hedwigs-travelcompanion

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Good question:

In the United States, many jails and prisons can and will charge you money for every single night that you spend imprisoned, for the entire duration of your incarceration, as if you were being billed for staying at a hotel. Even if you are incarcerated for years. Adding up to tens of thousands of dollars. What happens when you’re released?

In response to this:

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So.

You’re getting charged, like, ten dollars every time you even submit a request form to possibly be seen by a doctor or dentist.

You’re getting charged maybe five dollars for ten minutes on the phone.

Any time a friend or family tries to send you like five dollars so that you can buy some toothpaste or lotion, or maybe a snack from the commissary since you’re diabetic and the “meals” have left you malnourished, maybe half of that money gets taken as a “service fee” by the corporate contractor that the prison uses to manage your pre-paid debit card. So you’re already losing money every day just by being there.

What happens if you can’t pay?

In some places, after serving just a couple of years for drugs charges, almost 20 years after being released, the state can still hunt you down for over $80,000 that you “owe” as if it were a per-night room-and-board accommodations charge, like this recent highly-publicized case in Connecticut:

Excerpt:

Two decades after her release from prison, [TB] feels she is still being punished. When her mother died two years ago, the state of Connecticut put a lien on the Stamford home she and her siblings inherited. It said she owed $83,762 to cover the cost of her 2 ½ year imprisonment for drug crimes. […] “I’m about to be homeless,” said [TB], 58, who in March [2022] became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the state law that charges prisoners $249 a day for the cost of their incarceration. […] All but two states have so-called “pay-to-stay” laws that make prisoners pay for their time behind bars […]. Critics say it’s an unfair second penalty that hinders rehabilitation by putting former inmates in debt for life. Efforts have been underway in some places to scale back or eliminate such policies. Two states — Illinois and New Hampshire — have repealed their laws since 2019. […] Pay-to-stay laws were put into place in many areas during the tough-on-crime era of the 1980s and ’90s, said Brittany Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology at University of Southern California who is leading a study of the practice. […] Connecticut used to collect prison debt by attaching an automatic lien to every inmate, claiming half of any financial windfall they might receive for up to 20 years after they are released from prison […].

Text by: Pat Eaton-Robb. “At $249 per day, prison stays leave ex-inmates deep in debt.” AP News / The Associated Press. 27 August 2022.

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Look at this:

To help her son, Cindy started depositing between $50 to $100 a week into Matthew’s account, money he could use to buy food from the prison commissary, such as packaged ramen noodles, cookies, or peanut butter and jelly to make sandwiches. Cindy said sending that money wasn’t necessarily an expense she could afford. “No one can,” she said. So far in the past month, she estimates she sent Matthew close to $300. But in reality, he only received half of that amount. The balance goes straight to the prison to pay off the $1,000 in “rent” that the prison charged Matthew for his prior incarceration. […] A PA Post examination of six county budgets (Crawford, Dauphin, Lebanon, Lehigh, Venango and Indiana) showed that those counties’ prisons have collected more than $15 million from inmates — almost half is for daily room and board fees that are meant to cover at least a portion of the costs with housing and food. Prisoners who don’t work are still expected to pay. If they don’t, their bills are sent to collections agencies, which can report the debts to credit bureaus. […] Between 2014 and 2017, the Indiana County Prison — which has an average inmate population of 87 people — collected nearly $3 million from its prisoners. In the past five years, Lebanon’s jail collected just over $2 million in housing and processing fees.

Text by: Joseph Darius Jaafari. “Paying rent to your jailers: Inmates are billed millions of dollars for their stays in Pa. prisons.” WHYY (PBS). 10 December 2019. Originally published at PA Post.

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Pay-to-stay, the practice of charging people to pay for their own jail or prison confinement, is being enforced unfairly by using criminal, civil and administrative law, according to a new Rutgers University-New Brunswick led study. The study […] finds that charging pay-to-stay fees is triggered by criminal justice contact but possible due to the co-opting of civil and administrative institutions, like social service agencies and state treasuries that oversee benefits, which are outside the realm of criminal justice. “A person can be charged $20 to $80 a day for their incarceration,” said author Brittany Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology and a faculty affiliate of Rutgers’ criminal justice program. “That per diem rate can lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees when a person gets out of prison. To recoup fees, states use civil means such as lawsuits and wage garnishment against currently and formerly incarcerated people, and regularly use administrative means such as seizing employment pensions, tax refunds and public benefits to satisfy the debt.” […] Civil penalties are enacted on family members if the defendant cannot pay and in states such as Florida, Nevada and Idaho can occur even after the original defendant is deceased. […]

Text by: Megan Schumann. “States Unfairly Burdening Incarcerated People With “Pay-to-Stay” Fees.” Rutgers press release. 20 November 2020.

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So, to pay for your own imprisonment, states can:

– hunt you down for decades (track you down 20 years later, charge you tens of thousands of dollars, and take your house away)

– put a lien on your vehicle, house

– garnish your paycheck/wages

– seize your tax refund

– send collections agencies after you

– take your public assistance benefits

– sue you in civil court

– take money from your family even after you’re dead

[hedwigs-travelcompanion]

“I’m like, ‘Okay, she’s a doll. She’s a plastic doll. She doesn’t have organs. If she doesn’t have organs, she doesn’t have reproductive organs. If she doesn’t have reproductive organs, would she even feel sexual desire?’ No, I don’t think she could,” Robbie said. “She is sexualized. But she should never be sexy. People can project sex onto her. Yes, she can wear a short skirt, but because it’s fun and pink. Not because she wanted you to see her butt.”

Margot Robbie said Ace Barbie Rights with her whole chest.

[hedwigs-travelcompanion]

im very glad this person no longer has a gas leak by her bed but in retrospect this reveal signified that a vibe shift was happening... no longer do we flirt by saying we need to repopulate the hive

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[hedwigs-travelcompanion]

every mousegirl needs a big wife to put her in a toilet paper tube and shoot her like a blowdart

[hedwigs-travelcompanion]

No no you don't understand! I want to watch this show/movie, read this book, listen to this podcast, etc.! But I must be in the right mindset and the exact head space to begin, or I just can't!

[hedwigs-travelcompanion]

dude i know you said you weren't feeling good but you have to come over a gnome is letting us take shots out of his hat

[hedwigs-travelcompanion]

making up characters is so fun because you can be like “this is johnson he came from my mind” and all your friends will go “yippe!!! horray!!! we love johnson!!!”

[hedwigs-travelcompanion]

i love the term "joshing." it's slang, meaning to joke or tease playfully. "i'm just joshing you." who is this notorious josh. who joshed so much that the whole concept got named after him

[hedwigs-travelcompanion]

I like to think that at least once, the Avatar cycle seemed to skip the Water Tribe—like people knew it was the water tribe’s turn, everyone was looking for them, the tests are done on all the kids, but like 60-80 years go by and no avatar until some Earth Kingdom kid shows up. People wonder if the cycle skipped a generation or what, but nothing serious was going on at that time so they shrug and move on.

It’s only many many years later that someone is researching Swampbender oral history and someone tells the story of “Ol Stinky Jess, she was a funny one, could light the swamp on fire an’ all sorts o’ shenanigans! Best catfishgator catcher in the tribe, she was” and thats literally it, she just lived a totally chill life in the swamp and nobody knew what an avatar was at the time so they just rolled with that funny gal’s odd bending ways.

[hedwigs-travelcompanion]

[hedwigs-travelcompanion]

We need to go back to using sailing ships full time like immediately. Yes it would take longer to get places but the Aesthetic is unmatched

Like there is nothing sexier hthan this

[hedwigs-travelcompanion]

Wait for it

[hedwigs-travelcompanion]

An 8,000-year-old marble figurine of a voluptuous woman was unearthed in 2016 in the Neolithic urban settlement of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey. The figurine is 17 centimeters long, 11 centimeters wide and weighs one kilo.

[hedwigs-travelcompanion]

[hedwigs-travelcompanion]

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (1994) dir. Neil Jordan