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FlyAGS.com Desperate, vulnerable people plus low-paid, largely unsupervised employees equals a recipe for abuse. “I’ve heard stories of girls giving up the booty to get out of hours,” he says. “I’ve heard of money. I’ve heard any range. It’s crazy.” In March, a Sentinel assistant branch manager in Lawrenceville was charged with accepting money from probationers and not applying it to the money owed and to falsifying work times. “You’ve got to remember, this guy is just like a probation officer,” he says. “My financial livelihood and my freedom is based on an $11 an hour probation officer and a $22,000 a year salaried employee at the Rec Department. Those two people have my balls in their hands.” Spend any time around the Sentinel office and you’ll hear stories of oversight and abuse and outright mistakes, though perhaps none as egregious as the story of Kathleen Hucks, who was jailed this Labor Day weekend for violating the terms of a probation that ended four years earlier. Hucks was held at the Columbia County jail until her husband could pay Sentinel $157, which wasn’t until September 20. Long is also trying this case, and questions whether Sentinel even has the authority to operate in Columbia County. In a letter dated November 8, County Clerk Erin Hall replied to Long’s request for a contract between Sentinel and the Board of Commissioners with a letter stating that she could not find where any such agreement had been approved by the Columbia County Commission. According to Georgia Code, a private probation contract must be approved by the judge and the county commission. “If they don’t have a contract, they have no basis for collecting a dime or acting as a probation officer,” Long says. For Long, who says he’s investigating a desk full of allegations against Sentinel, it comes down to the desire for accountability expressed by the judges in Athens-Clarke County. “The people who make decisions to lock you up need to be accountable to a governmental agency,” he says. “The people who pick up our trash — if they want to outsource that, that’s fine. But there’s a big distinction. The man picking up my trash can not put my ass in jail.”
15NOVEMBER2012
AUGUSTA’S INDEPENDENT VOICE SINCE 1989
METROSPIRIT 15