Texan judge gives 17 year old honour student jail time for truancy

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Maybe they can institute a policy of having bloodhounds hunt down truant students.

You joke about it now...

A lot of jokes turn out to be prophetic. Buy some cayenne, get your kids a copy of Cool Hand Luke and make sure they watch it. 

[Deepthroat Chopra]

Jail? Really?

I think it might just be impossible to take the piss out of America any more. Well, if Texas counts. Is this one of those Privatised prison lobby things, where private prisons lobby the government for what used to be civil offences becoming criminal and jail-sentence offences? Sounds like.

To think, Billy Bragg wrote "Help Save the Youth of America" in the 80's.

[Cain]

It could also be "the judge is an investor in the private prison" thing.  I recall a similar case not too long ago.

However, it is more likely to be mindless authoritarianism than anything else.

[navkat]

EDITED FOR CLARITY:

I read something a while back about the school system being set up as a pipeline to either prison or the military. BOTH of those are a mainline of income for often the same private contract corporations: health, nutrition, welfare, security and armament services. The warm bodies in any given institution need to be clothed, fed, bathed, have waste services and be on one side or the other of the guns and metal bars.

From there, the prisoners keep getting perpetually re-fed into the prison system or are kept in a state of justified dis-empowerment as they become minimum-wage laborers with no sense of righteousness or hope and often stripped of even the right to vote.

Ex military are fed back into the system too...through the VA which feeds some of the SAME CONTRACTORS in health and human services and into DoD, Police, Fire and EMS positions because these are the jobs to which their skillsets most often translate seamlessly.

This is already very firmly the case in poor and lower-middle-class neighborhoods where there really aren't any other choices and it's finding its way up the ladder.

But then again, "up the ladder" is finding itself lower and lower, now, aren't we?

[Epimetheus]

Maybe they can institute a policy of having bloodhounds hunt down truant students.

I just had a flashback to Fahrenheit 451...

[P3nT4gR4m]

However, it is more likely to be mindless authoritarianism than anything else.

From the "manager" of your local Macdonalds, right up to the Fuhrer of America. Mindless authoritarianism is the glue that holds this fine democracy of ours together.

[Kai]

This is like something straight out of Rash. Just wait till the prisons are run by multinational corps who use the prisoners as indentured workers to create their goods. Middle ages here we come!

[East Coast Hustle]

This is like something straight out of Rash. Just wait till the prisons are run by multinational corps who use the prisoners as indentured workers to create their goods. Middle ages here we come!

Whaddaya mean, "just wait"?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

This is like something straight out of Rash. Just wait till the prisons are run by multinational corps who use the prisoners as indentured workers to create their goods. Middle ages here we come!

Whaddaya mean, "just wait"?

The future is now!

[Don Coyote]

This is like something straight out of Rash. Just wait till the prisons are run by multinational corps who use the prisoners as indentured workers to create their goods. Middle ages here we come!

Whaddaya mean, "just wait"?

The future is now!

I own clothes made by prison labor. And by own I mean "I was issued" and by clothes I mean "FUCKING PT SHORTS ARE THE DEVIL!!!!"

[Don Coyote]

Reversal and dropping of the charges?
http://abcnews.go.com/US/community-aid-jailed-texas-honor-student/story?id=16464091#.T8fHGkXa7St

Tran's attorney, Brian Wice, told ABC News that he met with the Moriarty and convinced him to reverse his decision and drop the contempt charge, hoping to clear Tran's record.

http://gawker.com/5914669/hard+working-texas-honor-student-jailed-for-truancy-will-have-conviction-erased-from-record

Judge Lanny Moriarty, who previously said he sentenced 17-year-old Diane Tran to serve jail-time because he wanted to make an example of her, reviewed Tran's many hardships and determined that extenuating circumstanced led to her truancy.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Reversal and dropping of the charges?
http://abcnews.go.com/US/community-aid-jailed-texas-honor-student/story?id=16464091#.T8fHGkXa7St

Tran's attorney, Brian Wice, told ABC News that he met with the Moriarty and convinced him to reverse his decision and drop the contempt charge, hoping to clear Tran's record.

http://gawker.com/5914669/hard+working-texas-honor-student-jailed-for-truancy-will-have-conviction-erased-from-record

Judge Lanny Moriarty, who previously said he sentenced 17-year-old Diane Tran to serve jail-time because he wanted to make an example of her, reviewed Tran's many hardships and determined that extenuating circumstanced led to her truancy.

At this point it's pretty much the only way for him to save his career, is my bet.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Yep. He was fine locking her up until it got all this attention. Wasn't he supposed to "review" the situation in the first place?

[Bu🤠ns]

I really do wonder if the charges were reversed mainly due to the amount of attention the judge received.  That, for real justice, your case needs to go viral.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Yup. That's why Zimmerman's getting charged, too.