Sunday, June 16, 2013

Dark Clouds Over Fort Worth's Dickensian Debtor's Prison

There was a dark cloud hanging over the stunning skyline of beautiful downtown Fort Worth, this Father's Day Sunday in Texas, when I got myself some salubrious endorphin inducing aerobic stimulation via hill hiking in the Tandy Hills Sauna Steam Bath.

By dark cloud hanging over Fort Worth, I am referring to the dark cloud in the picture, not the one I read about in this morning's Fort Worth Star-Telegram in an article titled Is Fort Worth too tough on traffic offenders?

Too rough? That seems to be an understatement.

Apparently Fort Worth is running a totally idiotic Dickensian Debtor's Prison, throwing victims into squalid conditions, incarcerated while the victim's traffic violation fine is wiped out, credited at $338.45 per day of incarceration.

According to the Star-Telegram, the people of Fort Worth, via their inept city government, are spending $248 per inmate to incarcerate the victims in an out of town jail. The article did not indicate if this $248 per inmate is the per day cost, or the average cost, factoring the total paid, by Fort Worth, of $5.96 million per year, for the out of town jail, divided by the number of victims incarcerated, which, apparently, is around 24,000 hapless Fort Worthers per year.

Isn't there something in the U.S. Constitution that indicates that cruel and unusual punishment is a bad thing?

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