Friends of Justice

Lou is a longtime follower of this blog. I followed a case that he was personally involved in several years ago. Although all charges were eventually dropped, it was a terrible experience and it prompted Lou to do extensive research on our child protective services. This has resulted in a book, that he is in the process of self= publishing.

Recently, I received this email from Lou:

Bob,

I am on your mailing list and am asking for your help. I just finished my book about US Child Protective Services and am attaching a copy of the introduction. I have started a kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to raise the funds necessary to pay for self publishing my book about the U.S. Child Protective Services System. The book is a way to reach a wider audience than I have been able to achieve with the litigations I have participated in.

I ask for your support in raising funds. Please make a pledge to reserve a copy of my book. But more importantly, I ask you to please tell anyone else you may know who will be interested in this important news. I know that you have a mailing list of people who support your cause and believe that many of those people would support my book as well. If you would be kind enough to read my introduction, and if are so inclined, to send an email to your supporters and anyone else who you think may be able to end this abusive and unjust system telling them about my book.

In the next 18 months 600,000 children and 1.2 million parents will be exposed to this unconstitutional and destructive system in a way that will negatively effect their children and their marriages. With your support that can change.

The URL to see my site and make a pledge is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1041803268/childrens-rights.

Please help me expose the corruption and change the way CPS does business!!!

Best regards.

Louis A. Piccone

I cannot attach his introduction to this blog post, but if you would like to read it, let me know and I will email it to you. You can email me at bobchatelle@gmail.com.

-Bob

Photograph by Zora J Murff for The New York Times

Yet like the system of wealth-based detention they are meant to help reform, ankle monitors often place poor people in special jeopardy. Across the country, defendants who have not been convicted of a crime are put on “offender funded” payment plans for monitors that sometimes cost more than their bail. And unlike bail, they don’t get the payment back, even if they’re found innocent. Although a federal survey shows that nearly 40 percent of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to cover an emergency, companies and courts routinely threaten to lock up defendants if they fall behind on payment. In Greenville, S.C., pretrial defendants can be sent back to jail when they fall three weeks behind on fees. (An officer for the Greenville County Detention Center defended this practice on the grounds that participants agree to the costs in advance.) In Mohave County, Ariz., pretrial defendants charged with sex offenses have faced rearrest if they fail to pay for their monitors, even if they prove that they can’t afford them. “We risk replacing an unjust cash-bail system,” Steinberg said, “with one just as unfair, inhumane and unnecessary.”

Read the article by Ava Kaufman in the New York Times Magazine.

And its bad technology, These things also very frequently fail.

“Virtually everything about this spectacle except the tentative, then stoic intervention of Ford reeks of bad faith. Wisdom crouches in the corner, silent. Yet wisdom—have we forgot?—is the fundamental and ancient criterion for a judge. Kavanaugh has failed the test of wisdom not by what he is accused of doing when he was 17 and drunk but by his adult neglect of reflection and his indifference to suffering, something this moment puts in a sharper light. He does not deserve to be on any court, much less the Supreme Court.”

Read the full article in Counterpunch by JoAnn Wyypijewski.

A new prison post from my good friend, Gunther Fiek.

The juggernaut of what has become a remorseless child abuse industry rolls on, with parents being framed by protection agencies and wrongfully convicted on the basis of speculation and conjecture.

Read the article by Dr. James Le Fanu in the Sunday Guardian.

From my good friend, Gunther Fiek

A Time for a Change

The next time you shop on Amazon, go to smile.amazon.com. You will be asked to select a charity. Use the search mechanism at smile.amazon.com to locate the National Center for Reason and Justice.

The next time you shop, shop via smile.amazon.com and (for eligible items) a portion of your purchase price will go to the NCRJ.

…to help the National Center for Reason and Justice and receive a tax-deduction for 2016.

NCRJ works to free the wrongfully convicted and to prevent future injustices through rational criminal-justice reform.

You can make a credit-card donation via PayPal (you don’t have to have a PayPal account to do this) by clicking here.

You can also send a check, payable to NCRJ, to

NCRJ
POB 191101
Roxbury MA 02119

Date your check 12/31/16 or before for a 2016 deduction.

For those of you who have already given, we thank you again.

And we wish you all a very Happy New Year!

“I looked forward to the weekends and holidays because my window gave me a view of family and friends that were coming in to visit their loved ones. I could see individuals of all ages, families, elderly, children, …etc. I wondered: that is someone’s mother, father, wife, girlfriend, or kid. Needless to say, the time I really took advantage of that sight was when my family was coming to visit me. Sometimes I could see them drive in and park. I could see them going through the main front gate, walk through the open walkway to the main building where they would go through a security check and register. A few minutes later I was being summoned to the visitation room.”

Read Gunther’s full post.

“Research shows that keeping some families together after children are abused can result in safety for the children and united families, when proper assessment and interventions are made. Even so, the usual suspect ‘child-protection professionals’ scapegoat the approach.”–Debbie Nathan

Read the article by Richard Wexler in The Chronicle of Social Change.