THIS IS VERY TRUE!! Quote from article: However, an excellent piece of investigative journalism by Radley Balko of the Washington Post, How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty, which ran in September, addresses the issue head-on. He makes the point that local municipal governments, through an endless array of penny-ante citations and fines -- poverty violations -- torment the locals for the primary, or perhaps sole, purpose of keeping their bureaucracies funded. Some of the towns in St. Louis County can derive 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts, Balko writes. The fines are mostly for traffic offenses, but they also include fines for loud music, unmown lawns, wearing saggy pants and vague infractions such as disturbing the peace, among many others, and if the person fined, because he or she is poor, cant pay up, a further fine is added to the original, and on and on it goes.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Nov 2014 01:06:52 +0000
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