> The whole process this guy went through to report on the state of affairs is valuable because it puts the depth of reality on what is otherwise a known but relatively abstract situation. We all know that the judicial system is unfair in an abstract sense, but without seeing actual, real-life examples it does not get driven home nearly as strongly.
The key point here is that you get can get real-life examples by interviewing people caught up in the legal system. There are plenty of them, it isn't difficult to fact check the circumstances of their arrest. All this is possible without wasting police time.
How many police officers are there in New York city? How many people do they arrest or otherwise spend time on every single day? How many hours did his case take out of the total hours spent? 0.001% ?
That's not "waste" in any meaningful way of the word, and not even an argument in this discussion.
I am sure the math could be done on the actual cost of this persons misadventure. The cost of reporting the incident, trawling through CCTV, looking for the person responsible, holding the person responsible in a cell, processing the paper work, the courts time, cleaning up after him etc.
It is likely to be tens of thousands of dollars when everything is said and done. Such a waste of resources just so someone could write a story about his experience..
Imagine if more people wanted to spend their weekend in a cell just to see what it is like.. its rediculous and takes the police and prosecutors away from dealing with real criminals.
Granted some light has been shed on the state of the system in this article but the author could have achieved the same effect by interviewing people who have been through it.
I didn't really, I just pointed out that the "wasting of resources" argument is pretty silly since he actually used very little resources, in the scale of things.
I do however think he did (try to) do something worthwhile, at a personal expense.
> Imagine if more people wanted to spend their weekend in a cell just to see what it is like..
Yeah, call me when that happens.
Also, it doesn't matter that it would be bad if everyone did it. What would happen if everyone decided to take the subway at 10.00 tomorrow? IT WOULD BE CHAOS!! Does that mean I can't take the subway at 10 tomorrow?
> the author could have achieved the same effect by interviewing people who have been through it.
No-one would read that.. I'm sure I can dig up thousands of pages of reports like that.. not exactly making the headlines.
Dude...he didn't do it so that he could write about the experience, he did it so that we could read about it. That's a qualitative difference.
Someone who steps out of their comfort zone, and gets "the experience" has a more visceral feeling - for those who can't imagine themselves poor, unfortunate, or having to turn to crime, this is the only way they can truly "experience" it.
I'm not without reservations about the utility of this man's approach in documenting the harsh criminal "justice" system, but it does add another angle.
The DA wasted court time. The judge was accepting the plea bargain and the DA decided to waste time. They could have easily fined him to more than make up for any wasted time it took to track him down after he turned himself in.
Either the "system" is responding fairly and accurately to the level of "wrong" or it's just a bunch of power brokers in exercise, not contemplating justice.
What kind of person do you think I am?
The de facto situation in a worryingly large portion of people involved in debate about these topics is that it's not humanised to them, because it's at arm's length and they don't see it happen or feel any effect from it. It's no different to why seeing video footage of some atrocity is far more shocking than reading about it in a paper. That's why stuff like the OP and the link I posted is important - it's the next closest thing to shoving someone there themselves.
Think of the OP as a laywer dogfooding the judicial system he helps operate.
As an aside, there was a series on TV here a while ago called "Go Back to Where You Came From" [1]. It took a bunch of people, including some prominent anti-asylum political commentators and actually took them over to Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, the Congo, etc. and showed them first-hand what life is like for the people fleeing these places. Unsurprisingly, their reaction to it in person was markedly different to their reaction to it when they're sitting in an office at home reading about it in a paper.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Back_To_Where_You_Came_From
This argument is wrong. Let me rephrase it to make that more evident.
>We're dealing with humans, so it sort of by definition of the term requires [we treat them well].
or maybe
>We're dealing with humans, so it sort of by definition of the term requires [we don't reduce them to a statistic].
It clearly does not follow by definition.
>is far more shocking than
>their reaction to it in person was markedly different to their reaction
Yes. But is that better?
This article has good parallels with the NYT reporters who feigned being asylum seekers to travel to Australia by boat and document the horrible treatment experienced at all stages by those who take this journey [1]. I could easily imagine you arguing that these NYT reporters were terrible because they could have been on board a boat that sank and caused search and rescue people to go out and waste their time trying to find them. Equally, I could imagine you arguing that they denied a few genuine asylum seekers the room on a boat and therefore they're still stuck in a dangerous situation. However, that's completely missing the point.
The point is that without people undertaking these experiences and documenting them, the harsh reality of the situation is never quite realised. You don't end up humanising the debate around how these situations are handled, so people show less empathy towards the situation. This is a terrible situation to be in, because we then forget that we're dealing with actual human beings and not just nameless, inert objects.
In the case of the judicial system, it's one thing to know that the system mistreats and punishes people but it's another thing to actually hear the stories about the diabetic being denied proper medical treatment because of some power-tripping guard. That's why you had to go out of your way to clarify that you weren't justifying their ill treatment of him - it was humanised and put into real-world context.
In the case of the asylum seeker report, it's pretty widely known that they experience harrowing conditions and receive pretty repulsive treatment by the various governments in an effort to deter their coming to Australia. But without actually hearing the stories of the hopeful children excited about the journey as they kill time in a refugee safehouse playing in the pool with literal spare parts of broken equipment as toys, or the blind hope of the guy wanting to make a better future for his kids whilst simultaneously denying to himself that he won't just be chucked in a jail on a third world island, you don't experience the same empathy for their situation.
It's a direct counter to the rhetoric used to de-humanise the whole situation. In the case of asylum seekers, they go from being 'asylum seekers' to 'boat people' because the thought of turning away people fleeing some war-torn hellhole to find a better life is harder than turning away a few people who decide one day to hop on a boat to 'jump the queue'. The re-humanising of the whole argument through actual stories and events is the strongest way to put some emphathy back in to the argument and highlight that we are in fact dealing with other human beings, capable of thinking for themselves and having their own families and loved ones.
In the case of the judicial system, it's that these people are criminals who exist in some isolated void without family or former childhoods or any of that and simply must be dealt with so that they can't commit another crime, rather than humans with a story and a life larger than the crime they allegedly committed. Hell, the author himself said that when he was practicing, he always assumed he was trying actual guilty criminals and that once they'd been dealt with, it was all over. It was only afterwards that he started wondering about the broader implications of what he was doing.
So because of that, I completely reject your statement that it's a waste of resources and time to undertake these sorts of investigations. Does it divert theoretical resources away from the ideal task that those resources would be addressing? Sure. But it's an extremely valuable use of those resources to highlight the broader issues at play and put some human empathy, so often sorely missing, back in to the debate.
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/magazine/the-impossible-re...