Are we creating punishments that fit the 'crime'? or getting carried away with incarceration and money/fines?

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/12/woman_dies_in_jail_while_serving_sentence_for_her_kids_unpaid_school_fines/

A Pennsylvania woman died in a jail cell over the weekend while serving a 48-hour sentence for her children'��s unpaid school fines. Eileen DiNino was found dead on Saturday in a Berks County jail cell where she was midway through the sentence that would have eliminated around $2,000 in fines and related court fees related to her children’s attendance at school. Police have said her death is not considered suspicious, but the cause has yet to be determined. She was 55 years old and a mother to seven children.

��This lady didn'��t need to be there,�� District Judge Dean Patton �� who said he was ��reluctant�� to sentence DiNino ,�� told the Associated Press. ��We don'��t do debtors prisons anymore. That went out 100 years ago.�� More than 1,600 people have been jailed in Berks County alone �� the majority of them women �� because of similar fines.



More from the Associated Press:

Patton said he has lost sleep over her death. At the same time, he acknowledged that a short jail stint can sometimes '��break the habit'�� of parents who'��d rather party into the night than take their children to school the next day. The county started a program a few years ago that gives families 30 to 60 days to keep daily logs of each class and assignment. He estimated that the district truancy rate had dropped more than 30 percent.

DiNino did not work or appear to have much help with four children still at home, according to Patton. She frequently skipped hearings, or arrived without requested documents.

'��She cared about her kids, but her kids ruled the roost'�� Patton said. ��She was just accepting what was coming, and (would) let the cards fall where they may.��

Although she was often unkempt, she came to court clean and neat to surrender Friday, he said. She had on clean sweatpants, had combed her hair, and had tape holding her glasses together.

��She was a different person. She was cleaned up, smiling,�� Patton said. ��I think she realized, when this is done, the weight was off her shoulders.��

Berks County Commissioner Kevin Barnhardt, chairman of the county prison board, expressed outrage that DeNino died alone and away from her family while serving a sentence that was meted out for the crime of being poor. ��This woman died in prison, away from her family,�� Barnhardt told the Reading Eagle. ��And for what?��


The circumstances of DeNino'��s death are a stark and tragic reminder of how being poor is considered a crime worthy of punishment in the United States. Thousands have been jailed in Berks County for failure to pay truancy fines, but court fees and other fines have put thousands of others behind bars across the country. As an investigation by National Public Radio revealed, a homeless man was sentenced to a year in jail because he couldn’t pay the $2,600 penalty he incurred after shoplifting a $2 can of beer. A teenager was jailed for three days because he couldn'��t pay the fine associated with catching a fish off season.

Debtor prisons have never gone out of vogue, just ask the I.R.S. or
anyone who has had the pleasure of their services for failing to give
Uncle Sammy what he feels belongs to him, ya know, his much needed
" revenue " to finance " the nanny state " and the worlds " police "
force !!!!

As for the story, and this tragic incident, it is a shame that some
see this as an attack on the poor and not on " poor " parenting
skills.

I believe this is more about poor parenting skills and life choices
that this woman made which ultimately affect the/her children and
their future.

But there has to be a better way then sending them/her to prison !!

The fact that the woman died while serving a very-very-very short jail sentence is irrelevant to the reason why she was serving that very-very-very short jail sentence.

yes, that she died is irrelevant

that incarcerating someone for not having money may be a punishment not fitting the crime is not,,,

If she hadn't allowed her children to skip school as much as they did, then the woman wouldn't have been in legal trouble in the first place.

I've known plenty of single mothers with several children and no father figure to help guide and discipline them that can't keep their kids under control after they reach a certain rebellious age.

It takes a village to raise children properly.

Poorer women have it much harder in every aspect of life, and its not from a lack of trying to do their best. They are only one person with so much they can do.

Should we go even farther and say poor women should keep their legs closed and not continue having children they can't afford or control?

That would be a great idea in theory.

But the poor men I know have serious control over their women, and when both are struggling to survive the basic facts of life is about all they do feel powerful over.

I think the real issue in this particular story is WHAT caused the woman's untimely death in such a short amount of time?

Was she a drug addict or an alcoholic and died from the immediate onset of withdrawal, like the DT's?

She was 55, and might have had undiagnosed high blood pressure and stroked out, or had a heart attack if she wasn't being monitored correctly.

If the deceased woman wasn't a widow, then I'd like to know where the father of her children was while those children were skipping school.

how do we know she 'allowed' it?,, parents , especially those trying to work, aren't in their kids back pockets 24/7, and kids have wills of their own.

If US legal convention is anything like the Commonwealth, serving time to cancel by-law (non-criminal) fines is optional and elective. You don't even have to see a judge, a court clerk can give you the option of paying off the fines at an affordable plan, or serving time in local jailhouses (not prisons) at a particular rate per day, concurrently.

How it works is the judge says "two thousand dollar fine, pay at the clerk office" and you have a default 7, 14 or 28 day deadline. You can ask the judge to give you a payment plan based on income as you can't afford to pay it all at once.
Even if you don't do that you can see the clerk and ask him, generally it's okay.

What you can also do is ask the clerk if you can serve jailtime instead. Sometimes this is actually a good idea if you have more than one fine, since you can typically serve them concurrently.
Say it's $100/day but you have a number of fines totally $2000, serving concurrent means you only have to work off the single largest fine and all the others are served alongside it, so if the biggest single fine is $200 out of a total of $2000, you still only serve 2 days and all the fines are cancelled.

Even if you don't see the clerk for that, you can default of the fines, then when the warrant is served elect to serve time instead of paying them. Same rules apply.
You don't need to go to a prison unless your jailtime exceeds 28 days, even though you can only stay at a jailhouse for up to 7 days, you can be moved around several jailhouses at local police stations for up to 28 days before you have to actually go into a prison.
Say you're on minimum wage and a few thousand is real hard to come by, even saving, then doing a couple of days to pay off concurrent fines totalling a few thousand looks pretty attractive.

So in remand centres and jailhouses, probably the most common resident is there serving fines as opposed to people charged with criminal offences.

What I've often found is most of the western democracies actually have very similar legal systems and cultures, but just tend to use very different terminology, plus a few isolated regional differences like US personal defence laws compared to Commonwealth ones. But the very fact things like Interpol works reasonably well is because most of the developed world works upon similar legal themes and tends to prosecute similar things similarly.

They simply turned it around,and lock you up for disobeying the Court ordering you to pay up!
Contempt of Court!
Got you coming and going!

http://archive.mises.org/17835/from-3-to-4500-what-laws-have-you-broken-today/

From 3 to 4,500: What laws have you broken today?

The U.S. Constitution mentions three federal crimes by citizens: treason, piracy and counterfeiting. Today, there are an estimated 4,500 crimes in federal statutes, write Gary Fields and John R. Emshwiller for the Wall Street Journal.

Clarence Darrow anticipated the prison nation that America is today a hundred years ago in his book Resist Not Evil. All areas of life have become part of the penal code, with an army of people operating as police, legislators, and the court system to enforce these laws through force and violence. But even Darrow wouldn't have dreamed that the unauthorized use of the Smokey Bear image, or of the slogan Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute can land a person in federal prison.

Fields and Emshwiller's frightening article tells about a father and son chased by the Feds for unknowingly digging on federal ground for arrowheads.The Andersons are two of the hundreds of thousands of Americans to be charged and convicted in recent decades under federal criminal laws as opposed to state or local laws,as the federal justice system has dramatically expanded its authority and reach.

The American Bar Association can't even tally up the federal offenses exactly but believe the number exceeds 3,000. The ABA's report said the amount of individual citizen behavior now potentially subject to federal criminal control has increased in astonishing proportions in the last few decades.
A Justice spokeswoman told the WSJ, that there was no quantifiable number. Criminal statutes are sprinkled throughout some 27,000 pages of the federal code, write Fields and Emshwiller.

These crimes of the state's making are sending 83,000 people a year to federal prison. While the US population has grown 36% in the past three decades, three times more people are going to prison, with immigration and drug violations making up over 60% of the offenses in 2010. The federal prison population has grown eight fold during this period.

Of course much of the public cheers on the increasing prison state.

Roscoe Howard, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, argues that the system isn't broken.Congress, he says, took its cue over the decades from a public less tolerant of certain behaviors. Current law provides a range of options to protect society, he says. It would be horrible if they started repealing laws and taking those options away.

One wonders if Howard believes 77-year-old race-car legend Bobby Unser deserves to have a criminal record for accidentally driving a snowmobile onto protected federal land, violating the Wilderness Act, while lost in a snowstorm. Or whether a Pennsylvania woman who violated a 1998 federal chemical-weapons law tied to an international arms-control treaty should spend six years in prison. The woman spread some chemicals that burned her husband's paramour on the thumb.

The woman has challenged the law's constitutionality and the Supreme Court is sympathetic.

During oral arguments in the case, Justice Samuel Alito expressed concern about the law's breadth by laying out a hypothetical example. Simply pouring a bottle of vinegar into a bowl to kill someone's goldfish, Justice Alito said, could be potentially punishable by life imprisonment.

And this is todays justice system? Darrow wrote in 1902,

the state furnishes no machinery for arriving at justice. [It] has no way of arriving at the facts. If the state pretends to administer justice this should be its highest concern. It should not be interested in convicting men or punishing crime, but administering justice between men. It is obvious to the most casual observer that the state furnishes no machinery to accomplish this result.



"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Ayn Rand -FN-

I just wonder how constructive it is to put people in prison/jail for not being able to pay a fine

they certainly cant pay it from jail, or after they lose a job for being incarcerated,,,


hard crimes, I understand,,, crimes where no one is hurt, I don't quite get,,,,