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Woman Gets Jail For Food-Stamp Fraud

 

This is what “justice” is coming to in the United States. The laws seem to exist to protect the wealthy and punish the poor. This is a sad comment on our society. One can only suppose that the conservative attendees at the the Republican Presidential Debate who booed the gay soldier [1] and cheered the hypothetical death of an uninsured man [2] probably condone these inequalities and will push to see them grow if their candidate becomes president. While we do not condone fraud of any kind, there should be equality under the law and punishment proportional to the crime. Under those conditions then compared to Anita McLemore,  the Wall Street bandits who defrauded the country should spend the rest of their life in prison.

 

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Woman Gets Jail For Food-Stamp Fraud; Wall Street Fraudsters Get Bailouts [4]

By Matt Taibbi
Last week, a federal judge in Mississippi sentenced a mother of two named Anita McLemore to three years in federal prison for lying on a government application in order to obtain food stamps.
Apparently in this country you become ineligible to eat if you have a record of criminal drug offenses. States have the option of opting out of that federal ban, but Mississippi is not one of those states. Since McLemore had four drug convictions in her past, she was ineligible to receive food stamps, so she lied about her past in order to feed her two children.
The total “cost” of her fraud was $4,367. She has paid the money back. But paying the money back was not enough for federal Judge Henry Wingate. Read More [4]    
Among the comments following the article are:

The cost to keep the woman in jail 3 years is about $100,000 + about $40,000 for foster care for the 2 kids.

3 years of food stamps, about $5000.

Even looking at only the individual case, this makes no sense financially. Nor will it “win” the “drug-war”. Addicts will not stop using for food stamps, all that will happen is their kids will go hungry. Further, the uglier and meaner our society gets, the more the demand for means to escape it will be.

 

Obviously we should have drug tested the bankers before giving them any kind of government assistance. Only then would we have seen a few of those criminals behind bars.

 

Was she sentenced to serve her term in a privately owned facility? I would really like to know……that would close to loop, because I’m sure some of those companies are publicly traded meaning Wall Street gets to profit from jailing her. They could even sell her labor while she’s in jail. * Bonus*

Giv’em credit, they seem to being running with more transparency then the Government.

 

A great book on this very two-tiered corrupt system of accountability and punishment is Glenn Greenwald’s “With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.”