The Miserable Ones

Jean Vanjean* is alive and living in America. His real name is Tom Barrett.

Charles Pierce highlights a Human Rights Watch "report, 'Profiting from Probation: America’s ‘Offender-Funded’ Probation Industry,' [which] describes how

more than 1,000 courts in several US states delegate tremendous coercive power to companies that are often subject to little meaningful oversight or regulation. In many cases, the only reason people are put on probation is because they need time to pay off fines and court costs linked to minor crimes. In some of these cases, probation companies act more like abusive debt collectors than probation officers, charging the debtors for their services....

Human Rights Watch estimates that, in Georgia alone, the industry collects a minimum of US$40 million in fees every year from probationers. In other states, disclosure requirements are so minimal that is not possible even to hazard a guess how much probation companies are harvesting from probationers....

* In Augusta, Georgia, a man who pled guilty to shoplifting a US$2 can of beer and fined US$200 was ultimately jailed for failing to pay more than US$1,000 in fees to his probation company. At the time he was destitute, selling his own blood plasma twice a week to raise money.

* In another Georgia town, a company probation officer said she routinely has offenders arrested for non-payment and then bargains with their families for money in exchange for the person’s release.

* In Alabama, the town of Harpersville shut down its entire municipal court after a judge slammed the municipality and its probation company for running what he called a 'judicially sanctioned extortion racket.'

This is not breaking news. Ethan Bronner of the New York Times wrote a story on these probation mills in July 2012. (If you're interested in the follow-up to the case brought by attorney John B. Long, mentioned in the story, here's what I found. The law is a long and winding road.)

Pierce writes,

This is yet another product of the immensely stupid notion of privatizing the proper functions of government, which is based on the colossally stupid notion that private industry is more honest and more efficient than the public sector, which is itself based on the transcendentally stupid decision by too many states that it is better to light their balls on fire than raise taxes in order to pay for anything anywhere at any time.

But the problem is larger than even Pierce lets on. It goes to the heart of libertarian-conservative philosophy: the notion that, as Ronald Reagan infamously said, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." What these winger-philosophers want is to return us to the days of laissez-faire. Laissez-faire, in fact, will always suit those is power, because it is they who decide who has the privilege of being left alone, who has freeeedom! to act as s/he wishes. Those who do not belong to this privileged class -- which grows smaller and smaller with each success of the philosopher kings -- will necessarily lose some of their freedoms. Thus, poor people who run afoul of the law in the most minimal ways -- traffic violations, petty thefts, public drunkenness, jaywalking, public protests -- can and do lose their most basic freedoms. The idea that the punishment must fit the crime is abandoned. When the courts become cash cows, all manner of justice disappears. There is no redress.

The privatization of the probation function is horrific, but it is the tip of the iceberg. What has made government relatively honest, if not always optimally functional, was civil service reform. Removing the patronage systems of Tammany Halls large and small meant that governments returned to functioning as servants of the people, and elections more closely reflected the will of the people. Privatization circumvents civil service & returns the levers of corruption to the powerful. We've seen this in New Jersey, where Gov. Chris Christie has not only undermined public unions but also used his power to reward friends and family. As Paul Krugman wrote in June 2012,

In 2010, Chris Christie, the state’s governor — who has close personal ties to Community Education Centers, the largest operator of [New Jersey's system of halfway houses], and who once worked as a lobbyist for the firm — described the company’s operations as 'representing the very best of the human spirit.' But The Times’s reports instead portray something closer to hell on earth — an understaffed, poorly run system, with a demoralized work force, from which the most dangerous individuals often escape to wreak havoc, while relatively mild offenders face terror and abuse at the hands of other inmates.

Krugman sees the larger picture:

As more and more government functions get privatized, states become pay-to-play paradises, in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become a quid pro quo for getting government business. Are the corporations capturing the politicians, or the politicians capturing the corporations? Does it matter?

The full New York Times report on Christie's halfway house horrors is here. More recently, we've seen how Chris Christie's brother Todd has profited from a project approved by David Samson, Christie's top appointee to the Port Authority. (Samson also profited from the deal.) And the day after Hurricane Sandy left New Jersey, Chris Christie gave a no-bid contract for cleanup to a firm for which Christie mentor & former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is a lobbyist, even though local (private) firms offered to do the job for less.

So privatization is really just one more way in which the haves take from the have-nots. That the philosopher kings do so under the pretense of better serving the public adds insult to injury.

Meanwhile, none of this stops the libertarians from screaming about any perceived intrusion on their own freeedoms! Thus Rand Paul cited Ayn Rand in a screed against the "collective'"s plans to phase out energy-sapping incandescent light bulbs. Paul apparently does not know how to screw in those new-fangled coily things. Then he went on what ABC News called a "toilet tirade" because "Frankly, my toilets don’t work in my house. And I blame you [an Energy Department official] and people like you who want to tell me what I can install in my house, what I can do. You restrict my choices." Low-flow does not work for a big shit. Paul's concerns are for his choices. And what happened when Paul objected to a TSA patdown? As Politico reported in January 2013,

For Paul, TSA reform is personal. He drew viral media attention for resisting a TSA pat-down in 2012, which caused him to miss a speech at the March for Life rally. Following that incident, Paul introduced TSA privatization and flier bill of rights legislation last summer.

More recently, Paul has tapped into libertarian paranoia over NSA spying, & is suing the federal government to "protect the Fourth Amendment." Coincidentally, he is using his suit as a fundraising vehicle.

None of this freeedom! philosophy stops its adherents from restricting the freedoms of women, particularly poor women. As Erin Ryan of Jezebel lays out, "Rand Paul also famously opposes giving low-income women any sort of aid in acquiring birth control, and is staunchly anti-abortion. Rand Paul should just come out and say it: he doesn't think unmarried low income women should be having sex." Charlotte Alter of Time writes: "Rand Paul ... co-sponsored the Life at Conception act to completely outlaw abortion and opposes the Obamacare birth control insurance coverage mandate." This is fine with Paul because the women he knows can afford to pay for their own contraception and abortions. In fact, he boasts about how successful his women friends are. “I’ve seen the women in my family and how well they’re doing. My niece is in Cornell vet school and about 85% of the people in vet school are women.” If there was a "war on women," women won, he says.

Freeedom is not about you. It is all about Rand Paul and his privileged ilk.

* In the novel Les Misérables, Victor Hugo's protagonist Jean Valjean is arrested for stealing a loaf of bread and sentenced to a five-year prison term (extended to 19 years for his attempts to escape).

Comments

[Patrick]

Re Jean Valjean and the scam of privatized probationary and corrections, it gets worse. When the probationer actually gets sent back to prison, the state has an incentive to sell his/her labor for cheap. This piece was picked at random from a Google search ("prison labor in immokalee"). It is not specifically about probationers, bt about getting stuck. There are many more.

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/04/04/prison-labor-and-taxpayer-dollars/

Some vestigial holdovers from the immediate post-slavery era resemble these practices, which were used extensively in the South before immigrant ag labor became more available (cheaper). Some of the practices read like tragedies: if an ag worker left his farm, and had little money, he could be picked up for "vagrancy" (or anything) and, unable to pay the fine, put in the county jail, whence the jailer could hire him out as ag labor. Violations of jail/work "rules" added time; the prisoner/worker could end up in long-term forced labor, for the crime of being poor and away from his "place."

This still happens, just not as egregiously and as pervasively as it used to.

We have still not succeeded in ending slavery in the U.S.

[Akhilleus]

You'll find this comment, by Akhilleus, under the February 6 Commentariat.

Marie

[PD Pepe]

Thanks CW for this segment––much appreciated. Back in 2010 there was a report about horrifyingly absurd tale of the privatized youth detention centre in Pennsylvania, run with the help of a crooked local judge who railroaded kids through his court for a cut of the profits. Some 6,500 children were later found to have been wrongly convicted for such minor infractions as smoking pot and "throwing a piece of steak at my mom's boyfriend". The subsequent bill for their incarceration went directly to the taxpayer.

And I have a story of my own: Years ago I was shopping at a Marshall's store adding to my wardrobe for the next school year (I was teaching). I was in a hurry––and because you were limited to six items of clothing to be taken into the dressing room––I had seven––I stupidly stuffed a light blouse into my rather large bag so that I wouldn't have to completely dress and undress again for one bloody blouse. I had no intention of stealing which is not what two police in dark suits thought when they surrounded me and took me upstairs in a room without a view and started to interrogate me. I was mortified. The authorities told me they would press charges, I would be hearing from them shortly, banned me from the store and let me go. As soon as I got home and relayed the tale to my husband he immediately called our lawyer who within minutes not only got me off whatever I would have had to go through, but erased all traces of shoplifting. I am white and obviously privileged.

[Akhilleus]

Marie,

Excellent, excellent piece.

Speaking of patronage, I recently watched a sci-fi film, "Elysium", a dystopic vision of the future Earth where the haves live in pampered luxury high above the planet of have-nots which has been reduced to a sprawl of over population, crime, disease, and filth, patrolled by corporate robots who inflict punishment for any infraction of the rules laid down by the haves.

All important healthcare is reserved solely for the wealthy who benefit from amazing scientific advances, while the have-nots are left to fend for themselves (the situation the GOP currently seeks to maintain in perpetuity).

The film has all the trappings of this type of dystopian narrative and an unfortunately large chunk of the movie is about shit blowing up, but like much of the best science fiction, there is more than a small germ of truth to it. In fact, it's pretty much what life is like right now for billions of human beings, a situation the Rand Pauls of the world hope to keep that way in order to preserve their own personal, sacrosanct freedom, because, I suppose, in their warped minds, freedom is a limited commodity and there's only so much to go around.

This is more evidence of the way the right sees life as a zero sum game. The smallest tidbit for someone else is one less tidbit for them. It is inconceivable to them that a country (never mind a world--thinking too long about that many non-rich, non-white people would fry their synapses) which attempts to raise the standard of living for all citizens short-circuits the need for a zero sum approach.

The founders realized that freedoms come with responsibilities, something the right staunchly denies, except when talking about non-conservatives or non-whites. And a reasonable understanding of the Constitution will bring with it the recognition that there are competing claims to "freedom" that must be tempered with some give and take, some accommodations that fairly spread out the benefits of a democratic, constitutional society to all. Something else the right firmly rejects. For someone like Rand Paul, it's all about him. It's a world view so vile and greedy, dark and ahumanistic as to be far more despicable than it first seems.

And how does patronage apply to a story like "Elysium" and to the world of Rand Paul's wingnutty dreams?

In Greek mythology Elysium, sometimes referred to as the Elysian Fields, represented a perfect afterlife, a heavenly resort, if you will, populated solely by those with connections to gods or great heroes.

Hoi polloi not invited. And no pat-downs in transit.

The perfect wingnut paradise.

[Victoria]

I agree with Patrick: the privatization of probation as described above is very much like what D. Blackmon describes in "Slavery by Another Name."