Thread: This mothers day, I'm thinking about Cindy Rodriguez. She was a 51-year-old mother of two living with a physical disability. She was arrested for shoplifting from a grocery store. What happened next will shake you to the core, and inspire you. (1)

Because Cindy had never been arrested in her life, the DA told her that her case would be dismissed if she just paid some fees. This kind of extortion is common. But for Cindy it unraveled her life. She was so poor that she had trouble even paying for utilities. (2)

Like hundreds of thousands of others in Tennessee, Cindy was placed on "probation" with a private company because she couldn't afford the debts. The company began adding many of its own fees, taking its cut first and threatening her that she would be jailed if she didn't pay. (3)

Cindy was mocked and threatened for having disability and not being able to pay the company. Even though her grocery store theft didn't involve drugs, the company made her submit to humiliating drug tests where someone *watched* her urinate. Each test added $20 to her debts. (4)

Cindy was so afraid of being jailed and separated from her kids that she paid the company instead of paying her car loan, and she lost her car. She couldn't go places and became isolated. She then started diverting her disability check to the company. (5)

After about a year, Cindy had paid off most of the original debt, but with all the new fees, she still owed about as much as she started. Because she couldn't pay, the company and the court issued an arrest warrant. The same thing happened to hundreds of thousands of others. (6)

Across the U.S. the police spend much of their bloated budgets enforcing these warrants. They don't want you to know that. Here's what police did to Cindy (7)

Police then posted her mugshot on Facebook, and Cindy's preacher and friends all saw that she had "violated her probation." She was not even allowed to appear for her court hearing without paying the company another $20 for a new drugs test. (8)

The company and court made millions of dollars. But Cindy told her story to a group of law students who were on a spring break trip to Tennessee, and Cindy decided to fight. She filed the most important civil rights case to challenge privatization of court debt collection. (9)

But as the company and county fought in court, Cindy became homeless and too sick to carry on. She passed away before the case was finally resolved--a life destroyed by the daily violence of cops, prosecutors, judges, and the bureaucracy that enriches already wealthy people. (10)

Cindy and our other clients won the case. They put the company out of business, got $14.3 million for tens of thousands of the poorest people in Rutherford County, TN, and won a federal injunction banning people from being jailed because they can't pay debts. (11)

You can read about the case here (12) https://www.civilrightscorps.org/work/criminalization-of-poverty/rutherford-county-tn-private-probation

And our incredible team @CivRightsCorps just won another settlement this past week in a similar case against another county and two more for-profit probation companies. We'll keep fighting these injustices with every ounce of energy we have. (End) https://twitter.com/CivRightsCorps/status/1390678815697997828