My first job was being a bus boy. The guy owed me $157 for a month and a half of work. The check bounced and I ended up owing the bank $7. The place closed down two months later. I was the lucky one tho. I had a home with parents to take care of me (being 15). Others who relied on that place for their livelihood were…

I wish.

The ordinary, every-day kind.

Answer to the title of the article is, for me, : Not you (meaning, me). Great read. Having been a recipient of wage theft with no recourse, it sucks beyond. Just awful.

I used to play a game, waiting at the metered freeway entrance on my way to work every morning, called “who’s cheating in the carpool lane?”

That may not be enough as some immigrants (legitimately) may not trust the government to not find some other reason to deport them, now that the government knows they’re there illegally.

I still benefit from this kind of permissiveness as a poor white person. In the UK where I live you can get government assistance with housing costs - but many landlords will not accept this arrangement. They put “no DSS” on their adverts - “no department of social services funding allowed”, they mean.

I’m an immigration attorney. I’m constantly telling my clients that they may have the law on their side, but the government has the power. And most of them don’t have the money or the resources to fight, no matter how right they are, or how just their cause.

Fantastic. I grew up in a children’s home in the South and this hit me viscerally. What’s that you’re feeling? Oh, nothing much. Just the eternal reverberations of a life without justice.

“I learned later that the wealthy, Wall Street, the banks—they all get to break the rules. But us, the poor, the people of color—we don’t”

Best thing I’ve read on a Gawker site in quite a while.

Yeah. :(

It depressing to see comments when someone goes to jail about how they’ll be raped now. When in reality the most vulnerable prisoners are singled out for sexual assault; the young, the nonviolent, the poor (if a rich person actually goes to prison they can pay for protection), and of course transgendered folks.

This is prison. Most of these people are not good.

Even judges use prison rape as a talking point during sentencing.

Rape or sexual abuse in prison to anyone is a problem and something in Anglo culture has generally become accepted as part of being punished.

My poor dear husband didn’t grow up with cats. We were at a house party and he started petting their cat. I took one look at the cat’s twitching tail and said, “uh, careful there, she’s going to swipe at you.”

Cats are not very social animals in comparison to some, but they are mammals with fairly strong offspring care.

Having worked in zoos for 7 years in my life, and having personally known Stacey, maybe I can add some of my own experience.