Mug-Shot Industry Digs Up Your Past, Charges You To Bury It

An anonymous reader writes "Exploiting Florida's liberal public-records laws and Google's search algorithms, a handful of entrepreneurs are making real money by publicly shaming people who've run afoul of Florida law. Florida.arrests.org, the biggest player, now hosts more than 4 million mugs. On the other side of the equation are firms like RemoveSlander, RemoveArrest.com and others that sometimes charge hundreds of dollars to get a mugshot removed. On the surface, the mug-shot sites and the reputation firms are mortal enemies. But behind the scenes, they have a symbiotic relationship that wrings cash out of the people exposed."

Comments

Bad economy? It's a problem of abundance.

[nido]

Yet another side effect of the bad economy.

Seeing as how 20% of the labor force has been replaced by machines, what are these people supposed to do to support themselves? They can't all be criminals...

This story is about a type of make-work employment too, it's just not funded by the government. It's not so different than organized crime, in that no true value is created for the economy by the actions of the parties involved.

If the government made money (instead of the banks), they could spend it into circulation to employ people who do valuable things. Community cleanup, public works, etc.

Jobs projects are totally different than make-work jobs. A job project is paying someone to do something that ought to be done, but which isn't profitable for the market to do itself. Make-work jobs put people to work doing pointless or harmful things: 1/2 digging ditches, 1/2 filling them in.

Laws criminalizing plants (Marijuana, coca leaf, etc) create make-work jobs in the prison industry, for example. Some of the other ones that come to mind are political sacred cows, so I won't mention them here.

The blog post I'm (slowly) working on links to some of John Harvey's blog posts. I found them last month, starting with Why You Should Learn to Love the Deficit: Federal Budget Fallacies:

... Nothing could be more foolish right now than policies that reduce government spending or increase taxes. We have nearly 14 million unemployed people in the United States, a number that undoubtedly underestimates the true magnitude of the problem since it ignores discouraged workers and the underemployed. Despite this, Messrs. Obama, Ryan, and Geithner tell us that we need to make sacrifices. Seriously? The American people already have, and what they are asking us to do will simply make it worse. ...