You're on the hook for thousands of dollars even if you're never charged!
Don't forget about the bail loan firms. Say, you're arrested and kept on a $20K bail. Even if you have the money in the bank, the only way to pay is by cash or money order. They won't accept personal check, they won't accept wire transfer, they won't accept nothing. You can't buy a money order from your cell. But they will helpfully refer you to a bail loan firm. They take away your phone, so you won't be shopping around much - their referral is all you have. And, unless you happen to have a suitcase full of cash with you, this is the only practical way to pay. Bail loan firms charge 10-15% of the bond, which, of course, they get to keep even if you show up in court as promised, regardless of whether you're found guilty or even charged with anything. This is such a profitable scam those firms will do anything to keep the current system in place.
US justice system is probably more corrupt than some African countries, yet nobody is even talking about it.
Furthermore, that is why public broadcasting is a primary target of populist/far-right campaigns in most other countries too: their propaganda focuses on the unpopular "unjustified" broadcast fees, while they really want to get rid of these largely independent stations, and replace them with commercial competitors that are controlled by media moguls instead of democratic structures.
From my central European perspective, (serious) media are so incredibly important for our society and democracy.
I understand that the USA has somewhat more independent and strong public institutions than us and can rely on them, but still.
Where I live, false or exaggerated headlines are the norm. Scary headlines are lucrative! If we can’t depend on the media to do its job right, then who does that function?
And yes, I know all of the rhetorical defenses for a propagandist media (“no one is perfectly neutral so why bother trying?”, “you have to choose between the progressive narrative and literal Naziism”, etc).
The situation in Hungary has gone really south once there was no strong independent media outlet left. Poland is following a similar path.
You underestimate the power of racism, homophobia and other things that drive some people, plus the feeling of having power over other people (and also, if a crime has been committed, the drive to make culprits out of innocents if police cannot find the real ones).
Sure, the US has some amazingly broken systems that seem to foster endemic corruption, but even without them it’s not enough to guarantee that a police force behaves appropriately (we just had a case in france where at least two people have done 1.5 years and 4 years in detention based on a made-up testimony forced by police officers caught on video, and the police unions and the far-right are still screaming that justice is too lenient and the liberation is a scandal).
No doubt racism is real (especially in the criminal justice system), but it feels like Occam’s Razor would favor the “incentives” argument here.
There is institutional racism in our system. These are laws from long ago, that stick around due to inertia. They end up punishing POC more. When changing these laws comes up for debate, it's not that hooded KKK stand up and protect them, it's that the laws been around for decades. The laws don't affect the majority white population. They are defended uses words like, lazy, poor, criminals, bad part of town...Those words don't tend to bring to mind white middle class people. Then the laws stick around. Or new laws are pass using the same methods.
You don't have to say racist things in the US in order to defend racist laws. There are a myriad of code words you can use instead. Also, many people don't realize just how racist we are as a culture. The Christian church in America has deep racism issues.(read White Too Long by Robert P. Jones)
The US population has been raised by generations of racists so we just literally don't see it anymore. It doesn't affect the majority, so it isn't an issue. Each time a problem is brought up, it's usually dismissed out of hand. We love our victim blaming, our blind eyes, our justifications, and our fear.
Yes, there are massive incentives and money to be made in the criminal justice system. But they only exist because of who they are keeping down. And why don't we care about the ones being kept underfoot?
If you want me to point to a single person or law I can't. There are hundreds of them, but very few of them written today are based on the color of your skin, the politicians got wise to that. If you really want to dive into this topic. Then I suggest reading a book or article that covers the topic of racism in America today. Preferably written by a POC.
> Preferably written by a POC.
I'm not a big fan of using race as a proxy for academic authority.
Since 1964 at least it is.
Some rich white men convinced a majority of American whites anything is better than "handouts" to people of color. They can and do rely on this majority to vote themselves into ruin if that's the price for people of color to get nothing. Instead of living in prosperity together, Americans vote to live in poverty together if that's what it takes. It's astounding.
By any measure, the United States by now is a failed state because of this. Hard to believe but it is.
An example of putting forth a concrete, actionable model and proposing a solution might be (and note that this is only an example):
* jurors are more likely to convict a black defendant than a white defendant
* we believe that jurors see racial disparities in crime committance and project them onto defendants
* to combat this, we might try promoting cultural integration to reduce the racial disparities in crime committance as well as advocating for colorblind antiracism so jurors are less likely to see a defendant as a token of his race
The important thing is that the example (1) puts forth a testable model for how the system works and (2) proposes solutions based on that model. You may find yourself disagreeing with our hypothetical model, and that's fine. Note that you can even debate it because it's testable (you can probably conceive of data which rebut it). This is in contrast to esoteric debates about systemic racism, which seem more religious in nature than useful for combatting unjust disparities.
But if you know that black people are more likely convicted than a white person(they also get longer sentences for the same crimes), then why are you asking as if you don't know. Overall, you've ended up raising more questions than answering...
I don't know how to parse this. What are you trying to communicate here?
> This is why I point you to research books or articles.
I'm pretty widely-read on this subject, and yet there is no indication that this is converging on something useful.
> Or even follow actual politicians on what work they are doing
If the literature isn't forthright, why would a politician be different? Who are the honest, forthright politicians to whom I should be listening?
> But if you know that black people are more likely convicted than a white person(they also get longer sentences for the same crimes), then why are you asking as if you don't know.
I'm not asking whether black people are more likely to be convicted or not, I'm asking what utility there is in framing the problem with esoterics.
> Overall, you've ended up raising more questions than answering...
Right, I'm asking a question, and explicitly not positing any answers, so of course I'm raising more questions than answers.
I'd think someone would need to find and make a list of those laws and problems, and ways to explain to the voters how those laws are unfair against POC. And how the laws should be changed, maybe removed, many of them?
For a change to happen, there needs to be concrete specific steps of problems and things to actually do
(I'm not saying that you or anyone here should do this, just that some people, somewhere, needs to? I'd guess/think that BLM has gotten started a bit? Eg de funding the police, maybe that's one concrete thing to do, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police)
Obviously financial incentives are a key motivator for many people in forces as well, I was only saying that this can happen even if there is no money to make.
All those scams have to stop being dirty little secrets, there needs to be public outrage built around it.
You need to stop thinking that punishment works. Punishing people, like with dogs, rarely serves any purpose beyond "feeling of justice".
Such "feelings of justice" don't tend to make the world a better place.
I'm no expert, but if you remove perverse incentives and train officers to resolve conflicts without violence, then you'll probably get very far.
Prosecuting police officers is a difficult way to change policing culture.
You need clear guidance about when they have to arrest somebody and when not. And only secondary a system where abuse can be punished.
The purpose of awarding damages for false arrests is to punish malicious false arrests, or mistakes so egregious that we might as well consider them malicious, which some systems are more prone to than others.
Oh, and if you are carrying a suitcase full of cash, expect it to be seized under asset forfeiture laws. Apparently carrying large sums of cash is evidence of criminality.
It's not even large sums of cash, people have had what amounts to a part-time paycheck at minimum wage seized because they made the mistake of having it on their person while they drove a car.
That would definitely not help you.
It's a mess on many many levels.
Plenty of people talk about this. It's a lack of listening that's the problem.
Nice to know African countries are a symbol and the pinnacle of dysfunction and corruption.
That's something at least.
And those backwater control posts are just living of the land like 30 year war mercenaries. Sorry if reality is offensive.
Like the Reagans, the greater society doesn't care about anything unless it affects them. So, they're perfectly fine with degrading, exploitative warehousing and slavery of humans for profit.
On the one hand, the guy definitely did something bad. On the other hand, gee I wonder how generational cycles of poverty, driving future crime rates, happen. No mystery that the effects of criminality seems to afflict entire families when the justice system is actively contributing to that.
And no, it's not like they only got charged that much because they're flush with cash. I'm pretty sure the courts didn't give a damn whether they could afford it (technically, yes they could, but in anything resembling a financially-responsible sense, god no, not at all, they weren't starting from a great spot and it basically ruined them—the bread-winner will now work until he dies or gets so sick he can't anymore)
The entire host of companies people are forced to do business with by court order are like this. Rehab, post conviction monitoring, etc. etc. They're all scum. And they get away with it because nobody will defend criminals.
Every time something like OUI comes up in passing on HN there's be a miles long comment chain where everybody is piling on about how they're terrible people. Sure, fine, they may be, but they also have rights. People like you (probably you reading this very comment) are why ignition interlocks and ankle bracelets can be made that report false positives left and right, the companies that run them can charge stupid amounts of money and get away with it all. Because your principals go out the window as soon as someone is convicted of something you don't like.
Firstly (and depending on jurisdiction), IIDs have to pass fairly rigorous verification in an accredited laboratory before they are accepted for use.
Secondly, all IIDs are regularly (every one to two months) calibrated against ethanol/nitrogen gas certified to a set level, to ensure accuracy. In contrast, police breathalysers are usually calibrated every 6 to 9 months.
Thirdly, all breath alcohol testing devices (IIDs, fuel cell breathalysers, evidential infrared breathalysers) detect ethanol.
This is well and good, but ethanol is also present in miniscule quantities in a vast array of foods and drinks, in addition to beer, wine and spirits.
If someone has consumed these in the past couple of minutes, then takes a test, it will detect the ethanol.
Some examples that people commonly report using in vehicles, which all contain ethanol:
- anything fermented. Kombucha, ginger beer
- fresh bread, pizza, doughnuts [1][2]
- mouthwash, hand sanitiser
- some medications, including asthma medications
These are common everyday items, leading to an ethanol-detecting device detecting ethanol in a substance that contains ethanol. From the user perspective, this is a false positive.
From a technology perspective, this is working exactly as it should be.
Fourthly, alcohol readings caused by mouth contaminants aren't a surprise. Any sane jurisdiction will allow the user to take another test within a few minutes to prove they hadn't ingested alcohol (mouth contaminations will clear from the mouth within a few minutes, whereas ingested alcohol will show another alcohol reading).
To summarise: breath alcohol testing is an established technology with high standards to meet; ethanol is widely prevalent leading to IIDs detecting ethanol; recourse is available to prove the ethanol detected wasn't ingested alcohol.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fermentation [2]: https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/22237/does-bread...
If only we had some mantra/idiom/whatever the correct word is like "innocent until proven guilty"...
That is a part of it.
"Cops laugh about “probable cause on four legs” but the damage to innocent lives is real."
This is the first sentence in the article. So I think this the mention of innocent until proven guilty is something to talk about concerning the article. The system treats you like a guilty person and stacks the deck against you. I think the plea bargaining that you mention falls into this. I would add that prosecutorial and law enforcement discretion is probably the biggest area of abuse. Because of this, bad laws stay on the book and can be enforced with bias because many people think "oh they wouldn't charge me with that". For example, in my state you can be put in jail for 90 days for your dog getting out of your yard. If it happens twice in one year, it's a misdemeanor. Pretty insane really, but people don't care because it's only enforced sometimes and they don't know how serious it can be.
if the "bad thing" was voluntarily ingesting a chemical that state has no ethical authority to ban a person from ingesting into their own body then I would urge you to reformulate what you consider a "bad thing"
Drug Abuse can lead to all manner of actual crime (theft, Intoxicated Driving, etc) that has a degree of probability to harm OTHERS, this is where the states power can be ethically applies, when a persons actions can directly physically harm another person against that persons will.
However state power should never be considered ethical when they are attempting to "protect people from themselves" this mentality leads to all kinds of abuse by authority and create the very system that causes the issue you highlight
Lifetime ultra heavy pot smokers for example face significant lung cancer risks, though very few people are heavy daily pot smokers for 50+ years at this point.
At the other end, 1 glass of wine every day for 60 years is as far as we can tell on net harmless. Where even light daily pot smoking still causes some lung issues on those timescales. So yes, alcohol in and of it’s self can be deadly but it’s not nearly as bad as these comparisons generally suggest.
When it comes to mouth, esophageal and stomach cancers, even one drink a day increases your chances of developing them.
Therefore you need to take net not individual health impacts, which is more complicated. Remember the scale 55% of adult Americans drink at least monthly and those cancers are still rare and also associated with soda consumption etc.
This is such a weird view.
Alcohol is addictive, causes a huge variety of mental health issues and can kill through both chronic and acute exposure.
It's not just that use is widespread, and if it is abused, that's part of the issue, that people are prone to abuse it!
By comparison even clean opioids are more deadly long term. Pot has different Heath effects but is not safe when consumed to excess with extremely heavy users facing mental and physical issues, which can for example result in cancer or traffic related deaths.
Which again isn’t to say alcohol is safe, but rather heavy drug is generally bad independent of drug type.
People don’t evaluate alcohol use the same way as they do drug use and they should. When honestly evaluated that way alcohol is right up there in terms of harm.
You can’t put it all down to how common it is, and neither can you write off ‘abuse’ as a separate issue, abuse potential is all part of the harm profile.
My context was someone saying well accepted, and also more deadly and addictive than many so called "dangerous drugs" which is a common argument but as far as I can see biased in the other direction. ~55% of adult Americans drank alcohol in the last month, it’s hard to find illegal drugs that would be safe at that scale and level of use.
Micro dosing LSD for example is likely comparable to some moderate alcohol use. But, if 55% of the population was self administering LSD it wouldn’t be limited to people micro dosing. Many would push thing to much higher levels regularly. That’s really the only thing I meant by separating out people abusing alcohol. It’s part of the spectrum of use, but not the only point of comparison.
In that same month about 8000 people in the US died from alcohol-related issues. So I'm losing sight of your point?
Booze just is well established in the literature (AFAICT) as more addictive and more deadly than many/most other recreational drugs. Generally excluding tobacco, opiates, cocaine or methamphetamine, sure, but experts in the field tend to rank it more or less with them. If you don't think the people studying this stuff have taken the widespread nature of alcohol's use into account ... well I think they likely have.
LSD, your example there, is generally considered non (or relatively non) habit-forming, we'd be unlikely ever to see chronic health effects there. At the doses it's commonly used we'd be unlikely to see acute mortalities (though vasoconstriction can be a side-effect), though I imagine some idiots would still take it and get in the car. Result - even if available freely and used widely, it's very likely it would cause fewer deaths and other societal problems than booze.
Those alcohol related deaths include car accidents. If ~150,000,000 people in the US regularly took LSD you would get a significant increase in such accidents independent of any other health effects. Falls, suicides and other mental Heath related deaths would also increase. LSD related deaths are hard to track as only ~0.1% of adult are active users but from the data we have 8k deaths per month at that scale is roughly within the margin for error.
Now, you can reasonably argue that fewer than 150 million people would take LSD but that’s hardly making it safer for those who would. It’s just arguing Alcohol is popular not that it’s inherently more dangerous.
Of course it is. Wow.
LSD is not habit forming. That's the point. This is so frustrating and you keep ignoring it. LSD does not present the same danger to the individual as alcohol because people are not drawn to keep using it in the same way. This in itself reduces the dangers of chronic problems, because lifetime exposure is reduced. It also reduces the liklihood of acute problems, because the frequency of use is reduced. This includes both physical and mental health issues, and consequences of intoxication like car crashes.
>> It’s just arguing Alcohol is popular not that it’s inherently more dangerous.
No, it isn't.
Alcohol is addictive. More so than most other drugs.
That is an inherent danger of alcohol.
You are in denial.
Alcohol withdrawal can be nasty. But it takes years and dedication (usually) to build up an alcohol habit that threatens serious withdrawal symptoms; for the most part, "withdrawal" is simply a hangover.
Contrast with a minor tranq such as diazepam: you can easily acquire a habit from which withdrawal is potentially life-threatening, in as little as a month.
LSD is mildly addictive (18) slightly less than MDMA (20) or Marijuana (21). But MDMA is inherently much more harmful. That said, when LSD was legal it was quickly becoming popular and caused users a lot of issues. As such the more addictive nature of alcohol (81) is just one property and not enough on it’s own to compare it to other drugs.
Research by John Hastings. Relative rankings are definite, numbers given are (+/-)1%
While addictiveness is not the same as habit forming, it does link to overall useage.
It's literally impossible to acquire an LSD habit. After 3 or 4 days of continuous LSD use, no amount of LSD will have much effect on you. You need to lay off it for a few weeks to re-sensitise.
The body of someone who uses medical heroin every day with clean needles and doesn't drink alcohol will be in a much better state than someone that drinks two liters of beer every day. Of course I don't think that there is a person with a heroin addiction that doesn't also have an alcohol problem.
I think it makes sense to look at alcohol as more dangerous than heroin from a personal risk perspective.
> At the other end, 1 glass of wine every day for 60 years is as far as we can tell on net harmless.
The evidence seems to be that even low levels of alcohol consumption can increase the risk of certain cancers:
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/moderate-drinking.ht...
All opioids build tolerance but not resistance. Overdoing is sadly common in very long term users even of medically sourced and therefore clean drugs. Even clean heroin by itself is vastly more deadly than Alcohol for average users over moderate to long timescales.
Which is why you need to compare habitual long term users of drug X to habitual long term users of drug Y.
By the same token, drinking alcohol in shots, cold and concentrated, is about the worst way to consume it, because most of it is then spent ruining the liver, and little actually reaches the brain. Sipping a glass of wine does not compare.
AFAICT a lot of health problems that even heroin addicts face do not come from overdoses, but from the unsanitary ways of intravenous administration of it, and the wear-off of the veins from constant injection.
Comparing drugs by just their chemical properties, and ignoring the ways they are consumed, is not very productive, alas.
That really isn’t how alcohol works in the bloodstream. Once it’s through the GI tract there is zero difference in what the source of alcohol is. Further, the liver takes a long time to break down a shot of alcohol or a glass of wine. The only real difference is to the throat, stomach lining where more concentrated alcohol can be a larger irritant. But again once it’s in the blood stream it’s both significantly diluted and rapidly spread throughout the body.
Now sipping wine with food does significantly slow absorption, but it’s the same effect if you take a shot in the middle of a meal.
Not sure how this applies to drinking concentrated vs dilute alcohol though
In contrast to the results in the fed state, in humans fasted overnight the concentration of alcohol consumed (4%, 16%, and 40%) had no significant effect on mean AUCs. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1530-0277....
This is how you threaten the middle. You threaten their wealth and their careers.
This also reminds me of how some drug companies are pricing gene therapy drugs (like to restore sight, fix muscular dystrophy, etc). They have admitted that they weren't pricing the drug based on what it cost to develop but based on what that person's [function] is worth to them. If your pricing model is based on desperate people being willing to pay anything, then I don't think these executives have thought this through. Desperate people may be willing to pay anything, but when they have nothing to pay, then they are also willing to do anything.
I think this can be a similar situation in the "justice" system. If you have no faith in the system do to their track record of misconduct, mistakes, etc, then you have no incentive to believ in them or try the legitimate path.
I believe this is why high level politicians and the wealthy get out of trouble. They know the system is a sham, so there's no point in going along with it.
I might understand that it’s a sham, but I’d be miserable and powerless to push against it. So it’s a pointless belief to have.
But after that, it becomes a bit chicken and egg: Is it a sham only because you have power to make it a sham or was it a sham all along?
>But after that, it becomes a bit chicken and egg: Is it a sham only because you have power to make it a sham or was it a sham all along?
I disagree with this point. It was a sham all along. I think the chicken and egg problem is that people feeling like the system is a sham makes the system into a sham. Which came first? A system that's a sham or the belief?
That's bog-normal value-based pricing which is used almost everywhere, especially in the software industry. You'll find many, many upvoted blog posts on HN that explain why you should do this.
Now you can certainly argue that this should not be done for medical products, especially those granted a monopoly via patents so that there is no price competition.
But you better have a really good idea of how exactly you're going to prevent it and how you avoid destroying the incentives for doing the (very, very costly) research and clinical trials to create these drugs in the first place.
"how you avoid destroying the incentives for doing the (very, very costly) research and clinical trials to create these drugs in the first place."
This just isn't true, and is built on typical industry lies. You have many people who would work on this type of societal improvement products for a well paid but not excessively lavish lifestyle. Look at people like Salk.
Pharma executives are some of the highest paid. Much of the research is government funded. The companies spend more on lobbying and advertising than they do for R&D.
Personally, I'm fine with the pace of progress slowing if it means we aren't allowing companies to manipulate the public and hold people's health hostage for obscene salaries and bonuses. There's too many people on the planet anyways.
For big pharma to extort, first they need the product that actually works. Most gene therapy is pipe dream. There are some drugs on the market for some orphan (rare) diseases but the development is very costly and the market is very small.
Obviously it will mean that the price will be very high. Most people are not in the position to pay it and it is up to the insurers or the government to decide if they can afford it or not.
Here is the story of the first approved gene therapy drug: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alipogene_tiparvovec
They sold the drug to 1 person only. The original company developing this drug went bankrupt.
Do you realize they went bankrupt largely due to their pricing model? If you have a valid market and plan, you can get funding. This seems like they didn't have a good plan. Just because you give one example of a bankrupt small company doesn't mean that is representative of the industry. There are plenty of examples of other companies being successful. Some of these tend to get bought out by the larger companies. This article suggests that R&D costs about $1M (and 2 people recieved the treatment from the company that went bankrupt due to the high price). I'm sure there are additional costs for testing and approval.
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2017/12/12/gene-therapy-c...
Having executives making a combined $14M per year seems like a major factor in the price when the patient population is small. For example, 1k patients per year would have to pay $140k each just to cover the executive overhead.
If you have nothing to lose you have nothing to fight to protect but if you have little you have are precariously close to having nothing, and that is a line most people fill fight hard not to be pushed closer toward.
Please help stop use of the phrase "justice system".
They chose to spend their money to keep their son out of jail. Thats was their choice. That’s the consequence of the son committing what appears to be a major crime. Hopefully the son learns from that and he should be working to help repay that debt.
From a sheer fairness and what is justice actually POV, it's bullshit that this is yet another thing a rich family can shrug off, while a poor family is screwed. I don't have a solution for it, but the role money plays in our justice system may well be the biggest problem with it, which is saying something.
> Hopefully the son learns from that and he should be working to help repay that debt.
Very unlikely, with a record. A decade later and he's doing OK, for values of OK that include "can mostly pay own not-large bills, and only because he's living with his parents, and is steadily and consistently progressing in a low-paying field". Last I checked he's still "in the system" to some extent, as far as ongoing fees and check-ins and such.
(for the record, just to set some parameters here, he didn't physically hurt anyone, but it was still quite serious and definitely not something a society would want to go un-punished, that's absolutely true)
One imagines the long-term lasting harm to all of: victims, families of victims, perpetrators, and families of perpetrators; happening over and over in high-crime neighborhoods and it's no wonder it's so damn hard to improve those areas. That, on top of everything else that's often wrong with them. Reducing, not increasing, the "blast radius" of crime seems like something you'd focus on if you want to reduce crime rates, when stress and poverty are causal for crime and stress and poverty are part of the effect of same "blast radius".
If you think about it, keeping families uneducated and perpetually in debt means more bargaining power for those who have the money to lobby and change the system. What incentive do they have to do that?
Look, some people will always be fuck ups. That’s the sad reality of the life. Some people, no matter how their are guided, will always eventually fuck up and ruin all the hard work people put into them. They are wired to always make poor decisions no matter what. My best friend is like this. After 40 years of trying to help him, I accept him as he is now with no expectations he will ever get better despite decades of trying to help him. I have a close relative like that too. If they are protected from consequences too early in life, they tend to make larger, irrevocable mistakes later in life and then they are fucked for a long time.
In SF crime is running rampant now because of a DA that refuses to prosecute smaller crimes. It has emboldened criminals. Prop 47 has made it so that gangs of thugs enter a store, fill their bags with merchandise and run out with no repercussions. I witnessed this with my own eyes and the manager said they don’t even call the cops anymore because they won’t come. Instead, 15 Walgreens have closed their stores in SF in the last few years because of it. Criminals are arrested 20+ times in the span of a year and they keep getting let go and they are free to continue committing crimes and it’s getting worse and worse.
So punishing criminals matter. Putting them on the right path matters but it can’t be consequence-free.
(FWIW I haven't downvoted any of your posts)
Just so you know, the DA came into office in Jan of 2020. That’s well after Prop 47 and nothing to do with him. If you look at clearance rates published by SFPD to compare 2020 to 2019, you’ll find that they are the same year over year at a surprisingly low 9% overall.
I see a lot of FUD spread about our DA where people don’t seem to actually look into what the DA’s office has done in cases or how often arrests are even made. In these convenience store robberies, it sounds like arrests aren’t even being made. No arrest and the DA’s office can’t bring charges. Just because it’s not a felony doesn’t mean they shouldn’t arrest and charge. Even if the person is released, the charges make repeat crimes more severe.
Especially for drugs, we need to move away from a punishment/vengeance system of justice and towards a rehabilitation/lowest TCO form of treatment.
they're not necessarily worse than jail ofc, but they don't serve any useful therapeutic purpose either
The government may tend to lack efficiency, but at least its lack of profit motive wouldn't completely taint the whole system.
similarly most exploitative prison labor doesn't take the form of producing goods for private companies (like the Whole Foods cheese thing) but consists of using inmates to reducing staffing & other costs inside the prison, like making them work in the kitchens or laundry
edit: immigration detention is the notable exception - about 70% of immigration detainees are held in private prisons, compared to about 10% of prison inmates
I am 100% in favor of unscheduling all drugs and providing addicts under Dr. care actual pharmaceuticals. Including opiates. Even if they still inject it's still a LOT safer.
When are we going to see some of this settlement money expanding treatment?!
If anyone hasn't watched it, I highly recommend the new HBO doc from Gibney "Crime of the Century" shows some new evidence just confirms how evil Purdue is and specifically Richard Sackler.
They present evidence that the FDA employee who wrote the label wrote it in a hotel with Purdue employee.
This is HUGE. That label is what they used to market the original "Big Lie" that OxyContin “Delayed absorption as provided by OxyContin tablets, is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug” which is on the same level as cigarette companies being horrible and deliberately killing hundreds of thousands of us.
Second half focuses on the Kapoor's fentanyl corporate crime syndicate. at least he is serving a small amount of jail time. Sadly now corporations are moving on to Asia and Africa. It's disgusting and makes me so angry.
one thing I don't think that's talked about enough re: the opioid crisis is labor injuries - imo people taking opioids in order to be able to work through injuries they've incurred on the job played a big part in it. doesn't diminish the guilt of the Sacklers et al, ofc, but it wasn't purely an overprescription problem
AND it seems worse incentive! dole out more, kill more people, and you're pharmacy will make higher profit.
Yes I agree just the general idea of 'needing' to treat all pain, and companies skirting workers comp time off is gross. Might as well dope up Amazon warehouse workers. Given them vyvanse and longer shifts... That's what purdue marketed and completely changed how Drs treat. That 1-10 face chart that is still in my Drs office was made and distributed by Purdue.
The hbo doc actually goes into the distributors. How one gov. prosecutor used the existing DEA law to order a stop on one factory warehouse for filling orders that were magnitudes larger than like last months, and are are clearly abuse or diversion.
But then this same prosecutor who had a great reputation for being tough got hired by these Pharma corps, and lobbied to change that law so they can't shut it down anymore. It passed congress unanimous consent. he used his position to say 'this isn't effective' and lie about what it actually did, and most LAs and members didn't bother to read it...
Simple possession shouldn’t be a crime but crimes themselves shouldn’t be consequence-free otherwise it turns a city into a shithole. Look at SF over the last few years.
Would you rather have less crime & better society, or punish people for some vague notion of consequences, even knowing it's a worse outcome for society? Because the consequences of a crime, whatever they are, should also be chosen to have the least negative drain on society.
* Prevention * Deterrence * Veangance
The least-useful of these is veangance. Legislators think it is needed to forestall private acts of veangance. But in itself it serves no purpose.
To deter crime, people have to believe that the likelihood of their being caught and punished is high; without that belief, it doesn't matter how severe the penalties are set.
Prevention by detention is an extreme sanction, and extremely costly. It's only appropriate for incorrigible psychopaths. "Prevention" by court-ordered medical treatment (e.g. rehab, chemical castration) is a human-rights violation. Prevention by supervision, harm-reduction, or education are evidence-based responses that actually have a chance of improving things.
Jail should be reserved for people who a direct physical threat to other peoples bodies or properties. Continued incarceration should be viewed from that lens as well.
Victim Compensation should be a higher priority instead of punishment, instead we put almost no priority to Victim Compensation instead viewing the crime as a "crime against society" and the person "pays a debt to society" that is the wrong position.
I don't think that would work simply because after that person spends the $5M, the government can't claw it back even if that person commits another crime, and if they are in the state where they are considering another crime, the extra $5M debt would probably not deter them too much. This proposal would need to be reworked to align long term incentives of the person with not committing another crime. It would also need to disincentivize people from committing crimes just so they can get this benefit.
In a somewhat related vein, I recall there being a proposal to provide basic housing to the chronically homeless, as certain homeless people cost the taxpayers millions due to arrests and illnesses from being homeless. Although there is no angle of punishment here, there is still the angle of those homeless not deserving free housing. I believe however that there is a strong case for providing such housing, when viewed from a dispassionate point of view, as it is both fiscally prudent as well as humane in reducing suffering.
In your scenario you are adding an incentive to a single commit murder. You are trying to make the point justice is not about utilitarianism but about morality on some level - but your example is so unmoored from reality that it is useless.
The only real reason to object to it would be problems unlisted in this analogy - like the obvious incentive to murder. But we're axiomatically handwaving those intuitive signs of a bad choice away due to a "those turn out to not be an issue".
The problem here is your conclusion ("yes this may look good on paper but your gut instinct clearly tells you this is a bad idea regardless") is based on using your gut instinct, in a hypothetical that axiomatically requires you to ignore your gut instinct. In other words, you're breaking your own rules.
This idea of restorative justice is an abject failure. It might work for first time offenders, which I’m okay with trying on, but once criminals commit crimes multiple times, we need to protect society from them. Locking them up is the best way to do this.
The tides are turning against the idea that criminals shouldn’t see jails, because of how much of a failure it has been. I used to think maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on crime, but after not only being the victim but seeing what it had done to SF, I’m firmly in the camp of throwing criminals in jail. Mainly moderates like myself feel the exact same way in the last 2-3 years and it will show more and more in voting, especially in SF.
https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(15)01030-X/pdf
Yet you're proposing doubling down on a clearly broken approach?
no it is not, Chesa Boudin did not in anyway advocate for Victim Compensation, he was advocating diversion programs completely different
>Criminals end up continuing to commit crimes because they know there are no consequences.
Absolutely nothing in my statement is about no consequences. It is saying that we can have difference consequences than mass incarceration, one that actually makes the victims of crime, specifically property crime, whole again. Which are current system does not
You seem to believe I am advocating for SF style policy of just not prosecuting theft crimes at all, there is NOTHING in my statement that aligns with that position. Simply opposing Jail time for those offense, which further burdens society and does nothing for the victims is not a solution to shoplifting and theft, nor is the other extreme of just let shoplifters go
The fact that you have a tribal binary response of "if you do not want harsh prison must mean you want no consequences" show your lack of understanding of this topic, there are lots of other models out there
Drug addiction and the crimes that spring from it are a different matter. There is a clear cause for the crime: the addiction. Fix that, no more repeat offenses. However most rehab programs for addicts that end up in the criminal justice system aren't that great, so that's another area that needs fixing.
Regardless, my point is just that consequences for criminal acts should never be simple punishment if there are options with a better net benefit for society. That will of course mean there has to be a detergent aspect to things as well, which may take the form of a punishment, but not a punishment for its own sake.
Ow, wow. That's like 17th century thinking right there, when we used to hang people for petty theft, executions were a public holiday, folks thought it would deter crime but it stayed sky high.
Also boiling people alive was a thing, and, most egregiously, we overboiled them.
I am willing to bet that you or someone in your family or friends has broken some law somewhere at some point, possibly without realising. I don't think this line of thinking leads to a good place.
The antithesis to this would be the police pinning another nearby robbery on your relative just cause he is guity already, or violating his right in some way.
Keeping someone in prison costs tax payers about $70,000 per year (directly). In addition to that, it increases the chance that their family will need government aid, decreases the average educational level reached by their children, and isn't especially effective at deterring crime.
Furthermore, just because someone is guilty doesn't mean that the law is just. In the past, we have locked up people for (illegally) escaping slavery, being gay, publishing books the government doesn't like, and many other unjust laws. Currently, there are about 3 million people in prison for no crime other than drug possession, despite the fact that countries like Portugal have shown that decriminalizing drugs yields far better outcomes for individuals and society as a whole.
Lastly protecting the rights of the guilty is critical because doing so is the only thing in the US that protects the rights of the innocent. Countries like the UK are set up to charge officers and prosecutors who violate rights with crimes. In the US, however, we've decided that the better approach is to prevent misconduct by not allowing evidence that was obtained improperly. We as a society can not be lax on misconduct against the guilty because it is the only defense the US has against misconduct against the innocent.
Woah, hang on. I've lived in the UK all my life; I've never heard of a prosecutor being charged. Officers can usually escape charges by taking early retirement; policemen are hardly ever charged with violating the rights of members of the public, even if they kill them.
That is not the UK I know.
On it's own I take this to mean that we need to address the issues in policing and the justice system to have a lot less bullshit and a lot more impact. Time/money (and resulting fallout) spent harassing innocent people creates all manner of problems and is also time/money not spent on actually doing the job. In this I wholly agree.
That said, There is still room for nuance and appropriate recourse in actual crime. There are a lot of crimes, and it's pretty clear that in many cases the punishment doesn't fit the crime, or that the crime even makes sense.
Ultimately if we ever get our shit figured out I'd assume both of these would be accomplished. I just hope that we get there.
Even when the "crime" doesn't hurt anybody except the "offender?" GP post strongly implies the charge was some sort of possession charge. Drug addicts do not need to be punished any more than they punish themselves.
I have no idea, though. It would've been better if they gave a little more detail about the nature of the crime.
If this were the scenario, and I had to guess, I would say it probably was some sort of property crime. People other than the perpetrator tend not to get seriously (physically) injured in most property crimes, and insurance often covers the damages. In any case, monetary restitution to cover the damage plus rehab. should be a sufficient sentence.
100% the kind of thing someone ought to be punished for (unlike simple possession, certainly). The main thing I find objectionable is that one must pay a flat-fee ransom to an assuredly-connected-to-important-people-and-overcharging commercial entity to get one's children out of jail. There are a few things wrong with that, but fundamentally it sucks that how much money you (or your family) have determines so much about how harsh a punishment is. It can be anywhere from "a little annoying but no lasting harm done to anyone" to "everyone in your immediate family's quality of life is now 10-80% worse, measured over a lifetime", for exactly the same crime.
[EDIT] and on a less personal level, the thing that bothers me about it is that a justice system that intends to reduce crime rates should avoid at all costs being a driver of poverty.
What's an actual crime to you? I bet our definitions differ based on something not-so-quantifiable. A good DA can produce charges against someone to make it look like an actual crime was committed when it's really something petty or much less nefarious. We've seen countless examples of this.
Rather than describing my sympathies at some nebulous level, I'd rather say this: I have sympathy for those in the criminal justice system because I realize most people are capable of change and that is mostly ignored by the public and the criminal justice system together. Former criminals are almost never rehabbed, and worse we see many examples of folks who were never criminals being introduced to a system that by default does not care about them but carries maximal implications for their life.
I don't know why I should care about if this thief is capable of change or should be rehabbed. I want to kick the shit out of the thief and get the necklace back, because this person has caused so much anguish to me and my family.
To me, when someone does something like this the criminal justice system is supposed to figure out why they did it (drugs, opportunity, gangs, etc) and rehab them accordingly so they don't go on to repeat this behavior in the future. What happens all too often is we stick them in a box, never rehabilitate them, and they go on to learn more about criminal activity in prison only to commit worse offenses when they get out. You don't have to care, the criminal justice system does because it's within their charter to do so.
Keep in mind, I'm not advocating putting someone in a box. I have no solution either. I haven't seen proof that doing what CA is doing reduces pretty crime either. So paint me skeptical
The purpose of the criminal justice system wasn't to make you feel better or to get you your stuff back. Sometimes that happens but it's mostly by chance and not by design. Really, the system wasn't built to facilitate revenge, that's just the way it works now. That's where things like insurance come in. No insurance program is going to value a family heirloom the way you value it though.
And, yes, no insurance will cover my emotional loss. "justice" in the system seems to be missing.
If the answer to that is "deal with it", I'm obliged to return in kind the same mindset to thieves.
But with plea bargain, I bet the number of false positives is somehow elevated.
Also, prisons are a terrible way to handle criminals. Instead of reforming the criminal and helping reintegration into the law-abiding society, many prison systems, including the US's, produce hardened criminals who learned a lot more of criminal trade during incarceration, or crushed people who have no chance to get to their feet again. Unless a society just kills every criminal, it makes sense to care what happens to them, because they'll be back.
Proportionality between crime and punishment is a central pillar of a fair justice system. The extrajudicial financial punishments that the article and the OP allude to, are in direct conflict with that.
Like one of the previous posters said, daemonizing the guilty is what keeps this system from being fixed.
Discussions on sensitive, divisive topics are difficult enough without someone pouring petrol on the fires. It may not be arson, but it's at least negligence, and it's destructive. Please stop.
And the K9 dog wasn't even the biggest problem in the police handling. The police just acted in bad faith throughout.
I expected to find just one or two extra screw-ups, but good grief, this is just an orgy of fuck-ups. Granted, this is just one side of the story, and some details can perhaps be contested, but overall it seems fairly solid and reliable to me. Much of this was captured on body cams.
A summary:
- A concerned citizen called the police to make sure everything was okay.
- "Inexplicably, instead of initiating contact with Wendy to see if she was okay, Clark instead called for an ambulance–unnecessarily escalating the welfare check without even checking to see what was going on."
- For some reason this "are you okay?" call expanded to a DUI investigation. Wendy was repeatedly denied to do a chemical test for alcohol or drugs, which she asked for to prove her innocence. Clark insisted on doing a field sobriety test, which was "improperly conducted [..] and improperly instructed Wendy on how to perform the tests", and even more damning "Clark positioned Farris to take the field sobriety tests in a spot ↪where the tests themselves would not be caught on camera"
- She failed this test and was placed under arrest. Again she asks for a breath or blood test (the EMTs were still present, had already checked her out, and decided she was fine). Again denied. At this point she was "in a state of near panic".
- Clark's report didn't mention that Wendy had been awake for 24 hours, had just been awoken, was forced to look out into the bright sunlight to respond to the officer (of course her pupils were constricted), and that she wasn't actually driving the car.
- The dog fails to find anything on the first pass of the car, and near the end of the second pass the dog handler touches the car with the hand that was holding the dog's scent toy. Karma looks at his handler and "finds drugs".
- They discover the $5,000. The car was impounded and "ripped apart in an effort to find drugs" which "permanently damaged Wendy’s vehicle". No drugs were found. She never got paid damaged for this.
- Booked in to jail, according to Clark she refused a breathalyser; "Wendy did not decline, she simply advised the deputy that she had been told not to answer questions until her attorney arrived" (who was on their way, and had wisely advised not to answer questions).
- Finally got her blood test done (results for this take a while, more on this later).
- Cited with a DUI violation. Was booked in on Friday and released on Monday (doesn't mention times).
- On Monday the prosecutor dropped the charges as there's no real probably cause.
- The same day Wendy returned to complain about Clark's handling, and "In retaliation, Clark submitted the DUI arrest to the State of Washington Department of Licensing for an administrative decision on Wendy’s license. Wendy had no idea Clark had done this". The paperwork Clark submitted for this claimed that Wendy refused to do a breathalyzer.
- Wendy’s driving privileges were suspended for a year and was required to get SR-22 insurance, which she can't afford. "As a result, Wendy has not driven since she discovered her license was suspended" and "as a result of unjustifiable suspension of her license, Wendy lost job opportunities".
- Wendy was charged again for DUI based on Clark's lie that she had refused to take to a breathalyzer. She had to travel from Montana to Washington only to have the case dismissed again.
- To prove her innocence she tried to get the blood test results, but according to the police office the "lab was busy" and the results weren't ready yet. In May 2020 she contacted the lab directly, and they informed her that the tests had been completed and submitted to the police office on March 27th, 2019.
- She never heard about the complaint she submitted against Clark. Seems to have been >/dev/null'd.
[1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.waed.91...
Batman is a fictional character but sometimes he seems like our only solution to these kinds of problems. Just do the right thing regardless of the consequences.
This has nothing to do with government bureaucracy, and everything to do with malicious, criminal cops. Don't confuse one for the other.
They suffer no consequences for harassing and abusing people. Frequently they even get away with murder. The cities and their unions protect them, because they know that at the core the police are a criminal enforcer organization. The law protects the rights of the poor and innocent in the USA, but the police are tasked by landowners with a lot more than simply enforcing the law: they want them to enforce the social order, too, which is a much more, err, "informal" process, such as we see here.
This results in a culture of lawlessness in the police, as they carry out the wishes of those who write the checks and suffer no consequences for breaking the law which they exist ostensibly (but not in practice) to uphold.
I've written about this before: https://sneak.berlin/20200628/the-problem-with-police-in-ame...
This has everything to do with government (or otherwise, bigCo is not immune to this) bureaucracy.
Diffusion of responsibility, conflicting process, etc. etc. are how this kind of behavior can persist. These cops can do this crap and remain employed because the pile of bureaucratic process that distills everything down to (mostly) objectively evaluate metrics and therefore "doing your job while being a dick" doesn't negatively affect them.
It isn't just police that have this problem. Every regulatory enforcement agency has this problem to various extents.
I don't tend to stay angry for very long. Actually, I pretty much never do. But it's hard to describe the amount of anger one can feel when being the victim of such a blatant bad faith injustice. I never thought I was capable of this, but turns out I am. These people tried to charge me for fixing cracks in the walls because the building had subsided. Yes, really. They literally admitted in the email that they knew this was illegal but were going to try it anyway (and there's a lot more bad faith bullshit in similar fashion). Eventually I got the £2,800 charge down to £800-something after filling a dispute. There was still a bunch of outright bullshit in there (about £200 at the most was justified), but is those £600 worth it?
If you can afford it: probably not. Aside from the time you need to spend on it you just get consumed by anger and negativity. It's not healthy for me, so I just moved on and tried to forget about it. I still get angry when thinking about it though; what bunch of morally bankrupt tosspots.
I've seen this with other people as well; years ago one of my coworkers had a similar conflict with his garage. I don't even know if he was right, but he certainly had the same feeling as I had. He did go to court for it (I don't recall the outcome) and he spent months talking about it to anyone who wanted to listen, including customers (many customers). I don't think it was good for him.
Ideally, government should be better than some random company. But in reality, government and companies are both organisations comprised of the same sort of people, and people can be rather ugly and unreasonable.
I do think you can minimize these sort of things by fostering a good organisational culture, which is easier said than done of course. You will always have some problems, but a lot of the truly outrageously bad problems seem to stem from a toxic culture: the culture at my rental agency, or the culture at the police in the US, or stuff like the toxic culture at the Dutch tax service leading to the recent/on-going scandal regarding false allegations of fraud and ignoring of evidence there was actually no fraud.[2]
[1]: They also evicted me over this, turns out that calling your landlord a cunt over entering your house without ringing the doorbell is not a good idea in a country with minimal protections for renters, even though it was quite justified considering it's 100% unacceptable and illegal and I had already told them many times I didn't want it.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...
After an arrest, police will often ignore exonerating evidence or not bother trying to get it, for much the same reasons. And they have a whole arsenal of tactics for making life a pain in the ass for the accused while they fight to get rid of bogus charges.
And after all that, they make filing a complaint as difficult as possible, after which the complaint either disappears entirely or seemingly sits in a drawer for months to years before ending in a generic finding of no wrongdoing from the officer.
As far as the police are concerned, the system is working as intended. Politicians may disagree, but they're too scared to make serious changes, so it never changes.
This is what we get when we over-rely on armed agents and the legal system to fix far too many societal issues. That’s a result of too many fear-possessed people simply voting their fears.
I don't know what you would call it, but I don't think "justice" should be part of its name.
They never really close the file.
> Instead of birthday cake and ice cream, she got jail food and a bill for hygiene supplies
To spell it out, although she wasn't charged in the criminal sense, she was "charged" financially—for the privilege of experiencing false arrest.
There are other states with extremely messed up legal processes, such as those where not only convicted persons receive a bill for their public defender (which at least makes some sense, logically) but states where you are on hook for thousands of dollars even in the event that you are never tried or you are tried and found not guilty.