Florida County will Throw Parents of Truant Kids in Jail

Florida County will Throw Parents of Truant Kids in Jail

December 12, 2011

The Lookout - A new truancy court in Palm Beach, Florida aims to cut down on the state's absentee rate for young children by punishing parents who don't take their kids to school.

Florida law says parents of children under 16 who let their kids miss 15 days of school within three months can be sent to jail for up to two months as punishment. The Florida Sun-Sentinel reports that Palm Beach prosecutors say the two-month jail sentence will be a last resort, after government and nonprofit workers try to fix whatever problem is keeping parents from getting their kids to school.

About a dozen Baltimore parents were sent to prison for their kids' truancy in 2011, the Baltimore Sun reported in April. (In 2010, no Baltimore parents were jailed.) After California adopted a strict anti-truancy bill earlier this year, at least five parents in Orange County were sent to jail for the crime, according to the local CBS affiliate. Judges in Alabama, Texas, and North Carolina and other states have also used truancy laws to send offending parents to jail.

Earlier this year, the NAACP sued a Pennsylvania school district for levying what it claimed were illegal fines of thousands of dollars on truant students and their parents. Lenora Hummel, above, was fined $8,000 after her son and daughter stopped going to school because they said they were bullied and harassed by other students.

See: Human Trafficking in America's Private Prisons (Excerpt Below)

The U.S. public is witnessing an unfolding crisis of MASS IMPRISONMENT, more and more visible to us each day, and the war on crime has found new investors: venture capital and for-profit prisons. Outlawed at the beginning of the 20th Century, private corporations are once again owning and operating prisons for profit.

There are also different ways that those who make the laws profit from the laws they make through prison privatization. The most direct are those who own stock in private prisons. There are also those officials who are on the actual payroll of these corporations. A third way comes from campaign contributions and political action committee moneys, through which the corporations financially reward those officials that allow private prisons in their states or jurisdictions, or who pass laws that will continue prison expansion -- public or private -- thus expanding the resource base of the privatization industry.

And most importantly, public officials profit from prison privatization as it allows them to act with less accountability to the public, allowing prisons to be built without passing prison bonds for the public to vote on, and not having to worry how one will budget their inflammatory and expensive tough-on-crime rhetoric.