(Russia Today) The recession ruined Linda Ruggles’ business and she has been selling plasma twice a week since to make ends meet. The blood bank couldn’t bail her out from behind bars though, which is where she ended up after she couldn’t pay a $480 fine.
That fine, say cops in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, came about because Linda Ruggles had a messy yard.
Barely getting by in recent years, Ruggles, 53, has been stockpiling scraps to pawn off in order to make her bill payments. In her yard rests a pile of metal that she routinely cashes in to get by. Elsewhere outside her house is a shack of shingles. Paying to have her roof fixed, often a job that comes at a cost of several thousand dollars, has been out of the question.
So when cops ticketed her $480 for having a messy yard, Ruggles wasn’t exactly prepared to pay it.
“I told everyone, ‘If I had $480 to pay the fine, I’d fix the roof,’”‘ she told Charleston, South Carolina ‘s Post and Courier.
Ruggles couldn’t fix the roof, however, and she couldn’t pay the fine either. For being unable to do so, she was sentenced to serve 10 days in jail for failing to pay her “clean lot violation.”
“I feel like they want to make an example out of me,” Ms Ruggles tells the paper. “This should be an embarrassment for the town of Mount Pleasant. And it should be an embarrassment for my neighbors who called the code enforcement officer, because no one offered to help me – no one.”
Six days into her sentence, however, Ruggles was allowed home only to be greeted by an array of local residents who read about her plight and offered to help. That assistance came only after nearly a week in jail and legal complications which are surely only going to add onto the troubles (and scrap metal) which has already piled up.
“It didn’t change the situation,” she adds. “I just don’t think being handcuffed, photographed and fingerprinted is really a behavior-modification tool to keep me from being poor.”
On the bright side, the neighborhood grocery store that Ruggles works part-time at has allowed her to reclaim her position after her brief stint behind bars. On the bright side, that is, as long as she can forget about her last shift behind the register. It was on the job last month when the cops entered her place of business and hauled her off to jail.
Source-http://govtslaves.com/woman-put-in-jail-for-being-poor/
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Ding
January 17, 2012
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Ding
January 17, 2012
How many times did the HOA notify Linda to keep her front yard area cleaned up, before they actually issued the fine? Why did Linda not keep the mess & blight contained to her backyard, out of respect for her neighbors and (by law)?
Are HOA’s control happy? Yes, but let’s first look at why the fines were issued and what Linda did to arrive at this point. And not that It’s the responsibility, per se, of Linda’s neighbors, but let’s find out if any of them helped her.
Should they have carted LInda off to jail for failure to pay that fine? Well the community is more responsible to answer that than anybody else.
As it is in MANY cases, people dont fully reveal all the details which leads to these situations, and those who write articles like this dont bother to dig into ALL OF THE DETAILS, boefore writing and posting the article. Why? Because many times ALL FO THE DETAILS, dont make for good copy, and wont provide the “crockadile tears” from the reading audience, they are looking to generate.
Aritcles like this are often foundation builders for the publishing entity to build a foundation for their other agendas.