You’re out of work. Money is tight. To make things worse you get pulled over and receive a ticket, resulting in a fine—for not wearing you’re seatbelt. It is forty-dollars.
But forty dollars is way too much for your empty pocketbook. And so, for not paying the fine, you are put on probation. You are now handed over to a 3rd party, for-profit, privately owned, Probation Service Company. This private probation service company charges you a monthly fee for its services to the community’s court system—thirty-five dollars a month.
You already could not pay a forty-dollar fee. How are you now going to pay a thirty-five dollar monthly fee to a privately owned, for-profit, Probation Service company? You get deeper and deeper into debt that you are unable to payoff immediately.
Oh yea! Did I mention this: If you don’t pay-up, you go straight to jail and do time, and for what? For not being able to pay the initial forty-dollar fine resulting from failing to wear your seat-belt while driving. (Do you remember the old concept of “debtors’ prison”?) So, you either go to jail, or you get deeper and deeper into debt, or both—and your life spirals uncontrollably downward because of a simple forty-dollar fine AND because of a court system that has hired a for-profit, privately-owned, Probation Services Company thinking that it will save tax-payer money (which is very doubtful).
This is a quintessential example of injustice. It is transforming justice into a business commodity handing it over to third party businesses with pure profit motives, resulting in an absolute conflict of interest as to the due-process and end-goal of real justice. And this travesty of justice is actually happening now here in America! This is an outrage!
Get on the computer and google the phrase “Probation for Profit.” Look up the info and find out for yourself. We can’t allow this to continue. It must be nipped in the bud now. (Although as far as I can tell, it is far beyond the “budding” stage.)
If you have any sense of justice you’d have to agree that this is wrong?
Oh yes, what is also wrong, having the same conflict-of-interest effect, and therefore having the same damaging effect on our justice system, is the whole idea of privately run and privately owned for-profit prisons. This too is happening in America. And it is wrong.
We are selling-out justice to the highest bidder. This forebodes ill for America. We are corrupting our system—imperfect as it already is, we’re only making it worse. The majority of us may not feel its ill effect here and now. But we will feel it, down the road. Just give it a little time. And when we, the many, finally do, much damage will have already been done, and it will be all the more difficult to stop it and reverse it. Yet I fear that no one much cares, until or unless it hits us, personally—when it will be too late to do something about it.
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