7 ms·

This, along with the private prison systems, creates perverse incentives in criminal justice.

rayiner 4y ago
It should be noted that the DOJ started phasing out private prisons last year, and most states don't have any significant number of people in private prisons: https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-prisons-united-states https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso.... Additionally, the prisons folks tend to hear about in terms of abuses, like Rikers in NY, are good old public prisons.
- fredophile 4y ago
  Rikers is a jail, not a prison. It might seem like I'm being pedantic but when you're talking about problems in the criminal justice system it's important to recognize the difference between the two and how the problems and solutions may be different.
  - jhgb 4y ago
    For someone from Europe...what's the exact difference?
    - rendall 4y ago
      A prison is usually run by the government. A private prison is run by a corporation hired by the government; payment is usually prisoner * time. It's understood that the incentive for the private prison is to spend as little on the prisoners as possible, because the rest is profit; although I understand some contracts regulate this.
      - jhgb 4y ago
        I meant prison vs. jail. It seems mildly blurry to me considering that in my country we do have some distinctions between different types of detainment facilities but from what I grasped, the distinctions are delineated somewhat differently in the US that they are around here.
        riku_iki 4y ago
        First link from google: If you want to be specific jail can be used to describe a place for those awaiting trial or held for minor crimes, whereas prison describes a place for criminals convicted of serious crimes.
        rendall 4y ago
        I see that someone answered, but the cultural feel is that jail time is anything from a few hours to a few years for reasons that could include public drunkenness, assault, prostitution, or just awaiting trial, it's kind of ambiguous what it means when someone was in "jail", but it could really be no big deal. Most cities or towns would have a jail. Prison is a bigger deal. A prisoner was convicted for something unambiguously bad, and there is this cultural expectation that they have become somewhat hardened or institutional in prison. A state or Feds would run a prison. While I've known people to be in jail for longer sentences than prisoners, the expectation is that prison sentences are much longer. I'm speaking only to the social meaning of the two concepts, which might help to understand the underlying understanding that Americans share about this difference, but the actual legal realities are no doubt quite different. Most of us are pretty naive about our legal system.
        jhgb 4y ago
        Ah, this is interesting. I thought we had a somewhat clearer distinction in my country since we call "věznice" ("prison", presumably) the facility where you serve your sentence, and we call "vazební věznice" (literally "detention prison", I guess?) the facility where you're detained before your sentence and while your court case is pending. This would seem to indicate that these are separate facilities. But then I went to check the list of "detention prisons" (there's like nine of them or so) and it turned out that there's a wing for sentenced prisoners in pretty much all of them. So in fact our "detention prisons" would seem to be like US jails in function (with the exception that drunk people don't end up in jail -- they're taken to "záchytka" instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunk_tank#Czech_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunk_tank#Czech_Republic). Having said that, the operating term is still "věznice" here; there's no word with different etymology for it. Colloquially, it's called "vězení" -- we have a form of limited diglossia in my country where you commonly wouldn't use formal names of things in normal speech without sounding weird, so some phrases are somewhat different in speech than they often are in writing. And additionally, while you would say "byl jsem ve vězení" ("I was in prison") after serving a sentence, if you were detained before sentencing, you'd say "byl jsem ve vazbě" ("I was in pre-trial detention"), NOT anything like "Byl jsem ve vazebním vězení" ("I was in jail"). So we don't really have this distinction you could make between "people who did unambiguously bad things" and "people who did some light infractions". Basically you have no way to make it sound like what you did was no big deal -- everyone convicted is a prisoner and that's it (if institutionalized, that is; not after a suspended sentence, fine, or community service of course). But in American English, you apparently do. Interesting.
      - t43ytjhfajn 4y ago
        You are totally right
    - eloisius 4y ago
      Prison means you’re going away for a while. Jail means you’re awaiting trial or have a minor sentence to serve for something like failing to pay a fine, vandalism, etc. Jail is also usually operated locally by a city or county while prison is state or federal.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    I agree that’s true in general. But people can be in Rikers for months and sometimes years (average is over 9 months). So the capacity for the government to abuse prisoners is demonstrated: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/08/8-appalling-stories-of-abuse-from-rikers-island.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/08/8-appalling-stories-... I don’t think we should have private prisons, but the level of focus on them is about politics. It’s an issue that unifies the economic left, who support unions and oppose privatization but may or may not care about prisoner abuse, with the criminal justice movement. But at the end of the day, most prisoners (over 90%) are not in private prisons, and there is little evidence that private prisons are worse than public prisons. The reality is that our government run, union-staffed prisons are really bad. But prisons are a major source of jobs, and public unions that represent prison employees are powerful—and Americans are punitive—so it’s difficult to tackle the real issues.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Private prisons are good at silencing prisoners.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    [citation needed]
    - Supermancho 4y ago
      https://www.fedemploymentlaw.com/blog/2022/03/a-spotlight-on-whistleblower-retaliation-in-the-bureau-of-prisons/ https://www.fedemploymentlaw.com/blog/2022/03/a-spotlight-on... Google is there for your further investigation beyond the first result.
      - rayiner 4y ago
        So the page you linked is from a plaintiff’s law firm, talking about the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and doesn’t say anything about private prisons. The first article linked from that page is about sexual abuse at FCI Dublin. That sounds terrible, but it’s public servants employed by the federal government running that “rape club”—members of the American Federation of Government Employees.
        Supermancho 4y ago
        I didnt even look at the link. You are remaining ignorant intentionally then drawing a line in the sand. GL with whatever.
- tehwebguy 4y ago
  I believe the timeline is that Obama started phasing them out, Trump halted that, and then Biden started phasing them out again. Good reminder that executive action isn’t worth the paper it’s written on either way. (Perhaps most importantly, most private prisons are not federal)
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    Seems like they just pivoted: > Among the immigrant detention population, 40,634 people – 81% of the detained population – were confined in privately run facilities in 2019. The privately detained immigrant population grew 739% since 2002 to 2019.1) Biden’s executive order does not limit private contracts with immigrant detention facilities.
    - tehwebguy 4y ago
      Oh wow, that’s more than double the non-immigration federal private prison population
  - seoaeu 4y ago
    > Good reminder that executive action isn’t worth the paper it’s written on either way. That doesn’t at all follow from your previous statement that the executive orders of the last three presidents regarding private prisons have in fact been followed
    - tehwebguy 4y ago
      You are right, a better way to look at it would be that only the Democrat executive orders have been worthless since the federal private prison contracts that were already signed pre-Obama action (or signed during Trump admin) are not instantly dissolved by their executive action.
_8j50 4y ago
In Justice period. The victims often have no relation to crime or criminal prosecution. It's not a bug, it's a feature. The system is working as intended. It is no accident that the US has #1 incarceration rate on the planet. A significant portion of the population and and even higher portion of those in government believe manipulation and control of certain groups in the population is more important than any notion of justice or law an order. Their love for their country pales in comparison to their hatred and greed.
- Hnrobert42 4y ago
  > The victims often have no relation to crime or criminal prosecution. What does this mean?
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Somebody else used their property to e.g. transport contraband. Often enough, stole it. Wasn't long ago a twin engine Beechcraft was stolen, used, and confiscated. The owner never got it back because the DEA argued they needed it.
  - _8j50 4y ago
    Let's say someone smoked weed outside your house and right off your property, your house can be taken by the police even if you have no relation with the person and they did not enter your property because your lack of relationship or their history at your property is contested by the government and your house itself is the accused and the evidence therefore being an inanimate object that can't defend itself it now belongs to them. Can't make this up lol
    - Hnrobert42 4y ago
      But, I mean, you did just make that up.
      - _8j50 4y ago
        The fact that asset can be seized without any due process based on suspicion alone? How did I make that up? That's what the whole topic is about.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
When they outlawed general slavery, they specifically enshrined the type of slavery taking place at state penns every day.
kingcharles 4y ago
As a current prisoner, one of the nice things about private prisons is that they are so thirsty for profit that a lot of them bypass all the asinine rules about security that government prisons have in order to sell you anything and everything, e.g. games consoles, steel-stringed guitars, etc. So, while you are more likely to come to grief in a private prison due to them under-spending on guards, health care, physical plant, etc, you will die in luxury as long as your family have money to send you.
FireBeyond 4y ago
And let's not forget the plea bargain. Very few other places use it, and those that do, use it a very tiny fraction of what the US does.
- giantg2 4y ago
  Please bargains themselves aren't terrible. They're only bad because the trial wait times and bail conditions are so bad that innocent people are accepting a plea bargains. If the rest of the system was fair, like with reasonable bond and not waiting years for a trial, then it could still be a valid tool. I won't hold my breath though.

It should be noted that the DOJ started phasing out private prisons last year, and most states don't have any significant number of people in private prisons: https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-prisons-united-states https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso.... Additionally, the prisons folks tend to hear about in terms of abuses, like Rikers in NY, are good old public prisons.

fredophile 4y ago
Rikers is a jail, not a prison. It might seem like I'm being pedantic but when you're talking about problems in the criminal justice system it's important to recognize the difference between the two and how the problems and solutions may be different.
- jhgb 4y ago
  For someone from Europe...what's the exact difference?
  - rendall 4y ago
    A prison is usually run by the government. A private prison is run by a corporation hired by the government; payment is usually prisoner * time. It's understood that the incentive for the private prison is to spend as little on the prisoners as possible, because the rest is profit; although I understand some contracts regulate this.
    - jhgb 4y ago
      I meant prison vs. jail. It seems mildly blurry to me considering that in my country we do have some distinctions between different types of detainment facilities but from what I grasped, the distinctions are delineated somewhat differently in the US that they are around here.
      - riku_iki 4y ago
        First link from google: If you want to be specific jail can be used to describe a place for those awaiting trial or held for minor crimes, whereas prison describes a place for criminals convicted of serious crimes.
      - rendall 4y ago
        I see that someone answered, but the cultural feel is that jail time is anything from a few hours to a few years for reasons that could include public drunkenness, assault, prostitution, or just awaiting trial, it's kind of ambiguous what it means when someone was in "jail", but it could really be no big deal. Most cities or towns would have a jail. Prison is a bigger deal. A prisoner was convicted for something unambiguously bad, and there is this cultural expectation that they have become somewhat hardened or institutional in prison. A state or Feds would run a prison. While I've known people to be in jail for longer sentences than prisoners, the expectation is that prison sentences are much longer. I'm speaking only to the social meaning of the two concepts, which might help to understand the underlying understanding that Americans share about this difference, but the actual legal realities are no doubt quite different. Most of us are pretty naive about our legal system.
        jhgb 4y ago
        Ah, this is interesting. I thought we had a somewhat clearer distinction in my country since we call "věznice" ("prison", presumably) the facility where you serve your sentence, and we call "vazební věznice" (literally "detention prison", I guess?) the facility where you're detained before your sentence and while your court case is pending. This would seem to indicate that these are separate facilities. But then I went to check the list of "detention prisons" (there's like nine of them or so) and it turned out that there's a wing for sentenced prisoners in pretty much all of them. So in fact our "detention prisons" would seem to be like US jails in function (with the exception that drunk people don't end up in jail -- they're taken to "záchytka" instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunk_tank#Czech_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunk_tank#Czech_Republic). Having said that, the operating term is still "věznice" here; there's no word with different etymology for it. Colloquially, it's called "vězení" -- we have a form of limited diglossia in my country where you commonly wouldn't use formal names of things in normal speech without sounding weird, so some phrases are somewhat different in speech than they often are in writing. And additionally, while you would say "byl jsem ve vězení" ("I was in prison") after serving a sentence, if you were detained before sentencing, you'd say "byl jsem ve vazbě" ("I was in pre-trial detention"), NOT anything like "Byl jsem ve vazebním vězení" ("I was in jail"). So we don't really have this distinction you could make between "people who did unambiguously bad things" and "people who did some light infractions". Basically you have no way to make it sound like what you did was no big deal -- everyone convicted is a prisoner and that's it (if institutionalized, that is; not after a suspended sentence, fine, or community service of course). But in American English, you apparently do. Interesting.
    - t43ytjhfajn 4y ago
      You are totally right
  - eloisius 4y ago
    Prison means you’re going away for a while. Jail means you’re awaiting trial or have a minor sentence to serve for something like failing to pay a fine, vandalism, etc. Jail is also usually operated locally by a city or county while prison is state or federal.
- rayiner 4y ago
  I agree that’s true in general. But people can be in Rikers for months and sometimes years (average is over 9 months). So the capacity for the government to abuse prisoners is demonstrated: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/08/8-appalling-stories-of-abuse-from-rikers-island.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/08/8-appalling-stories-... I don’t think we should have private prisons, but the level of focus on them is about politics. It’s an issue that unifies the economic left, who support unions and oppose privatization but may or may not care about prisoner abuse, with the criminal justice movement. But at the end of the day, most prisoners (over 90%) are not in private prisons, and there is little evidence that private prisons are worse than public prisons. The reality is that our government run, union-staffed prisons are really bad. But prisons are a major source of jobs, and public unions that represent prison employees are powerful—and Americans are punitive—so it’s difficult to tackle the real issues.
ncmncm 4y ago
Private prisons are good at silencing prisoners.
- rayiner 4y ago
  [citation needed]
  - Supermancho 4y ago
    https://www.fedemploymentlaw.com/blog/2022/03/a-spotlight-on-whistleblower-retaliation-in-the-bureau-of-prisons/ https://www.fedemploymentlaw.com/blog/2022/03/a-spotlight-on... Google is there for your further investigation beyond the first result.
    - rayiner 4y ago
      So the page you linked is from a plaintiff’s law firm, talking about the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and doesn’t say anything about private prisons. The first article linked from that page is about sexual abuse at FCI Dublin. That sounds terrible, but it’s public servants employed by the federal government running that “rape club”—members of the American Federation of Government Employees.
      - Supermancho 4y ago
        I didnt even look at the link. You are remaining ignorant intentionally then drawing a line in the sand. GL with whatever.
tehwebguy 4y ago
I believe the timeline is that Obama started phasing them out, Trump halted that, and then Biden started phasing them out again. Good reminder that executive action isn’t worth the paper it’s written on either way. (Perhaps most importantly, most private prisons are not federal)
- stormbrew 4y ago
  Seems like they just pivoted: > Among the immigrant detention population, 40,634 people – 81% of the detained population – were confined in privately run facilities in 2019. The privately detained immigrant population grew 739% since 2002 to 2019.1) Biden’s executive order does not limit private contracts with immigrant detention facilities.
  - tehwebguy 4y ago
    Oh wow, that’s more than double the non-immigration federal private prison population
- seoaeu 4y ago
  > Good reminder that executive action isn’t worth the paper it’s written on either way. That doesn’t at all follow from your previous statement that the executive orders of the last three presidents regarding private prisons have in fact been followed
  - tehwebguy 4y ago
    You are right, a better way to look at it would be that only the Democrat executive orders have been worthless since the federal private prison contracts that were already signed pre-Obama action (or signed during Trump admin) are not instantly dissolved by their executive action.

_8j50 4y ago

In Justice period. The victims often have no relation to crime or criminal prosecution. It's not a bug, it's a feature. The system is working as intended. It is no accident that the US has #1 incarceration rate on the planet. A significant portion of the population and and even higher portion of those in government believe manipulation and control of certain groups in the population is more important than any notion of justice or law an order. Their love for their country pales in comparison to their hatred and greed.

Hnrobert42 4y ago
> The victims often have no relation to crime or criminal prosecution. What does this mean?
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Somebody else used their property to e.g. transport contraband. Often enough, stole it. Wasn't long ago a twin engine Beechcraft was stolen, used, and confiscated. The owner never got it back because the DEA argued they needed it.
- _8j50 4y ago
  Let's say someone smoked weed outside your house and right off your property, your house can be taken by the police even if you have no relation with the person and they did not enter your property because your lack of relationship or their history at your property is contested by the government and your house itself is the accused and the evidence therefore being an inanimate object that can't defend itself it now belongs to them. Can't make this up lol
  - Hnrobert42 4y ago
    But, I mean, you did just make that up.
    - _8j50 4y ago
      The fact that asset can be seized without any due process based on suspicion alone? How did I make that up? That's what the whole topic is about.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

When they outlawed general slavery, they specifically enshrined the type of slavery taking place at state penns every day.

kingcharles 4y ago

As a current prisoner, one of the nice things about private prisons is that they are so thirsty for profit that a lot of them bypass all the asinine rules about security that government prisons have in order to sell you anything and everything, e.g. games consoles, steel-stringed guitars, etc. So, while you are more likely to come to grief in a private prison due to them under-spending on guards, health care, physical plant, etc, you will die in luxury as long as your family have money to send you.

FireBeyond 4y ago

And let's not forget the plea bargain. Very few other places use it, and those that do, use it a very tiny fraction of what the US does.

giantg2 4y ago
Please bargains themselves aren't terrible. They're only bad because the trial wait times and bail conditions are so bad that innocent people are accepting a plea bargains. If the rest of the system was fair, like with reasonable bond and not waiting years for a trial, then it could still be a valid tool. I won't hold my breath though.