I'll never understand why when you are kids and get in trouble, they separate you. When you are an adult criminal, they put you in with other criminals and create more criminals.

Recidivism is high in those types of situations, in addition to how records are never cleared for good behavior. We have a serious corrections problem that does little in the way of correcting by grouping everyone so tight.

Let's pretend for a moment that I'm a relatively competent programmer with small amounts of disposable income to spend on hobbies, such as running algorithms over government datasets. (Okay, that's a weird one -- but I think it's good to apply my craft towards politics.) I know a lot about making computers scan through large sets of data looking for patterns, and some about making websites and whatnot.

I normally don't think technology does much for political problems, but this one legitimately sounds like we should be applying fraud-detection style algorithms to the names that appear in court records, looking for abnormalities. (Heck, we should probably look for all kinds of irregularities, not just in the pattern of names.)

Identifying the problem doesn't magically solve it, but it sounds like being able to assemble subtle cases out of thousands of documents across hundreds of jurisdictions actually would provide utility towards addressing this.

It doesn't stop the corruption directly, but it shines a pretty bright light on it. And it allows groups looking to tackle it head on to focus their efforts on litigating, instead of document finding or figuring out who the culprits are.

In the particular case of the OP, if this is all true, it looks like they tried to call someone out who was very powerful. When corruption runs that deep, it's very difficult for change to occur. For every story that ends up like the one behind the movie Changeling, there are probably a dozen or more of people who tried to do the right thing and end up silenced in prison or mental hospitals forever.

Troy Davis was executed, even after former President Jimmy Carter spoke up and called for his case to be reexamined.

That said, this would be a project I'd be interested in contributing to. If you set it up, shoot me an email.

But I suspect that much like homelessness, step 0 is gathering an accurate, systemic level picture so we can even understand what we're trying to fix. Targeted treatments and good intentions aren't working -- we need a system level mechanism.

Ed:

I replied to a cached copy; leaving in case anyone raises the same point.

So the question becomes, what is the gamut of these jails? Are there facilities that are run well, on time, safely, etc..? What separates them from these hellholes? What's the context? What's the difference between those counties?

If he didn't go in a killer, he sure as hell should be ready to take a life by now. If someone robbed me of 9 years of my life, I'd make it my mission to rob them of any joy in their life.

Making someone's life miserable is not only a waste of one's one lifetime but not helping the next innocent person who is in pre-trial detention for years.

You don’t have to be racist to survive county. You simply stick with your race. There’s a distinction. Yes, if shit pops off and you’re not sticking up for your race, you can get called out. But nobody is asking the 70-year-old with a limp to roll heavy with the woods/kinfolk/whatever. There’s more an element here of getting marked as a bitch: prison, and to a lesser extent county, is a game of respect. Run store and someone steals from you? Handle it or it will be repeated, because they notice you don’t stick up for yourself. The smart ones watch. But the woods weren’t eyeing me when I played my daily game of spades with a kinfolk partner (and still friend). It’s not like that in county. Prison, maybe.

DO behavior is intentional. County belongs to them. Prison belongs to the inmates. This was explained to me as “this is their house. Prison is ours.” The person explaining, our head wood, was looking forward to prison. Life is way different in prison, with mutual respect — again, I’m told. Jail sucks on purpose. If it didn’t suck nobody would care that they ended up there. This is the American approach to corrections, that of deterrence; in other places there is more of a focus on rehabilitation, and you’ll find a much different jail experience.

Jail is a lot more fun when you make it abundantly clear to the DOs that you see through their psychopathy. It’s a control mechanism for those who don’t. Once they figure out it doesn’t work on you and you’ll play their game anyway, you can actually develop a decent rapport with DOs. Just never, ever, ever trust them. I grieved one and he used to pull tricks like calling me out right after a race meeting to make it look like I was a snitch (don’t even THINK about snitching, or enjoy PC). They know the game better than you do, and they’re paid to do it.

Those dry runs were actually nice, I found, because it was a nice break outside. My cell was way better than transfer cells, though, and breaking routine sucks. Doing time is all about routine. By 30 days in, I had a schedule. The next 100 flew. Just keep to yourself, improve yourself during the downtime, get on a schedule, and play the respect game carefully and you’ll be fine. I got marked quickly as the computer nerd, but that also meant I could help people out with their legal stuff. Find a purpose and become useful, and stand up for yourself when needed. Lead with your shoulder and pivot, if it comes to that — I’ve fought more outside than in, though, and most of the violence I experienced was from DOs (tased once because I couldn’t hear orders in the shower, pepper sprayed twice). Help the right people and you’ll have the right friends, which is a big part of survival.

Some parts of your comment confused me, so maybe you can clarify. Murder trial inmates are almost always confined in maximum. Medium is a larger cross section of crimes and classification, and most places call medium “gladiator school” or “gladiator academy” because there’s a lot more freedom than maximum and still some hard hitters. Minimum is like summer camp that you can’t leave, with everybody sitting for DUI or check fraud. Transfer cells mix this classification up, which is probably where you landed with the heavy hitters in that 11 hour room (that sounds like transfer), but a misdemeanor rap almost guarantees you were in minimum. Am I right? Or did you get classified as a hitter and thrown in school?

I can’t speak to the rest of your comment.

So, you have to protect yourself. In jail, this means fighting when needed. In other situations, it’s just being aware and ready to protect yourself.

DOs certainly respond if a fight takes place (it’s a chance to put some fools in the hole), but it’s the same concept as police response time. If you adopt that otherwise-correct attitude and treat it as more than just words, you won’t be ready for the inevitable. If you take care of things, you will be left alone; there’s some truth in that Hollywood trope about jail. The only person you can rely upon in jail is yourself, and that’s actually a lesson I’m glad I experienced, because it gave me different perspective on day to day life.

Is this right? Not saying it is. I do know I’d much rather be in jail here than, say, Thailand or Peru. Every time they hit a Peruvian jail they confiscate five or six guns.

Funny you say that, by the way, because Joe Arpaio ran my jail. :)

Try a nordic jail sometimes.

And I'm willing to bet anything that there is no evidence that prisons actually achieve their stated purpose.

I was abused in prison I'd expect to be able to sue the state for damages. Is there a general exception to the expectation of security for prisoners that means they can't expect the state to protect their well being in there?

LOL. There are people proven innocent that get out of jail after 30+ years, with evidence hidden by prosecutors and their trial and other such shady stuff, and they get zilch.

New Yorker article about 'a secretive mogul's entertainment kingdom': https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/16/the-man-who-ow...

This guy worked for the California office of Homeland Security, now works for Anschutz's company: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewbettenhausen

(I don't know anything, and I'm not claiming anything about the GP's allegation or their truthfulness. Just wanted to save others the time of making the same Google searches.)