Society's ChildS


Handcuffs

Harpersville, Alabama - the town that turned poverty into a prison sentence

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© Harpersville, Alabama (Hannah Rappleye)
Most states shut down their debtors' prisons more than 100 years ago; in 2005, Harpersville, Alabama, opened one back up.

At the single stoplight in Harpersville, Alabama, Debra Shoemaker Ford saw the police lights flash. On that January day in 2007, she steered her beat-up black Chevy Blazer into the parking lot, under the big red dot advertising Jack's restaurant. The officer said she had a taillight out. He asked to see her license.

Ford didn't have one. Her license had been revoked after she failed to pay a court judgment against her for a traffic ticket in a nearby town. She hadn't worked since a car wreck a decade earlier, surviving instead on disability payments of about $670 a month. That meant generic washing powder instead of Purex. Cigarettes, when she allowed herself, were rationed, each drag a pleasure measured in pennies. To pay the ticket, plus the fee to reinstate her license, would have meant going without essentials. Though she knew she shouldn't, Ford, a small white woman in her 50s with a fringe of bangs and a raspy voice, regularly climbed behind the wheel of the old Chevy. In rural Alabama, it's the only way to get around.

Ford left the parking lot with tickets for no proof of insurance and driving without a license, which would come to $745 with court costs. She didn't know it yet, but they would also cause her to spend years cycling through court, jail and the offices of a private probation company called Judicial Correction Services. JCS had contracted with the town of Harpersville several years earlier to help collect on court fines, and also to earn a little something extra for itself. It did this by charging probationers like Ford a monthly fee (typically between $35 and $45) while tacking on additional fees for court-mandated classes and electronic monitoring.

Ford tried to meet her mounting debt to Harpersville, but as the months passed and the fees added up, she fell behind and stopped paying. In June 2007, the company sent a letter telling her to pay $145 immediately or face jail. But the letter was returned as undeliverable - a fact that did not stop the Harpersville Municipal Court from issuing a warrant for her arrest. Almost two years later, in January 2009, Ford was arrested on that outstanding warrant and promptly booked in the county jail - where, to offset costs, the town charged her $31 a day for her stay.

Ford spent seven weeks in jail, during which time her debt grew into the thousands. She did not, however, see the inside of a courtroom. All the lawyer hired by her family managed to do was to eventually get her transferred to a work-release program, which stopped her jail fees from growing and allowed her to live in a closed facility, the Shelby County Work Release Center,while going to work. Ford found a minimum-wage job at a local thrift store, but after buying food and handing a cut to the work-release program - 40 percent of her gross earnings - there wasn't much left to pay off the fines that kept her there. What had started as a simple traffic violation had become an indefinite sentence in a debtors' purgatory - one that would take years to pay her way out.

"It shouldn't have been that much punishment," Ford recalled later. "I was guilty - no license and no insurance - but I was trying to fix it. I was trying to make my wrong right, and there was no way they was gonna let me."

Oscar

Jon Stewart roasts Dianne Feinstein: She doesn't mind if the NSA looks at your 'sh*t'

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© Raw Story
Daily Show host Jon Stewart broke out his George Carlin swear jar on Wednesday to highlight Sen. Dianne Feinstein's (D-CA) apparent double standard when it came to government surveillance.

"She doesn't mind if our security apparatus might be looking at your stuff, because your stuff is sh*t," Stewart said after Feinstein accused the Central Investigation Agency (CIA) of violating the Constitution by searching Senate staffers' computers. "But her sh*t is stuff."

What made the allegations incredible, Stewart said, was that it was Feinstein - who has publicly supported the National Security Agency's (NSA) domestic surveillance program - behind them, and not privacy advocates like Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) or Sen. Rand Paul, who has criticized the use of unmanned military drones.

But at the same time, Stewart didn't quite buy CIA director John Brennan's statement that such an action would be "beyond the scope of reason."

Blackbox

Best of the Web: CNN host Don Lemon 'puts it out there': Was lost Malaysian flight taken by 'supernatural' forces?

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Saying he was "just putting it out there," CNN host Don Lemon asked his Sunday afternoon guests if something "supernatural" might be in play with the missing Malaysian flight MH 370.

After noting that he has been getting questions via email, social media, and on the street, Lemon wondered if "something beyond our understanding" might have happened to the missing airliner.

"Especially today, on a day when we deal with the supernatural," Lemon said. "We go to church .... the supernatural power of God. People are saying to me, why aren't you talking about the possibility - and I'm just putting it out there - that something odd happened to this plane; something beyond our understanding?"

Decoded host Brad Meltzer responded saying, "People roll their eyes at conspiracy theories, but what conspiracy theories do is, they ask the hardest, most outrageous questions sometimes. But every once in awhile they're right."

Airplane

The missing Malaysian flight may have used "terrain masking", a dangerous flying technique, to avoid detection

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© AP Photo/U.S. Navy, Eric A. PastorIn this photo provided by the U.S. Navy, crew members on board an aircraft P-8A Poseidon assist in search and rescue operations for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean on Sunday, March 16, 2014
Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have dropped to an altitude of as low as 5,000 feet in an effort to evade the radars of at least three countries. The dangerous flying technique known as "terrain masking" is the latest direction being looked at by investigators trying to locate the missing plane, a Malaysian newspaper reported on Monday.

The New Straits Times in Kuala Lumpur reported that investigators are further asking if the aircraft stuck to a more high-traffic commercial route over the Bay of Bengal in order to avoid the suspicion of those manning military radars.

"To them, MH370 would appear to be just another commercial aircraft on its way to its destination," the Malaysian paper wrote.

"The person who had control over the aircraft has a solid knowledge of avionics and navigation, and left a clean track. It passed low over Kelantan [in Malaysia], that was true," an unnamed official told the New Straits Times. "It's possible that the aircraft had hugged the terrain in some areas that are mountainous to avoid radar detection."

Sheriff

Oklahoma sheriffs visiting State Capitol building ordered to disarm walk out

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© KTUL-TVSheriff Bob Colber
Wagoner County Sheriff Bob Colbert traveled to Oklahoma City, the state's capitol, earlier this week with 40 other sheriffs from around the state like they do every year - to meet with politicians and lobby.

Everything was going fine in the state capitol building on Tuesday. More than that, "everybody in that building knew who we were," Colbert told KTUL-TV in Tulsa.

"One of the senators, who they wouldn't tell us, complained because we were armed in the building," Colbert added to the station. Then he said the sheriffs were given a choice - disarm or leave.

"So we all packed up and left," Colbert told KTUL. Colbert said he doesn't know which senator complained, but he has his own beefs about the treatment he and his associates received. "We're the people that protect these people," he told KTUL.

Family

American father deported from Britain because he had cancer; mother forced to raise daughter alone

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Family: Lorraine Marx (left), 56, of Chidham, West Sussex, nursed her partner Ralph Marx (centre), also 56, when he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. They have 10-year-old daughter Alexandra (right).
  • Lorraine Marx, 56, nursed husband when he was diagnosed with leukaemia
  • But he was escorted onto a plane and deported against medical advice
  • Home Office ruled Ralph Marx, 56, had become burden on the taxpayer
  • Couple, who have 10-year-old daughter Alexandra, married 13 years ago
  • Mr Marx chose not to apply for residency status when he wed Mrs Marx
  • It meant the engineer could only stay in UK for up to six months at a time
A British mother has been left to bring up her daughter alone after her American husband was kicked out of the country - because he had cancer.

Distraught Lorraine Marx, 56, nursed her husband Ralph Marx, also 56, when he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.

But the Home Office ruled he had become a burden on the taxpayer - despite having private health cover - after the NHS billed him £98,000 for the emergency cancer treatment he had received.

Red Flag

Former House stenographer, known for bizarre rant in the House chamber, says she 'did not have a breakdown'

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Messenger: Dianne Reidy said she was prompted to speak by the Holy Spirit
Former House stenographer Dianne Reidy, the woman who was removed from the House chamber last October when she went on a rant about God and the Constitution, released a video statement Saturday denying she suffered a breakdown and claiming that God guided her actions.

Reidy, who appears alongside her husband Dan in the video, said her public comments are meant to "set the record straight" about what unfolded late last year.

"I remember getting up to the podium and after saying, 'God will not be mocked.' I don't have a memory of anything else that was said that evening until I was escorted off the floor," Reidy said during the 38-minute video statement.

She later added, "I knew that God was going to speak through me, and I knew it was going to be during the vote, raising the debt ceiling level and ending the government shutdown."

Comment: See: 'You cannot serve two masters!' House stenographer goes crazy during House vote, escorted out


Bizarro Earth

Blaming the victim: School bans bullied 9-year-old from carrying My Little Pony lunchbag

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© WLOS
A mother and her 9-year-old son say school officials won't let him bring a My Little Pony bag to school. The boy and his mother say he's getting shoved around because bullies think his pick of a favorite toy is for girls. It's a decades-old kids show where pony characters emphasize the bonds of friendship.

It's become anything but friendship for 9-year-old Grayson Bruce. Grayson Bruce, My Little Pony fan, "they're taking it a little too far, with punching me, pushing me down, calling me horrible names, stuff that really shouldn't happen." Grayson picked a Rainbow Dash bag out this year, which he says has intensified the attacks against him. Grayson, "most of the characters in the show are girls, and most of the people put it toward girls, most of the toys are girlie, and surprisingly I found stuff like this."

Grayson has developed a following on Facebook after a friend made a support page for him. Grayson stands by his favorite cartoon and the message he says it sends. His mother says, why not?

Alarm Clock

In the Shadows: How serious is the Military sex assault problem in Hawaii?

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Military sexual assault may happen in the shadows, but Hawaii can be a shadowy place.

Service members have been raped at Kailua barbecues, in Honolulu alleyways, and at bars in Kona and Wahiawa. One attack took place in a parked car in Waikiki. They've been sexually assaulted aboard ships in Pearl Harbor, in government buildings, and in grassy parks on military bases.

A decade of military records, obtained by Civil Beat through a series of open-records requests, details hundreds of sex crimes against male and female service members in Hawaii.

In addition to noting the troubling number and circumstances of such attacks, the records suggest that the underreporting of such assaults continues in all military branches in the state.

In that way, Hawaii is little different from the nation as a whole.

Stormtrooper

Video of Oklahoma cops murdering Luis Rodriguez in broad daylight - Thugs claim they were 'intervening in domestic dispute'

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Luis Rodriguez later died in hospital
"What began as a fun night out to the movies ended in tragedy for one Oklahoma family after a father was beaten to death by police following a domestic dispute," CNN reported.

The incident, which was caught on video, began when Mrs. Nair Rodriguez got into an altercation with her 19-year-old daughter outside the Moore Warren Theatre in the early hours of February 15 and slapped her. A bystander who witnessed the incident reported the event to police.

The mother-daughter disagreement had upset Mrs. Rodriguez so much that she had bolted for the family car. Her husband, Luis followed her to calm her down when he was intercepted by five police who arrived on the scene. However instead of confronting Nair, five cops took down her innocent husband Luis Rodriguez, beating, pepper spraying and pinning him on the road."

Ana Kasparian, Cenk Uygur, Ben Mankiewicz (What The Flick?!, TYT Sports) and Brian Unger (Showdown Of The Unbeatables) break it down on The Young Turks:


Comment: See also: Father trying to stop family fight beaten to death by Oklahoma cops