trouble identifying the overwhelming majority of
American phone numbers.”

The study confirms what numerous critics of the NSA have been
saying. A professor speaking on behalf of the ACLU, for instance,

said in an August court hearing testifying against the
program:

Although officials have insisted that the orders issued under
the telephony metadata program do not compel the production of
customers’ names, it would be trivial for the government to
correlate many telephone numbers with subscriber names using
publicly available sources. The government also has available to it
a number of legal tools to compel service providers to produce
their customer’s information, including their names.

Some government officials also aren’t buying the story that bulk
collection of
“just metadata” is harmless. In his
preliminary injunction against the program last week,
Judge Richard Leon said:

The Government maintains that the metadata the NSA collects does
not contain personal identifying information associated with each
phone number…[but] there is also nothing stopping the
Government… using public databases or any of its other vast
resources to match phone numbers with subscribers.

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/26/stanford-study-its-ridiculously-easy-to
via IFTTT

A Great Christmas Season Rant Against the Unfairness of the State. (Warning! NSFW!)

Clark Bianco at Popehat has a
bracing holiday rant against the state with the NSFW title
“Burn the Fucking System to the Ground.”

It’s interesting in how it brings white-hot heat against the
practices of the state without coming from an explicitly
libertarian perspective about things like when and where it is
appropriate for the state to act. There’s no big controversial
political philosophical premises or reasoning involved.

It’s just pointing out–in ways that people who think of
themselves as “left” or “right” should be able to
understand–that the state acts in many ways to perform utterly
unconscionable acts that ruin people’s lives for no good
reason–and does so in a way that can seem more based on class
divisions than any “state vs. people’s rights” calculus that has
anything to do with beliefs in the necessity or propriety of
government.

Some excerpts:

The older I get, the more I see, the more I read, the more clear
it becomes to me that the entire game is rigged. The leftists and
the rightists each see half of the fraud. The lefties correctly
note that a poor kid caught with cocaine goes to jail, while a Bush
can write it off as a youthful mistake (they somehow overlook the
fact that their man Barrack hasn’t granted clemency to any one of
the people doing federal time for the same felonies he committed).
The righties note that government subsidized windmills kill
protected eagles with impunity while Joe Sixpack would be deep in
the crap if he even picked up a dead eagle from the side of the
road. The lefties note that no one was prosecuted over the
financial meltdown. The righties note that the Obama administration
rewrote bankruptcy law on the fly to loot value from GM
stockholders and hand it to the unions. The lefties note that
Republicans tweak export rules to give big corporations subsidies.
Every now and then both sides join together to note that, hey! the
government is spying on every one of us…or that, hey! the
government stole a bunch of people’s houses and gave them
to Pfizer,
because a privately owned for-profit corporation is apparently what
the Constitution means by “public use”.

….the system is not reformable. There are multiple classes of
people, but it boils down to the connected, and the not connected.
Just as in pre-Revolutionary France, there is a very strict class
hierarchy….

Jamal the $5 weed slinger, Shaneekwa the hair braider, and
Loudmouth Bob in the 7-11 parking lot are at the bottom of the
hierarchy. They can,literally, be killed with impunity …
as long as the dash cam isn’t running. And, hell, half the time
they can be killed even if the dash
cam is running….

Next up from Shaneekwa and Loudmouth Bob are us regular peons.
We can have our balls squeezed at the airport, our rectums explored
at the roadside, our cars searched because the cops got permission
from a dog (I owe some Reason intern a drink for that one), our
telephones tapped (because terrorism!), our bank accounts
investigated (because FinCEN! and no expectation of privacy!). We
don’t own the house we live in, not if someone of a higher social
class wants it….And if there’s a “national security emergency”
(defined as two idiots with a pressure cooker), then the
constitution is suspended, martial law is declared, and people are
hauled out of their homes.

Next up from the regular peons are the unionized,
disciplined-voting-blocks. Not-much-brighter-than-a-box-of-crayolas
teachers who work 180 days a year and get automatic raises.
Firefighters who disproportionately retire on disability the very
day they sub in for their bosses and get a paper cut.

A step up from the teachers and firefighters are the cops: all
the same advantages of nobility of the previous group, but a few
more in addition: the de facto power to murder someone as long as
not too many cameras are rolling….

Above the cops, the prosecutors, and the judiciary we have the
true ruling class: the cabal of (most) politicians and (some) CEOs,
conspiring both against their own competitors and the public at
large. If the public is burdened with a $100 million debt to pay
off a money losing stadium, that’s a small price to pay if a
politician gets reelected (and gets to hobnob with entertainers and
sports heroes via free tickets and backstage passes)….

It is corrupt, corrupt, corrupt….

The system is not fixable because it is not broken. It
is working, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,
to give the insiders their royal prerogatives….

Burn it to the ground.

Burn it to the ground.

Again, a kind of anger that theoretically could fuel a genuinely
“populist libertarianism” without explicitly libertarian roots.
Interesting to think about.

[Hat tip: the Twitter feed of magazine editor and TV talk show
host Matt Welch]

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/26/a-great-christmas-season-rant-against-th
via IFTTT

The Straight And Narrow

It seems not only is the “market” adhering to the lower-left-to-upper-right mentality of newsletter-writers a little too literally but it it would appear we have found the limit of Birinyi’s ruler… Behold the Dow Jones Industrial Average on the straight-and-narrow. Because, when there’s no dip to buy, you BTFATH…

 

 

Chart: Bloomberg


    



via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/yi_PNq6qHJU/story01.htm Tyler Durden

U.N. Asks U.S. To Justify Latest "Cruel, Inhuman" Drone Attack That Killed 15 Yemen Civilians In A Wedding

Imagine, if you will, that you and your 15 closest unarmed, civilian friends are celebrating a young couple who has just started their lives together, and are on your way to their wedding party, when all of a sudden a remote-controlled US killing machine drops several air-to-surface tactical missiles on your group and kills you before you have a chance to blink. Macabre as it sounds, this is precisely what happened in the conflict-torn (courtesy of the CIA) republic of Yemen last month when a US drone mistakenly killed 15 people.

The US justification: the 15 civilians were mistaken for an Al Qaeda convoy (good thing this was not in Syria, where such an Al Qaeda convoy would have received US arms and funding), and in keeping with the US “superpower” walkthrough, the missiles were launched first, and questions would be asked later if ever. And while this happens daily around the globe (remember: they hate America for its freedoms, not because it rains hellfire on civilians without reason), this time the United Nations human rights watch actually had the temerity of calling out the US on its latest act of mass murder.

Reuters has the full story:

United Nations human rights experts told the United States and Yemen on Thursday to say whether they were complicit in drone attacks that mistakenly killed civilians in wedding processions this month.

 

The independent experts questioned the legitimacy of drone attacks under international law and said the governments should reveal what targeting procedures were used.

 

Local security officials said on December 12 that 15 people on their way to a wedding in Yemen were killed in an air strike after their party was mistaken for an al Qaeda convoy. The officials did not identify the plane in the strike in central al-Bayda province, but tribal and local media sources said that it was a drone.

 

Stressing the need for accountability and payment to victims’ families, the U.N. statement issued in Geneva said that two attacks, on two separate wedding processions, killed 16 and wounded at least 10 people.

 

“If armed drones are to be used, states must adhere to international humanitarian law, and should disclose the legal basis for their operational responsibility and criteria for targeting,” said Christof Heyns, U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

Poor Yemen, unclear that others’ sovereignty does not matter to the US, voiced a feeble protest: “Yemen cannot consent to violations of the right to life of people in its territory,” he added.” Good luck with non-consenting.

However, it was the UN that surprised onlookers with one of the harshest condemnations of what is essentially unaccountable murder by an American remote-control plane, controlled from thousands of miles away:

Juan Mendez, U.N. special rapporteur on torture, voiced concern about the legitimacy of the airstrikes. Each state was obliged to undertake due investigation into the reported incidents, including their effect on civilians, he said.

 

“A deadly attack on illegitimate targets amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment if, as in this case, it results in serious physical or mental pain and suffering for the innocent victims,” Mendez said.

Wait, so cruel, inhuman and degra…. oh look, another all time high for the S&P! Quick BTFATH, and ignore all this irrelevant “stuff.”


    



via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/uVo2hVw2zoY/story01.htm Tyler Durden

U.N. Asks U.S. To Justify Latest “Cruel, Inhuman” Drone Attack That Killed 15 Yemen Civilians In A Wedding

Imagine, if you will, that you and your 15 closest unarmed, civilian friends are celebrating a young couple who has just started their lives together, and are on your way to their wedding party, when all of a sudden a remote-controlled US killing machine drops several air-to-surface tactical missiles on your group and kills you before you have a chance to blink. Macabre as it sounds, this is precisely what happened in the conflict-torn (courtesy of the CIA) republic of Yemen last month when a US drone mistakenly killed 15 people.

The US justification: the 15 civilians were mistaken for an Al Qaeda convoy (good thing this was not in Syria, where such an Al Qaeda convoy would have received US arms and funding), and in keeping with the US “superpower” walkthrough, the missiles were launched first, and questions would be asked later if ever. And while this happens daily around the globe (remember: they hate America for its freedoms, not because it rains hellfire on civilians without reason), this time the United Nations human rights watch actually had the temerity of calling out the US on its latest act of mass murder.

Reuters has the full story:

United Nations human rights experts told the United States and Yemen on Thursday to say whether they were complicit in drone attacks that mistakenly killed civilians in wedding processions this month.

 

The independent experts questioned the legitimacy of drone attacks under international law and said the governments should reveal what targeting procedures were used.

 

Local security officials said on December 12 that 15 people on their way to a wedding in Yemen were killed in an air strike after their party was mistaken for an al Qaeda convoy. The officials did not identify the plane in the strike in central al-Bayda province, but tribal and local media sources said that it was a drone.

 

Stressing the need for accountability and payment to victims’ families, the U.N. statement issued in Geneva said that two attacks, on two separate wedding processions, killed 16 and wounded at least 10 people.

 

“If armed drones are to be used, states must adhere to international humanitarian law, and should disclose the legal basis for their operational responsibility and criteria for targeting,” said Christof Heyns, U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

Poor Yemen, unclear that others’ sovereignty does not matter to the US, voiced a feeble protest: “Yemen cannot consent to violations of the right to life of people in its territory,” he added.” Good luck with non-consenting.

However, it was the UN that surprised onlookers with one of the harshest condemnations of what is essentially unaccountable murder by an American remote-control plane, controlled from thousands of miles away:

Juan Mendez, U.N. special rapporteur on torture, voiced concern about the legitimacy of the airstrikes. Each state was obliged to undertake due investigation into the reported incidents, including their effect on civilians, he said.

 

“A deadly attack on illegitimate targets amounts to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment if, as in this case, it results in serious physical or mental pain and suffering for the innocent victims,” Mendez said.

Wait, so cruel, inhuman and degra…. oh look, another all time high for the S&P! Quick BTFATH, and ignore all this irrelevant “stuff.”


    



via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/uVo2hVw2zoY/story01.htm Tyler Durden

How Debtors' Prisons Are Making A Comeback In America

Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg,

Apparently having 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of its prisoners simply isn’t good enough for neo-feudal America. No, we need to find more creative and archaic ways to wastefully, immorally and seemingly unconstitutionally incarcerate poor people. Welcome to the latest trend in the penal colony formerly known as America. Debtors’ prisons. A practice I thought had long since been deemed outdated (indeed it has been largely eradicated in the Western world with the exception of about 1/3 of U.S. states as well as Greece).

From Fox News:

As if out of a Charles Dickens novel, people struggling to pay overdue fines and fees associated with court costs for even the simplest traffic infractions are being thrown in jail across the United States.

 

Critics are calling the practice the new “debtors’ prison” — referring to the jails that flourished in the U.S. and Western Europe over 150 years ago. Before the time of bankruptcy laws and social safety nets, poor folks and ruined business owners were locked up until their debts were paid off.

 

Reforms eventually outlawed the practice. But groups like the Brennan Center for Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union say it’s been reborn in local courts which may not be aware it’s against the law to send indigent people to jail over unpaid fines and fees — or they just haven’t been called on it until now.

 

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law released a “Tool Kit for Action” in 2012 that broke down the cost to municipalities to jail debtors in comparison with the amount of old debt it was collecting. It doesn’t look like a bargain. For example, according to the report, Mecklenburg County, N.C., collected $33,476 in debts in 2009, but spent $40,000 jailing 246 debtors — a loss of $6,524.

Don’t worry, I’m sure private prisons for debtors will soon spring up to make this practice a pillar of GDP growth.

Many jurisdictions have taken to hiring private collection/probation companies to go after debtors, giving them the authority to revoke probation and incarcerate if they can’t pay. Research into the practice has found that private companies impose their own additional surcharges. Some 15 private companies have emerged to run these services in the South, including the popular Judicial Correction Services (JCS).

 

In 2012, Circuit Judge Hub Harrington at Harpersville Municipal Court in Alabama shut down what he called the “debtors’ prison” process there, echoing complaints that private companies are only in it for the money. He cited JCS in part for sending indigent people to jail. Calling it a “judicially sanctioned extortion racket,” Harrington said many defendants were locked up on bogus failure-to-appear warrants, and slapped with more fines and fees as a result.

 

Repeated calls to JCS in Alabama and Georgia were not returned.

 

The ACLU found that seven out of 11 counties they studied were operating de facto debtors’ prisons, despite clear “constitutional and legislative prohibitions.” Some were worse than others. In the second half of 2012 in Huron County, 20 percent of arrests were for failure to pay fines. The Sandusky Municipal Court in Erie County jailed 75 people in a little more than a month during the summer of 2012. The ACLU says it costs upwards of $400 in Ohio to execute a warrant and $65 a night to jail people.

 

Mark Silverstein, a staff attorney at the Colorado ACLU, claimed judges in these courts never assess the defendants’ ability to pay before sentencing them to jail, which would be unconstitutional.

Full article here.

On a related note, I strong suggest everyone read the following article from The Atlantic called: I Got Myself Arrested So I Could Look Inside the Justice System.

You’ll never see the “justice” system in the same light again.


    



via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/LqUUiGJAsJI/story01.htm Tyler Durden

How Debtors’ Prisons Are Making A Comeback In America

Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg,

Apparently having 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of its prisoners simply isn’t good enough for neo-feudal America. No, we need to find more creative and archaic ways to wastefully, immorally and seemingly unconstitutionally incarcerate poor people. Welcome to the latest trend in the penal colony formerly known as America. Debtors’ prisons. A practice I thought had long since been deemed outdated (indeed it has been largely eradicated in the Western world with the exception of about 1/3 of U.S. states as well as Greece).

From Fox News:

As if out of a Charles Dickens novel, people struggling to pay overdue fines and fees associated with court costs for even the simplest traffic infractions are being thrown in jail across the United States.

 

Critics are calling the practice the new “debtors’ prison” — referring to the jails that flourished in the U.S. and Western Europe over 150 years ago. Before the time of bankruptcy laws and social safety nets, poor folks and ruined business owners were locked up until their debts were paid off.

 

Reforms eventually outlawed the practice. But groups like the Brennan Center for Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union say it’s been reborn in local courts which may not be aware it’s against the law to send indigent people to jail over unpaid fines and fees — or they just haven’t been called on it until now.

 

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law released a “Tool Kit for Action” in 2012 that broke down the cost to municipalities to jail debtors in comparison with the amount of old debt it was collecting. It doesn’t look like a bargain. For example, according to the report, Mecklenburg County, N.C., collected $33,476 in debts in 2009, but spent $40,000 jailing 246 debtors — a loss of $6,524.

Don’t worry, I’m sure private prisons for debtors will soon spring up to make this practice a pillar of GDP growth.

Many jurisdictions have taken to hiring private collection/probation companies to go after debtors, giving them the authority to revoke probation and incarcerate if they can’t pay. Research into the practice has found that private companies impose their own additional surcharges. Some 15 private companies have emerged to run these services in the South, including the popular Judicial Correction Services (JCS).

 

In 2012, Circuit Judge Hub Harrington at Harpersville Municipal Court in Alabama shut down what he called the “debtors’ prison” process there, echoing complaints that private companies are only in it for the money. He cited JCS in part for sending indigent people to jail. Calling it a “judicially sanctioned extortion racket,” Harrington said many defendants were locked up on bogus failure-to-appear warrants, and slapped with more fines and fees as a result.

 

Repeated calls to JCS in Alabama and Georgia were not returned.

 

The ACLU found that seven out of 11 counties they studied were operating de facto debtors’ prisons, despite clear “constitutional and legislative prohibitions.” Some were worse than others. In the second half of 2012 in Huron County, 20 percent of arrests were for failure to pay fines. The Sandusky Municipal Court in Erie County jailed 75 people in a little more than a month during the summer of 2012. The ACLU says it costs upwards of $400 in Ohio to execute a warrant and $65 a night to jail people.

 

Mark Silverstein, a staff attorney at the Colorado ACLU, claimed judges in these courts never assess the defendants’ ability to pay before sentencing them to jail, which would be unconstitutional.

Full article here.

On a related note, I strong suggest everyone read the following article from The Atlantic called: I Got Myself Arrested So I Could Look Inside the Justice System.

You’ll never see the “justice” system in the same light again.


    



via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/LqUUiGJAsJI/story01.htm Tyler Durden