Posted on 12/26/2009 7:49:11 AM PST by GOPsterinMA
With the crippled economy forcing more Bay Staters to dust off library cards, local lending institutions are throwing the book at overdue scofflaws, turning them over to the cops and courts in a hard-nosed bid to collect fines and recover costly tomes and DVDs.
“The value of the materials is fairly high. We need to replace them,” said Martha Holden, director of the Peabody Institute Library, which has sent the law after a trio of overdue culprits.
The Peabody library filed criminal complaints against 19-year-old Alyssa Toste and 23-year-old Jeramie Crane on Dec. 15. Despite repeated notices, both Toste and Crane failed to return more than $500 worth of overdue books, DVDs, music CDs, books on tape and other items, Holden said.
Toste and Crane did not respond to requests for comment.
(Excerpt) Read more at bostonherald.com ...
Puts me in mind of Bookman - the hard-nosed library cop from Seinfeld.
These two with $500 and a third one with $1000 due. Hmmm, here’s an idea. Instead of leaning them more and more, how about cutting up their library card long before it reached this amount.
I believe that's the value of the stuff they checked out, not the amount of the fines. It is enough to count as a felony theft, that should get their attention.
So, let me see if I understand this correctly... The library, feeling hard up for money, has dedicated someone who likely pulls down $500 a week in salary, and probably $400 a week in benefits, to go hunt down people who haven’t paid their fines, possibly resulting in the repayment of $2,000?
Seems to me to be a constantly losing proposition. Because the end income will always be greater than the cost of having a public employee collect it.
One more public employee hack - at least one more Rat vote for life.
Cousins of cousins of hacks gotta eat too!
The liberal idiots running the libraries are not living in reality and are very hard nosed.
My oldest daughter borrowed a DVD copy of “Stripes”.
She then turned it in using the library’s drop box.
A month later she got a notice that the DVD wasn’t turned in and that the replacement fee was $100. She bought a copy ($14.99 + tax) and took it to the library as restitution. The took it as a donation and then wanted their original back plus fines.
She argued with them off and on for a year. The fines built up to $500. She didn’t pay it and they sold the $500 debt to a collection agency.
The collection agency put a bad debt mark on her credit report and she lost her student loans.
She had to take a part time job to stay in school because she couldn’t get a student loan. Her grades dropped and she struggled every year. After 3 years, her mother and I paid the %500 to the collection agency. They told us the bad mark couldn’t come off for 7 years. We hired an attorney and finally got things fixed. Total cost, about $800 plus the cost of the stupid DVD of “Stripes”.
How do you “cut them off”. Library thieves don’t generally check things out in dribs and drabs over a long period of time. In general they check out a whole bunch of stuff all at once and never come back. Short of putting a cap on the dollar value everybody can check out you can’t really cut these guys off, by the time you know they’re a problem it’s too late.
*How do you “cut them off”. Library thieves don’t generally check things out in dribs and drabs over a long period of time. In general they check out a whole bunch of stuff all at once and never come back. Short of putting a cap on the dollar value everybody can check out you can’t really cut these guys off, by the time you know they’re a problem it’s too late.*
It’s odd, isn’t it? Freepers generally want the death penalty for every other crime committed in America, but in this instance—since the crime was committed against a function of a local government—freepers turn into mushy liberals and argue that the criminals should have been somehow stopped before they committed their crime. Utterly ridiculous.
Look, people, when you get a library card you are explicitly told that if you don’t behave in a certain way there will be financial repercussions—usually you have to sign your name to that. If you can’t hold up that end of the bargain, don’t borrow the materials.
I can almost guarantee that the people who stole the taxpayers’ property in this instance are deadbeats, too, which are usually a Freeper’s favorite target. Interesting to see that any function of any government ranks below petty deadbeats in some Freepers’ eyes.
The fewer fines that libraries recoup, the more taxes they try to take to replace these items—consider that.
I have never watched Seinfeld - not one minute of it.
“Short of putting a cap on the dollar value everybody can check out”
That’s a great idea! There’s the solution.
Mother of God - what a horrible, horrible ordeal! You couldn't find anyone along the way that could have ended this (city councilor, state rep, mayor, etc.)?
What state was this in?
WOW!!!
Libraries need to have memberships like a Costco. If you don’t return the goodies and pay the fines in time, you lose the membership.
They do have membership. It’s called a library card. If you don’t return items they will put a Stop on your card.
Unlike a Costco, a library card is free.
I would charge $30 per adult library card and $10 for kids...or $50 for a family card.
At the end of the year all fines and missing items must be accounted for before the “card” is reactivated.
Problem solved.
Fantastic idea! Someone else also suggested capping (in $ value) how much you could take out.
The simple solution is to dissolve public libraries. They are useless nowadays. One can find information on the Internet in less than a few seconds. It takes one an hour to go the library, look up a holding, and check it out. I cringe everytime talk comes up about modernizing out library. Half the cost will go to meeting disability access laws - more ramps, elevators, and short stacks that can be reached from a wheelchair meaning fewer books per square foot of floor area.
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