On June 7, 2014, Mike Tobias, a 28-year-old from Reading, Pennsylvania, was watching television at home when his brother burst into the room with an emergency phone call. Their mother, Eileen DiNino, had been discovered unconscious in her cell at Berks County Prison and taken to the hospital. “I talked to the doctor and he explained what happened,” Tobias told a reporter from the Reading Eagle. “She had blood coming from her nose and mouth when they found her and that was that.” DiNino suffered from a number of health problems, and did not have access to medications for high blood pressure, anxiety, and bipolar disorder while incarcerated. The night before, DiNino’s cellmate, Nicole Lord, said she heard DiNino complaining of pain all over her body, saying that she had been moaning, “It hurts, it hurts. I cannot breathe.” Now, the doctor told Tobias, his mother was dead.
DiNino, a 55-year-old single mother of eight, had been sentenced to a two-day stint at Berks County because she owed the local courts more than $2,000 in fines and fees related to the truancy of two of her teenage sons. She was unemployed, lived in a house owned by a relative, and her husband, Brian, who had owned a small business, passed away in 2011 from complications from hepatitis. Caring for her family was a struggle. “My brothers, despite the truancy, are good kids,” Tobias said. “They’re not out running the streets committing crimes.”
[For more of this story, written by Dana Goldstein, go to http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121186/truancy-laws-unfairly-attack-poor-children-and-parents ]
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