A profit in everything, including prisons, as we’ve discussed before. The International Business Times reports on another move to extract cash from even the merely accused:
It all started with a traffic violation. Green, a 49-year-old father of five from Lugoff, South Carolina, about 30 miles northeast of Columbia, acknowledged that he shouldn’t have been driving at all. He didn’t have a license. But last October, his mother’s car, a 1994 Chrysler, had broken down at a nearby Taco Bell. So he hitched a ride to go retrieve it for her.
On his way home while driving his mother’s car, he failed to use his turn signal at an intersection, and a local police officer pulled him over.
Green was arrested, placed in handcuffs and taken down to the local county jail, where he waited overnight until his elderly mother was able to post the $2,100 to bail him out. A condition of Green’s bail, ordered by the judge, was that Green wear — and pay for — an electronic monitoring device.
Green, who lives on a monthly $900 disability check, couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Pay for it?” Green said. “I never heard of that.”
But he was indeed hearing correctly. In Richland County, South Carolina, any person ordered to wear the ankle monitor as a condition of their bail must lease the bracelet from a private, for-profit company called Offender Management Services (OMS), which charges the offender $9.25 per day, or about $300 per month, plus a $179.50 set-up fee, according to county documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request made by International Business Times.
Amazing – they’ve effectively fined a man convicted of nothing AND redirected the fine to a private company. I’d have to say the responsible parties in Lugoff, SC, have screwed up at least two different ways, since the bail money will be returned to the family so long as the accused makes it to the trial, while the money for the GPS is long gone, so it’s a fine with no legal backing. And then giving the money to a private company under the guise of a lease? Strike two. And the whole scheme … well, anyone who likens corruption to a pig rooting out truffles should be salivating on this one.
And, of course, my current hobby horse applies.
