Arrest-Proof Yourself by Dale C. Carson, Wes Denham Read Free Book Online Page B

holes, pouring concrete, filling boxes, butchering animals, picking fruit, mopping floors, and flipping burgers. Whoopee.
    When you’re on the electronic plantation, doors close. Opportunities vanish. Years ago background checks were expensive and were used only by large corporations and institutions. Now, via the Internet, any employer, school, or landlord can pay $40 or less and discover that you have been arrested. Major corporations love background checks. They’re not only not hiring people who have slipups in their past; they’re actually laying off employees who have even a returned check or an unpaid traffic ticket. Only Goody Two-Shoes types with perfect church attendance pins can work in the prim corporate America of the future. Yikes!
    If you are convicted of a felony, it gets worse. In Florida, felons can never work in any business licensed by the state. That means real estate, securities, health care, law, insurance, and even barbering are out of the question. You can’t vote. Don’t even think about owning a gun. What does it take to get a felony rap? Less than you think. If you’re contemplating a life of crime, contemplate this: you’ll be washing dishes and dumping garbage for the rest of your life.

THE MAGIC PORTAL
     
    Cops! They’re the gatekeepers of the plantations. The door of a police cruiser is a magic portal. Once you go through it, your life changes forever. You lose your freedom and your anonymity. You belong to the state, and whatever it wants to know about you, it will discover. It will fingerprint you, photograph you, and in many states swab the inside of your cheek to map your DNA. It can look down your throat and inside your body anytime it wants. It can force you to spill your guts to psychiatrists and take tests administered by psychologists, who are not, repeat not, working to help you. You’re bagged and tagged, and all that information will go into computerized files that are increasingly available to anyone. The magic portal is one-way and leads only to the plantations, where servitude is not limited by indenture and is, in fact, a life sentence. So don’t go through that portal . Stay out of there! Stay away from cops unless you need them! Run and hide if you must! (More about how to do that in upcoming chapters.)

SO WHO’S IN CHARGE? NOBODY!
     
    The horror of the electronic plantation is that nobody’s in charge. Local judges can’t do anything because they have no jurisdiction beyond the state line and none whatsoever over the federal government, which maintains the NCIC arrest database. The U.S. Congress, which does have jurisdiction, gives privacy issues more hot air than action. Europe strictly guards data privacy; the United States does not.
    Here’s another problem. Most lawyers and judges who work in the state criminal justice systems are paper people (in the federal court system, documents are filed electronically). For good and necessary reasons (anyone can say they didn’t get a fax or e-mail) judges and court officers do not send documents electronically, but have them served by certified mail or by human process servers. This is the only method so far devised that ensures that people actually receive summonses, complaints, subpoenas, court orders, etc. Most lawyers and judges view computers as glorified typewriters to be pounded by underlings. They are amazingly uninformed about the problems caused by electronic records releases and their use in discriminating against people with arrests but no convictions—and this includes records of false arrests and bad arrests.
    Here’s something else you need to know that should raise goose bumps of fear. Felony arrests, in many states, can be based solely on the testimony of a credible witness. You say, so what? What’s so bad about that?
    Imagine one day that your next-door neighbor or your ex-girlfriend or your ex-wife or your ex-boyfriend or your ex-husband who hates your guts calls the cops. He or she says,