Florida is a special version of horrible when it comes to treatment of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. The citizens of Florida overwhelmingly voted to restore voting rights to people who had completed their sentence. Ron DeSantis and the Republicans modified the law to prevent people from voting if they hadn't paid all of their fees, which there is no central tracking or source of. They then went on to arrest Black citizens who tried to register to vote after their PO had told them they owed no money and were clear to vote.
Alabama should be included on any list of states terrible to inmates. We still have jails and prisons without HVAC. I really don't care what you did, having to live in a metal and concrete box in the middle of an Alabama summer without basic air conditioning is absolutely torture in my book.
I love this ^^^ However, you forgot one particularly disgusting tidbit: the Supreme Court blessed Florida's poll tax, basically concluding that, even though it looks like a poll tax, it's really not, so it's all good.
Do you believe someone who had been released from prison with no housing, no income, no phone, no computer, and no job, trying to get on their feet, would have the time or money to hire a lawyer and submit a petition within their first two months?
Yeah let me look that up that lawyer's number on my phone that I have to pay $120 in unpaid device payment fees plus $50 in reactivation fees before t-mobile reactivates my data plan.
No worries, let me just use the McDonalds wifi, I'll drive there in my car that was repossessed while I was incarcerated since no one was paying my car payment.
Actually, I'll use my laptop at home. Oh nevermind, it was thrown out on the side of the street a month after I was incarcerated because I got evicted for nonpayment of rent and someone driving by grabbed it.
Things that are simple for you and I are 1,000% more difficult for someone who was just out of prison or is currently homeless.
It's a wonder mini Jan 6 events don't happen more often. Either people are more cowed than I'd hope, the Murphy's Law outcomes like that almost never happen, or the surveillance state is so complete it would make Eric Blair turn stone cold and piss his britches.
> It's a wonder mini Jan 6 events don't happen more often.
An event involving a bunch of people with the financial wherewithal to all take vacation from work and travel across the nation, in order to support an auto-coup with the tacit blessing of a President in power who keeps not-really-joking about being president for life?
I wouldn't use that label since I don't see a lot of overlap with the downtrodden people we're talking about here.
What percentage of ex convicts are so completely isolated from society that they have no friends, family, or even a public defender, social worker, or parole officer?
This does not include those who were not wrongfully convicted, but who did not serve out the entirety of their sentences, or who had been released without the state admitting wrongdoing. This appears to be more limited in scope than the parent comment’s underlying point.
So if you went to prison for 7 years, and your conviction wasn’t overturned but you served your time, it’s somehow ok for the government to send you a bill for $50 * 365 * 7 = $127750? When convicted felons usually struggle to find better than minimum wage jobs due to their records? What a perversion of “justice”. And if you get out early for good behavior or due to prison overcrowding (again, your sentence was valid) you still get charged for the full 7 years? How is that morally reasonable?
No it is theft, also I think it's like this because the state needs criminals to justify its standing army and policing powers. If it's this hard to do well, kneecapping someone only makes it more likely they will betray society instead of rejoining it. No criminals means no need for police or SWAT or overreaching crime fighting powers or overbearing surveillance. The State is a higher order organism which needs criminals to justify itself.
How is that morally reasonable? I think it depends on whether the court was aware of this and considered it during sentencing. If someone served 7 years for a major corruption charge, paid $1.5 Million in restitution, and $250k in fines, then I think $127k in fees might be perfectly reasonable.
If someone served 7 years on a drug charge, the part that I would find morally reprehensible would probably be the incarceration. In my mind 7 years of prison is a lot worse than the $127k.
I am not a bankruptcy (or criminal) lawyer, but it may also be dischargeable in bankruptcy. What I see online says "punitive" charges are not dischargeable, but "reimbursement" based charges are and this seems related to reimbursing the state for the cost of the bed.
nativeit says that it doesn't apply to those who were not wrongfully convicted, then an authoritative source is presented that clearly states that it does apply to those who were not wrongfully convicted, and your counterclaim is that "wrongfully convicted" is a term of art with a specific legal meaning?
Tell that to the person who said that it doesn't apply to those who were not wrongfully convicted, using those exact words, not the person who is providing authoritative references stating that it does.
GP was talking about correctly convicted prisoners who had completed their sentences, you are talking about wrongful convictions. You seem to think you replied to someone upthread who told a different story about wrongful convictions in Florida, but have inadvertently replied to the wrong person.
> And well, this was done for a very simple reason: almost all criminals vote Democratic.
Criminals deserve human rights as anyone else does, but, all the same, I think it's important not to buy into the framing imprisoned → criminal. (To be clear, these charges would still be wrong even if we lived in a world where only the guilty were imprisoned, but that's not our world.)
I also doubt your statistic. Do you have a reference?
I have no objection to calling "almost all criminals vote Democratic" a "claim" rather than a "statistic," although I'm not sure what it changes. I still doubt the claim, and, even if there is no pre-defined numeric threshold at which one can say precisely that one more criminal voting Democratic would mean "almost all" do, and one less would mean the contrary, then there are certainly quantitative data that could be judged to refute it—for example, if fewer than half do—or that could be judged to be evidence for it—or example, if 90% do. I think it is reasonable to ask for a reference to some confirmatory evidence for such a statement.
