If you get convicted for embezzlement, as in the first example in the article, and don't pay your fines and restitution, what do you think the courts should do?

Wage garnishing is easy? If you have an employer then now they are on the hook for following through as well.

Hell, shut down the restitution centers and use that budget to help cover court fees instead!

Think about it: if someone gets fined $10,000 and is working minimum wage, is there really anything good accomplished by trying to recover that much? Just cap out some wage garnishment scheme if you want to fine them.

The criminal has an actual victim who needs his money back. It's pretty important to him (or her) that he gets his money back. Maybe she could pay the restitution with the money she embezzled.

She also skipped her meeting with her probation officer, more than once, and she didn't report to the probation officer (or the court, whatever) that she got an increase in income, when she got her job at Harrah's. Funny, that.

They don't mention that in the article, do they.

Here's the hearing transcript: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6598211-Annita-Husba...

- the fines are not merely around making victims whole. There’s also just fines as punishment on top of that

- even if they are just about that, do you think that a debtors prison is going to get that money back sooner?

- given how being broke in America is basically a death sentence, I have empathy for people trying to scrape by

- (now we’re in income reporting reform!) why isn’t Harrahs reporting the wage increase? Why even give opportunities for lies/mistakes/omissions?

Even if what you said is true, putting people in jail is not super ethical nor is it useful at accomplishing much for society, for the individuals involved, and “punishment as deference” is disproved so much.

Not seeing the argument for this programs continued existence

Per the article, most of the money wasn't used for restitution, and many individuals are arrested for merely not paying fines and fees, no restitution given.

That's just criminalizing being poor.

Absolutely they mentioned it in the article.

Where do they mention that she didn't report an increase in income?

Wage garnishment?

Should be treated like unsecured debt. Bankruptcy being an option.

So let's expand that out.

Every crime has a monetary value. Once someone has gone to prison and paid their debt to society, is there any good reason according to you that we shouldn't then throw them in another prison until they pay restitution?

Hell, maybe it's even a good thing that silcon valley could disrupt. Let's have companies skim a bit off the top and build smart prisons. They get to spend longer in debtor prison and others earn more money, it's a win/win.

Because she was skipping meetings with her probation officer, you can infer she hasn't paid her debt to society.

Not to mention, you know, the actual debt that she owed.

I don't care about the particulars of the individual and you focusing on that is clearly deliberate to avoid discussing the actual topic at hand.

What I'm talking about is that these sort of facilities shouldn't exist at all, full stop. Do you think that people that say, couldn't afford to pay their speeding ticket right away should be thrown into prison until they pay their debt?

I agree, embezzlers with priors should get a 15 year minimum sentence. Instead, Husband got let out(!) and had to meet a $250/month minimum payment. Far too lenient.

It sounds to me like they’re actually trying to rehabilitate her. How much of her 7 year sentence has she actually served?

>but are we much better?

Generally yes.

Worldwide the bar is not high.

There's lots of space between recognizing a system is better than most and "So yay go USA!"

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” - Winston Churchill

In that regard sure we arent the best. But there are far worse countries.

I find it sad to see this type of argument, increasingly it seems our only justification for the decline of the US is, "At least we're not as bad as X." As in, "Sure companies and the gov sell all our data, but at least we're not like China!". Feels like we've given up even trying to live up to our liberal Western ideals...

It's not a justification for anything.

It is a response providing perspective to questions like "but are we much better?"

Agreed, and I should of elaborated: sure we're worse in the case of incarceration, but our legal system is still way better than in other countries.

There's nothing wrong with comparisons. I just wonder why we started comparing ourselves with the worst rather than the best.

The U.S. has the single highest incarceration rate in the world. In that respect, we have the worst criminal justice system in the world. Other metrics matter, of course, but let's not kid ourselves: the American system is an unmitigated disaster.

I see several comments complaining about the US incarceration rate without mentioning the US crime rate. You can’t credibly assert that the US incarceration rate is too high without knowing how it compares to the crime rate.

More than just the crime rate, the rate at which crimes are successfully prosecuted and the resources exist to enable incarceration. Some countries that have a very high crime rate [1], but have a much lower rate of incarceration than the US [2]. In these cases, the US having a higher prison population is just a consequence of the US being wealthy.

1. http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/crime-rate-by-cou...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

> I see several comments complaining about the US incarceration rate without mentioning the US crime rate.

The former is a major cause of the latter.

> You can’t credibly assert that the US incarceration rate is too high without knowing how it compares to the crime rate.

The incarceration rate is too high, in part, because it drives the crime rate.

It's also too high because it's historically largely a product of criminal justice policies adopted as a direct replacement for chattel slavery as a tool of racial suppression and which have continued to this day with that effect, having spread beyond the region which had chattel slavery to replace to the whole nation.

This is particularly true of penal slavery.

A high crime rate is a telltale sign of a dysfunctional society, anyway. Something is rotten.

The US does not have the same class structure as most developed nations. We have 40 million black Americans who are descended from slaves and faced legal discrimination up until the mid-1960s. This population makes up a disproportionate share of our prison population. Since then, a second extremely large ethnic underclass had immigrated across the US’s southern border. This population also makes up a disproportionate share of our prison population. As far as I am aware, this is unique among developed western nations.

There's more to it than that - there's the plea bargain system, which is largely considered to be unethical elsewhere, that increases the _conviction_ rate.

In some places, incarceration rates could be lower only because capital punishment is much more widely used.

Not that US's incarceration rates are sane; to the contrary.

I definitely think that incarceration is actively harmful at fighting crime, because it puts a criminal in an environment of worse criminals, and provides room and board to just hang with them and learn their rules by heart (or be abused, or killed by them). Then the felon is released and has a lot of trouble finding work, so the new criminal knowledge burns to be used.

You can sanity check those assumptions. Worldwide executions are rare especially compared to US incarceration rates.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/04/death-penalty...

In my opinion this is just one symptom of the overall illness our society is suffering from. There's no unity among people. It's very much a materialistic society. Everyone thinks everything should be safe. The government has become the arbitrator for fucking every conflict which further prevents us from seeing the humanity in each other. And that's critical because there seems to be less humanity in us every year.

The Injustice system is just an outgrowth of this madness. People in this country don't think right and so you go to justice system that ain't right. But they don't care as long as they're not the ones in prison or jail. it's literally good that other people are in jail because that makes them better than other people. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if this country reverted to some form of slavery. Our society is sick. So our justice system is sick.