Woman Arrested for Failing to Return Twilight to the Library

WTF.

Goddammit. Not only does the court manage to prove its own ineptitude, but it made me feel sorry for a Twilight fan. Double fail!

This woman’s address was self-reported so it all falls back on her. As someone who works in government, this kind of stuff is really frustrating. Libraries don’t make money as it is, and I’m sure her library advertised that they were going to be tough on people with overdue fees. Boo hoo hoo, personal choice to have 5 preteen children, personal choice to be a shitty library patron.

This woman’s address was self-reported

Source? All I found through Google is that the warrant was delivered to her childhood home.

so it all falls back on her

Yes, unofficial organizations like courts have no need to double-check the delivery of unimportant documents like warrants. It’s not like they’re going to screw anybody’s life up. /sarcasm

I’m sure her library advertised that they were going to be tough on people with overdue fees

Any proof of this or are you just assuming (e.g. making it up)?

personal choice to have 5 preteen children

Right, because leaving children with no one to care for them isn’t a human rights issue – those kids made the personal choice to be born to a dangerous criminal, so just leave them in a potentially dangerous situation. /sarcasm

personal choice to be a shitty library patron.

Except 1) she says she didn’t check them out and 2) thirty six dollars of late fees does not logically lead to a jail cell. By your logic if the courts decided to put jaywalkers on death row, that’s just the result of their personal choices.

Thank you, you expressed everything I wanted to say. I’m not a fan of Twilight by any means, but I couldn’t see how that was relevant to a story. And the judginess in that comment (especially the comment about the kids- how does having children make you a bad person?) was overwhelming.

Someones got some personal issues goin on here. 

 At some point in time, the woman had a library card with her childhood address listed as primary residence.  It is up to the library patron to maintain correct address and contact information.  I can’t speak for all libraries, but all that I have worked in or used have computer systems that “expire” a card after a certain period of time.  The point of the expiration is to update contact information or move the patron up to a different demographic range in the computer system (like from child to adult and have them resign a card application at that point).  To reactivate the card, library staff must verify address and contact information of the patron.  Some libraries actually require proof of address in form of a piece of mail or rent/lease agreements and the like to reactivate a card and some libraries just accept a patron’s verbal confirmation of address.  I can’t say what this particular library’s policies are, so I can’t judge.

There is only so much library staff can do to actually verify the correct address.  And many libraries are departments of their cities or counties, so going through the legal system to get city/county property back or reimbursement for said property makes sense.  So does outsourcing to a collection agency if that is an affordable alternative.  Either way of collection is ultimately funded by taxes anyway, so ultimately it’s about what that particular taxpayer base feels comfortable with.

And if the woman truly did not check the items out, okay but that still doesn’t negate her from having responsibility of some of her actions or inactions.  It’s still her responsibility to cancel her library card if she’s not going to use it or if it was stolen.  Or get a new card with a different card number so that would invalidate the old card.  Just the same as replacing her credit cards or other store membership cards. If you don’t report your credit card stolen, it’s much harder to prove you didn’t make those charges and then you become liable for them.

Dude, really? It’s just a freaking library book! And it’s not even a very GOOD library book! The New Mexican State Government just arrested some woman over a shitty library book that she didn’t even rent.

I swear the more I read about how inept people in general are, especially in the government, the more I start to wonder if reality in America is all an elaborate hoax.

 I’m more worried that 2 people actually gave that comment a Like. Must be the Yahoo Polititards!

I agree that the woman in question should have changed her card when she changed her address. How hard can it be to change a library card’s address when you’ve moving somewhere else? Come on. Really? This does make this problem partially her own fault – after all, that was why the bill never came in the mail to pay the fines, why the court summons never made it for not paying the fines, and why she ended up in jail to begin with. Just update your damn info, woman, it’s not hard. Most libraries even have websites now, so you have very, very little excuse here.

However, it’s not all the woman’s fault that this happened. What in the Hell was the state doing giving a court summons for $36 worth of library fees? Is Portales, NM the Gotham City of New Mexico, except instead of crime, there’s a horrible epidemic of people not returning library books or paying fines? Why doesn’t the library just cancel her card? Why does the state government need to get involved? Government shouldn’t even be involved in public library affairs aside from the taxes they are funded by. Government shouldn’t be involved in making laws about the damn library period. So what the Hell, New Mexico? What idiot lawmaker in your state decided that the crime of not returning a shitty book from the public library, and failing to repay the fines involved, is worth of a freaking court summons? Why is that law even on record? And how the Hell can a court summons be obeyed if the summons was never obtained? You couldn’t check to make sure the database info matched up? Surely SOME paperwork had to have been done and SOME information had to have been filed when that woman moved. What, were the secretaries feeling too lazy to double-check that day? That’s not what New Mexico pays your lazy asses for, ladies (and gentlemen)! Or did you just go on the assumption that the information on the card was correct instead of checking? Because if you did, you need to recall that when you assume, it makes an ass out of u and me. Then you need to write it on a piece of paper, clip it to a clipboard, and slam your stupid heads into it until that oh-so-valuable life lesson is hammered into your thick skulls by sheer force. And furthermore, how does the library have the authority to tell the police to arrest someone for not paying, oh whoop-dee-doo, $36 worth of library fines? Is the Portales public library just full of whiny milquetoasts who can’t bear the thought of someone being irresponsible in any possible way when politicians do it all the time? Or maybe they just regret that now they will be missing the extra cash they could have gotten from the woman, because it’s $36 more that they could put towards, I dunno, new computers in the library or something when $36 goes jack-skippety nowhere in this economy. $36?! Say it isn’t so! We could have used it to buy a whole three new Stephen King novels! We could have used it to buy a new aquarium for the betas in the children’s books area! And now we won’t get it because some horrible wench decided not to pay her library fines, even though that literally happens all of the time anyway! Arrest her before this twisted monster steals money from us that wasn’t ours to begin with again!

… Sorry, rant mode over. But dear Lord, everyone involved in this case just needs to step back and look at what they’re arguing about. They’re upset over a shitty Stephanie Meyer “novel” that isn’t even worth the money it took to print that stupid pile of word feces in the first place. How on earth is Stephanie Meyer’s literary trash-heap called The Twilight Saga worth $610 in bail money and $36 in library fines?

 Well, my library is a department within the City government.  The library’s budget for books, maintenance and repairs to the building, salaries and benefits for employees and so forth come directly from the City budget. It’s hard to “keep the government out” of the library when it is part of the government.  Books, including the overdue books, are City property and as such it’s up to the City government to get them back.  As I said before, whether it’s from the court system or through a collection agency doesn’t matter.  It’s all being funded by tax dollars and whatever the taxpayers feel comfortable with.

Yes, there does need to be a better way to check and cross-check address information between departments within the City, as in maybe water/electric/trash/library/ and so forth.  BUT, I will say that many times it’s hard to track a person because they may not have utilities registered in their name or such, especially if they are married or living with someone else. 

Ultimately she was taken to jail over the court summons, not the book.  If she failed to report for jury duty or had a traffic violation unpaid, the same thing would have happened.

I’m sure people are arrested all the time for having outstanding warrants due to not paying minor parking tickets and other municipal fees, but when it’s for library fines (although in this case for not returning library items which is considered at a certain point theft of public property) we get all riled up and think it’s stupid and extra-ordinary?  If it was a rare out of print first edition of a great work of literature would we think differently?

Its New Mexico and a town over from where I live. This area is so dumb… 

 http://lnk.co/I0RQG

Indeed. It’s bizarre. Why a court summons over a book?

All they do here for severely overdue books, is 1) put a block on your card, so if you’re a regular user of the library you’d find out soon enough 2) request you pay for the cost of the book 3) if that doesn’t happen, refer you to a debt recovery service, but that kind of thing is a very very distant last resort.

Also it’s odd that apparently in the US a summons doesn’t have to be “received by hand or dropped at the foot” of the person. They just assume it got to them through the magicks of the postal system, oh dear.

A third point but if you’re a registered voter/licensed driver etc surely the courts would have access to current address details and not just use whatever the library provided them? that’s seriously slack.

“Teel maintains that she doesn’t even remember checking them out.” Many patrons claim they don’t remember checking items out. If all of their children putting items on the counter at the same time,  they do have a hard time keeping track of everything.

Conversely, her address could have been mis-transcribed. I went to pick
up mail I had on hold for a few weeks and my mail was ‘lost’ for several
hours (with important legal documents in it) because the postal worker
was looking for 28 Sullivan street. To be clear: there is no Sullivan
street our town and I don’t live on 28-any-street. That was an unpleasant 5 hours.
Oh, but it was my fault because I clearly forgot the address of the
house I’ve lived in for the last 27 years. That falls back on me?

 That’s exactly why I have a tendency to not believe this woman didn’t check the books out or at least had been using her library card recently (as in since moving out of her “childhood home”).  If she hadn’t been using her card at all, she would have said something like, “I haven’t used my card in years/since I was a kid/etc”.  But saying she “doesn’t recall checking them out” sounds more like she has been using that card (with an outdated address).  So the commenters here that are saying she said she didn’t check them out seem to be making assumptions, in my opinion. 

And as far as Katana_X saying the address had been transcribed, how so?  The address was clearly stated as being that of her childhood home, so it wasn’t transcribed; it was clearly just never updated since she moved out of that home.  Whether that’s her fault for misleading library staff deliberately, her lack of remembering as being simple oversight of having too many books to keep track of, or the library’s lack of verifying her address properly (through current pieces of mail, current bills or utilities, etc) is unclear.

This is a serious failure of our criminal justice system. If anyone involved had taken one extra minute to think about the situation, this lady never would have been jailed.

It’s the same thing with that poor girl who worked two jobs to support her family, got all A’s in school, but was jailed overnight for truancy. How the hell did that conversation go?

“You have to go to jail because you missed too much school!”

“It’s because I get tired from working a full-time and part-time job to support my siblings after my parents abandoned us.”

“Yeah, well… kids who skip school like you are the problem with today’s youth!”

“But I’m on the honor roll. I work hard in school and get all A’s.”

“Yeah, well… YOU’RE STILL GOING TO JAIL.”

Now how about this lady?

“You have to go to jail because your library books are overdue!”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I don’t even remember taking those books out.”

“Yeah, well, you have to go to jail now!”

“Can I just give you the $36?”

“No, you have to go to jail now!”

“But I have five children who need me to watch them.”

“JAIL. NOW.”

It should be mandatory for all judges and cops, before they do anything, to pause and ask themselves, “Am I being ridiculous here?” In criminal court cases, juries have the right to find the defendant not guilty even if there is proof that they are guilty. Because they’re allowed to choose what’s RIGHT regardless of the law.  If you’re not going to apply any human intelligence or compassion to the law, then we should just let computers handle the entire process. Actually, that’s looking like the better option these days anyway…

I agree with recognizing the responsibility the woman accepted by registering for the card, noting that she failed to meet her responsibilities by not returning the $36 worth of materials she borrowed, and that the state owns library materials and has a reponsibility to manage those resources. But with that in mind, doesn’t going as far as the state went to try and reclaim those materials go far beyond what was fiscally responsible in this case? I doubt the $36 [or even the $646] cover the staff time, specialized software and storage space required to track the borrowed items, issue overdue notices, send the summons, hold the hearing, prepare the warrant, arrest her, transport her to jail, process her at jail, house her at jail, set bail amounts and process the bail. It seems like an awful lot of time and money wasted to teach this woman a lesson about responsible library use. The inhumane treatment she received is just icing on the cake.

 Does the 36 dollars even begin to cover the cost of outsourcing the item recovery to a collection agency?  That’s basically the only other option of proactive item recovery.  Or would you rather the city government not actively try to get back its own property and just say, “Oh well.  That’s 36 bucks down the drain.  Let’s go order replacement copies and cross our fingers they don’t get ‘long overdue’ as well.”  The library is not really based on being a “moneymaker” by no means, but I do get what you mean about using the allocated funding in a better man.  But part of the things you mention do cross into other departmental budgets (police, the courts, etc), so it’s not all the library’s fiscal burden. 

Also, in terms of the library”s “staff time” in dealing with their end of the  overdue process, it doesn’t account for a lot.  I’ve been there and printing overdue notices while waiting on other patrons and performing multiple tasks at the desk.  My best bet on this, based on my work experience, is that the library staff’s part in this extended only to the normal duty of printing and mailing the overdue notices and probably printing out a list of names and addresses to be turned over to the legal system. 

I’d be more concerned with how this woman checked out the items with an outdated address, or if she didn’t then who had access to that card, and how to correct a lapse in policy or lapse in enacting a policy regarding address verification. 

Someones got some personal issues goin on here. http://FoxGetPositionWork.blogspot.com

I have been there too (probably in a different library system). Direct staff time spent in printing and sending library notices probably doesn’t amount to a lot. Honestly, even printing the slips and mailing them is more time than I have ever expected to spend on that part of handling overdue accounts as in my system the process is mostly automated. Time spent maintaining the infrastructure that allows the tracking to happen, correcting system errors (on the relatively rare occasions errors occur, e.g. when incorrect items are applied to accounts, usually because of some damnable feature of the ILS) and talking to people who have overdue accounts is significant enough to question the value of pursuing low-fine amounts, even if they are really long-term.The other aspect to it is the original rationale you presented for pursuing the fines: if it is state money, than all of the money the state spends to collect it counts. One of the reasons it can justify going to extremes to collect money is that no one department feels the pinch. It is still bloat, and the kind of bloat that impacts services that typically get viewed as low-priority (like libraries). And in terms of paying the money to collect it, yes, I would rather the state pay less money to replace copies than spend more money to hunt down the originals. It is cheaper.

On the outdated address, people with low or unstable incomes tend to move a lot, often forgetting to update services between. In the move, items checked out from the library can easily get lost or left behind. It does not necessarily make this persons situation right, but it is a factor to consider when providing services to this segment of society.I don’t think that the collections agency is the best option either, because I got into this business more because I love answering people’s questions than I love pressuring people to pay fines. But turning an account over to a collections agency would cost the state less money, as it would probably cost between $15-$25 worth of administrative costs which could be passed directly on to the patron ( although in this case, I suspect the ~$60 fee would also never be paid). 

…That sucks. Thank God my library doesn’t do that, I’d be in and out of jail like a alcholic living next to a bar.

 The fact that many people lie or make mistakes does not mean that everyone does. You may disagree with the plausibility of Teel’s version of events, but it is still possible and thus needs to be considered along with all the other evidence.

This is what inferior fiction has wrought, people: warrants and huge fines.  Support GOOD LITERATURE!

I live in the United States, and what you described is exactly what every sane library in every sane state does. Apparently New Mexico isn’t sane. O.o

Not really. Stealing a book’s not the same as stealing a car, or causing a problem with parking.

 True, and unfortunately it’s more or less a perfect storm that ended up with the postal service missing her address because they had the wrong info, and her who got the brunt of it.