Editing Harpersville, Alabama (section)

==Government==
The mayor is Theoangelo Perkins. The previous mayor was Don Greene, and the two have traded this position back and forth for many election cycles.

Mayor Theoangelo Perkins was the mayor in 2012. Also in 2012, the international scandal of the traffic court investigation into the high fines, prison sentences for traffic violations, and large fees to a non- public third-party probation company was widely reported from local news agencies to the United Kingdom in the Guardian.

Shelby County judge called the Harpersville Traffic Court “judicially sanctioned extortion  racket.” (https://eji.org/files/mi-mgm-alabama-city-running-exortion-racket-07-16-12.pdf;

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/us/judge-in-alabama-halts-private-probation.html?smid=pl-share)

Mayor Theoangelo Perkins was also the mayor of Harpersville when Shelby County Sheriff's Department acted on an order to seize the town's records before the documents could be removed or destroyed. The Mayor was not available for comment according to the Shelby County Reporter; “Harpersville Mayor Theoangelo Perkins did not immediately return phone messages seeking comment.” (https://www.shelbycountyreporter.com/2012/08/10/sheriffs-deputies-seizing-records-in-harpersville-city-court-case/)

The Harpersville Clerk of the Court in a recorded deposition which was reported in an article in The Nation said,  “In testimony offered at a deposition, Hall, the court clerk, acknowledged that the sentences Harpersville debtors served at the Shelby County Work Release Center were indefinite. Ford’s sentence, Hall explained, was “up to her”; she could leave as soon as she paid off her fines. The sole function of work release was to collect outstanding debt, forgoing the rehabilitative underpinning of most work-release programs.”  https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/town-turned-poverty-prison-sentence/)

The article also listed that two people died while in custody waiting to pay off their debt to the Harpersville Traffic Court.