Whenever a system is set up to allow corruption, it becomes corrupt. This ought not to surprise anyone, since it’s pretty obvious that the people who set it up to become corrupt planned it that way.
Watching this stuff, and thinking about it, has made my already dim view of humanity get dimmer and dimmer.
This story comes from Alabama – speaking of “places full of planned corruption.” [mj]
Ten years ago, an Alabama sheriff paid $500 for half a truckload of corn dogs. It was a sweet deal for Morgan County Sheriff Greg Bartlett, who liked to find free or donated food for his county jail so he could pocket the leftover money from a state stipend for feeding inmates. For weeks, Bartlett’s prisoners ate corn dogs twice a day, and he used the savings to pad his own wallet, as he testified in a federal court case in 2009. He kept a total of $212,000 over a three-year period—taking advantage of an ambiguous state law that lets sheriffs pocket tax dollars meant to buy meals for jail inmates.
Apparently the original loophole in the law dated back to the 19th century, because sometimes sheriff’s wives would make food for inmates, and they deserved to be compensated for their efforts. Naturally, the loophole stayed on the books and corrupt cops drove a truck right through it.
It ought to be trivially obvious to detect this sort of corruption and eradicate it, but you can’t get that to happen when the lawmakers who are supposed to be fighting corruption are, themselves, corrupt. Eventually, the system collapses because its parasite-load is more than it can support. Then, you have a brief period of dictatorship, which sets the new corruption in stone, and if there’s any attempt to democratize or clean up after the dictatorship it’s mooted by the interests of the embedded corrupt class.
Here we have it, one more story of cops misbehaving. I feel like I hear these stories daily. This makes me wonder, how comes that the majority of cop movies and detective novels portray cops as virtuous and incorruptible people who fight against crime and try to protect us all. In books and movies the narrative is that people who choose to become cops care for justice and want to protect the citizens from all those bad criminals. In fiction it’s the good cop against the bad criminal. Maybe authors of detective novels ought to start changing their plots—for example, the average person investigating police corruption and trying to figure out which cop shot their family member.
Don’t know if you know about this website, called PINAC: Photography is not a Crime. But it could just as easily be called Continuous Stream of Cops Behaving Really Badly.
https://newsmaven.io/pinacnews/
Well, apparently everything that sheriff did was legal, so why not. Corn dogs are food and they even contain protein and the prisoners don’t deserve any better so no harm done. The fact that the sheriff managed to skim off about $70,000 per year just means that he’s smart in that Darth Vader sort of way.
I am not exactly sure what a corn dog is but a diet based solely on them sounds like cruel and unusual punishment to me, not to mention nutritionally unsound.
Depending on the size of the Sheriff’s jail population, the very possible riot and likely ensuing deaths need to be factored in. A food riot in a correctional institution can get very nasty very quickly.
@ 3 voyager
the prisoners don’t deserve any better
You ARE the head of the Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre!
Jrkrideau @#4
I didn’t know either, so I looked it up. A corn dog is a sausage (usually a hot dog) on a stick that has been coated in a thick layer of cornmeal batter and deep fried. My conclusion was that corn dogs look like something I wouldn’t eat unless I had no other options. It’s just deep fried junk food, and I don’t eat this kind of unhealthy crap. I can only assume that Americans don’t care about the health of all those people whom they have locked up behind bars.
Where’s Marcus?
Did They™ get him?
I’m here!
good
Andreas Avester@#5:
A corn dog is a sausage (usually a hot dog) on a stick that has been coated in a thick layer of cornmeal batter and deep fried. My conclusion was that corn dogs look like something I wouldn’t eat unless I had no other options.
It’s a human rights abuse.
Ah I think I know corn dogs as pogos. They must be served with mustard. A bit horrible but one as a voluntary snack is probably okay—not that I am touching one. I agree with Marcus assuming he meant a steady diet of the things. Clearly a human rights abuse.