Brown lawn means jail time - St. Petersburg Times

Brown lawn means jail time - St. Petersburg Times.

On Friday morning Joseph Prudente put on a pair of shorts and his "Grandpa Gone Wild" T-shirt. He took off his wedding band and put his heart medication in a plastic Wal-Mart bag. Then his daughter drove him to jail. Grandpa had time to do.

His crime? - He had disobeyed a court order that he sod the lawn at his Beacon Woods home.

His bail? -  Zero.

Prudente 66 must stay in the Pasco County jail in Land O Lakes until the required sod work is completed under a September court order signed by Circuit Judge W. Lowell Bray.

...and from the comments:

50 years ago, instead of taking him to court, the neighbors would have gotten together to fix his yard for him.

which leads to this...

[Law] got a guy to let him borrow a machine to remove the old grass. Two companies donated sod. Soon, the yard was full of people. Pasco County Commissioner Jack Mariano also read the story, found the house, canceled a speech and went to work.

"I've never seen someone so important get dirty," said Jennifer Lehr, 32, who is Pat's daughter and calls Joseph her dad. Lehr, her husband and their two young daughters moved into the house two years ago after barely scraping by on their own.

Jennifer and Pat kept trying to feed the strangers working on their lawn, but they kept saying no, to not spend their money.

A man came to fix the sprinkler. People dropped off checks. A neighbor looked at all the work being done and cried because she felt her faith in humanity restored.

How far is any of this likely in the UK? Thankfully we don't have HOAs with this sort of power, but some local authorities are getting pretty close in their behaviour over things like bin collections, ASBOs etc.