Debtors prison

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

I learned about this issue when I was working on the mayoral campaign. I was shocked to learn there were dozens of people in jail for months — because they couldn’t afford to pay fines for misdemeanors like drunk and disorderly. And of course, you’re actually charged for your stay, which makes it even worse. These laws are insane, and now we have de facto debtors prisons:

A Pennsylvania mother of seven died in a jail cell where she was serving a two-day sentence for her children’s absence from school, drawing complaints from the judge that sent her there about a broken system that punishes impoverished parents.

Eileen DiNino, 55, of Reading, was found dead in a jail cell Saturday, halfway through a 48-hour sentence that would have erased about $2,000 in fines and court costs. The debt had accrued since 1999, and involved several of her seven children, most recently her boys at a vocational high school.

“Did something happen? Was she scared to death?” said District Judge Dean R. Patton, who reluctantly sent DiNino to the Berks County jail Friday after she failed to pay the debt for four years.

He described her as “a lost soul,” and questioned Pennsylvanian laws that criminalize such lapses as truancy or failing to pay a trash bill.

“This lady didn’t need to be there,” Patton said. “We don’t do debtors prisons anymore. That went out 100 years ago.”

Her death is not suspicious, but the cause has not yet been determined, police said.

Now that it’s happened to a white person, maybe they’ll do something about it.

Philadelphia isn’t all bad news

~ susie
MATT SLOCUM — AP Photo
MATT SLOCUM — AP Photo

Hey, we take our happy stories where we can get them!

PHILADELPHIA — It’s rush hour in Philadelphia for thousands of baby toads as they hop across a busy residential street on a rainy summer night.

Why do toadlets cross the road? To get to the woods on the other side — where they will live, eat mosquitoes and grow up to be full-sized American toads (bufo Americanus). After a couple of years, they’ll make the reverse trek as adults — unless they get squashed by a car.

That’s where the Toad Detour comes in.

The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education sets up a roadblock each year in the Roxborough neighborhood, rerouting cars so the amphibians can cross the two-lane street without fear of, um, croaking.

The cycle starts in early spring when adult toads, which can fit in the palm of your hand, emerge from the woods to breed. They cross Port Royal Avenue, scale a 10-foot-high embankment and then travel down a densely vegetated hill to mate in the abandoned Upper Roxborough Reservoir. Their offspring — each about the size of a raisin — make the journey in reverse about six weeks later.

So many baby toads were on the move Monday evening it looked like the road’s muddy shoulder was alive. Volunteers scooped them up in plastic cups and deposited them on the habitat side of the street.

“I didn’t expect at all that there were going to be so many of them in one area,” said 17-year-old Kaitlyn Hunt as she held a cup with more than a dozen toadlets. “And they’re so tiny. They look like bugs.”

Ho boy

~ susie ~ 7 Comments

chris_hedges-1-2-2
Chris Hedges, plagarist.

“The Katz stuff was flat out plagiarism,” says the Harper’s fact-checker. “At least twenty instances of sentences that were exactly the same. Three grafs where a ‘that’ was changed to a ‘which.’” The fact-checker reiterated to me that first-person accounts in Hedges’s draft had him quoting the same sources as in Katz’s pieces, with the sources using exactly the same wording as in Katz’s pieces. “Hedges not only used another journalist’s quotes,” says the fact-checker, “but he used them in first-person scenes, claiming he himself gathered the quotes. It was one of the worst things I’d ever seen as a fact-checker at the magazine. And it was endemic throughout the piece.”

The fact-checker spoke on the phone with Hedges at least three times and exchanged about a dozen e-mails with him. “He was very unhelpful from the beginning, and very aggressive,” said the fact-checker. Hedges repeatedly claimed he had done original reporting. “Hedges reassured me there were no problems,” said Ross. “He then went to the fact-checker and tried to intimidate him and give him a hard time. Hedges told him, ‘Why are you going to the editor?’”

The fact-checker told me, “Not only was the plagiarism more egregious than I had seen before, but it was shocking how unapologetic Hedges was when it was put in his face. He got very heavy-handed about it. He kept claiming that the people quoted in the Katz piece gave him the exact same quotes.”

According to Ross and the fact-checker, Hedges then tried to circumvent their questions by appealing privately to Harper’s publisher Rick MacArthur, who at the time was a personal friend.

“After it became clear that we had a serious problem, the reaction at the magazine was admirable,” Ross said. “Ellen brought me in to talk to Hedges on the phone when we killed it. He was very upset. He didn’t believe he did anything wrong. It was a hostile conversation between the three of us. It got heated. I said words to the effect of ‘Chris, we’re doing you a favor here. You don’t want to go out with that kind of work. Because you’ll get caught. Someone is going to catch you.’ I thought it was all pretty sad. Here was a chance to do a creative, smart, impactful story on poverty and we lost it because he wasn’t willing to do the work.” Hedges has not been invited to write for Harper’s again.

10,000 suicides tied to recession

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

How can you be sure, how can you be certain?

Oh, come on! It only has important implications for policymakers if they want to stop them:

The lost jobs, sinking home values and stock market free-fall of the Great Recession led to a significant rise in suicides, according to a new study.

At least 10,000 more Americans and Europeans took their own lives from 2007 to 2010 than during the good economic times of the previous few years, the study found.

“It’s a fairly large and substantial increase over what we would have expected,” said Aaron Reeves, a sociologist and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford in England, who helped lead the research. “There are, broadly speaking, large mental health implications of the economic crisis that are still being felt by many people.”

Suicide rates didn’t climb evenly. In Sweden and Austria, rates remained flat during the Great Recession, although those nations’ economies struggled as much as others did – suggesting that the link between recession and suicide is not inevitable, said David Stuckler, a professor and health economist at Oxford and the paper’s senior author.

“These economic suicides are avoidable,” he said.

Sweden had strong support for people who lost their jobs or were struggling financially, Stuckler said.

This finding has important implications for policymakers, said Abdulrahman El-Sayed, a doctor and assistant professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in New York City.