The Rich and the Poor Alike Are Allowed to Post $12,000 Bail

I've been thinking about this story.

It's the Guardian, so no paywall, and you can click through, but the basics are this: It's Austin, Texas. A woman is waiting for her food at a food truck, as you do in Austin. Another woman, Gina Guidry, approaches, asking for money.

This is fairly common in my city, so I imagine it's fairly common in Austin as well. People usually have a riff -- their kid has diabetes and they need money for insulin, or their car is out of gas, or they don't have money for groceries. Maybe it's true, maybe they want to buy meth. I don't know, and I don't care. I always give them a couple of bucks.

But if you don't, that's fine. We all do our own moral calculus.

This person at the food truck didn't. And Guidry started yelling in her face, and then grabbed a dollar out of her hand. So the woman called the police.

The police show up. Guidry has gone nowhere. She still hanging out by the food truck, which tells you, I think, a lot about Guidry's mental and emotional capacity. The woman points her out: "That's her. She took my dollar."

The police arrested Guidry, and charged her with a felony. Sure, it was only a dollar, but "theft from the person" is a felony in Texas.

Also the bail for that is $12,000. Which obviously Guidry doesn't have.

So Guidry is being held in jail, awaiting trial -- which as we know means she can be held for years -- at the expense of the state, at the expense of what we can guess is her already fragile mental health, and toward what end?

I'm not saying whoever this woman who called the police on Guidry was wrong. It sounds like Guidry is probably not firing on all cylinders, and I'm sure the experience was terrifying for the woman who was attacked.

But putting people in jail because they are poor and damaged is surely not the best we can do as a society. And keeping them in jail for years because they are poor and damaged, so that we can then give them a trial and sentence them to -- what? What is the appropriate sentence for grabbing a dollar out of another woman's hand?

I'll add, also, that this story only happens because our economy is so broken. If we had resources for the poor, the addicted, and the damaged, Guidry wouldn't be wandering the streets begging for dollars, or screaming in women's faces at taco trucks. And if she was, there would be places we could take her that aren't Texas jails.

What's Middle-Class?

On another blog, I saw a naive blogger making the claim that $160,000/year was "middle-class," and that she didn't understand this claim that "people like her" weren't middle class. After all, her family only took a few "very modest" vacations* a year, and only ate out a few times a week. The claim, she said, that people making $40,000/year were middle class had to be nonsense. That was abject poverty! (For the record, up until a few years ago, I made just over $50,000/year. Since I became a full professor I make somewhat more than that.)

Hi! Guess Where I've Been?

The first summer semester (Summer I, as we call it) has started at my university.  I'm teaching a full load -- two classes, back to back, two and a half hours each, four days a week, with a daily office hour for each, for five weeks straight.  Then prep each night on top of that.  I'm teaching Mythology and the first half of Freshman Comp.

So that's where I've been.

See you in July, when I will get two days off before starting Summer II.

(Hey, but at least we can eat this summer!)

Double Rats.

You'll remember last fall when the dryer broke, and it was weeks and weeks before we could afford to get it fixed?

Yeah, now the washing machine is gone. And we are even poorer than ever.

Yay, laundromats.

Sadly, Winter Break Ends

Tomorrow is our Pre-School conference; Monday, Spring Semester begins.  Since I am not hardly done with revising the novel I wanted to finish revising (though I did finish and submit one short story, and not only revised but submitted and had another totally rejected already -- yay, me!) I am grumpy.

Also, what a bitch this semester looks to be.  No writing days at all, and Herr Dr. Delagar is only barely part-time.  I will be over-worked, he will be underpaid: poor and exhausted.  

But I'm teaching Chaucer, and I found a new HEL book.  And the revision is going well, so when I find a few hours to work on it, I'll be able to work.  So.

From Rottin' in Denmark

Only I think he's actually in Australia now --

A post on how disparity in our education system plays out, leading to disparity in the playing field. 

Overall, the whole thing just made me think of my University of London's professor's old catchphrase, 'You can blame people for their choices, but you can't blame them for their options.' 

U.S. Hunger

The Right-Wing narrative is that no one is hungry or poor in America -- "This is the only country in the world where our poor people are fat! Hurr Hurr Hurr!" -- but, in fact, not only are Americans poor, we're getting poorer.

No, it's not Third World Poor.  Only a few of us actually crouch under bridges and have no possessions at all.

But once people climb out of their basements and rip themselves away from their laptops, they'll find actual people, trying to live in some actual dire situations, here in this country -- living on twelve to twenty thousand a year, without health insurance, with no dental care (there's a reason my Arkansas students are missing teeth), with no vision care (I wince every year, at the first of the semester, when I write on the board for the first time, and five or six students move to the front row, squinting -- not because my handwriting is small, because it isn't -- they can't see), without enough money to buy food, the last weeks of the month.

Food insecurity, this gets called, and it's increasing these days, like everything else.

...about 49 million people, or 14.6 percent of U.S. households [...] a significant increase from 2007, when 11.1 percent of U.S. households suffered from what USDA classifies as "food insecurity" — not having enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle.  Researchers blamed the increase in hunger on a lack of money and other resources.

Over on the Winger blogs, this gets dismissed -- if they didn't spend their money on plasma TVs, and bling, on malt liquor and smokes, on lottery tickets and cheap hamburgers, they'd have plenty of money for food.  If they would just learn to live on rice and peas, like we did when we were poor, it's not that these people are poor, it's that they're wastrels.  Let'm starve, it'll teach'm a lesson!

Any time anyone says shit like that, I know right off he's never actually been poor.  Here's a clue, for anyone who needs a smack with a clue stick: being low on funds for a few weeks, or even a few months -- that's not poverty.

Rats

The dryer broke two days ago.  Of course we cannot buy a new one -- we can barely afford to get it repaired.  We had to wait until today, when we got paid, to go to the laundromat, that's how stony broke we are these days.  It is very sad.

Today, this morning, at dawn, we loaded up all the laundry, which was piles and piles of it, because the dryer has been breaking for days, and drove off to hunt down a laundromat (these are both scarcer and pricier than they used to be -- I will appall you later with tales of how much it costs to wash a load of laundry*).  The kid had never been to a laundromat and was terrified, who knows why.  I kept telling her she would love it.

"They have chairs," I said.  "Nearby will be a small store to buy chips and crap.  We can read and talk while the laundry spins.  It will be warm and smell good and we can watch the interesting people.  I got several of my best details for my best stories watching people at laundromats.  You'll see."

I was right, too.  She loved it.

"This is so cool," she told me, returning from a lengthy circuit of the laundry.  "We should come here every week!"

(Herr Dr. Delagar, I must tell you, was much less sanguine.)

*I forgot to include this. $2.25 a load.  But this is for the big machine, the front-load triple loader.  The smaller machine was only $1.50.  The dryers are a quarter for every 9 minutes.