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doxydad

(1,363 posts)
Mon Jun 16, 2014, 09:05 AM Jun 2014

Modern-Day Debtors’ Prison? Judges Push Back Against the South’s Privatization Wave

Kathleen Hucks was almost a model probationer.

In 2006 she was convicted of driving under the influence, possession of marijuana, and driving with a suspended license in Columbia County, Georgia. She successfully completed her probation and paid all of her court-issued fines.

But Hucks failed to pay all of the additional supervision fees charged by the private probation company supervising her case. Unaware of the oversight, she moved to Richmond County, Georgia. On Labor Day weekend—nearly six years later—a police officer asked for identification.

“I was out walking my dogs when an officer came up to me asking who I was," she said. After running her name through the system, he told her that there was a warrant out for her arrest—a hold on her back in Columbia County.

“I kept telling the officer, ‘I’m not on probation,'" said Hucks, who lives with her husband in a trailer in the town of Hephzibah, deep in the rural heartland of Georgia. “But he said, ‘Ma’am, I have to take you in. It’s showing up on here that you’re in violation of probation.........’”

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/modern-day-debtors-prison-judges-push-back-against-souths-privatization-wave?akid=11920.1892773.QFTx21&rd=1&src=newsletter1003144&t=21

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