This blog was inspired by a 90 day stint spent by the author in the Collin County jail in McKinney, TX. During my sentence, I of course learned the lore of the jail, which tends to get handed down from inmate to inmate. It was here that I learned more of the corruption rampant in Collin County, both in the government and the general population.

As a more upscale suburb of Dallas, Collin County is the second wealthiest county in Texas, and one of the richest counties in the country. I grew up in the area, but escaped to the much more liberal Austin locality in my mid twenties. At least… I thought I had escaped. Even as a former resident long since relocated, I was sucked into the dubious jurisdiction of a civil trial involving a dispute with a former Plano girlfriend, who had abused and cheated on me, over bawdy talk on FaceBook. I was branded a terrorist by a shyster civil litigator, deemed a threat to the plaintiff even though I live 300 miles away and never expressed any serious intention to hurt her or even go near her, and was ultimately thrown in jail without ever once being offered a lawyer, even after performing the due diligence of traveling 300 miles to attend two out of town court dates in good faith. They even sent the local police to my personal residence to search it without a warrant!

I am a college graduate and salaried computer programmer with a well-established career in software engineering. Prior to this, I had no history of violence or criminal record other than petty charges from peaceful acts of civil disobedience. Restraining order reform is separate issue a bit outside the scope of this blog, but definitely one worth considering. Basically, I publicly insulted a princess (there were no threats, unless you count the threat the truth can often be to a person of questionable character’s reputation), and I was locked in a tower as punishment, as if the county’s justice system were governed by a sort of feudalistic medieval chivalry.

There are many local stereotypes about people from Plano, the well-to-do suburb that resides within Collin County. Citizens of Plano are often considered stuck up and pretentious, and yet the nationally publicized Plano heroin scandal of the 1990’s showed that the children of Plano’s upper class tend to be, well… crazy. Wild. Rambunctious. Typical repressed kids rebelling against their strict parents. The old money of Dallas generally tend to live within Dallas County in the Highland Park area, whereas Plano is populated mostly by the executives of dot-com boom upstarts.

You hear a lot of the stereotypical spoiled rich kid stories about those Plano kids who have been born to nouveau riche families with more money than class or intelligence, AKA “trash with cash”. The preppy quarterback who gets a hundred thousand dollar sportscar on his 16th birthday, and promptly totals it while drunk driving. The spoiled, slutty, daddy’s little girl, AKA “The Plano Princess”. Having dated several women from the area, I’ve learned to discriminate against them romantically, as they tend to not be very good at giving me the type of relationship I really want, which is to say, a non-abusive, non-exploitative, monogamous commitment in the form of an equitable, romantic partnership, a dream most suburban girls are too self-entitled to fulfill. I’m actually from a bit south of the area, Dallas proper, and I think of myself as more down to Earth than the bratty people, both children and adults, of Plano (or similar neighborhoods).

The mentality of the Plano community is that of a homeowner’s association gone mad with power. Residents aren’t allowed to paint their houses certain colors, and one might even say that the residents themselves can only be certain colors. Collective tyranny enforced by a despotic local government, a whole community full of people self-assured that they can take the world around them and force it to conform to a very narrow definition, through the sheer force of lawyers, guns, and money.

And the citizens of Plano/Collin County have created a full-service (to the wealthy) fascist municipal government to carry out their totalitarian designs for the world around them. It starts early with schools that have very strict dress codes, which don’t allow for the expression of counter-culture or radical politics. Conformity and cultural prejudice are pounded into children at a young age, via both social norms and a systemic infrastructure which internalizes cultural bigotry, thought police, and destroys any illusions of individual rights early on in the life of anyone unfortunate enough to be raised there.

Dating the former captain of a Plano West High School debate team provided me some insight as to how the school system teaches kids to think backwards. Debaters choose or are assigned a position on a topic, and then they are expected to find sources and articles to back up their position. This is the exact opposite of the scientific method, where evidence is gathered BEFORE a conclusion is drawn. What do kids learn from this? That the truth is not objective, but rather, malleable by argument, and subject to public opinion, or the judgment of authority figures. History is revisable.

As my case proves, you don’t want to get in any kind of legal dispute with a citizen of Collin County, because their oppressive, conformist culture has begotten a biased and tyrannical government you don’t want sicced on you. An upper class citizen of Collin County, and especially one who conforms to the culture of the area, has more rights than an outsider, practitioner of alternative lifestyle, or even a member of Plano’s lower class, and the county’s legal system reflects this. That drunk driving 16 year old I mentioned earlier? His daddy’s well-connected lawyer will get him probation, but the dark-skinned, peaceful hippie growing pot without endangering anyone will get the maximum sentence.

Part of the problem is the pervasive influence of a very real local Prison-Industrial Complex and an incestuous culture of crooked county administrators fat with porkbarrel. This can best be summed up in the history of the Collin County Jail, which was originally intended to be a Federal prison when it was constructed, but it failed to meet the Federal specifications. So the taxpayers (and property taxes in Collin County are quite high) had this big albatross that no one knew what to do with.

And so it was decided to make the rejected prison an over-sized county jail, to be fed by a crooked court system that often walks all over the rights of the accused, puts on biased trials, and always gives the maximum sentence upon conviction, unless, of course, a high-priced lawyer with the right connections is hired, to signify to the Judge that the defendant is upper-class, and to be treated with kid gloves.

This is how they pay for this blunder of government waste: For every inmate in Collin County Jail, the county receives anywhere from $100-$500 per Diem from the Federal and State governments, depending upon the nature of the offense he is said to have committed. This gives the Judges of Collin County the incentive to hand down long sentences for petty crimes. And the citizens think this is keeping them safer, when in fact, the whole point is to pay off this ridiculously over-sized folly of a jail, at the expense of defendants’ rights and public safety!

Most of the people in Collin County jail serve no purpose by being there other than to help the county siphon funding from State and Federal coffers. For instance, during my term, I met an old drunk picked up for Public Intox. In the inner city jail of a major metropolitan area, such as Dallas, a drunk would never make it past the 72 hour holdover, or “drunk tank”, before he was released, having sobered up and no longer a danger to himself or others, with a court date and a fine to pay. The old man arrested for Public Intox in Collin County served almost two weeks before finally being released. Two weeks. For Public Intox.

There was also a retarded man, just a boy really, no more than 19 years old, who was in jail for forging checks. There is no way this kid could have forged the check he tried to pass, nor could he have possibly understood the abstract nature of the law he was breaking by attempting to cash the hot check, no doubt on behalf of an actual criminal. But, to the Collin County justice system, he was a warm body to fill a cell, and that’s all they needed. At one point they were ready to send him off to the State Mental Hospital, but he was too incompetent to sign the release, even though he would have probably liked the State Hospital better than the jail. He simply did not have the wherewithal to make legal decisions for himself. And the county took advantage of him.

There was a man sentenced to 6 months for non-payment of child support. He wasn’t a deliberately negligent parent, he had simply fallen behind. I don’t believe that incarcerating him had a positive effect on his ability to pay child support, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to “teach him a lesson”: don’t be poor in Collin County.

Most of the people in Collin County Jail are there for probation violations from non-violent drug charges. The Collin County Adult Probation System is one of the most stringent in the state, and is notorious for violating people on technicalities, in order to send them back to jail for the full term of their sentence, thus feeding through funding the aforementioned local Prison-Industrial Complex.

In what is clearly a conflict of interest to which the average Collin County citizen is largely oblivious, the long-running Sheriff of Collin County, Terry Box, actually owned the land upon which the monstrosity of a jail resides, made millions off its sale to the county, and actually made profitable businesses for his family in the course of constructing and administrating the jail as a “public servant”. And he has gifted some of the most lucrative contracts for jail services, such as vending and phone systems, to his immediate family and cronies.

As I said before, the average citizen of Collin County is largely unaware of this collusive corruption, but the general mentality of the redneck populace with delusions of class is that jail “helps” criminals. Which, in my experience is not true. In Collin County Jail, I was exposed to violence, gangs, and racism, the effects of which have taken me years to recover from. I can honestly say that I left the jail very negatively affected, psychologically, by my stay, having never been violent, racist, or gang-affiliated before serving my sentence there.

The Family Courts of Collin County are notoriously crooked and culturally prejudiced, as evidenced by two prominent cases: Judge Suzanne Wooten, who was impeached for taking bribes in child custody cases, and Judge John Roach Jr, who enforced a morality clause in a divorce agreement, thus depriving a lesbian woman of custody of her child. Then there were the judges involved in my case: Nathan E. White Jr, who claims to be a civil libertarian, but is in fact a fascist servant of the wealthy, and Benjamin N Smith, who unthinkingly handed down the heaviest possible sentence for my “crime” of speaking my mind on the internet, probably because he is a former prosecutor with an anti-defendant bias, the perfect candidate to act on behalf of the Prison-Industrial Complex. Rumors abound of a polyamorous swinger’s club with which many of the litigators, plaintiffs, and defendants in Collin County Family Court are associated, a perverted sex club feeding off a divorce court, which is often used to influence judges’ decisions in family law cases, which are usually decided by judge rather than jury.

Of course, I mounted an appeal on my case, from jail, but it was deliberately suppressed by a Judge who denied me Informa Pauperis, and a court which drug their feet on the delivery of trial transcripts to the appellate court, which undoubtedly would have smelt something fishy about the way I was denied both legal counsel and a fair trial by a jury of my peers. I was also denied access to the law library in jail, which seems to exist only for purposes of show. If this is one of the most well-run, cleanest, least crooked courts/jails in Texas, then I hate to imagine what the rest of the courts and jails in Texas are like.

And the sad thing is that I’m not the only blogger or journalist writing about this. This isn’t a lone nut espousing conspiracy theories. You might say to yourself, “Well I’m sure every court makes a bad decision now and then“, or “Everyone who loses in court is going to call the court ‘crooked’…” But this is actually a pattern of corruption that many locals are beginning to become aware of, and hopefully will change through the course of democratic elections.