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I'm all for decreasing people's unnecessary trouble with the justice system. But I also find it a bit sad and maybe not totally sympathetic that people who rec

I'm all for decreasing people's unnecessary trouble with the justice system. But I also find it a bit sad and maybe not totally sympathetic that people who receive a court summons can't pay attention / treat it seriously enough to remember to make it an important point to get themselves to court. You start to think that people who can't even get their lives together to remember a court date -- how many other things are they going to get into trouble with that we'll have to save them from too? You're being summoned to a court of law for something that you did. You would think that you could spend a few minutes not browsing Instagram and take certain things in life more seriously. Also edit: totally not right that I'm being flagged for just having an unpopular opinion. I'm not flaming anyone, personally insulting anyone, or raising illegitimate points. Whoever is doing this is exactly falling into the behavior of trying to silence people you disagree with.

anoncake 6y ago
People who can't get their lives together are more likely to be summoned to court to start with.
spyspy 6y ago
It sounds like you're not really for decreasing people's trouble with the justice system if you're going to dismiss them all as just stupid and lazy.
Swizec 6y ago
Or they have 5 jobs at 20h each so they can support their kids. Or mental health problems. Or drug issues. Or dying parents they’re taking care of. Or all of the above. Lots of reasons why you might bail on something important because your life is full of something urgent.
devwastaken 6y ago
Believe it or not many people work a job and that job is manual labor, where you have to lose yourself in time and not think too hard about your position in life and things you have to do or else it reminds you how caught in the gears of the system you are. And then a court date passes by like any other day. I don't even keep track of days and I look at the calendar and weather every day, there's too much work and too little time. We better start calling HN instaprogrammar.
jen20 6y ago
> You're being summoned to a court of law for something that you did. For something you are _accused_ of doing, usually.
lazyjeff 6y ago
Part of it might be the format it comes in. If it comes in the mail, which for me is 99% grocery flyers and bank offers and fast food brochures, it might just be going in the trash. Texts are probably much more reliably going to be received, especially in a multiperson address.
ch4s3 6y ago
> not totally sympathetic that people who receive a court summons can't pay attention / treat it seriously enough It's a little hard to pay attention to physical mail when you may be in a precarious housing situation, or un-housed. > You're being summoned to a court of law for something that you did People get summons for all kinds of things, and being summoned doesn't have to mean you did something. Plenty of people get them for "loitering", the crime of having nowhere to go.
- kepler1 6y ago
  I don't know where you get your distorted view of what police and the justice system do. But they barely have enough resources to address the major crimes that happen. Almost everyone who gets called to court has been legitimately ticketed or cited for doing something. Belief that people are being unfairly targeted or cited is putting some serious blinders on to reality.
  - avs733 6y ago
    >Almost everyone who gets called to court has been legitimately ticketed or cited for doing something you have some evidence to support this? It is oddly authoritarian for HN...
    - SamReidHughes 6y ago
      It is plainly true, and if you have any dispute about this, you really need to get off the computer, go outside, and get a grounding in reality.
      - alexilliamson 6y ago
        If it's plainly true it shouldn't be hard to produce a citation.
        SamReidHughes 6y ago
        Go outside. I can assure you you'll be able to learn about reality without needing any citations.
jrochkind1 6y ago
So, I think it's totally reasonable to wonder how this state of affairs happens, I appreciate the question. As it does seem like not the way I would act, it does seem like something surprising. I would not jump to conclusions about being sympathetic or not without knowing more about what is behind people acting this way though. One guess I'd have is... well, the people entangled in the criminal justice system are largely an overrepresented subset of our population, the poor, who usually haven't just had ONE interaction with the criminal justice system. I'd guess that they may kind of give up and think no matter what they do they are screwed, it's all so incomprehensible and beurocratic anyway, the amount of effort they put in in the past (or have seen their peers put in) doesn't seem to be correlated to liklihood of good outcomes, and poor people are actually usually really busy trying to stay housed/fed/employed/sane/alive. The way to find out, of course, is not guessing but talking to some people with court dates and people who have missed court dates.
avs733 6y ago
The goal/problem is simply to get them to show up so the justice system can properly function. Your sympathy is irrelevant to the actual problem. What you (may) have read is an explanation of why the actual problem isn't one of laziness. You choose to dismiss that research which sought to solve the problem and attribute an entirely different, and unevidenced, cause. That type of assertional problem solving is part of why the underlyign problem continues to exist.
Raphmedia 6y ago
> I'm not flaming anyone, personally insulting anyone Reread yourself. Your entire comment can be reduced to: "I believe that people are childish and unable to take life seriously". The paper explores a different possibility for why defendants might miss court: simple human error. They then explore that theory and notice that by implementing ways to avoid this human error the failures to appear are lower. It also explores the theory that by shifting away from punitive attitudes (i.e. not blaming or punishing people) you lower this behavior. Your comment is irrelevant to this discussion as it blames the victims of the system.
- xibalba 6y ago
  > Your comment is irrelevant to this discussion as it blames the victims of the system. And your comment assumes the impossibility that these people are capable of being responsible and adhering to a summons. This stance is unscientific and ideologically driven.
  - LurkersWillLurk 6y ago
    It doesn't assume it's always impossible. If you think the problem with the current summons/warrant/arrest system is "unscientific", then I invite you to consider what kinds of effects mandatory court appearance between 9 am and 5 pm have on low-income defendants. I'm not aware of any jurisdiction in the United States that prohibits employers from firing workers who have to appear in court. But I totally understand why "respecting the legitimacy of the courts," while nice in principle, doesn't match in comparison to putting food on the table.
  - Enginerrrd 6y ago
    Having worked on an ambulance as a paramedic where I was exposed to a lot of people, I would say that assuming the possibility that these people are capable of being responsible and adhering to a summons would be the unscientific and ideologically driven stance. You forget that you mostly deal with "normal" people. People with jobs, or friends, hobbies, etc. There is however, a surprisingly large class of people that aren't even remotely capable of the fairly rudimentary skill-set required to do something like: read a summons, understand that it says they have to go to court on a certain date, decide that they should in fact go, schedule that date and reserve the time to go, wake up on time, remember to go, find reliable transportation to get to court, find the court, figure out how to get into the building and through security, and figure out where to go once in the court building. Failing at any one of the steps in that chain means failing to appear. It may be hard to believe, but in my experience, there are actually a LOT of people for whom this sequence would be a pretty big stretch. Guess which segment of society makes up a disproportionate number of police encounters which will ultimately lead to a court summons?
imtringued 6y ago
I don't know how you came to this conclusion because the abstract specifically addresses this: >In lab experiments, we find that while criminal justice professionals see failures to appear as relatively unintentional, laypeople believe they are more intentional. It's exactly the opposite of your stance.
wonder_er 6y ago
I don't think OP should be getting downvoted or flagged. This is a reasonable and common opinion shared by the majority of people living in the USA, and is indeed how well-paid middle-class people would respond to a court summons. It's well-documented that in many ways, the USA has "criminalized" being poor. Not directly, of course, but indirectly. I suspect OP would be entirely amenable to this line of reasoning, perhaps they'd be willing to read a bit on the topic. For example: - https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2015/08/21/criminalizing-poverty-how-government-works-against-the-poor/#1751544d3cce https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2015/08/21/criminal... - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25852784-evicted https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25852784-evicted - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6792458-the-new-jim-crow https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6792458-the-new-jim-crow - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38561954-american-prison https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38561954-american-prison But gosh, lets not attack and flag the comment. OP, I've left my up-vote. Sorry the shame brigade got to it first, instead of anyone interested in a constructive dialogue. The author said: > totally not right that I'm being flagged for just having an unpopular opinion. I'm not flaming anyone, personally insulting anyone, or raising illegitimate points. Whoever is doing this is exactly falling into the behavior of trying to silence people you disagree with. I couldn't agree more.
- kepler1 6y ago
  I appreciate that a lot, thank you. And as I said, I am not a fan of having an encounter with the justice system send you down a spiral of Kafka-esque inability to recover. Also, I fully agree that some (few!) jurisdictions turn the policing into a pseudo-revenue source, which is not reasonable and should be regulated against with sensible laws. But my exactly related point is that at some stage of thinking, you will confront the question of "how hard do we have to keep on trying to make things easier for people to deal with the consequences of their actions?" And, what are we trying to get to as a goal? We are not going to rid the world of crime. We are not going to be able to hand deliver people to court who forgot their court date. We are not going to be able to alleviate every person of the stresses in life that they encounter. How much should we do? Of course we shouldn't put artificial barriers in people's way to trip them up. And if something is easy to help them avoid trouble, by all means. It's only in a government's interest not to cause people to spiral into criminality with no way out. It's a cost on society! You would be dumb not to see that. As a middle class person, it's easy for me to say all this, yes. Admitted. But neither do I reflexively believe that "victim blaming" is a reasonable full excuse against all the trouble a person gets into in life. Now, whether there is something systemic about our country, people, government, and the widening gulf between rich and poor (or in my words, people capable of getting through daily life successfully) is growing and increasingly causing more than some people can handle -- well, that is a bigger question that I don't know the answer to.
duxup 6y ago
I think your theory on what might be happening with some of these folks may be spot on. Still there's an incentive for everyone to keep these things from spiraling out of control no matter whose fault it is. We should want some level of compliance here and avoid a legal system that then rolls out of control with minor offenses snowballing from failure to appear to serious life consequences stemming from, arrest, job loss and etc. Those situations impact everyone in society at some point, even if only in increased taxes. These aren't super criminals, we want to process whatever has happened through the courts as efficiently as possible without it getting out of control. Even if things spiraling out of control are their own bad choices, if we can prevent that it benefits everyone.
Nasrudith 6y ago
Well think about it this way - the kind of people who get caught for petty stuff like that and not showing up to court probably don't have the best executive functioning in the first place. Look in prisons and you will find plenty of people who have ruined their lives and others by not thinking things through at all. Hell most criminals are dumb and serial killers have been horrifyingly successful with relatively basic precautions and choice of victim as most arrests are on the "dumbasses". Horrifyingly lead exposure can cause violent impulsivity and is strongly linked to crime rates. Just getting upset about them being "irresponsible" or not as it "ought" to be is unproductive pseudo-moralism (the distinction being that it is reasonable to require that for a set code to be considered moral it has to actually improve the situation in at least some sense or else it is irrelevant) it doesn't address either the root cause or the symptoms. Hammering them with hard consequences fails so continious nudging with trivialities shows better results for all involved even if it is a tacky and kind of weird stop-gap social work. Getting into the classic "if it looks stupid but works well it isn't stupid".
lazyasciiart 6y ago
You know who can't remember what day it is today? People with Alzheimer's and dementia, for a start. Should we just jail them now to save ourselves the trouble of looking after them in general? Maybe tell them to get off Instagram for a minute?

anoncake 6y ago

People who can't get their lives together are more likely to be summoned to court to start with.

spyspy 6y ago

It sounds like you're not really for decreasing people's trouble with the justice system if you're going to dismiss them all as just stupid and lazy.

Swizec 6y ago

Or they have 5 jobs at 20h each so they can support their kids. Or mental health problems. Or drug issues. Or dying parents they’re taking care of. Or all of the above. Lots of reasons why you might bail on something important because your life is full of something urgent.

devwastaken 6y ago

Believe it or not many people work a job and that job is manual labor, where you have to lose yourself in time and not think too hard about your position in life and things you have to do or else it reminds you how caught in the gears of the system you are. And then a court date passes by like any other day. I don't even keep track of days and I look at the calendar and weather every day, there's too much work and too little time. We better start calling HN instaprogrammar.

jen20 6y ago

> You're being summoned to a court of law for something that you did. For something you are _accused_ of doing, usually.

lazyjeff 6y ago

Part of it might be the format it comes in. If it comes in the mail, which for me is 99% grocery flyers and bank offers and fast food brochures, it might just be going in the trash. Texts are probably much more reliably going to be received, especially in a multiperson address.

ch4s3 6y ago

> not totally sympathetic that people who receive a court summons can't pay attention / treat it seriously enough It's a little hard to pay attention to physical mail when you may be in a precarious housing situation, or un-housed. > You're being summoned to a court of law for something that you did People get summons for all kinds of things, and being summoned doesn't have to mean you did something. Plenty of people get them for "loitering", the crime of having nowhere to go.

kepler1 6y ago
I don't know where you get your distorted view of what police and the justice system do. But they barely have enough resources to address the major crimes that happen. Almost everyone who gets called to court has been legitimately ticketed or cited for doing something. Belief that people are being unfairly targeted or cited is putting some serious blinders on to reality.
- avs733 6y ago
  >Almost everyone who gets called to court has been legitimately ticketed or cited for doing something you have some evidence to support this? It is oddly authoritarian for HN...
  - SamReidHughes 6y ago
    It is plainly true, and if you have any dispute about this, you really need to get off the computer, go outside, and get a grounding in reality.
    - alexilliamson 6y ago
      If it's plainly true it shouldn't be hard to produce a citation.
      - SamReidHughes 6y ago
        Go outside. I can assure you you'll be able to learn about reality without needing any citations.

jrochkind1 6y ago

So, I think it's totally reasonable to wonder how this state of affairs happens, I appreciate the question. As it does seem like not the way I would act, it does seem like something surprising. I would not jump to conclusions about being sympathetic or not without knowing more about what is behind people acting this way though. One guess I'd have is... well, the people entangled in the criminal justice system are largely an overrepresented subset of our population, the poor, who usually haven't just had ONE interaction with the criminal justice system. I'd guess that they may kind of give up and think no matter what they do they are screwed, it's all so incomprehensible and beurocratic anyway, the amount of effort they put in in the past (or have seen their peers put in) doesn't seem to be correlated to liklihood of good outcomes, and poor people are actually usually really busy trying to stay housed/fed/employed/sane/alive. The way to find out, of course, is not guessing but talking to some people with court dates and people who have missed court dates.

avs733 6y ago

The goal/problem is simply to get them to show up so the justice system can properly function. Your sympathy is irrelevant to the actual problem. What you (may) have read is an explanation of why the actual problem isn't one of laziness. You choose to dismiss that research which sought to solve the problem and attribute an entirely different, and unevidenced, cause. That type of assertional problem solving is part of why the underlyign problem continues to exist.

Raphmedia 6y ago

> I'm not flaming anyone, personally insulting anyone Reread yourself. Your entire comment can be reduced to: "I believe that people are childish and unable to take life seriously". The paper explores a different possibility for why defendants might miss court: simple human error. They then explore that theory and notice that by implementing ways to avoid this human error the failures to appear are lower. It also explores the theory that by shifting away from punitive attitudes (i.e. not blaming or punishing people) you lower this behavior. Your comment is irrelevant to this discussion as it blames the victims of the system.

xibalba 6y ago
> Your comment is irrelevant to this discussion as it blames the victims of the system. And your comment assumes the impossibility that these people are capable of being responsible and adhering to a summons. This stance is unscientific and ideologically driven.
- LurkersWillLurk 6y ago
  It doesn't assume it's always impossible. If you think the problem with the current summons/warrant/arrest system is "unscientific", then I invite you to consider what kinds of effects mandatory court appearance between 9 am and 5 pm have on low-income defendants. I'm not aware of any jurisdiction in the United States that prohibits employers from firing workers who have to appear in court. But I totally understand why "respecting the legitimacy of the courts," while nice in principle, doesn't match in comparison to putting food on the table.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  Having worked on an ambulance as a paramedic where I was exposed to a lot of people, I would say that assuming the possibility that these people are capable of being responsible and adhering to a summons would be the unscientific and ideologically driven stance. You forget that you mostly deal with "normal" people. People with jobs, or friends, hobbies, etc. There is however, a surprisingly large class of people that aren't even remotely capable of the fairly rudimentary skill-set required to do something like: read a summons, understand that it says they have to go to court on a certain date, decide that they should in fact go, schedule that date and reserve the time to go, wake up on time, remember to go, find reliable transportation to get to court, find the court, figure out how to get into the building and through security, and figure out where to go once in the court building. Failing at any one of the steps in that chain means failing to appear. It may be hard to believe, but in my experience, there are actually a LOT of people for whom this sequence would be a pretty big stretch. Guess which segment of society makes up a disproportionate number of police encounters which will ultimately lead to a court summons?

imtringued 6y ago

I don't know how you came to this conclusion because the abstract specifically addresses this: >In lab experiments, we find that while criminal justice professionals see failures to appear as relatively unintentional, laypeople believe they are more intentional. It's exactly the opposite of your stance.

wonder_er 6y ago

I don't think OP should be getting downvoted or flagged. This is a reasonable and common opinion shared by the majority of people living in the USA, and is indeed how well-paid middle-class people would respond to a court summons. It's well-documented that in many ways, the USA has "criminalized" being poor. Not directly, of course, but indirectly. I suspect OP would be entirely amenable to this line of reasoning, perhaps they'd be willing to read a bit on the topic. For example: - https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2015/08/21/criminalizing-poverty-how-government-works-against-the-poor/#1751544d3cce https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2015/08/21/criminal... - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25852784-evicted https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25852784-evicted - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6792458-the-new-jim-crow https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6792458-the-new-jim-crow - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38561954-american-prison https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38561954-american-prison But gosh, lets not attack and flag the comment. OP, I've left my up-vote. Sorry the shame brigade got to it first, instead of anyone interested in a constructive dialogue. The author said: > totally not right that I'm being flagged for just having an unpopular opinion. I'm not flaming anyone, personally insulting anyone, or raising illegitimate points. Whoever is doing this is exactly falling into the behavior of trying to silence people you disagree with. I couldn't agree more.

kepler1 6y ago
I appreciate that a lot, thank you. And as I said, I am not a fan of having an encounter with the justice system send you down a spiral of Kafka-esque inability to recover. Also, I fully agree that some (few!) jurisdictions turn the policing into a pseudo-revenue source, which is not reasonable and should be regulated against with sensible laws. But my exactly related point is that at some stage of thinking, you will confront the question of "how hard do we have to keep on trying to make things easier for people to deal with the consequences of their actions?" And, what are we trying to get to as a goal? We are not going to rid the world of crime. We are not going to be able to hand deliver people to court who forgot their court date. We are not going to be able to alleviate every person of the stresses in life that they encounter. How much should we do? Of course we shouldn't put artificial barriers in people's way to trip them up. And if something is easy to help them avoid trouble, by all means. It's only in a government's interest not to cause people to spiral into criminality with no way out. It's a cost on society! You would be dumb not to see that. As a middle class person, it's easy for me to say all this, yes. Admitted. But neither do I reflexively believe that "victim blaming" is a reasonable full excuse against all the trouble a person gets into in life. Now, whether there is something systemic about our country, people, government, and the widening gulf between rich and poor (or in my words, people capable of getting through daily life successfully) is growing and increasingly causing more than some people can handle -- well, that is a bigger question that I don't know the answer to.

duxup 6y ago

I think your theory on what might be happening with some of these folks may be spot on. Still there's an incentive for everyone to keep these things from spiraling out of control no matter whose fault it is. We should want some level of compliance here and avoid a legal system that then rolls out of control with minor offenses snowballing from failure to appear to serious life consequences stemming from, arrest, job loss and etc. Those situations impact everyone in society at some point, even if only in increased taxes. These aren't super criminals, we want to process whatever has happened through the courts as efficiently as possible without it getting out of control. Even if things spiraling out of control are their own bad choices, if we can prevent that it benefits everyone.

Nasrudith 6y ago

Well think about it this way - the kind of people who get caught for petty stuff like that and not showing up to court probably don't have the best executive functioning in the first place. Look in prisons and you will find plenty of people who have ruined their lives and others by not thinking things through at all. Hell most criminals are dumb and serial killers have been horrifyingly successful with relatively basic precautions and choice of victim as most arrests are on the "dumbasses". Horrifyingly lead exposure can cause violent impulsivity and is strongly linked to crime rates. Just getting upset about them being "irresponsible" or not as it "ought" to be is unproductive pseudo-moralism (the distinction being that it is reasonable to require that for a set code to be considered moral it has to actually improve the situation in at least some sense or else it is irrelevant) it doesn't address either the root cause or the symptoms. Hammering them with hard consequences fails so continious nudging with trivialities shows better results for all involved even if it is a tacky and kind of weird stop-gap social work. Getting into the classic "if it looks stupid but works well it isn't stupid".

lazyasciiart 6y ago

You know who can't remember what day it is today? People with Alzheimer's and dementia, for a start. Should we just jail them now to save ourselves the trouble of looking after them in general? Maybe tell them to get off Instagram for a minute?