4 ms·

Then we should ask, can we fund them more? Moreover, if we don't live in California, can we lobby our states to help pay for the Cali AG?

jerf 6y ago
Having an "effectively infinite" list of crime isn't the result of a lack of funding, but the size of the set of things that technically constitute "crimes". Quadrupling their funding would still leave them with an effectively infinite amount of crime they could deal with. (This being another place where "unbounded" is probably a better word than "infinite"... there isn't literally an infinite amount of crime, but it is the case that pretty much no matter what they do, when they reach for another crime to prosecute, there will always be one there.) One of the subtle checks & balances in our system is that we don't even want prosecution to literally go after every crime... we want them to choose the things that are actually important. There's a lot of things labeled "crimes" today where the cost of enforcement greatly exceeds any value to society of that enforcement. (Expanding on that, one of the biggest problems, if not the biggest problem, with automated crime enforcement is that it removes this check & balance that almost nobody has even realized exists yet.)
- whatshisface 6y ago
  Rather than being a balance, doesn't this fact leave a giant hole open for biases and the influence of personal connections?
  - jerf 6y ago
    Yes, it does that too. It's an "and". That said, I will still take "biased human picking what to prosecute" over "a prosecution sufficiently funded to prosecute literally everything". I mean, sure, I'd prefer "real justice", but "biased human" is still constrained in their actions and has to produce enough results useful to society to be able to hide their corruption in, whereas totally perfect enforcement would be a nightmare.
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      If we can imagine perfect AD funding, we can imagine better legislation, can't we? You can't have perfect legislation (philosophy is not yet advanced enough) and you can't have perfect AD funding, but here is my proposed solution: every time you improve AD funding you improve legislation, so that they both converge in lockstep to perfect in the limit of infinite time.
      - kbenson 6y ago
        I think first perhaps we should decide on a good way to measure legislation if you plan to improve it. Good luck with that, because now you're right back to the problem of people's biases affecting the outcome. The world is made of individuals and groups with biases, and as long as they have even the tiniest amount of power, those biases cannot be removed from the process.
        whatshisface 6y ago
        An open legislative process involving debate among many representatives is way less susceptible to bias than the personal priorities of a district attorney.
        kbenson 6y ago
        > here is my proposed solution: every time you improve AD funding you improve legislation My point is that locking "improved funding" to "improved legislation" is impossibly without a way to usefully measure improvements in legislation. Improving funding has a few ways to measure it, but in the discussion we've been having I took improved to mean "more". As for legislation, I don't think we want more legislation, but any measurement is rife with problems. As a simple example, legislation if perpetual until changed (or created with an expiration), and laws created today with a beneficial effect may have a deleterious effect years or decades from now. Examples of this are abundant, such as patent and copyright laws not dealing with the nuance of the digital age, to privacy laws not taking into effect the ability to store everything that happens in a way that can be indexed and accessed because of computers. A moderately good law today may become a real problem tomorrow. Given that, how do we measure legislation when the effect time is essentially unbounded?
- clairity 6y ago
  yah, besides decriminalizing large swaths of behavior to make case loads manageable, let's further strike down any law that's more costly to enforce than it provides in benefits (it's literally absurd to have them). instead, put those in a civics manual that guides people on how to be a good citizen and avoid conflict (and lawsuits) with others. and teach civics in school again.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    If you do that, you end up in the extreme with police departments not prosecuting anything that doesn’t have a financial benefit to the city.
    - clairity 6y ago
      that would only be true if the only benefits were financial ones to the municipality. that also requires a level of control and coordination that isn't present in many (especially larger) jurisdictions. you'd instead be giving police the freed time and resources to both investigate real cromes like murder, theft and corruption, and also commit to community policing around observing, teaching and encouraging good civic behavior, rather than writing pointless jaywalking tickets.
- derefr 6y ago
  Would it be possible to design a criminal justice system that recognizes only a bounded amount of crime? I.e., a legal system where the "choosing" of which cases to go after, is somehow built into the letter of the law (maybe with a high bar in the indictment process?), such that everything that is illegal by the letter of the law is something necessary to go after (the societal equivalent of a showstopping bug—serial killers, for example), rather than just a "nice-to-have" that could be indefinitely deprioritized.
Gene_Parmesan 6y ago
As someone who used to be a prosecutor, from society at large, I would have most appreciated the following. a) Stop electing people whose platform is "tough on crime." These people come in with a mandate to do nothing but increase the number of cases on dockets and the numbers of years on sentences, both of which are extremely harmful to both the crim justice system and to society at large. This is why I would come into court every single day with an average of 6-8 trials scheduled (yes, every day), with some days bringing 14+. So what do you do with that? Well, you overcharge so you can plea them down. That's not justice. It's also why I was forced by the hand of the law to send a 20 year old with no priors to prison for 5 years after he was pressed into selling weed by the local gang and a gun was found in his room near the drugs. Someone wanted to appear tough on guns, so if a gun's found anywhere near drugs w/ intent to distribute, automatic 5 years. He was a good kid who made a mistake, his parents were crying and begging the court for mercy, his young sisters were in the back sobbing, and I had to stand there and be the representative of that law. One of the most shameful experiences of my life, and one of the things that directly led to me resigning. b) Be okay with paying taxes. I can't even tell you the number of times every single week I would hear civilians in the courtroom complaining about how long they were stuck there. "This is where our tax dollars go??" Actually, this is where your tax dollars don't go, because there isn't enough of them to go around, so my office is stuck paying law school graduates with high loan burdens under $40k per year, and then burning them out in < 2 years because the case loads are so high. I don't mean too sound harsh, but - the idea that other states should be funding another state's AG dept is frankly kind of ludicrous, it's not like it's a charity or nonprofit or something. The case volume they have is a direct result from the political forces at play in that state; that's true for any state. If they want more resources per case, they should lower the number of cases. That starts with the AG himself but includes the rest of the state-level government and the citizens making voting decisions.
- jasonshaev 6y ago
  Name checks out
- Meekro 6y ago
  I had always read that prosecutors have near-total discretion about which cases to bring and how aggressively to pursue them. Did you have that kind of discretion? If not, how high up in the chain was it exercised? Also, another question: how could you have 6 trials scheduled on the same day? Does that mean you had to be in 6 places at once, presented 6 cases to 6 juries? How does that even work?

jerf 6y ago

Having an "effectively infinite" list of crime isn't the result of a lack of funding, but the size of the set of things that technically constitute "crimes". Quadrupling their funding would still leave them with an effectively infinite amount of crime they could deal with. (This being another place where "unbounded" is probably a better word than "infinite"... there isn't literally an infinite amount of crime, but it is the case that pretty much no matter what they do, when they reach for another crime to prosecute, there will always be one there.) One of the subtle checks & balances in our system is that we don't even want prosecution to literally go after every crime... we want them to choose the things that are actually important. There's a lot of things labeled "crimes" today where the cost of enforcement greatly exceeds any value to society of that enforcement. (Expanding on that, one of the biggest problems, if not the biggest problem, with automated crime enforcement is that it removes this check & balance that almost nobody has even realized exists yet.)

whatshisface 6y ago
Rather than being a balance, doesn't this fact leave a giant hole open for biases and the influence of personal connections?
- jerf 6y ago
  Yes, it does that too. It's an "and". That said, I will still take "biased human picking what to prosecute" over "a prosecution sufficiently funded to prosecute literally everything". I mean, sure, I'd prefer "real justice", but "biased human" is still constrained in their actions and has to produce enough results useful to society to be able to hide their corruption in, whereas totally perfect enforcement would be a nightmare.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    If we can imagine perfect AD funding, we can imagine better legislation, can't we? You can't have perfect legislation (philosophy is not yet advanced enough) and you can't have perfect AD funding, but here is my proposed solution: every time you improve AD funding you improve legislation, so that they both converge in lockstep to perfect in the limit of infinite time.
    - kbenson 6y ago
      I think first perhaps we should decide on a good way to measure legislation if you plan to improve it. Good luck with that, because now you're right back to the problem of people's biases affecting the outcome. The world is made of individuals and groups with biases, and as long as they have even the tiniest amount of power, those biases cannot be removed from the process.
      - whatshisface 6y ago
        An open legislative process involving debate among many representatives is way less susceptible to bias than the personal priorities of a district attorney.
        kbenson 6y ago
        > here is my proposed solution: every time you improve AD funding you improve legislation My point is that locking "improved funding" to "improved legislation" is impossibly without a way to usefully measure improvements in legislation. Improving funding has a few ways to measure it, but in the discussion we've been having I took improved to mean "more". As for legislation, I don't think we want more legislation, but any measurement is rife with problems. As a simple example, legislation if perpetual until changed (or created with an expiration), and laws created today with a beneficial effect may have a deleterious effect years or decades from now. Examples of this are abundant, such as patent and copyright laws not dealing with the nuance of the digital age, to privacy laws not taking into effect the ability to store everything that happens in a way that can be indexed and accessed because of computers. A moderately good law today may become a real problem tomorrow. Given that, how do we measure legislation when the effect time is essentially unbounded?
clairity 6y ago
yah, besides decriminalizing large swaths of behavior to make case loads manageable, let's further strike down any law that's more costly to enforce than it provides in benefits (it's literally absurd to have them). instead, put those in a civics manual that guides people on how to be a good citizen and avoid conflict (and lawsuits) with others. and teach civics in school again.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  If you do that, you end up in the extreme with police departments not prosecuting anything that doesn’t have a financial benefit to the city.
  - clairity 6y ago
    that would only be true if the only benefits were financial ones to the municipality. that also requires a level of control and coordination that isn't present in many (especially larger) jurisdictions. you'd instead be giving police the freed time and resources to both investigate real cromes like murder, theft and corruption, and also commit to community policing around observing, teaching and encouraging good civic behavior, rather than writing pointless jaywalking tickets.
derefr 6y ago
Would it be possible to design a criminal justice system that recognizes only a bounded amount of crime? I.e., a legal system where the "choosing" of which cases to go after, is somehow built into the letter of the law (maybe with a high bar in the indictment process?), such that everything that is illegal by the letter of the law is something necessary to go after (the societal equivalent of a showstopping bug—serial killers, for example), rather than just a "nice-to-have" that could be indefinitely deprioritized.

Gene_Parmesan 6y ago

As someone who used to be a prosecutor, from society at large, I would have most appreciated the following. a) Stop electing people whose platform is "tough on crime." These people come in with a mandate to do nothing but increase the number of cases on dockets and the numbers of years on sentences, both of which are extremely harmful to both the crim justice system and to society at large. This is why I would come into court every single day with an average of 6-8 trials scheduled (yes, every day), with some days bringing 14+. So what do you do with that? Well, you overcharge so you can plea them down. That's not justice. It's also why I was forced by the hand of the law to send a 20 year old with no priors to prison for 5 years after he was pressed into selling weed by the local gang and a gun was found in his room near the drugs. Someone wanted to appear tough on guns, so if a gun's found anywhere near drugs w/ intent to distribute, automatic 5 years. He was a good kid who made a mistake, his parents were crying and begging the court for mercy, his young sisters were in the back sobbing, and I had to stand there and be the representative of that law. One of the most shameful experiences of my life, and one of the things that directly led to me resigning. b) Be okay with paying taxes. I can't even tell you the number of times every single week I would hear civilians in the courtroom complaining about how long they were stuck there. "This is where our tax dollars go??" Actually, this is where your tax dollars don't go, because there isn't enough of them to go around, so my office is stuck paying law school graduates with high loan burdens under $40k per year, and then burning them out in < 2 years because the case loads are so high. I don't mean too sound harsh, but - the idea that other states should be funding another state's AG dept is frankly kind of ludicrous, it's not like it's a charity or nonprofit or something. The case volume they have is a direct result from the political forces at play in that state; that's true for any state. If they want more resources per case, they should lower the number of cases. That starts with the AG himself but includes the rest of the state-level government and the citizens making voting decisions.

jasonshaev 6y ago
Name checks out
Meekro 6y ago
I had always read that prosecutors have near-total discretion about which cases to bring and how aggressively to pursue them. Did you have that kind of discretion? If not, how high up in the chain was it exercised? Also, another question: how could you have 6 trials scheduled on the same day? Does that mean you had to be in 6 places at once, presented 6 cases to 6 juries? How does that even work?