Boop

They have increased their goal several times and exceeded it within hours. HOURS!!

Here is their latest update

They’re asking you to please donate to their other fund, to help the victims of the shooting in Kentucky. These people are beyond amazing. They give me hope for the future and restore my faith in humanity.

Here is the fund for the synagogue

Here is the fund for the victims in Kentucky

They haven’t reached their goal with this one yet. If you’re feeling compelled to donate, please donate to the Kentucky fund. Because of everything else going on, it hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention. But these two peoples lives were just as important. They were just as loved and they will be just as missed.

And because they haven’t gotten as much attention and their stories aren’t in the news as much, here’s their story. From the fund raiser.

Please pass this around. If you can’t donate, someone who sees your reblog might.

Keep up the great work!!

PS: the fund for the Tree Of Life victims has raised an additional $11k in the past two and half hours as well. How amazing is that ?!

In dozens of one-on-one meetings every week, a lawyer retained by the city of Philadelphia summons parents whose children have just been jailed, pulls out his calculator and hands them more bad news: a bill for their kids’ incarceration.

Even if a child is later proved innocent, the parents still must pay a nightly rate for the detention. Bills run up to $1,000 a month, and many of the parents of Philadelphia’s roughly 730 detained children are so poor they can afford monthly installments of only $5.

The lawyer, Steven Kaplan — who according to his city contract is paid up to $316,000 a year in salary and bonuses, more than any city employee, including the mayor — is one agent of a deeply entrenched social policy that took root across the country in the 1970s and ’80s. The guiding principle was simple: States, counties and cities believed that parents were shedding responsibility for their delinquent children and expecting the government to pick up the tab.

If parents shared the financial cost of incarceration, this thinking went, they would be more involved in keeping their children out of trouble.

“I mean, do we think the taxpayers should be supporting these bad kids?” Kaplan said in an interview.

Today, mothers and fathers are billed for their children’s incarceration — in jails, detention centers, court-ordered treatment facilities, training schools or disciplinary camps — by 19 state juvenile-justice agencies, while in at least 28 other states, individual counties can legally do the same, a survey by the Marshall Project shows. […]

Because these parents are so often from poor communities, even the most aggressive efforts to bill them seldom bring in meaningful revenue. Philadelphia netted $551,261 from parents of delinquent children in fiscal 2016, a small fraction of the $81,148,521 the city spent on all delinquent placements, according to city records.

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From NBC News:

When Kameelah Davis-Spears’s son came home after nine months in juvenile detention for getting into a fistfight with a neighbor at school, she thought the worst was over.

Then, about a year later, she received a summons to meet with Steve Kaplan, a lawyer contracted by Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services. Kaplan told Davis-Spears she owed $12,000 as child support for her son’s time in detention.

“He said he was cutting me ‘a hell of a deal.’ There was no back and forth. He just said, ‘This is what you owe,’” Spears explained in written testimony. “I didn’t have a lawyer there to help me. It felt so one-sided.”

Davis-Spears isn’t alone. In fact, charging parents for their kids’ incarceration is common in 19 states identified by a new Marshall Project investigation published in partnership with the Washington Post. In 28 more states, the Marshall Project found that the practice is allowed at the county level.

Third-year law student Wesley Stevenson at Temple University in Philadelphia was puzzled by her latest law clinic assignment. The project was to represent low-income working parents being billed for their kids’ incarceration.

“When I first heard about this, you know, I thought that I misunderstood,” Stevenson explained, “As an idealistic law student I thought that this couldn’t be something that the law was being used to do.”