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Trump calls children of struggling farmers “spoiled, rotten brats.” I wonder how many farmers will STILL vote for him.

Mississippi Today https://mississippitoday.org/

Working Toward Freedom

To pay off fines and other debts, inmates in Mississippi’s little-known restitution centers must work grueling low-wage jobs, pay rent and endure strip searches.

In this world between prison and freedom, they often don’t know when they’ll get to go home.

By Anna Wolfe and Michelle Liu | January 9, 2020
Data analysis by Andrew Calderón, The Marshall Project

JACKSON, Miss. – During her shifts at a Church’s Chicken, Annita Husband looked like the other employees. She wore the same blue and red polo shirt, greeted the same customers, and slung the same fried chicken and biscuits.

But after clocking out, Husband, a mother in her 40s, had to wait for a white van with barred windows and the seal of the Mississippi Department of Corrections on its sides. It delivered her to the Flowood Restitution Center, a motel converted into a jail surrounded by razor wire, nestled among truck stops and an outlet mall. Here, Husband slept in a room with seven other women, sharing a mirror to get ready in the mornings, enduring strip searches for contraband at night.

A judge sentenced Husband to the restitution center in 2015 to pay off almost $13,000 she owed from an embezzlement conviction in 2009. The corrections department would not release her until she earned enough money at her $7.25-an-hour part-time job to clear her debts and cover $11 a day for “room and board” at Flowood.

“If I wasn’t at work, I was in prison,” Husband said.

The corrections department took her paychecks, she said, giving her back just $10 a week — all in quarters — so she could buy things like soap and deodorant.

The state of Mississippi had locked Husband into a modern-day debtors prison. She had other plans.

Mississippi appears to be the only state where judges lock people up for an indefinite time while they work to earn money to pay off court-ordered debts. While there is no comprehensive data, legal experts who study fines, fees and restitution say Mississippi is unusual at the very least.

“We don’t know of any other states that have a program quite like Mississippi’s,” said Sharon Brett, a senior staff attorney with Harvard’s Criminal Justice Policy Program.

A handful of states experimented with restitution programs starting in the 1970s, but abandoned them as expensive and ineffective.

Not Mississippi. Judges have sentenced hundreds of people a year to four restitution centers around the state, almost always ordering them to stay until they pay off court fees, fines and restitution to victims, according to four years of government records analyzed by Mississippi Today and The Marshall Project.

People sent to the centers had been sentenced for felonies but didn’t commit violent crimes, according to the program rules. When we tracked down the cases of more than 200 people confined there on Jan. 1, 2019, we found that most originally got suspended sentences, meaning they did not have to go to prison.

They didn’t usually owe a lot of money. Half the people living in the centers had debts of less than $3,515. One owed just $656.50. Though in arrears on fines and court fees, many didn’t need to pay restitution at all — at least 20 percent of them were convicted of drug possession.

But people spent an average of nearly four months — and up to five years — at the centers, working for private employers to earn enough to satisfy the courts. Meanwhile their costs continued to balloon, since they had to pay for room and board, transportation to their jobs, and medical care.

They didn’t get paid much. Between 2016 and 2018, workers at the centers made an average of $6.76 an hour in take home pay, according to our analysis of state data.

It’s a futile system that penalizes the poorest residents of the poorest state in the country, said Cliff Johnson, director of the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of Mississippi.

“Debtors prisons are an effective way of collecting money — as is kidnapping,” he said. “But there are constitutional, public policy and moral barriers to such a regime.”

(continued . . . )
https://mississippitoday.org/2020/01/09/restitution/

More in this excellent series ...
https://mississippitoday.org/restitution-series/

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https://twitter.com/MSTODAYnews

This investigation was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, the USA TODAY-Network, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger and the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting. The Marshall Project is a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system; sign up for The Marshall Project’s newsletters, or follow them on Facebook or Twitter.

(published under Creative Commons license)

The Broken Road of Peggy Wallace Kennedy

All white Southerners live with the sins of their fathers. But what if your dad was one of the most famous segregationists in history? Veteran Alabama journalist Frye Gaillard visits the daughter of George Wallace.

[snip]

Then came 1972. On May 15, running for president yet again, Wallace was shot at a campaign rally in Maryland. The bullet pierced his spine. Peggy, who was then in college, flew to Maryland and rushed to Holy Cross Hospital, where he had undergone life-saving surgery. There was an eerie unreality about the scene.

In the coming hours, other visitors would make their way to his bedside. One of them was Ethel Kennedy, who, four years earlier, had lost her husband to an assassin. She said Robert Kennedy would want her to be there. The visit surprised and moved Peggy, but the most astonishing well-wisher of all was a woman who was also running for president. Shirley Chisholm was a fierce trailblazer, the first woman to seek the presidential nomination of a major party, and the first black woman elected to Congress. Among the ranks of her followers was a former Black Panther named Barbara Lee, who now represents California in Congress. Lee warned Chisholm sternly, “Don’t you go visit that racist.”

Chisholm brushed the warning aside.

During her short time in Congress, besides her militant pursuit of equality, Chisholm had established a counter-reputation for reaching across the aisle, and working with people very different from herself. She collaborated with Sen. Bob Dole, a Kansas Republican, to create the still-standing nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Because of white allies, Chisholm said, “poor babies have milk and poor children have food.” But now, her spirit of generosity was being pushed to new and untested limits. George Wallace stood for things she found repugnant. And yet, he was also a human being. As Wallace lay badly wounded in a hospital bed, unable to move the lower parts of his body, Chisolm reached out.

“She and daddy talked real low,” remembers Peggy. “They prayed together. Daddy asked her, ’What are your people going to say about you being here?’ She told him it didn’t matter: ‘I would not want this to happen to anyone.’ Daddy’s face changed. There was just something that came over him. I think a seed was planted that day.”




https://bittersoutherner.com/the-broken-road-of-peggy-wallace-kennedy

https://twitter.com/altNOAA/status/1214370897945075718



Alternative NOAA @altNOAA

This is William Patrick Hitler. He served in the United States Navy 1944-1947. He received the WWII Victory Medal and Purple Heart. His uncle was Adolf Hitler. You read that correctly. More Hitlers have served in the US Armed Forces than Trumps.