Alabama Sheriff Legally Took $750k Meant to Feed Inmates, Bought Beach House (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Alabama Sheriff Legally Took $750k Meant to Feed Inmates, Bought Beach House (2018)

npr.org

86 pointspaulpauper36 comments

This is an old article, and a lot has happened since.

In 2019 Alabama updated their laws so that the extra money had to go into a public fund for other public goods.

In 2020 a couple of cities passed laws reinstating the ability for the Sherrif to pocket the money.

Last Week Tonight did a piece on Sherrif power, and talked about this particular Sherrif and his $750K beach house: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_kak7kAdNw . I think that was his last episode in front of an audience.

If the state law and city law conflict, shouldn't state law take precedence?

I'm actually not too upset about what the sheriff did. How many people do you think would do differently if they had to take out a $150k loan to cover their predecessor's obligations and then had the chance to feed inmates for less?

My takeaway is the state law clearly needs further modernization. First, it doesn't matter if it costs more. A direct personal incentive to feed people as cheaply as possible directly incentivizes low food quality. There should be some standard of food quality in a developed country. Second, if up to $750k (maybe more) is up for grabs, the sheriff's position because too valuable, which entices corruption. Not that they can't and aren't already be crooked, but they don't need further incentives.

These incentives aren't theoretical. There was a sheriff arrested for essentially starving inmates while pocketing $220k. Of course he only spent a night there.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/us/09sheriff.html

There are many allegations about the same thing, but generally judges aren't looking for a fight with the police or the sheriff.

> In 2020 a couple of cities passed laws reinstating the ability for the Sherrif to pocket the money.

Cities or counties? This is a county sheriff and I don't think cities have their own sheriffs typically

I would think that the sibling comment by ignostic is correct though; wouldnt the state law supercede the county/city law?

From three years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16598801

Well that is a pretty bad law. I wonder what the origin of that law is?

The good interpretation is that it incentivized the Sherrif to cut costs by getting a bonus in doing so.

The probably more accurate interpretation was that it was a way to continue the policy of slavery while enriching the Sherrif for torturing the inmates with terrible food.

Why should the state incentivize an employee to cut costs, when the state receives 0% of that cost savings?

Nope, this just smells like regular old good-old-boys-run-of-the-mill corruption to me, on top of an enormous moral hazard[1].

[1] Since this concerns prisoners.

> Why should the state incentivize an employee to cut costs, when the state receives 0% of that cost savings?

The ethical Sherrif would use the savings to make other improvements at the prison, or at least some of it. The loophole was that it doesn't stop them from just keeping it.

Why on earth would anyone expect that to be the resulting behaviour of this ruleset.

That's not a 'loophole', that's just defective by design.

I'll also point out that an 'ethical' dictator-king with absolute power would be a fantastic solution to government, but I haven't seen too many people advocate for one. Because such an approach to governance is, too, defective by design.

It doesn’t incentivize cutting costs, but it it does effectively impose a maximum cost as the Sheriff has to eat any cost overruns.

The state can pay $2 per person and not a penny more, no matter what.

Since he's pocketing a mountain of money, they are clearly overpaying, and the contract should be going out to public bid. If he is so great at feeding inmates, then surely, he should have no problem winning that bid.

From the article, it basically seemed like a county jail was essentially a secure boarding house where the wife of the sheriff did the food prep. In that case, a per diem would have been a lot easier administratively. Alabama has 67 counties. That's a lot of different jurisdictions to keep track of.

Note that $750k is a lower bound, based on 3 years for which the sheriff in question was not required to report more specifically than that the amount was $250k+.

All too often I wonder if the fairly high Corruption Perception Index scores of the United States mean that actual corruption is low in the US, or if it simply means that corruption has a rather peculiar regional definition in the US.

Important to remember that sheriffs are elected, so the constituents like it that way. Some people here may think that this particular sheriff is corrupt and inhumane, but the good citizens of Etowah County disagree.

Do they disagree or rather do they prefer someone corrupt and inhumane for the position?

Prisoners can't eat a beach house!

What do we have Sheriffs? What do they do that local and state law enforcement don't do?

The problem is that it's legitimately what the people want. And the people want it because the police are very, very powerful especially in the South, and criminals are very, very much an outgroup. John Oliver did a story on "Air Conditioning" in jails, and how there is essentially no will to fix what is clearly a human rights violation. What he did not explore was the fact that nearly every ordinary citizen in those areas believes that whatever the criminals must endure in prison is better than they deserve, as being arrested and convicted of a crime means you may as well be dead.

This sentiment also reflected in laws that make it difficult to impossible to reintegrate into society, by taking away voting rights, and allowing employers to screen prospects based on previous convictions, and arrests.

What it means is that, in reality, any individual police officer exists in what I call a "Marshall Law Bubble" that allows them to do whatever it is they want to you. It's true they still have to pay lip service to the law, but that's very easy: they just have to memorize a few phrases like "I felt my life was in danger." I'm sure that many ordinary citizens resent the fact that these noble officers have to debase themselves with such a lie, and would prefer those powers to be overt.

My theory is that this is prevalent in the South because speaking truth to power is simply not a cultural value. If you talk back, or challenge authority, it makes you a smart-ass trouble-maker, and that's coming from the people themselves, who elect the judges, the sherrif's who themselves reflect those views.

Only the worst excesses get reported in the news. Sherrif Joe Arpaio was and still is lauded by his community for his overtly racist and illegal behavior, despite a rare conviction (and then pardon by Trump). It's the same story in 2014 with the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, near St. Louis Missouri, and even after Obama's federal team found blatant abuse of power everywhere in the city government. Those in power want it, and no-one who doesn't like it is allowed to speak without severe repurcussions to them personally.

It's tempting to say that if you have democracy in areas with bad people, you get bad government. And there's truth to that. But it also means that democracy has to have a game mechanic that doesn't give the winners ever more "win more" moves. The edge always has to go to the underclass, the losers, the smartasses, the rude and impolite, if democracy is to function.

As for why Southern cultures are particularly problematic around criminal justice, a system built to grind up a largely black underclass, I leave that up the reader.

We should be clear that this is not "the people", point blank, but a demographic, even in the South, one naturally cultivated by the police. The demographic and situation doesn't stay the way it is by the mere persistence of culture.

But otherwise your points are reasonable.

It's the black political culture that I'm most curious about. Something has happened that has sapped the will to express power at the ballot box, and it's not just voter suppression laws (although that doesn't help). There are some unhealthy memes, like the idea (voiced by comedians like Dave Chappelle) that to vote just reinforces an unjust system, and that to not vote has the positive benefit that it will get so bad that a real revolution can happen. Less than 50% of blacks in Georgia voted in the election that could have propelled Stacy Abrams (a moderate liberal black woman) into the governor's seat. Think about that. Voter suppression cannot explain why half of Georgia's black voting population didn't show up to vote! It's just like the occasional comment that comes up at HN about the power of imposed censorship compared to the power of self-censorship - the latter is far, far more impactful than the former.

Local elections everywhere have a lower turnout than national elections. It's how Biden could win Arizona and then have the state do it's audit.

Just as much, having a system bought and paid for by billionaires will turn people off voting, whether you or I engage in "you're abandoning your civic duty" hand wringing or anarchist chuckling. Maybe if more people voted you could inch things forward but at scale, voting requires positive hope and aspirations. The current situation isn't intended to give that to the less-well-off person.

Well, hand-wringing doesn't do any good. To me, it's a legitimate mystery, independent of how it should be I'm actually curious to understand why things are the way they are. We know people behave in reaction to incentives. So what are those incentives? How are they communicated? Why are they effective? I'm not sure what element of science it is (sociology? political science?) but it's an interesting problem - and certainly not unique to 21st century USA! I mean, these same questions are interesting to ask in many historical contexts when seemingly civilized, rational groups suddenly take a collective moral nosedive, to their own great detriment. Blacks not voting is a relatively mild case compared to the self-destructiveness of Germany in the 1930's or the USSR in the 40's-80's or the Cambodia of the 70's. There's plenty of other examples, too. Maybe if we can figure it out we can reduce the harm when it becomes an existential threat, as with climate change and WMD.

My understanding is that there are a variety of significant factors that disproportionately affect marginalized people that make it harder to vote.

Systemically, we're dealing with a population that has been systemically marginalized. They're disproportionately imprisoned (and therefore stripped of their rights to vote), disproportionately targeted for less opportunities to vote (less ballot boxes per person, longer lines, etc), and their cultures around voting disproportionately targeted and excluded (sunday voting exclusion).

Similarly, it's also a population that disproportionately cannot afford to leave during a workday, during work hours, to stand in line for several hours to vote. That disproportionately cannot afford to participate in civic engagement, due to being unable to monetarily afford the documentation and cognitively afford the brain space to ensure they're registered in time, remember the ever-changing rules around voting, know which candidates to vote for, etc.

And then, this very same population is fully aware that the people who are in power have put in place the very same systemic oppression that makes their lives more difficult, and the very same system of civic engagement has produced the system of their oppression. There's a significant amount of cynicism that comes with that.

Sounds plausible, but that doesn't make it true (or false). I'm sorry to say that liberals play games in this space, and I don't particularly trust these neat narratives. The overarching objection I have is that it casts black folks as helpless victims unable to change their own circumstances. I find it very hard to believe that making voting inconvenient, even terribly inconvenient, even to the extent that you describe, is enough to dissuade fully half of all black people to opt-out. And if you're right, I would argue that the black people themselves need to fix it. If I was part of an oppressed minority and there was a legal, peaceful way for me to have even a sliver of a chance of changing my people's circumstances, you'd have to keep me out of the voting booth with a gun in my face. (And yeah, at that point I'd say a real revolution is in order.)

The baseline is 60% voter participation. It makes sense that a marginalized group with significantly higher barriers has a 10% reduction in participation to me!

You should be careful with posts like this - challenging police authority, or pointing out that there may still be historic baggage surrounding ethnicity and the law is not something that is positively received here, either.

You're right of course, no joke. I was born with a smartass speak-truth-to-power gene that I've chosen not to suppress with respect to important political matters (I suppress it at work on technical matters, but even there it peeps through and has a more positive outcome, usually).

It worries me only in that the fallout may harm my kids. But OTOH I also enjoy believing that my kids will grow up to respect my principles and integrity, despite the cost.

A better way to have handled such funds is probably to put it into some kind of investment account so that it can grow and then you could withdraw a percent of the profits without touching the principal. And then if you need it for prison use you get margin loans using your stocks as collateral.

But you could also own a beach house and live a life that you wouldn't ordinarily be able to afford.

(And frankly, in this case, is unethical to do so regardless imo.)

A better way to have handled such funds is for the state not to make them personal property of the Sheriff in the first place, without even any accounting of the amount used for the allocated purpose vs the amount retained as excess.

How do you run a government budget that way?

I really don't mean to be rude but seeing these types of posts on hackernews bothers me. I really would like to see us keep the scope of the news we post within tech. I feel like I'm seeing more non tech articles - like this one - on the site. It frustates me because when I want to escape the sort of articles that propagate through anger or outrage it becomes increasingly more difficult. We don't need another reddit. Please consider the type of community we want to have.

did you decide to make your account and post for the first time just to decide what's best for the community that you are definitely part of?

does the venom and snark make you feel good on the inside?

no, I typically don't participate in online discussions because of people like you.

You don't have to read the non-tech articles if you don't want to, and you are certainly welcome to participate on HackerNews!

But "Please consider the type of community we want to have." is a little rich if "community" only means reading the articles. Perhaps the word you are looking for is "product" or more charitably "experience"?

scroll past.

just like the rest of us do.

i think complaining about posts is also against the community standards here.

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