Double Life Sentences for $11? Som'em Ain't Right

So, will two black Mississippi women, whom so many agree have been unjustly imprisoned, now be freed?

On Sunday, syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald became the latest to raise his voice. He wrote:

"Let’s assume they did it.

"Let’s assume that two days before Christmas in 1993, a 22-year-old black woman named Jamie Scott and her pregnant, 19-year-old sister Gladys set up an armed robbery. Let’s assume these single mothers lured two men to a spot outside the tiny town of Forest, Miss., where three teenage boys, using a shotgun the sisters supplied, relieved the men of $11 and sent them on their way, unharmed.

"Assume all of the above is true, and still you must be shocked at the crude brutality of the Scott sisters’ fate. You see, the sisters, neither of whom had a criminal record before this, are still locked away in state prison, having served 16 years of their double-life sentences.

"It bears repeating. Each sister is doing double life for a robbery in which $11 was taken and nobody was hurt. Somewhere, the late Nina Simone is moaning her signature song: Mississippi Goddam."

Just In: Felony Convictions Hurt Employment Opportunities

"Eh, duh," you say. (H/t Tim Wise)

So obviously, I'm hoping to make a point, right.

EAGLE, Colorado — A financial manager for wealthy clients will not face felony charges for a hit-and-run because it could jeopardize his job, prosecutors said Thursday.

Eagle, Colorado? Where have I heard . . . oh, yeah! That's where Kobe Bryant was charged with rape. But surely there must be a different DA. Kobe's case was seven years ago.

One would tend to think so. But . . .

Haddon and Hurlbert have squared off before. Haddon was one of Kobe Bryant's defense attorneys, with lead attorney Pamela Mackey, when Bryant faced sexual assault charges in Eagle County. Hurlbert was the lead prosecutor in that case.

Figure that out and get back to me. No seriously, cause that doesn't make sense. Cents, yes. Sense, no.

Prison School?

Michelle Chen
Lawsuit Charges NYC Police With Criminalizing Kids
Jan 21, 2010
 
After years of complaints and mounting tensions in New York City public schools, civil liberties activists have filed landmark lawsuit against the city government and police force. The NYCLU accuses the NYPD’s School Safety Division of systematically violating children’s civil rights and creating a school climate of violence, arbitrary arrest and discrimination.
 
School to Prison Pipeline
 
Read more.

Dissatisfied?

Just a marvelous op-ed in the Boston Globe by James Carroll. I'll reiterate that King didn't launch anything. Other than that, learn and enjoy, via portside. ~ No1KState

King: `Now is the Time to Make Real the Promise'

By James Carroll

Boston Globe
January 18, 2010

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/01/18/king_now_is_the_time_to_make_real_the_promise/

The great Martin Luther King Jr. address of 1963 at the
Lincoln Memorial is remembered as the "I have a dream''
speech. But King spoke an even more compelling line
that day: "When will you be satisfied?'' It was the
question that had so often been put to him and his
fellow "devotees of Civil Rights,'' and it carried the
accusation that he was a malcontent - never happy with
the incremental progress offered to black Americans, as
if the shift from slavery to Jim Crow should have been
enough. "No!'' he answered.

King launched the civil rights movement, but was not
satisfied - because he saw that racial discrimination
was embedded in violence. Therefore he drew the link
with the nation's violence in Vietnam. He then brought
together powerful movements opposing racism and war -
but still he was not satisfied. He saw how the brew of
racism and violence was essential to poverty, and he
recast the movement again, launching the Poor Peoples'
Campaign. Yes, a class revolt, and it got him killed.
"No! No! We are not satisfied!'' he had declared in
Washington, "And we will not be satisfied until justice
rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty
stream!''

If King were with us today, one imagines him speaking
less of dreams and more of dissatisfaction. For
starters, he might eschew the word "poor'' in favor of
"impoverished,'' since poverty is not a natural state,
but the result of social structures, policies, and
market systems tilted to protect the privilege of a few
at the expense of many. That's more clear this year
than ever. In the four decades since King's murder, it
is true that doors have opened to African-Americans,
even including the door to the White House. Wouldn't
that leave him satisfied? But one hears the answer,
"No! No!'' And then that rolling cadence, the prophetic
voice denouncing, say, the vast American prison
population, disproportionately made up of young black
males, most of whom are guilty not of violent acts, but
of the crime of, well, being dissatisfied. Rather than
educate or motivate such malcontents, and rather than
address the conditions that condemn them to
dissatisfaction, America would rather snatch them from
the streets and lock them up.

Since King's time, the free markets have gone global,
and now vast populations of humans have been declared
redundant. Having made connections between civil
rights, domestic poverty, and US wars, King can be
readily pictured today making further connections with
the cast-aways abroad - the impoverished masses who
have been declared superfluous by the world economy.
The catastrophe of Haiti would be no mere symbol of
global inequity to King. He was attuned to the real
suffering of individual human beings, and would be part
of the effort to alleviate it there. But would he be
satisfied with the compassion of the moment? Moral
sentiment unattached to structural analysis, and to
changes in systemic causes of poverty, is worse than
useless. The Haiti earthquake might be deemed an act of
God, but King would rage at any characterization of the
foundational Haitian plight that left out historical
factors like slavery and colonialism, or the defining
contemporary influence of the United States, which,
across the years since King's death, has, in relation
to Haiti, defiled the meaning of neighbor.

What is the key to King's greatness? It was his
ferocious dissatisfaction that fueled his capacity to
dream, and to articulate his dream in a way that made
its fulfillment possible. Yes, King's dream did come
true when Barack Obama took the oath as president one
year ago this week. But equally, King's dream, even in
coming true, continually fired his refusal to be
satisfied. No! No! King would be a malcontent today:
"When will you be satisfied?'' And today, Haiti would
define his answer. His burning unhappiness on behalf of
that benighted nation would ignite his urgency and his
action. " Now is the time to make real the promises,''
he said in Washington. "Now is the time to open the
doors of opportunity to all of God's children.'' In
nearby Haiti we glimpse the far distance that separates
this world from justice. Now is the time to close it.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

Bringing Smart-Sexy Back!

The Silver Rights Movement - big props to my homie Segun Olagunju. Uh . . . now, that's not him in the video. That's John Hope Bryant, whom CNN says you need to know.



I agree with everything he says. The kids in the inner-city need better role models than athletes and entertainers - I could launch into the racism that plays into that, but we'll save that for another day.

Today is about becoming a member of the Silver Rights Movement. It's about promoting financial education, which everyone could use, but the inner-city desperately needs. - I mean think about, most of those people don't wanna be there and would do anything to get out. You wanna tell me who benefits from their economic vulnerability? Do you realize that as a nation, we spend more on prisons than on education? And that lots of these prisons are private and amount to a form of neo-slavery?

But, back to the video, this is the kind of thing I love to see happening. Now, if you ask me, the US and corporate America owes its black citizens trillions of dollars. But, as we all know, white America isn't ready to accept the truth of what this country has done to us, much less to make any amends for it. And the way I see it, we black folks, like always, are gonna have to do it for ourselves.

But, back to the video, watch it a few times if you need to. At least, more than once.

Here are the websites he mentions at the end:
Operation Hope
And I think this is an idea of what he says is to come:
5 Million Kids

I'm Tired

No, really. I'm tired. With the CFS, that's not unusual.

But I'm tired of politics right now. The Republicans are only lying and deceiving the American people. They're making false claims of sexism and elitism and "raising taxes on everybody." And I can't take it anymore!

The Democrats are hit back a little harder than normal, but between the early morning news and the primetime news, nothing's changed.

And I'm tired. I'm tired of all these problems we're deal with in America that people don't realize has to do with the way the vote. I mean seriously, blaming the problems of the last 8 years on a Congress that's only had 2 years of Democratic control? And the Democrats seem not to have the balls, neither inside or out, to call out Republicans for the obstructionism the way the Republicans called them out every chance they got.

We're dealing with a military-industrial complex (MIC) and a prison-industrial complex (PIC). We spend more money on incarcerating people than educating people. Is it any wonder we're in the shape we're in now? And with the military-industrial complex, is it any surprise everytime you blink, another neo-conservative wants to go to war.

Some tell me honestly, how are our neo-cons any different from the "Islamofascists" they claim pose such a great threat. Hmmm. Someone explain something to me. Seeing as how there are close to if not more than 1billion Muslim in the world, why are we spending so much more trying to fight the relatively few who would do us harm. And they don't hate us for our freedom. They hate us because we're the bully of the world. That's all we do: bully countries, not into being democratic, but into opening their markets to us. Then we our GDP grows, their GDP slumps, and of course there'll be some evil mad man who's will to sell or give away guns to help the angry dispossessed do what they feel is necessary to be heard over the sounds of "ching, ching!"

Check it out. We really don't care about spreading democracy around the world. We've allowed ruthless and bloodthirsty dictators to maintain power so long as they otherwise gave us access to their oil or whatever else they have that we want.

And I'm tired of it. I'm tired of a media consolidated and owned by the very corporations who need the MIC to protect them, not us. Regular Americans aren't in danger. It's the multi-nationals and the governments that protect them that the "terrorists" are upset about.

And the American electorate is too dumb to realize what's going on. BushCo wants every child left behind some when that child grows up, s/he'll be so worried about the mortgage and/or health bills that s/he'll have no choice but to accept what the plutocracy - cause let's be honest, that's really the government we have - tell them. And even if they had time to question, these people who see everything in black and white and think the question of when life begins is clear cut either don't have or aren't using the intellectual capacity to question the world around them. Instead, they snub the ones who speak out as being "anti-American" or "blame America first." People like the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright.

And this whole argument that Sarah Palin is better qualified to be president than Barack Obama because she's had "executive experience" and all he's done is "community organizing," is crap. If my health were any better, I'd be community organizing right now. Community organizing is precisely what Republicans claim to be about: initiative, self-help, personal responsibility. In fact, just as soon as I figure out here, I'm going to head up some community organizing by way of conference phone calling. Watch me do it! And besides, I was the leader of my student Christian organization in college, president of the young adults of my church's Baptist association for 4 years. Does that qualify me to be president? And I had to get things done with no budget! What d'ya think about that Republicans?

And so help me Lord, if those lily white Republicans are using community organizing as some kind of code for "he's really, really black" because community organizing is something you usually associate with social activist groups; or if they're using community organizing for code "organizing=black community=he did do crack, so maybe he used to be and still is a crack dealer," I . . . I don't know what I'll do. I have to be careful about my health. But you can best believe it won't be good.

So to finish this off, don't be surprised if I don't blog for a while, or blog about things in my personal life. I would blog about something now, but just in case the person involved reads this, I don't want this person to know I'm still thinking about our previous conversation. But I swear, this person is so unvain, I could write their name and they still wouldn't know it was about them. It's one of the qualities I love best about this person.

But anyway, but for now and perhaps, for a while. I'm tired.

And I'm tired. So unless something especially egregious happens, or I do extraordinarily well in my fantasy football leagues, I'm taking a break.

Slavery Haunts America's Plantation Prisons

This was an urgent posting. I'll clean up any editing or aesthetics later.

Slavery Haunts America's Plantation Prisons
by: Maya Schenwar
t r u t h o u t Report
28 August 2008
http://www.truthout.org/article/slavery-haunts-americas-plantation-prisons

On an expanse of 18,000 acres of farmland, 59 miles
northwest of Baton Rouge, long rows of men, mostly
African-American, till the fields under the hot
Louisiana sun. The men pick cotton, wheat, soybeans and
corn. They work for pennies, literally. Armed guards,
mostly white, ride up and down the rows on horseback,
keeping watch. At the end of a long workweek, a bad
disciplinary report from a guard - whether true or false
- could mean a weekend toiling in the fields. The farm
is called Angola, after the homeland of the slaves who
first worked its soil.

This scene is not a glimpse of plantation days long
gone by. It's the present-day reality of thousands of
prisoners at the maximum security Louisiana State
Penitentiary, otherwise known as Angola. The block of
land on which the prison sits is a composite of several
slave plantations, bought up in the decades following
the Civil War. Acre-wise, it is the largest prison in
the United States. Eighty percent of its prisoners are
African-American.

"Angola is disturbing every time I go there," Tory
Pegram, who coordinates the International Coalition to
Free the Angola 3, told Truthout. "It's not even really
a metaphor for slavery. Slavery is what's going on."

Mwalimu Johnson, who spent 15 years as a prisoner at
the penitentiary and now works as executive secretary of
the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana,
concurred.

"I would truthfully say that Angola prison is a
sophisticated plantation," Johnson told Truthout.
"'Cotton is King' still applies when it come to Angola."

Angola is not alone. Sixteen percent of Louisiana
prisoners are compelled to perform farm labor, as are 17
percent of Texas prisoners and a full 40 percent of
Arkansas prisoners, according to the 2002 Corrections
Yearbook, compiled by the Criminal Justice Institute.
They are paid little to nothing for planting and picking
the same crops harvested by slaves 150 years ago.

On land previously occupied by a slave plantation,
Louisiana prisoners pick cotton, earning 4 cents an
hour. (Photo: Louisiana State Penitentiary)

Many prison farms, Angola included, have gruesome
post-bellum histories. In the 1950s, '60s and '70s,
Angola made news with a host of assaults - and killings
- of inmates by guards. In 1952, a group of Angola
prisoners found their work conditions so oppressive that
they resorted to cutting their Achilles' tendons in
protest. At Mississippi's Parchman Farm, another
plantation-to-prison convert, prisoners were routinely
subjected to near-death whippings and even shootings for
the first half of the 20th century. Cummins Farm, in
Arkansas, sported a "prison hospital" that doubled as a
torture chamber until a federal investigation exposed it
in 1970. And Texas's Jester State Prison Farm, formerly
Harlem Prison Farm, garnered its claim to fame from
eight prisoners who suffocated to death after being
sealed into a tiny cell and abandoned by guards.

Since a wave of activism forced prison farm
brutalities into the spotlight in the 1970s, some
reforms have taken place: At Angola, for example, prison
violence has been significantly reduced. But to a large
extent, the official stories have been repackaged. State
correctional departments now portray prison farm labor
as educational or vocational opportunities, as opposed
to involuntary servitude. The Alabama Department of
Corrections web site, for example, states that its
"Agriculture Program" "allows inmates to be trained in
work habits and allows them to develop marketable skills
in the areas of: Farming, Animal Husbandry, Vegetable,
meat, and milk processing."

According to Angola's web site, "massive reform" has
transformed the prison into a "stable, safe and
constitutional" environment. A host of new faith-based
programs at Angola have gotten a lot of media play,
including features in The Washington Post and The
Christian Science Monitor.

Cathy Fontenot, Angola's assistant warden, told
Truthout that the penitentiary is now widely known as an
"innovative and progressive prison."

"The warden says it takes good food, good medicine,
good prayin' and good playin' to have a good prison,"
Fontenot said, referring to the head warden, Burl Cain.
"Angola has all these."

However, the makeover has been markedly incomplete,
according to prisoners and their advocates.

"Most of the changes are cosmetic," said Johnson,
who was released from Angola in 1992 and, in his new
capacity as a prison rights advocate, stays in contact
with Angola prisoners. "In the conventional plantations,
slaves were given just enough food, clothing and shelter
to be a financial asset to the owner. The same is true
for the Louisiana prison system."

Wages for agricultural and industrial prison labor
are still almost nonexistent compared with the federal
minimum wage. Angola prisoners are paid anywhere from
four to twenty cents per hour, according to Fontenot.
Agricultural laborers fall on the lowest end of the pay
scale.

What's more, prisoners may keep only half the money
they make, according to Johnson, who notes that the
other half is placed in an account for prisoners to use
to "set themselves up" after they're released.

Besides the fact that two cents an hour may not
accumulate much of a start-up fund, there is one glaring
peculiarity about this arrangement: due to some of the
harshest sentencing practices in the country, most
Angola prisoners are never released. Ninety-seven
percent will die in prison, according to Fontenot.

(Ironically, the "progressive" label may well apply
to Angola, relative to some locations: In Texas,
Arkansas and Georgia, most prison farms pay nothing at
all.)

Angola prisoners technically work eight-hour days.
However, since extra work can be mandated as a
punishment for "bad behavior," hours may pile up well
over that limit, former prisoner Robert King told
Truthout.

"Prisoners worked out in the field, sometimes 17
hours straight, rain or shine," remembered King, who
spent 29 years in solitary confinement at Angola, until
he was released in 2001 after proving his innocence of
the crime for which he was incarcerated.

It's common for Angola prisoners to work 65 hours a
week after disciplinary reports have been filed,
according to Johnson. Yet, those reports don't
necessarily indicate that a prisoner has violated any
rules. Johnson describes guards writing out reports well
before the weekend, fabricating incident citations, then
filling in prisoners' names on Friday, sometimes at
random. Those prisoners would then spend their weekend
in the cotton fields.

Although mechanical cotton pickers are almost
universally used on modern-day farms, Angola prisoners
must harvest by hand, echoing the exact ritual that
characterized the plantation before emancipation.

According to King, these practices are undergirded
by entrenched notions of race-based authority.

"Guards talked to prisoners like slaves," King told
Truthout. "They'd tell you the officer was always right,
no matter what."

During the 1970s, prisoners were routinely beaten or
"dungeonized" without cause, King said. Now, guards'
power abuses are more expertly concealed, but they
persist, fed by racist assumptions, according to King.

Johnson described some of the white guards burning
crosses on prison lawns.

Much of this overt racism stems from the way the
basic system - and even the basic population - of Angola
and its environs have remained static since the days of
slavery, according to Pegram. After the plantation was
converted to a prison, former plantation overseers and
their descendants kept their general roles, becoming
prison officials and guards. This white overseer
community, called B-Line, is located on the farm's
grounds, both close to the prisoners and completely
separate from them. In addition to their prison labor,
Angola's inmates do free work for B-Line residents, from
cutting their grass to trimming their hair to cleaning
up Prison View Golf Course, the only course in the
country where players can watch prisoners laboring as
they golf.

Another landmark of the town, the Angola Prison
Museum, is also run by multi-generation Angola
residents. The museum exhibits "Old Sparky," the solid
oak electric chair used for executions at Angola until
1991. Visitors can purchase shirts that read, "Angola: A
Gated Community."

Despite its antebellum MO, Angola's labor system
does not break the law. In fact, it is explicitly
authorized by the Constitution. The 13th Amendment,
which prohibits forced labor, contains a caveat. It
reads, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as a punishment for crime where of the party
shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the
United States."

That clause has a history of being manipulated,
according to Fordham Law Professor Robert Kaczorowski,
who has written extensively on civil rights and the
Constitution. Directly after the 13th Amendment was
enacted, it began to be utilized to justify slavery-like
practices, according to Kaczorowski. Throughout the
South, former slaves were arrested for trivial crimes
(vagrancy, for example), fined, and imprisoned when they
could not pay their fines. Then, landowners could supply
the fine in exchange for the prisoner's labor,
essentially perpetuating slavery.

Although such close reproductions of private
enslavement were phased out, the 13th Amendment still
permits involuntary servitude.

"Prisoners can be forced to work for the government
against their will, and this is true in every state,"
Kaczorowski told Truthout.

In recent years, activists have begun to focus on
the 13th Amendment's exception for prisoners, according
to Pegram. African-Americans are disproportionately
incarcerated; one in three black men has been in prison
at some point in his life. Therefore, African-Americans
are much more likely to be subject to involuntary
servitude.

"I would have more faith in that amendment if it
weren't so clear that our criminal justice system is
racially biased in a really obvious way," Pegram said.

Prison activists like Johnson believe that
ultimately, permanently changing the status quo at
places like Angola may mean changing the Constitution -
amending the 13th Amendment to abolish involuntary
servitude for all.

"I don't have any illusions that this is a simple
process," Johnson said. "Many people are apathetic about
what happens in prisons. It would be very difficult, but
I would not suggest it would be impossible."

Even without a constitutional overhaul, some states
have done away with prison farms of their own accord. In
Connecticut, where the farms were prevalent before the
1970s, the farms have been phased out, partially due to
the perceived slavery connection. "Many black inmates
viewed farm work under these circumstances as too close
to slavery to want to participate," according to a 1995
report to the Connecticut General Assembly.

For now, though, the prison farm is alive and well
in Louisiana. And at Angola, many prisoners can expect
to be buried on the land they till. Two cemeteries,
Point Lookout 1 and 2, lie on the prison grounds. No one
knows exactly how many prisoners are interred in the
former, since, after a flood washed away the first
Angola cemetery in 1927, the bodies were reburied in a
large common grave.

Point Lookout 1 is now full, and with the vast
majority of Angola's prisoners destined to die in
prison, Point Lookout 2 is well on its way, according to
King.

"Angola is pretty huge," King said. "They've got a
lot of land to bury a lot of prisoners."

_____________________________________________

Man! What the . . .

Yeah. I won't finish my thought, but you get my drift.

I never thought this nation treated its poor citizens all that great. Especially since everytime the economy goes bad, Republicans all wanna cut "entitlement" programs. But this is just stupid.

Probation Profiteers
In Georgia's outsourced justice system, a traffic ticket can land you deep in the hole.

Celia Perry
July 21 , 2008

Welcome to Americus, Georgia. Located 10 miles east of the peanut farm where Jimmy Carter was raised, the town has a charming city center with broad streets, a diner that still sells hot dogs for 95 cents, a Confederate flag that flies conspicuously on the outskirts of town, railroad tracks that divide white and black neighborhoods, chain gangs that labor along the roadways, and, on South Lee Street, right across from the courthouse, its very own private probation office. Middle Georgia Community Probation Services is one of 37 companies to whom local governments have outsourced the supervision of misdemeanor and traffic offenders. It's been billed as a way to save millions of dollars for Georgia and at least nine other states where private probation is used. But to its critics, the system looks more like a way to milk scarce dollars from the poorest of the poor.

Here's how it works: If you have enough money to pay your fine the day you go to court for, say, a speeding ticket, you can usually avoid probation. But those who can't scrape up a few hundred dollars—and nearly 28 percent of Americus residents live below the poverty line—must pay their fine, as well as at least $35 in monthly supervision fees to a private company, in weekly or biweekly installments over a period of three months to a year. By the time their term is over, they may have paid more than twice what the judge ordered.

In his courtroom, which doubles as the Americus City Council's chambers, Judge J. Michael Greene issues a rehearsed warning about these additional charges, though he doesn't point out that they go to a private company; instead, he compares them to "taxes we all pay at the grocery store." When I was there in April, he admonished the African American defendants before him, "Don't fuss at the court clerks. If you do, you are going to jail. They have no more power over it than the nice lady at the checkout counter."

Carla, a 25-year-old single mother who lives in public housing, has been on probation for more than three years. "I never see myself getting off of it," she told me. "I could get off of it this year if they let the fines stay what they is and don't increase them. But every week and every month, they go up."

Carla's current case is a traffic violation, issued after she rolled through two stop signs. Judge Greene placed her on probation and ordered her to pay a $200 fine plus Middle Georgia's supervision fees. In January, she prematurely gave birth to her second child. The staples from her cesarean ripped, and she was placed on bed rest. "I couldn't even take my baby to the doctor," she says. Carla called her probation officer every Tuesday trying to report. "After a while I received a letter saying I ain't reporting or calling or doing nothing I was supposed to do. And she issued a warrant." One letter she got from Middle Georgia read, "Probation is a priviledge [sic] not a right. Probation did not levy a fine—the courts did." She was, the letter said, $245 behind. Two months later, thanks to various penalties, that amount had shot up to $525, and her total remaining balance was $690, more than three times the original fine.

By the time I met Carla, her sister had helped her get a minimum-wage job at the local dollar store. But she'd stopped contacting Middle Georgia because she feared going to jail (and losing her kids) if she showed her face. Her friend Erica, who also has a warrant out because of probation fees, told me she worries every time she goes outside. "You be scared to walk to your mailbox, because that's what the law do—they ride around and try to find you. You're scared to look for a job. But unless you get a job you can't pay your fine. So either way, you're just stuck."

No one at Middle Georgia returned my calls, so I stopped by the company's Americus office; there, I watched a female probation officer instruct a toothless man about the additional fees he needed to pay for improperly storing scrap tires at his auto shop. "Y'all know this ain't right," he shouted. "You railroading me!" Eventually, another Middle Georgia employee noticed me. I told her I was a reporter. "We don't talk to reporters," she said coolly.

Middle Georgia, along with the rest of the state's private probation industry, owes much of its business to Bobby Whitworth, who was Georgia's commissioner of corrections until 1993, when a sex-abuse scandal involving female inmates forced him out. Gov. Zell Miller promptly reassigned him to the Board of Pardons and Paroles, which positioned him nicely for a side job consulting with a private probation company called Detention Management Services. Three years later, in December 2003, a jury found Whitworth guilty of public corruption for accepting $75,000 from the company to draft and lobby for legislation that dramatically expanded the role of private probation companies. Whitworth was sent to prison for six months, but the law remains on the books, and the private probation industry—led by Georgia's two most powerful Republican lobbyists—has lobbied to be given felony cases as well. That plan has run into opposition from law enforcement: One sheriff told lawmakers last year that among his peers, private probation was seen mostly "as a moneymaking fee-collection service." Another said there is generally "not a lot of emphasis on supervision as much as there is on collection."

Lawrence Holt, a thin, 24-year-old African American man, is a supervisor at a mattress factory in Americus. He's held the job for three years, but lives in the projects and, like every member of his family before him, hits the bottle hard. He's been on probation since November, because of an arrest for driving under the influence a few days after his brother died of diabetes. By April, he had paid his original $600 fine, but had $645 to go to cover Middle Georgia's fees. He told me he wouldn't mind paying if his probation officer would only help him get treatment. "I throw up blood," he said. "I just can't stop drinking because I got so many problems in my head. I have asked, 'Can y'all find somebody to help me with my alcohol problem?' 'Sir, we can't do that. We don't do that.'"

"These are not cold, hardened criminals," local naacp chapter president Matt Wright, a 57-year-old caterer, told me. "These are just people struggling, trying to make it. The probation officers know it's hard for a poor person to come up with that money. They trick 'em into getting back in the system. They go back before the judge and the judge fines them again, puts them on probation again. And the cycle repeats itself."