“[Leasing] agents sometimes hesitated to push rents higher. Roper said they were often peers of the people they were renting to. ‘We said there’s way too much empathy going on here,’ he said. ‘This is one of the reasons we wanted to get pricing off-site.'”
“With the end of the filter system, Rutherford County now jails fewer of its kids than before. But that doesn’t mean its jail is ramping down. Quite the opposite. The jail keeps adding staff. Mark Downton, one of E.J.’s attorneys, says the county has ‘shifted gears.’ Forced to stop jailing so many of its own children, Rutherford County ramped up its pitch to other places, to jail theirs.”