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Why America's prisons are an unconstitutional moral horror (2019)

269 points by dan-robertson 6y ago

dan-robertson 6y ago
For EU users: https://archive.is/rChRr https://archive.is/rChRr
djoldman 6y ago
What would happen if the chief public defender of a large city declared that no public defender would accept any plea deal and that they would be taking everything to trial? The courts would immediately be clogged and prosecutors would be forced to drop many charges because they wouldn't be able to have a trial within the mandated 70 days. Prosecutors would be forced to choose the cases that they actually believed important as opposed to the current as-many-charges-and-cases-as-they-can.
- thebooktocome 6y ago
  More realistically, that chief public defender would be fired or harassed out of office within days. It's probably unconstitutional for them to refuse plea deals en masse if it creates a massive violation of one's right to a speedy trial.
  - djoldman 6y ago
    I'm not a lawyer but as far as I know it's the duty of the courts to provide for a speedy trial. And all the chief defender need do is state that in their opinion, plea deals are not fair and that they would not be taking any. If the courts couldn't keep up, then that's their problem. If the government wants to bring in more judges and prosecutors, that's its perogative.
    - thebooktocome 6y ago
      I think you underestimate the forces arrayed against this hypothetical chief public defender.
      - djoldman 6y ago
        Perhaps. But in some jurisdictions, there are so many defendants that they don't have enough courtrooms to run trials 24/7 to get them done in 70 days.
    - giantg2 6y ago
      Speedy trial can vary from state to state. If not in custody, PA considers anything under 4 or 5 years from the charge being brought to be speedy.
      - SilasX 6y ago
        That feels like a non-standard usage of “speedy”, even accounting for linguistic drift since 1789.
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        Not really. All such descriptors are standardly applied in a comparative manner - it is normal to describe a snail as "speedy" if it's faster than other snails, regardless of whether it's faster than other centipedes. But that purely linguistic analysis only tells you that "speedy trial" has no objective meaning, which can't be the intent of the phrase. The right to a "speedy trial" was supposed to ensure that trials occur speedily relative to some context which is now lost.
        giantg2 6y ago
        Not really. Rules of statutory construction generally say that you need to use a definition from the dictionary if it's not defined in the statute. Webster's basically says without delay. However, it's somewhat ambiguous. The principle of lenity is supposed to interpret ambiguity in favor of the defendant... it rarely happens.
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > Webster's basically says without delay. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/speedy https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/speedy The entire gloss is "marked by swiftness of motion or action. Also: prompt sense 2". Prompt 2 is "performed readily or immediately". We can reasonably interpret "immediately" as "without delay", but we then run into the problem that that is explicitly one of two options.
    - antattack 6y ago
      Apparently in NY it's less than 6 years[1] or life[2]: [1]"New York top court clears man held six years at Rikers Island without trial" https://cn.reuters.com/article/instant-article/idUSKCN1FZ2YZ https://cn.reuters.com/article/instant-article/idUSKCN1FZ2YZ [2]"Browder tragically ended his life in 2015 after suffering beatings, two years of solitary confinement, and egregious conditions during the three years he was incarcerated on Rikers Island—all because of a baseless accusation that he stole a backpack. " https://www.nyclu.org/en/news/new-york-may-finally-do-something-help-prevent-what-happened-kalief-browder https://www.nyclu.org/en/news/new-york-may-finally-do-someth...
      - djoldman 6y ago
        In cases where you see people in jail for years it's because the defendant has waived their right to a speedy trial until they are next in court. Every time they go to court, they waive their right to a speedy trial until the next time they're in court. If they didn't, the judge would set a trial date for within a short period of time (less than 70 days). In practice, defendants will waive dates to fit into the judge's calendar.
      - alasdair_ 6y ago
        The Browder case is appalling. For those claiming it was the fault of the defendant for waiving their right to a speedy trial, look at the “trial” section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder Over and over the prosecution was not ready and over and over the judge allowed it.
  - m463 6y ago
    I think there's also a case-load angle here. Don't public defenders usually have hundreds of active cases?
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Could they ethically do that? As then the prosecution has no reason to grant any leniency, so whichever clients they tried would receive far longer sentences. Sacrificing some clients to get others off does not seem permissible. I believe they are also required to present the deal to their clients.
  - djoldman 6y ago
    The prosecutors don't sentence defendants, judges do. Additionally, judges would know what was going on and presumably take it under consideration.
    - munk-a 6y ago
      Depending on the jurisdiction, though, the judge may be an elected official that doesn't want to look "soft on crime" for re-election or even may be receiving a big chunk of campaign donations from private prison organizations. It's an interesting open question whether judges should be elected or not (though I lean toward no due to the lack of visibility of their actions)... but what isn't up for debate is how corrupt the US election system is - as long as campaign finance is broken we can't expect the judiciary to fix things for us.
- koolba 6y ago
  The electorate would likely demand the immediate sacking of the chief public defender.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    Mob rule by proxy
  - excalibur 6y ago
    I don't know about the electorate, but other local officials certainly would. Most people can agree that the criminal justice system is broken and needs reform. But efforts to actually fix it are almost always painted as being "soft on crime" by fear mongering political opponents who care far less about reform than getting votes by any means necessary.
  - djoldman 6y ago
    Probably. But it'd be interesting if the mayor said nope, this is what we're doing.
- falcolas 6y ago
  A more likely outcome would be a doubling or tripling down on the legal threats to the defendant. It’s not the public defender’s call to make, and prosecutors are already pretty good at scaring the shit out of the defendants.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    And commiting prosecutorial misconduct with no consequences. Why is this downvoted? I've witnessed it. How else would you describe a trooper and ADA knew that a charge was incorrect and still let it stand, including pretrial restrictions only under the incorrect charge.
  - djoldman 6y ago
    The beauty of it is that they pretty much already throw as many charges that they can.
    - giantg2 6y ago
      I've seen an ADA and trooper hold a charge on someone even though they knew it was the wrong charge. That charge carried pretrial restrictions that the correct charge did not.
- ianferrel 6y ago
  Lawyers don't accept plea deals. Clients accept plea deals. Lawyers are required by professional ethics (and possibly by law in some places) to present plea deals to their clients. Having it be otherwise would be problematic.
  - djoldman 6y ago
    True. However, in practice, most defendants take the advice of their lawyers. If public defenders advised not to take a deal, they probably wouldn't take them. This is definitely the weak point of this plan, I admit.
    - ianferrel 6y ago
      The problem is that the existing system is in a stable equilibrium. A lawyer generally can't advise most clients to not take a plea deal because not taking the plea deal will have a worse outcome for that client. It's literally the prisoner's dilemma. You have to have all the lawyers and all the clients act in concert. But if someone defects, they get the plea deal (better than getting stuck in jail and going to trial) and the others get screwed.
      - djoldman 6y ago
        It is tricky for sure. It's a fantasy, I admit. I would truly like to see prosecutors have to take all cases to trial. The flagrant disregard for prosecutorial ethics is just appalling.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    They can also give advice as to whether or not accepting the plea deal is in the client’s best interests. That mechanism seems like it would be nearly equally effective, especially in today’s “one strange trick” society.
  - pat2man 6y ago
    Also judges must approve of a plea deal. I wonder if judges even know the likelihood of a given defendant accepting a plea deal even though they are innocent?
- zachrose 6y ago
  Why doesn’t one do this? Because it exposes their individual clients to greater risk?
  - giantg2 6y ago
    In some cases, the defendant can't afford bail and would be forced to sit in jail until the trial.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - djoldman 6y ago
      In these cases, the public defender waives the right to a speedy trial. It's how defendants are allowed to be held without trial for an excessive amount of time. They just have to not waive that right and the trial must proceed within 70 days or so.
      - giantg2 6y ago
        I think that depends on the state and details. If you're not in custody, the limit is generally measured in years. If public defenders are waiving that right without informed consent, then people need to file complaints with the bar
  - torstenvl 6y ago
    Yes. It is unethical. Your duty is to your client, not to your public policy position, even if your political position is just and even if it would benefit other hypothetical clients in the future.
    - munk-a 6y ago
      And this is exactly how it should be - people's futures shouldn't be bargaining chips to use to push through political reform, least of all the futures of those who may be wrongly accused. If we want to see change in the justice system we need wider societal education and to force that change from the outside, but that butts up against a lot of "hard on crime" rhetoric.
- standardUser 6y ago
  I'd be worried that prosecutors would go after cases that serve their own purpose and that those wouldn't be the cases most deserving of prosecution. For example, I would want every violent and sexual offense to be prosecuted before even a single drug case is considered. But would a prosecutor give up a a mid-level drug dealer to go after a sexual assault case or a mugging?
  - djoldman 6y ago
    If a prosecutor can't prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, I think we don't want them charging a crime regardless of what the crime is.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    Ideally there shouldn't be any dropped cases. But of course that requires adequate funding. You know, maybe depending money on expanding the number of courts/judges instead of marble floors and hardwood paneling. And we need to do away with most law enforcement discretion (this includes DAs). Enforcement is extremely uneven. If the law using going to be enforced in many situations, then why enforce it at all? This brings up another point. Is this a justice system? How can it be when the cost to defend one's self in court (with or without a lawyer) is more expensive than the fine. You can be punished more defending yourself as an innocent person than as a guilty one who pleads guilty.
    - clairity 6y ago
      i'd be down for expanding courts and enforcing (criminal) laws evenly and justly if we combined that with reviewing and aggressively purging unnecessary and unjust laws first. i'd conjecture we'd lose basically nothing in terms of justice and crime if we did that.
      - giantg2 6y ago
        Exactly. There seem to be a lot of non value added laws that are selectively enforced.
- Clewza313 6y ago
  Well, no, they would be forced to choose the cases where they think they have the best odds of winning. And you'd end up with Japan, where confessions are extracted out of prisoners during pretrial detention and 99.9% of those brought to trial are convicted. That said, even this would probably be an improvement, since plea bargains are an almost uniquely American horror.
  - alasdair_ 6y ago
    Japan has a 99.3% conviction rate, but only a 37% indictment rate, implying roughly two thirds of those arrested and held are let go without charge.
    - lazide 6y ago
      Probably even lower indictment rates, since I’m sure a lot of paperwork get’s ‘lost’ on the more embarrassing cases. If you can spend years held before trial that’s all still cold comfort
      - Clewza313 6y ago
        It's somewhat difficult to get Japanese police to even investigate crimes. I once had my pocket picked, went to the police station to report it, and they basically refused to mark it as theft and recorded it as lost instead.
        lazide 6y ago
        You can’t have bad numbers of no one ever writes down the bad stuff I guess? Face is a big thing in eastern Asian cultures, probably plays a big part.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  They did this in San Bernardino and Riverside counties about a decade ago when the DAs refused to bargain over drug rehab diversions for non-violent/non-dealer defendants. Nearly member of the defense bar (led by the public defenders, but including private counsel) convinced their clients to refuse to waive the rights to a speedy trial. SB and Riverside ran out of courtrooms to hold trials in by 10a that Monday, and were forced to ask LA and OC county for help. By that Wednesday, the backlog grew so large that defendants' cases were being dropped because the constitutional deadline for bringing their case to trial had passed. The following week, both DAs gave in completely.
  - koolba 6y ago
    You’re referring to this right? https://www.courts.ca.gov/partners/documents/Crush_of_Cases_1206_press_enterprise.pdf https://www.courts.ca.gov/partners/documents/Crush_of_Cases_...
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      No, the events in that article happened because Riverside decided it didn't want to pay for the courtrooms it needed for the volume of cases its court system was dealing with. However, the experiences of the defense bar during that time did inspire the subsequent events to which I was referring, which was in late 2009 or early 2010. It's hard to find articles about it online since it was an esoteric maneuver that AFAIK was only covered by local (now defunct) papers.
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  You should look into philidelphia’s district attorney. He led his campaign with plea reform. Also look into private prisons and Unicor. Essentially slave labor for GSA. Truly horrible conditions. There is not one semblance of rehabilitation in the US prison system.
  - alasdair_ 6y ago
    Prisoners should be paid at least the minimum wage, with a portion of their wages going to the victims.
- bsder 6y ago
  You can't do that. Putting this on the defender is the wrong target. The two structural changes that I would make are: 1) Any monetary collection by the "justice system" goes to a victim or into a fund which gets redistributed to the general public at the end of the year. No more funding things with fines (aka regressive tax on the poor). You want funding--it comes out of taxes, period. This stops a lot of the perverse incentives in the system. Marijuana legalization is mostly held up because the fines from it fund the "justice system". 2) Prosecutors may not offer plea deals. As we have seen time and again, this devolves into abuse of office. Prosecutors offer deals with far fewer consequences to rich, non-minority defendants. I would actually go one further: 3) Prosecutors don't get any ability to pick the jury. The court should be able to strike people for various bias reasons. The defense should be able to strike people with some limitations. The prosecution should have to make the case with the jury provided by the court system and the defense. Prosecutors already have far too many advantages when conducting a trial (too many jurors are "He's in the chair--he's guilty."). If they can't make a criminal conviction with those, then they shouldn't be prosecuting it in the first place.
- tyingq 6y ago
  One issue is all the leverage prosecutors have. Things like charges that are deliberately inflated, or 3rd strike rules, defendants already on probation for something else, etc. Many defendants have to take a plea deal because the prosecution has lots of leverage.
- ur-whale 6y ago
  I wonder how other countries, where the whole "plea deal" notion doesn't even exist, manage the problem?
- vxNsr 6y ago
  Already many crimes go unpunished, you’re proposing that nearly all “petty” crimes be consequence-free just think for a second how much worse Seattle or SF would get if the police arrested even fewer criminals and even fewer ppl would prosecuted for theft and home invasions? What you’re suggesting is a total breakdown in societal norms bec you see a problem and don’t understand the root cause so you just want to treat one symptom. Why not take some time to understand the root cause instead, and come up with a solution that doesn’t have immediately worse outcomes for literally all of the rest of society.
- ErikVandeWater 6y ago
  Also, if somehow the courts managed to take all these cases to trial, for every trial that the public defender lost, she could appeal that they did not receive adequate representation. I don't think she would win those appeals, just because the courts act with spite to anyone who rocks the boat, but it would be correct; there is no way that any public defender could handle that many cases going to trial. They already aren't allotted enough time just to plea bargain.
- ddtaylor 6y ago
  The courts are actually pretty capable of rubber-stamping guilty verdicts very quickly. They can also scale up and hire more assistant prosecutors etc.
PurpleFoxy 6y ago
Too many stories of people being deprived of bare essentials in US prisons like water and access to a toilet. It’s absolutely horrific.
- ddtaylor 6y ago
  While I was in federal prison (during COVID-19) at another area of the prison inmates were allowed out of their cells for 30 minutes every 3 days and they had to choose between: (a) take a shower (b) make a phone call or (c) speak to staff or file some kind of paperwork. Note that they are essentially required to pick (a) since other inmates have to live within 4 feet of them and if they "willingly" choose to not shower they will be seen as disrespecting others. This was because of COVID-19 causing a "lockdown" but I was told that this situation wasn't new and that over the last few years that area of the prison was locked down about 30% of the time. It's also worth mentioning that the area of the prison was a holding area mostly for minimum security inmates - eg. inmates that have non-violent records with some other qualifications.
twiddling 6y ago
Cruelty is the point
- auslegung 6y ago
  > I am familiar with the cynical riposte that jail isn't supposed to be fun. But we Americans can do better than that. The punishments received should be those mandated by the legal system, as properly expressed through the decisions of judges and juries. Some people might wish to argue for tougher penalties for some crimes and thus for some criminals, and that is a debate worth having. That is precisely the point: Such judgments should be made after public debate, not by gang powers within a prison.
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    I’m not sure they’re meaning it should be the point, but that our system, as designed, is to inflict as much harm (not justice) as we can on people that we think are less than us. They may not agree with it morally at all, but that could be what they see.
    - lostcolony 6y ago
      Yeah, I took it as an indictment of the current system, not a defense of it. If they'd meant it to be a defense they likely would have said something like "if you can't do the time don't do the crime" and "It's called consequences", and other neutral to positive phrases. 'Cruelty' is generally considered a negative term; to apply it to something else is usually to pass judgement on that something else.
  - Fomite 6y ago
    I believe they're suggesting that these systems are designed to be cruel, and that there are people who desire that. I was astonished while I was working on COVID-19 in jails that the statement "Someone shouldn't die of COVID because they can't afford bail" as something that got active pushback by some people.
    - 6y ago
tmpz22 6y ago
Shot Caller starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau should be mandatory in US high school civics courses. Well to do family man enters the California penal system for a DUI, is systemically raped, assaulted, and has his family's life threatened on the outside. In order to survive he is forced to join a white supremacist gang and participate in criminal activities that evolve into a life long sentence. This is "justice" apparently.
- wayoutthere 6y ago
  Is this actually reality in the US though? Pretty much everyone I’ve known who went to jail said you could just keep to yourself and you’d be fine. Most people in jail aren’t hardened criminals.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    Depends on if it's jail or prison, and what level of security/crimes. Jail is usually short term, so is less of a clique/gang issue (except some areas).
    - wayoutthere 6y ago
      Right, but the folks I’ve talked to about it in a prison context basically said if you can stay away from the drugs / alcohol you won’t get caught up in the gang stuff. Most “prisons” in the US are minimum security prison camps; if you go to prison for DUI you’d almost certainly end up there. Most of the people there are non-violent offenders with short sentences. The ones with the gang problems are maximum security, but unless you were involved with real serious shit (murder, armed robbery, rape, etc) you won’t end up there if you behave. This is discounting some of the racial bias however (if you’re black or Hispanic you’re much more likely to end up in high security prisons).
  - chasd00 6y ago
    i've spent a night in the pokey once or twice, yeah, mostly people just want to be left alone (prison is different thing than jail though). It's a weird feeling when the door shuts and you know you can't get out. Most people are pretty quiet and just thinking about how bad they screwed up heh.
honkycat 6y ago
And American citizens have the privilege of paying for this barbarism to the tune of ~$40,000/yr. It is a criminal waste of taxpayer capital, and it is a criminal waste of human life. A complete fucking for everyone involved, other than the people at the capital getting kick-backs from industries profiting off of the prison industrial complex, and the owners of the prisons themselves.
- kyrra 6y ago
  Depending on the kind of damage a given person may do when not in prison, the cost of keeping said person in-prison may be cheaper than the damage they do to society. For example, an arsonist that just burns down buildings for the lawls, it is cheaper to keep them contained in some fashion. Now, do we need to rework how our prison and penal system work overall? For sure! Once you have a felony on your record, you are a pariah within society and it makes it much harder to start over. As well, how we deal with mental health issues still seems less-than-ideal. But we still have yet to figure out how to differentiate between someone that tries to do better after 1 bad decision/mistake or someone that keeps being a drain on society (due to continued criminal activity). We tried the 3-strike model, that that doesn't seem to have worked out great. I honestly don't know of good approaches here.
  - tremon 6y ago
    how we deal with mental health issues still seems less-than-ideal. To be perfectly honest, I have a hard time taking anyone serious that still uses a euphemism for this.
  - birdyrooster 6y ago
    I think your underlying premise (of the gp too) is flawed because it seems to imply that we need to contain people in order to save money. I don't think that is a reasonable standard for reworking our prison and penal systems.
    - kyrra 6y ago
      Society overall needs a punishment/rehab system for people that do things that go against the rules of society. Prisons are the system we have right now. Maybe we need to experiment with other ideas?
jpxw 6y ago
The current prison systems in the US (and the UK to a lesser extent) are insane and counterproductive. It’s hard to imagine how someone would make it through a sentence in one of these places without becoming a hardened criminal, a drug addict, or both. Our prisons are factories which churn out career criminals. It has to be stopped. Countless lives are being lost to, or permanently ruined by, ex-prisoners who might otherwise have been rehabilitated into a more normal life, after serving their time. Prison should not be fun. Perhaps it shouldn’t even be comfortable. But we can’t go on with prisons like they are now.
williesleg 6y ago
Just send all the crooks back to Cuba and Mexico
internetslave 6y ago
The horror of prisons is tied just as much to the people that occupy them. If there wasn’t so much violence in prison, it would be easier to create a better living environment.
- ggm 6y ago
  Why do you think there is so much violence in prisons?
  - xyzelement 6y ago
    Is it because it is full of criminals?
    - ggm 6y ago
      Other economies prisons are full of criminals too. Its the USA and I believe Colombia, Mexico and Brazil and Russia which seem to have this persisting gang culture in prison. And, also have extremely violent prison culture. The Netherlands has a much less violent prison culture. Britain is hardly perfect but has a much less violent prison culture. They're all full of criminals.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hcurtiss 6y ago
Man, there's a lot of sympathy for criminals in this thread. While there are always marginal cases that pull at the heart strings, generally speaking I don't actually care that rapists are having a bad time of it in prison. I genuinely don't. And that ambivalence extends to other criminal categories too. Usually this conversation devolves into a conversation around drug prosecutions and what many people see as excessive penalties. Historically, my answer has been that I favor drug legalization (meaning that's not so much a conversation about prisons sucking too much, but rather whether we're enforcing the right laws). But I have to admit I've grown more skeptical of legalization as I've seen what rampant drug use has done to west coast cities. Prison sentences, particularly uncomfortable ones, do in fact serve to deter crime, even if not all of it.
- closeparen 6y ago
  The standard problem with this view is that most prison sentences end, at which point society has to deal with the personalities that prison has forged.
  - hcurtiss 6y ago
    To the degree they have committed a felony, either admitted or proven beyond a reasonable doubt, the personality has in most circumstances already been forged. While one can argue about rehabilitation and its efficacy, there are many urgent problems in society, and improving the conditions of prisoners in the hope of marginally improving rehabilitation efforts does not strike me as terribly pressing.
    - closeparen 6y ago
      All this cruelty is incredibly expensive. Reducing it would mean more left over for those pressing problems, not less.
- nonotreally 6y ago
  I encourage you to do some reading about the difference between Retributive Justice and Restorative Justice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice
Ensorceled 6y ago
As with the health care debate, the US is also an outlier when discussing prisons: "The United States has ... the highest incarceration rate in the world"[1] Canada has less than 1/6th the US incarceration rate and Mexico just over 1/5th. Interesting to keep this in mind while reading the rest of these comments. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_incarceration_rate_with_other_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in...
- thewarrior 6y ago
  This is what a lot of the other “well if you commit crimes then you go to jail” people in this thread are missing. They need to explain why Americans commit 6 times more crimes than Canadians.
  - vxNsr 6y ago
    Probably all those white supremacists that those other counties don’t have.
    - thewarrior 6y ago
      If you’re sarcastically implying what I think you’re implying which is that certain minorities commit a disproportionate number of crimes in the US, that still doesn’t explain it. All countries even wealthy ones have disaffected minorities that are economically and socially backward. But among the first world countries only America has such a severe crime problem.
      - vxNsr 6y ago
        I’m sarcastically implying that attempting to apply someone else’s marginally successful model to a totally different culture is a recipe for a bad time.
        Ensorceled 6y ago
        Canada is not a “totally different culture”. Also, your definition of marginally is ... odd.
k33n 6y ago
The only reason American prisons are so horrific is that criminal gangs run them. There should be cameras everywhere, and every infraction should be punished. Once prisons stop being a lord of the flies horror show, restorative justice could be possible.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
mberning 6y ago
While I do agree that the system has many opportunities for improvement, the idea that the vast majority of the people “in the system” can be rehabilitated is comical. Most people that can be rehabilitated have their run in with the law and straighten their act out. You don’t end up with a mile long rap sheet and on parole if you are amenable to rehabilitation. Let alone prison. You just don’t. If you actually knew a parole officer and heard what they had to deal with on a day to day basis, for very little money, you would become a “tough on crime” person. The bigger question is why do we have a culture and society where so many turn to a literal “life of crime”. Why do people begin stealing, doing drugs, and committing violence to begin with. A lot of it begins at home, but nobody wants to talk about that.
- thewarrior 6y ago
  Why do you think that a lot more Americans end up in prison compared to say Norwegians ? Is it culture ?
  - mberning 6y ago
    Destruction of the family unit. Lack of economic opportunities. And many sub-cultures that glorify and fetishize crime.
    - thewarrior 6y ago
      Don’t the three factors you list all feed into each other ? I recently found a shocking statistic that the lifetime probability for a black man to go to prison is 30 %. That directly leads to social breakdown and lack of economic opportunities. This directly leads to crime being seen as the way out. Jailing more and more people is a death spiral. Not even getting into the issues of prisons being run as for profit institutions that can use prisoners as slave labor. Or that prisoners can have their voting rights removed. Or that all this disproportionately falls on certain groups.
      - mberning 6y ago
        I think it is safe to assume that they do and have a synergistic effect with pumping people into the criminal justice system. And I do think there is plenty of reform, such as eliminating a for profit motive in incarceration. But putting 100% of the focus and onus on reforming the system is never going to give us the results we want. By the time people have done enough crime to end up on parole or in prison very few are coming back. We need to resolve some of the deeper issues, and they are not easy to solve. How can the government force a family to stay together? They can’t. But they could address lack of economic opportunities. As we know finances are one of the main drivers of failed relationships and homes. We have to admit to ourselves that not every person is cut out for college or a desk job. These people need meaningful work. Instead we export those jobs and import the misery.
mentatz 6y ago
Sounds like America is a third-world country at this point.
Koshkin 6y ago
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Enjoy: https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2016/03/26050/ https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2016/03/26050/
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't post flamebait to HN. It's great to include relevant links to other sources, but not with snarky one liners, especially when the topic is inflammatory. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
georgeecollins 6y ago
One of the problems not mentioned is mandatory sentencing guidelines that were passed as part of a "get tough on crime" laws of the 80s and 90s in the US. These laws do a lot to reduce the discretion in sentencing available to judges. My mom, who was a judge told me a lot about this. Say you are young and you do something very stupid. You get high and you go into a store with a friend who is also high and threatens the clerk with a knife to steal something. Maybe you don't do anything more than run away with your friend after he steals something. After you are arrested a prosecutor can probably charge you with half a dozen crimes, all associated with the event. The prosecutor is incentivized to charge you with a bunch of stuff to get you to plead guilty instead of going to trial which is very expensive. Maybe the police picked you up and you are the wrong person. Maybe you are young and you think you shouldn't go to prison because someone you barely know did something stupid and all you did was run away when they ran away. If you ask for your day in court you are going to face all these charges and probably the prosecution will win. DAs are usually better than defense attorneys unless you can afford a very good one. So you lose. A judge might look at your past behavior. Decide you are not a really dangerous person and think, if this person were locked up for a year or two they would learn their lesson and be productive members of society. But with many charges and mandatory sentencing, there is nothing to do but lock up the person for a really long time. So long that their productive life is ruined. Mandatory sentencing also helps weaponize charges in the plea bargaining process because it prevents a judge from applying their judgement to make the sentence fit the crime. So take a plea bargain of a couple years for an auto theft or lose in court and face ten years or more with a bunch of other charges tacked on.
vxNsr 6y ago
Force lawyers to do Public Defense like medical residency for drs. for 3 years. problem solved
Balgair 6y ago
Aside: If anyone here has some spare time as the pandemic ends, here is the BoP guide to volunteering in prisons: https://www.bop.gov/jobs/volunteer.jsp https://www.bop.gov/jobs/volunteer.jsp Volunteering can take many forms including: -Vocational training -Alcoholics Anonymous -Narcotics Anonymous -Tutoring -Leisure-time activities -Spiritual counseling -Religious services -Marriage and family issues -Preparing/participating in mock job fairs Additionally, you can donate to help those in prison. Book donations are especially popular and appreciated: https://prisonbookprogram.org/donate-books/ https://prisonbookprogram.org/donate-books/ Please, contact your local prison to find out more and what they specifically are interested in. https://www.usa.gov/prisons https://www.usa.gov/prisons
modularform123 6y ago
The thug who beat up the Asian lady in Manhattan a few days ago was able to do so only because the liberal parole board released him from the prison where he was serving time for stabbing his own mother to death.
1cvmask 6y ago
For those interested on the history of the prison industrial complex and political fundraising and how New York State Governor Mario Cuomo (Governor Andrew Cuomos dad) started it: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-prison-industrial-complex/304669/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-pri...

269 points by dan-robertson 6y ago

For EU users: https://archive.is/rChRr https://archive.is/rChRr

What would happen if the chief public defender of a large city declared that no public defender would accept any plea deal and that they would be taking everything to trial? The courts would immediately be clogged and prosecutors would be forced to drop many charges because they wouldn't be able to have a trial within the mandated 70 days. Prosecutors would be forced to choose the cases that they actually believed important as opposed to the current as-many-charges-and-cases-as-they-can.

thebooktocome 6y ago
More realistically, that chief public defender would be fired or harassed out of office within days. It's probably unconstitutional for them to refuse plea deals en masse if it creates a massive violation of one's right to a speedy trial.
- djoldman 6y ago
  I'm not a lawyer but as far as I know it's the duty of the courts to provide for a speedy trial. And all the chief defender need do is state that in their opinion, plea deals are not fair and that they would not be taking any. If the courts couldn't keep up, then that's their problem. If the government wants to bring in more judges and prosecutors, that's its perogative.
  - thebooktocome 6y ago
    I think you underestimate the forces arrayed against this hypothetical chief public defender.
    - djoldman 6y ago
      Perhaps. But in some jurisdictions, there are so many defendants that they don't have enough courtrooms to run trials 24/7 to get them done in 70 days.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    Speedy trial can vary from state to state. If not in custody, PA considers anything under 4 or 5 years from the charge being brought to be speedy.
    - SilasX 6y ago
      That feels like a non-standard usage of “speedy”, even accounting for linguistic drift since 1789.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        Not really. All such descriptors are standardly applied in a comparative manner - it is normal to describe a snail as "speedy" if it's faster than other snails, regardless of whether it's faster than other centipedes. But that purely linguistic analysis only tells you that "speedy trial" has no objective meaning, which can't be the intent of the phrase. The right to a "speedy trial" was supposed to ensure that trials occur speedily relative to some context which is now lost.
        giantg2 6y ago
        Not really. Rules of statutory construction generally say that you need to use a definition from the dictionary if it's not defined in the statute. Webster's basically says without delay. However, it's somewhat ambiguous. The principle of lenity is supposed to interpret ambiguity in favor of the defendant... it rarely happens.
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > Webster's basically says without delay. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/speedy https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/speedy The entire gloss is "marked by swiftness of motion or action. Also: prompt sense 2". Prompt 2 is "performed readily or immediately". We can reasonably interpret "immediately" as "without delay", but we then run into the problem that that is explicitly one of two options.
  - antattack 6y ago
    Apparently in NY it's less than 6 years[1] or life[2]: [1]"New York top court clears man held six years at Rikers Island without trial" https://cn.reuters.com/article/instant-article/idUSKCN1FZ2YZ https://cn.reuters.com/article/instant-article/idUSKCN1FZ2YZ [2]"Browder tragically ended his life in 2015 after suffering beatings, two years of solitary confinement, and egregious conditions during the three years he was incarcerated on Rikers Island—all because of a baseless accusation that he stole a backpack. " https://www.nyclu.org/en/news/new-york-may-finally-do-something-help-prevent-what-happened-kalief-browder https://www.nyclu.org/en/news/new-york-may-finally-do-someth...
    - djoldman 6y ago
      In cases where you see people in jail for years it's because the defendant has waived their right to a speedy trial until they are next in court. Every time they go to court, they waive their right to a speedy trial until the next time they're in court. If they didn't, the judge would set a trial date for within a short period of time (less than 70 days). In practice, defendants will waive dates to fit into the judge's calendar.
    - alasdair_ 6y ago
      The Browder case is appalling. For those claiming it was the fault of the defendant for waiving their right to a speedy trial, look at the “trial” section here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder Over and over the prosecution was not ready and over and over the judge allowed it.
- m463 6y ago
  I think there's also a case-load angle here. Don't public defenders usually have hundreds of active cases?
MattGaiser 6y ago
Could they ethically do that? As then the prosecution has no reason to grant any leniency, so whichever clients they tried would receive far longer sentences. Sacrificing some clients to get others off does not seem permissible. I believe they are also required to present the deal to their clients.
- djoldman 6y ago
  The prosecutors don't sentence defendants, judges do. Additionally, judges would know what was going on and presumably take it under consideration.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    Depending on the jurisdiction, though, the judge may be an elected official that doesn't want to look "soft on crime" for re-election or even may be receiving a big chunk of campaign donations from private prison organizations. It's an interesting open question whether judges should be elected or not (though I lean toward no due to the lack of visibility of their actions)... but what isn't up for debate is how corrupt the US election system is - as long as campaign finance is broken we can't expect the judiciary to fix things for us.
koolba 6y ago
The electorate would likely demand the immediate sacking of the chief public defender.
- giantg2 6y ago
  Mob rule by proxy
- excalibur 6y ago
  I don't know about the electorate, but other local officials certainly would. Most people can agree that the criminal justice system is broken and needs reform. But efforts to actually fix it are almost always painted as being "soft on crime" by fear mongering political opponents who care far less about reform than getting votes by any means necessary.
- djoldman 6y ago
  Probably. But it'd be interesting if the mayor said nope, this is what we're doing.
falcolas 6y ago
A more likely outcome would be a doubling or tripling down on the legal threats to the defendant. It’s not the public defender’s call to make, and prosecutors are already pretty good at scaring the shit out of the defendants.
- giantg2 6y ago
  And commiting prosecutorial misconduct with no consequences. Why is this downvoted? I've witnessed it. How else would you describe a trooper and ADA knew that a charge was incorrect and still let it stand, including pretrial restrictions only under the incorrect charge.
- djoldman 6y ago
  The beauty of it is that they pretty much already throw as many charges that they can.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    I've seen an ADA and trooper hold a charge on someone even though they knew it was the wrong charge. That charge carried pretrial restrictions that the correct charge did not.
ianferrel 6y ago
Lawyers don't accept plea deals. Clients accept plea deals. Lawyers are required by professional ethics (and possibly by law in some places) to present plea deals to their clients. Having it be otherwise would be problematic.
- djoldman 6y ago
  True. However, in practice, most defendants take the advice of their lawyers. If public defenders advised not to take a deal, they probably wouldn't take them. This is definitely the weak point of this plan, I admit.
  - ianferrel 6y ago
    The problem is that the existing system is in a stable equilibrium. A lawyer generally can't advise most clients to not take a plea deal because not taking the plea deal will have a worse outcome for that client. It's literally the prisoner's dilemma. You have to have all the lawyers and all the clients act in concert. But if someone defects, they get the plea deal (better than getting stuck in jail and going to trial) and the others get screwed.
    - djoldman 6y ago
      It is tricky for sure. It's a fantasy, I admit. I would truly like to see prosecutors have to take all cases to trial. The flagrant disregard for prosecutorial ethics is just appalling.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  They can also give advice as to whether or not accepting the plea deal is in the client’s best interests. That mechanism seems like it would be nearly equally effective, especially in today’s “one strange trick” society.
- pat2man 6y ago
  Also judges must approve of a plea deal. I wonder if judges even know the likelihood of a given defendant accepting a plea deal even though they are innocent?
zachrose 6y ago
Why doesn’t one do this? Because it exposes their individual clients to greater risk?
- giantg2 6y ago
  In some cases, the defendant can't afford bail and would be forced to sit in jail until the trial.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - djoldman 6y ago
    In these cases, the public defender waives the right to a speedy trial. It's how defendants are allowed to be held without trial for an excessive amount of time. They just have to not waive that right and the trial must proceed within 70 days or so.
    - giantg2 6y ago
      I think that depends on the state and details. If you're not in custody, the limit is generally measured in years. If public defenders are waiving that right without informed consent, then people need to file complaints with the bar
- torstenvl 6y ago
  Yes. It is unethical. Your duty is to your client, not to your public policy position, even if your political position is just and even if it would benefit other hypothetical clients in the future.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    And this is exactly how it should be - people's futures shouldn't be bargaining chips to use to push through political reform, least of all the futures of those who may be wrongly accused. If we want to see change in the justice system we need wider societal education and to force that change from the outside, but that butts up against a lot of "hard on crime" rhetoric.
standardUser 6y ago
I'd be worried that prosecutors would go after cases that serve their own purpose and that those wouldn't be the cases most deserving of prosecution. For example, I would want every violent and sexual offense to be prosecuted before even a single drug case is considered. But would a prosecutor give up a a mid-level drug dealer to go after a sexual assault case or a mugging?
- djoldman 6y ago
  If a prosecutor can't prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, I think we don't want them charging a crime regardless of what the crime is.
- giantg2 6y ago
  Ideally there shouldn't be any dropped cases. But of course that requires adequate funding. You know, maybe depending money on expanding the number of courts/judges instead of marble floors and hardwood paneling. And we need to do away with most law enforcement discretion (this includes DAs). Enforcement is extremely uneven. If the law using going to be enforced in many situations, then why enforce it at all? This brings up another point. Is this a justice system? How can it be when the cost to defend one's self in court (with or without a lawyer) is more expensive than the fine. You can be punished more defending yourself as an innocent person than as a guilty one who pleads guilty.
  - clairity 6y ago
    i'd be down for expanding courts and enforcing (criminal) laws evenly and justly if we combined that with reviewing and aggressively purging unnecessary and unjust laws first. i'd conjecture we'd lose basically nothing in terms of justice and crime if we did that.
    - giantg2 6y ago
      Exactly. There seem to be a lot of non value added laws that are selectively enforced.
Clewza313 6y ago
Well, no, they would be forced to choose the cases where they think they have the best odds of winning. And you'd end up with Japan, where confessions are extracted out of prisoners during pretrial detention and 99.9% of those brought to trial are convicted. That said, even this would probably be an improvement, since plea bargains are an almost uniquely American horror.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  Japan has a 99.3% conviction rate, but only a 37% indictment rate, implying roughly two thirds of those arrested and held are let go without charge.
  - lazide 6y ago
    Probably even lower indictment rates, since I’m sure a lot of paperwork get’s ‘lost’ on the more embarrassing cases. If you can spend years held before trial that’s all still cold comfort
    - Clewza313 6y ago
      It's somewhat difficult to get Japanese police to even investigate crimes. I once had my pocket picked, went to the police station to report it, and they basically refused to mark it as theft and recorded it as lost instead.
      - lazide 6y ago
        You can’t have bad numbers of no one ever writes down the bad stuff I guess? Face is a big thing in eastern Asian cultures, probably plays a big part.
gamblor956 6y ago
They did this in San Bernardino and Riverside counties about a decade ago when the DAs refused to bargain over drug rehab diversions for non-violent/non-dealer defendants. Nearly member of the defense bar (led by the public defenders, but including private counsel) convinced their clients to refuse to waive the rights to a speedy trial. SB and Riverside ran out of courtrooms to hold trials in by 10a that Monday, and were forced to ask LA and OC county for help. By that Wednesday, the backlog grew so large that defendants' cases were being dropped because the constitutional deadline for bringing their case to trial had passed. The following week, both DAs gave in completely.
- koolba 6y ago
  You’re referring to this right? https://www.courts.ca.gov/partners/documents/Crush_of_Cases_1206_press_enterprise.pdf https://www.courts.ca.gov/partners/documents/Crush_of_Cases_...
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    No, the events in that article happened because Riverside decided it didn't want to pay for the courtrooms it needed for the volume of cases its court system was dealing with. However, the experiences of the defense bar during that time did inspire the subsequent events to which I was referring, which was in late 2009 or early 2010. It's hard to find articles about it online since it was an esoteric maneuver that AFAIK was only covered by local (now defunct) papers.
dkdk8283 6y ago
You should look into philidelphia’s district attorney. He led his campaign with plea reform. Also look into private prisons and Unicor. Essentially slave labor for GSA. Truly horrible conditions. There is not one semblance of rehabilitation in the US prison system.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  Prisoners should be paid at least the minimum wage, with a portion of their wages going to the victims.
bsder 6y ago
You can't do that. Putting this on the defender is the wrong target. The two structural changes that I would make are: 1) Any monetary collection by the "justice system" goes to a victim or into a fund which gets redistributed to the general public at the end of the year. No more funding things with fines (aka regressive tax on the poor). You want funding--it comes out of taxes, period. This stops a lot of the perverse incentives in the system. Marijuana legalization is mostly held up because the fines from it fund the "justice system". 2) Prosecutors may not offer plea deals. As we have seen time and again, this devolves into abuse of office. Prosecutors offer deals with far fewer consequences to rich, non-minority defendants. I would actually go one further: 3) Prosecutors don't get any ability to pick the jury. The court should be able to strike people for various bias reasons. The defense should be able to strike people with some limitations. The prosecution should have to make the case with the jury provided by the court system and the defense. Prosecutors already have far too many advantages when conducting a trial (too many jurors are "He's in the chair--he's guilty."). If they can't make a criminal conviction with those, then they shouldn't be prosecuting it in the first place.
tyingq 6y ago
One issue is all the leverage prosecutors have. Things like charges that are deliberately inflated, or 3rd strike rules, defendants already on probation for something else, etc. Many defendants have to take a plea deal because the prosecution has lots of leverage.
ur-whale 6y ago
I wonder how other countries, where the whole "plea deal" notion doesn't even exist, manage the problem?
vxNsr 6y ago
Already many crimes go unpunished, you’re proposing that nearly all “petty” crimes be consequence-free just think for a second how much worse Seattle or SF would get if the police arrested even fewer criminals and even fewer ppl would prosecuted for theft and home invasions? What you’re suggesting is a total breakdown in societal norms bec you see a problem and don’t understand the root cause so you just want to treat one symptom. Why not take some time to understand the root cause instead, and come up with a solution that doesn’t have immediately worse outcomes for literally all of the rest of society.
ErikVandeWater 6y ago
Also, if somehow the courts managed to take all these cases to trial, for every trial that the public defender lost, she could appeal that they did not receive adequate representation. I don't think she would win those appeals, just because the courts act with spite to anyone who rocks the boat, but it would be correct; there is no way that any public defender could handle that many cases going to trial. They already aren't allotted enough time just to plea bargain.
ddtaylor 6y ago
The courts are actually pretty capable of rubber-stamping guilty verdicts very quickly. They can also scale up and hire more assistant prosecutors etc.

PurpleFoxy 6y ago

Too many stories of people being deprived of bare essentials in US prisons like water and access to a toilet. It’s absolutely horrific.

ddtaylor 6y ago
While I was in federal prison (during COVID-19) at another area of the prison inmates were allowed out of their cells for 30 minutes every 3 days and they had to choose between: (a) take a shower (b) make a phone call or (c) speak to staff or file some kind of paperwork. Note that they are essentially required to pick (a) since other inmates have to live within 4 feet of them and if they "willingly" choose to not shower they will be seen as disrespecting others. This was because of COVID-19 causing a "lockdown" but I was told that this situation wasn't new and that over the last few years that area of the prison was locked down about 30% of the time. It's also worth mentioning that the area of the prison was a holding area mostly for minimum security inmates - eg. inmates that have non-violent records with some other qualifications.

twiddling 6y ago

Cruelty is the point

auslegung 6y ago
> I am familiar with the cynical riposte that jail isn't supposed to be fun. But we Americans can do better than that. The punishments received should be those mandated by the legal system, as properly expressed through the decisions of judges and juries. Some people might wish to argue for tougher penalties for some crimes and thus for some criminals, and that is a debate worth having. That is precisely the point: Such judgments should be made after public debate, not by gang powers within a prison.
- t-writescode 6y ago
  I’m not sure they’re meaning it should be the point, but that our system, as designed, is to inflict as much harm (not justice) as we can on people that we think are less than us. They may not agree with it morally at all, but that could be what they see.
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    Yeah, I took it as an indictment of the current system, not a defense of it. If they'd meant it to be a defense they likely would have said something like "if you can't do the time don't do the crime" and "It's called consequences", and other neutral to positive phrases. 'Cruelty' is generally considered a negative term; to apply it to something else is usually to pass judgement on that something else.
- Fomite 6y ago
  I believe they're suggesting that these systems are designed to be cruel, and that there are people who desire that. I was astonished while I was working on COVID-19 in jails that the statement "Someone shouldn't die of COVID because they can't afford bail" as something that got active pushback by some people.
  - 6y ago

tmpz22 6y ago

Shot Caller starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau should be mandatory in US high school civics courses. Well to do family man enters the California penal system for a DUI, is systemically raped, assaulted, and has his family's life threatened on the outside. In order to survive he is forced to join a white supremacist gang and participate in criminal activities that evolve into a life long sentence. This is "justice" apparently.

wayoutthere 6y ago
Is this actually reality in the US though? Pretty much everyone I’ve known who went to jail said you could just keep to yourself and you’d be fine. Most people in jail aren’t hardened criminals.
- giantg2 6y ago
  Depends on if it's jail or prison, and what level of security/crimes. Jail is usually short term, so is less of a clique/gang issue (except some areas).
  - wayoutthere 6y ago
    Right, but the folks I’ve talked to about it in a prison context basically said if you can stay away from the drugs / alcohol you won’t get caught up in the gang stuff. Most “prisons” in the US are minimum security prison camps; if you go to prison for DUI you’d almost certainly end up there. Most of the people there are non-violent offenders with short sentences. The ones with the gang problems are maximum security, but unless you were involved with real serious shit (murder, armed robbery, rape, etc) you won’t end up there if you behave. This is discounting some of the racial bias however (if you’re black or Hispanic you’re much more likely to end up in high security prisons).
- chasd00 6y ago
  i've spent a night in the pokey once or twice, yeah, mostly people just want to be left alone (prison is different thing than jail though). It's a weird feeling when the door shuts and you know you can't get out. Most people are pretty quiet and just thinking about how bad they screwed up heh.

honkycat 6y ago

And American citizens have the privilege of paying for this barbarism to the tune of ~$40,000/yr. It is a criminal waste of taxpayer capital, and it is a criminal waste of human life. A complete fucking for everyone involved, other than the people at the capital getting kick-backs from industries profiting off of the prison industrial complex, and the owners of the prisons themselves.

kyrra 6y ago
Depending on the kind of damage a given person may do when not in prison, the cost of keeping said person in-prison may be cheaper than the damage they do to society. For example, an arsonist that just burns down buildings for the lawls, it is cheaper to keep them contained in some fashion. Now, do we need to rework how our prison and penal system work overall? For sure! Once you have a felony on your record, you are a pariah within society and it makes it much harder to start over. As well, how we deal with mental health issues still seems less-than-ideal. But we still have yet to figure out how to differentiate between someone that tries to do better after 1 bad decision/mistake or someone that keeps being a drain on society (due to continued criminal activity). We tried the 3-strike model, that that doesn't seem to have worked out great. I honestly don't know of good approaches here.
- tremon 6y ago
  how we deal with mental health issues still seems less-than-ideal. To be perfectly honest, I have a hard time taking anyone serious that still uses a euphemism for this.
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  I think your underlying premise (of the gp too) is flawed because it seems to imply that we need to contain people in order to save money. I don't think that is a reasonable standard for reworking our prison and penal systems.
  - kyrra 6y ago
    Society overall needs a punishment/rehab system for people that do things that go against the rules of society. Prisons are the system we have right now. Maybe we need to experiment with other ideas?

jpxw 6y ago

The current prison systems in the US (and the UK to a lesser extent) are insane and counterproductive. It’s hard to imagine how someone would make it through a sentence in one of these places without becoming a hardened criminal, a drug addict, or both. Our prisons are factories which churn out career criminals. It has to be stopped. Countless lives are being lost to, or permanently ruined by, ex-prisoners who might otherwise have been rehabilitated into a more normal life, after serving their time. Prison should not be fun. Perhaps it shouldn’t even be comfortable. But we can’t go on with prisons like they are now.

williesleg 6y ago

Just send all the crooks back to Cuba and Mexico

internetslave 6y ago

The horror of prisons is tied just as much to the people that occupy them. If there wasn’t so much violence in prison, it would be easier to create a better living environment.

ggm 6y ago
Why do you think there is so much violence in prisons?
- xyzelement 6y ago
  Is it because it is full of criminals?
  - ggm 6y ago
    Other economies prisons are full of criminals too. Its the USA and I believe Colombia, Mexico and Brazil and Russia which seem to have this persisting gang culture in prison. And, also have extremely violent prison culture. The Netherlands has a much less violent prison culture. Britain is hardly perfect but has a much less violent prison culture. They're all full of criminals.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

hcurtiss 6y ago

Man, there's a lot of sympathy for criminals in this thread. While there are always marginal cases that pull at the heart strings, generally speaking I don't actually care that rapists are having a bad time of it in prison. I genuinely don't. And that ambivalence extends to other criminal categories too. Usually this conversation devolves into a conversation around drug prosecutions and what many people see as excessive penalties. Historically, my answer has been that I favor drug legalization (meaning that's not so much a conversation about prisons sucking too much, but rather whether we're enforcing the right laws). But I have to admit I've grown more skeptical of legalization as I've seen what rampant drug use has done to west coast cities. Prison sentences, particularly uncomfortable ones, do in fact serve to deter crime, even if not all of it.

closeparen 6y ago
The standard problem with this view is that most prison sentences end, at which point society has to deal with the personalities that prison has forged.
- hcurtiss 6y ago
  To the degree they have committed a felony, either admitted or proven beyond a reasonable doubt, the personality has in most circumstances already been forged. While one can argue about rehabilitation and its efficacy, there are many urgent problems in society, and improving the conditions of prisoners in the hope of marginally improving rehabilitation efforts does not strike me as terribly pressing.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    All this cruelty is incredibly expensive. Reducing it would mean more left over for those pressing problems, not less.
nonotreally 6y ago
I encourage you to do some reading about the difference between Retributive Justice and Restorative Justice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retributive_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice

Ensorceled 6y ago

As with the health care debate, the US is also an outlier when discussing prisons: "The United States has ... the highest incarceration rate in the world"[1] Canada has less than 1/6th the US incarceration rate and Mexico just over 1/5th. Interesting to keep this in mind while reading the rest of these comments. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_incarceration_rate_with_other_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_United_States_in...

thewarrior 6y ago
This is what a lot of the other “well if you commit crimes then you go to jail” people in this thread are missing. They need to explain why Americans commit 6 times more crimes than Canadians.
- vxNsr 6y ago
  Probably all those white supremacists that those other counties don’t have.
  - thewarrior 6y ago
    If you’re sarcastically implying what I think you’re implying which is that certain minorities commit a disproportionate number of crimes in the US, that still doesn’t explain it. All countries even wealthy ones have disaffected minorities that are economically and socially backward. But among the first world countries only America has such a severe crime problem.
    - vxNsr 6y ago
      I’m sarcastically implying that attempting to apply someone else’s marginally successful model to a totally different culture is a recipe for a bad time.
      - Ensorceled 6y ago
        Canada is not a “totally different culture”. Also, your definition of marginally is ... odd.

k33n 6y ago

The only reason American prisons are so horrific is that criminal gangs run them. There should be cameras everywhere, and every infraction should be punished. Once prisons stop being a lord of the flies horror show, restorative justice could be possible.

deleted 6y ago
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mberning 6y ago

While I do agree that the system has many opportunities for improvement, the idea that the vast majority of the people “in the system” can be rehabilitated is comical. Most people that can be rehabilitated have their run in with the law and straighten their act out. You don’t end up with a mile long rap sheet and on parole if you are amenable to rehabilitation. Let alone prison. You just don’t. If you actually knew a parole officer and heard what they had to deal with on a day to day basis, for very little money, you would become a “tough on crime” person. The bigger question is why do we have a culture and society where so many turn to a literal “life of crime”. Why do people begin stealing, doing drugs, and committing violence to begin with. A lot of it begins at home, but nobody wants to talk about that.

thewarrior 6y ago
Why do you think that a lot more Americans end up in prison compared to say Norwegians ? Is it culture ?
- mberning 6y ago
  Destruction of the family unit. Lack of economic opportunities. And many sub-cultures that glorify and fetishize crime.
  - thewarrior 6y ago
    Don’t the three factors you list all feed into each other ? I recently found a shocking statistic that the lifetime probability for a black man to go to prison is 30 %. That directly leads to social breakdown and lack of economic opportunities. This directly leads to crime being seen as the way out. Jailing more and more people is a death spiral. Not even getting into the issues of prisons being run as for profit institutions that can use prisoners as slave labor. Or that prisoners can have their voting rights removed. Or that all this disproportionately falls on certain groups.
    - mberning 6y ago
      I think it is safe to assume that they do and have a synergistic effect with pumping people into the criminal justice system. And I do think there is plenty of reform, such as eliminating a for profit motive in incarceration. But putting 100% of the focus and onus on reforming the system is never going to give us the results we want. By the time people have done enough crime to end up on parole or in prison very few are coming back. We need to resolve some of the deeper issues, and they are not easy to solve. How can the government force a family to stay together? They can’t. But they could address lack of economic opportunities. As we know finances are one of the main drivers of failed relationships and homes. We have to admit to ourselves that not every person is cut out for college or a desk job. These people need meaningful work. Instead we export those jobs and import the misery.

mentatz 6y ago

Sounds like America is a third-world country at this point.

Koshkin 6y ago

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Enjoy: https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2016/03/26050/ https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2016/03/26050/

dang 6y ago
Please don't post flamebait to HN. It's great to include relevant links to other sources, but not with snarky one liners, especially when the topic is inflammatory. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

georgeecollins 6y ago

One of the problems not mentioned is mandatory sentencing guidelines that were passed as part of a "get tough on crime" laws of the 80s and 90s in the US. These laws do a lot to reduce the discretion in sentencing available to judges. My mom, who was a judge told me a lot about this. Say you are young and you do something very stupid. You get high and you go into a store with a friend who is also high and threatens the clerk with a knife to steal something. Maybe you don't do anything more than run away with your friend after he steals something. After you are arrested a prosecutor can probably charge you with half a dozen crimes, all associated with the event. The prosecutor is incentivized to charge you with a bunch of stuff to get you to plead guilty instead of going to trial which is very expensive. Maybe the police picked you up and you are the wrong person. Maybe you are young and you think you shouldn't go to prison because someone you barely know did something stupid and all you did was run away when they ran away. If you ask for your day in court you are going to face all these charges and probably the prosecution will win. DAs are usually better than defense attorneys unless you can afford a very good one. So you lose. A judge might look at your past behavior. Decide you are not a really dangerous person and think, if this person were locked up for a year or two they would learn their lesson and be productive members of society. But with many charges and mandatory sentencing, there is nothing to do but lock up the person for a really long time. So long that their productive life is ruined. Mandatory sentencing also helps weaponize charges in the plea bargaining process because it prevents a judge from applying their judgement to make the sentence fit the crime. So take a plea bargain of a couple years for an auto theft or lose in court and face ten years or more with a bunch of other charges tacked on.

vxNsr 6y ago

Force lawyers to do Public Defense like medical residency for drs. for 3 years. problem solved

Balgair 6y ago

Aside: If anyone here has some spare time as the pandemic ends, here is the BoP guide to volunteering in prisons: https://www.bop.gov/jobs/volunteer.jsp https://www.bop.gov/jobs/volunteer.jsp Volunteering can take many forms including: -Vocational training -Alcoholics Anonymous -Narcotics Anonymous -Tutoring -Leisure-time activities -Spiritual counseling -Religious services -Marriage and family issues -Preparing/participating in mock job fairs Additionally, you can donate to help those in prison. Book donations are especially popular and appreciated: https://prisonbookprogram.org/donate-books/ https://prisonbookprogram.org/donate-books/ Please, contact your local prison to find out more and what they specifically are interested in. https://www.usa.gov/prisons https://www.usa.gov/prisons

modularform123 6y ago

The thug who beat up the Asian lady in Manhattan a few days ago was able to do so only because the liberal parole board released him from the prison where he was serving time for stabbing his own mother to death.

1cvmask 6y ago

For those interested on the history of the prison industrial complex and political fundraising and how New York State Governor Mario Cuomo (Governor Andrew Cuomos dad) started it: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-prison-industrial-complex/304669/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-pri...