Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Now With Higher Recidivism and No Transaction Fees

Here are two words you never thought you'd see used together: probation kiosk.

What the?

That's right. Probation kiosk. Here's an excerpt from the Dallas Morning News article (which I can't link to because the scumbags want you to pay for an article when it's two freaking days old):
Dallas County probation officials say they have a remedy for their crushing caseloads. It looks and works much like an ATM. And some criminals now tell it - not a human being - whether they're behaving themselves.

I read this in the print edition on Sunday, and it's one of those classic, Marx Brothers bureaucratic disasters. They asked one of the program administrators what kinds of offenders got assigned to the kiosk, and she said (paraphrasing) "Low-risk. Certainly not something like DWI's. You won't find many DWI's." So when the Morning News investigated the 900 offenders who had been sentenced to use the kiosk, half of them were for DWI. And it went predictably downhill from there.

I bet there's already a drinking game for reporting to your probation kiosk.

City Attorney Rufus T. Firefly had no comment.

Next week: the probation pagoda.

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