Daily Bell
A judge threw a 17-year-old 11th grade honor student from Willis High School in jail after she missed school again ... Diane Tran, a 17-year-old honor student in Texas, was forced to spend the night in jail last week after missing too many classes, KHOU-11's Sherry Williams reports. The Willis High School junior, who helps support two siblings, has both a full time and part-time job. She said that she's often too tired to go to school. "She goes from job to job from school," Devin Hill, one of Tran's classmates, told KHOU-11. "She stays up until 7:00 in the morning doing her homework." In an interview with KHOU-11, Tran said she takes AP Spanish, college level algebra and dual credit English and history courses. Her parents divorced and no longer live near her, so she lives with the family that owns the wedding venue where she works on weekends. – Huffington Post
Dominant Social Theme: That'll teach 'er.
Free-Market Analysis: This is a sad story (see above), and one that has given rise to a petition and a good deal of outrage. Why a Judge threw a hard-working young woman into jail is clear enough, but the application of US law in this instance has finally resonated.
The US Justice System, in fact, carries the seeds of its own destruction. The more didactic, dishonest and corrupt it gets, the more it gives rise to this sort of "justice."
And such outcomes inevitably spark outrage.
Here at DB, we haven't been shy about calling for the return of private justice. A justice system in which the state makes the laws, enforces them, prosecutes them, hires the prosecutors, licenses the defense attorneys, pays the judges, builds the jails (and contracts them out to private entities), pays the wardens and the guards and eventually the parole officers ... is not a unbiased system.
The result (in the US): some six million behind bars at any one time and one-out-of-three individuals having some sort of interaction with the criminal justice system by the time they are 25.
US citizens like to think of themselves as "free" but monopoly justice does not contribute to freedom. And Diane Tran is just one more evidence of that.
As what we call the Internet Reformation begins to affect the fundamental social fabric we anticipate that there will gradually be a return to what we call private justice. It won't be as a result of policy but simply via an evolution as the current system breaks down.
That can't happen too fast! Public justice is arbitrary, unreasonable and carries within it the seeds of encroaching totalitarianism. Private justice, with its emphasis on the wronged individual seeking justice as he or she can get it, is an efficient mechanism for pruning the abuses of public justice.
Human beings for the most part utilized private justice for 50,000 or so. In the Neolithic, elaborate methodologies of enforcing private justice sprang up including vendettas, dueling, etc. The threat of family-on-family violence concentrated the mind while the emphasis on monetary compensation avoided the costs of prisons and the destructive break-up of families.
This sort of approach, of course, is absolutely foreign to the modern legal profession which has created an industry out of justice. Redress has turned into commerce.
And now poor Ms. Tran has a record.
Watch the video. The Judge's enunciated perspective is worth the price of admission.
If you are moved, you can go to a website that has set up a petition drive to reverse Ms. Tran's unjust jail time. Here's the address: http://www.change.org/petitions/honor-student-jailed-for-missing-school-ask-the-judge-to-cancel-her-fine-and-sentencing
There are already 35,000 signatures.
Here's a video that includes an interview with the Judge in which he explains his reasoning ...
A judge threw a 17-year-old 11th grade honor student from Willis High School in jail after she missed school again ... Diane Tran, a 17-year-old honor student in Texas, was forced to spend the night in jail last week after missing too many classes, KHOU-11's Sherry Williams reports. The Willis High School junior, who helps support two siblings, has both a full time and part-time job. She said that she's often too tired to go to school. "She goes from job to job from school," Devin Hill, one of Tran's classmates, told KHOU-11. "She stays up until 7:00 in the morning doing her homework." In an interview with KHOU-11, Tran said she takes AP Spanish, college level algebra and dual credit English and history courses. Her parents divorced and no longer live near her, so she lives with the family that owns the wedding venue where she works on weekends. – Huffington Post
Dominant Social Theme: That'll teach 'er.
Free-Market Analysis: This is a sad story (see above), and one that has given rise to a petition and a good deal of outrage. Why a Judge threw a hard-working young woman into jail is clear enough, but the application of US law in this instance has finally resonated.
The US Justice System, in fact, carries the seeds of its own destruction. The more didactic, dishonest and corrupt it gets, the more it gives rise to this sort of "justice."
And such outcomes inevitably spark outrage.
Here at DB, we haven't been shy about calling for the return of private justice. A justice system in which the state makes the laws, enforces them, prosecutes them, hires the prosecutors, licenses the defense attorneys, pays the judges, builds the jails (and contracts them out to private entities), pays the wardens and the guards and eventually the parole officers ... is not a unbiased system.
The result (in the US): some six million behind bars at any one time and one-out-of-three individuals having some sort of interaction with the criminal justice system by the time they are 25.
US citizens like to think of themselves as "free" but monopoly justice does not contribute to freedom. And Diane Tran is just one more evidence of that.
As what we call the Internet Reformation begins to affect the fundamental social fabric we anticipate that there will gradually be a return to what we call private justice. It won't be as a result of policy but simply via an evolution as the current system breaks down.
That can't happen too fast! Public justice is arbitrary, unreasonable and carries within it the seeds of encroaching totalitarianism. Private justice, with its emphasis on the wronged individual seeking justice as he or she can get it, is an efficient mechanism for pruning the abuses of public justice.
Human beings for the most part utilized private justice for 50,000 or so. In the Neolithic, elaborate methodologies of enforcing private justice sprang up including vendettas, dueling, etc. The threat of family-on-family violence concentrated the mind while the emphasis on monetary compensation avoided the costs of prisons and the destructive break-up of families.
This sort of approach, of course, is absolutely foreign to the modern legal profession which has created an industry out of justice. Redress has turned into commerce.
And now poor Ms. Tran has a record.
Watch the video. The Judge's enunciated perspective is worth the price of admission.
If you are moved, you can go to a website that has set up a petition drive to reverse Ms. Tran's unjust jail time. Here's the address: http://www.change.org/petitions/honor-student-jailed-for-missing-school-ask-the-judge-to-cancel-her-fine-and-sentencing
There are already 35,000 signatures.
Here's a video that includes an interview with the Judge in which he explains his reasoning ...
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