TLDR: even if we removed drug offenses from prison AND all the black population from prisons, the US would STILL have a HUGE prison population compared to any western country.
Why? Because from the 1980s all branches, police, judges and legislators have together increased sentences for all crimes. A LOT. Probably needlessly if going by recidivism.
It was also a surprise, to me at least, that even if you released all of the people in jail for drug offenses, it would really only affect certain black demographics. That's something I hadn't realized. Basically a HUGE affect on the number of blacks in prison, but almost no affect on the number of whites and latinos in prison. And whites and latinos are overrepresented in the prison population in a relatively draconian way compared to Europe. (Just not as overrepresented as blacks. I'm assuming because of the asymmetry in enforcement of drug laws.)
So we are using these sentencing laws to send EVERYONE to prison for a long time, regardless of the crime. It makes me wonder how many crimes actually land you in prison? Probably some things I don't even know about will put you there.
A drunk driving conviction is a drunk driving conviction... I'm ok with that. Especially if it's your 3rd time.
I do wonder if there is some cause and effect in play with robberies and the assaults. Being from a poverty stricken area, most of the robberies and assaults I witnessed (in my area) were just from poor people arguing about what little value they have. Or drugs.
I also would like to see the drug possessions broken down into type of drug. I suspect marijuana possession is still a large part of that. <1G of weed is different than heroin.
But fuck, life in prison for drunk driving three times? How about foot chain, mandatory visits to parole officer, or prison until convicted is of age 30 and above? (Less recidivism above a certain age.)
This is just my opinion, but if you get two passes for drunk driving and you do it a third time... that's your fault. Also from the data, very few inmates get more than 10-20 for drunk driving. Those are also probably people who have way more than 3 convictions, or have committed egregious drunk driving.
We might want to look at what is causing you to drunk drive (addiction, which should be a medical issue and not a legal one), but something should be done after your third time.
hell, I knew US is a effed up police state these days, but even a possibility of life for 3 times driving drunk? that's not western democracy, that's 3rd world fascist dictatorship in a hardcore flavor (FYI, I rarely drink and if yes its max few beers/wine only, would never drive under influence)
maybe if you are living daily in such a broken environment it starts to feel more normal, but seriously guys... get a grip and try to come up with something that actually solves problems and not just destroys lives permanently.
I don't want to travel to US for same reasons I don't travel to Afghanistan or South Sudan - some good people, but messed up system and you don't want to accidentally see the darker side of it
You didn't look at the stats... You're not getting a life sentence just for driving drunk a third time. You may get one for killing someone (or multiple people) while driving drunk, but not just for driving drunk.
Look, I'm left of left, but there should be punishments for negative behavior.
I've really wondered how one can be charged with Drunk Driving. Follow me out on this.
I work in Academia. There's signs everywhere about consent. "Women can't give consent when drunk" is the canard. In Indiana, that's not the law. But in many states, that's true. Now, if someone cannot give consent to do something, or sign legal documents, how can it be legal to charge someone with a drunk driving charge?
The decision to drive was not based in consent, but instead based in intoxication. Therefore they were not in the right state of mind, either to decide to drive or drive.
Then again, I also think that bars with parking lots are a significant issue as well, as it encourages patrons to drive there, drink (possibly to drunk) and then leave in their vehicle.
One area which I'm thinking about which entails drugs and non-consent is in a hospital after a wreck. Someone's on pain drip, and insurance goon one of shows up, asking for papers to be signed.
Signing those would be invalid. No informed consent was given, due to being in a mind-altered state due to pharmaceuticals. It's likely going to be a long court case, but there is precedent in having these types of coerced actions (signature) rescinded.
My argument was that drunk driving was made in a coerced state of mind. The journey to "drunk" is one thing, but there certainly is question about actual liability.
but again, the victim in the first case is you, the victim in the second case is not you.
Also yes in a better world getting people to sign shit from a hospital bed absolutely shouldn't leave them liable. I don't know exactly how many people have been bankrupt because an ambulance drove them to the ER but I know it's a hell of a lot higher than any sense of justice should allow.
>Then again, I also think that bars with parking lots are a significant issue as well, as it encourages patrons to drive there, drink (possibly to drunk) and then leave in their vehicle.
I somehow have the feeling that bars WITHOUT parking lots will have less clients ...
A solution could be bars with parking lots 1 mile away and courtesy bikes, but I guess that cycling accidents and bycicle thefts would have an instant surge ...
More seriously, you drive to the bar parking lot, and while you are perfectly sober, you decide to get drunk (beyond legal limits).
While you may well be right that the decision to drive is based on intoxication, the decision to get intoxicated is taken based on consent, knowing that you got there driving a car...
AFAICU legal limits are fairly low so you should be sober enough when you order the "yet another" drink.
The point with consent is that you cannot accurately asses consent of a very drunk person. So if she is very intoxicated and says "yes" you should not assume that's real consent. You should make sure she gets home safe and leave your number for her in the morning if she still wants it.
People can certainly consent while drunk, they can commit crimes while drunk as well.
Also our public services practically beg people to drive drunk, most public transit in most cities completely or mostly shuts down shortly before or exactly when the bars close.
> A drunk driving conviction is a drunk driving conviction... I'm ok with that. Especially if it's your 3rd time.
Near as I can tell, this is basically what the article is about. Our huge prison population is mostly due to extremely harsh sentences for serious crimes, not people with a little bit of weed. If you want a long prison term for some number of DUI convictions, then I hope you're okay with having prison populations much higher than any other first-world country, because they're the same thing. There's no way to cut that number down much without more lenient sentences for DUI, sex crimes, assault, murder, etc.
> If you want a long prison term for some number of DUI convictions, then I hope you're okay with having prison populations much higher than any other first-world country, because they're the same thing. There's no way to cut that number down much without more lenient sentences for DUI, sex crimes, assault, murder, etc.
TLDR; Yes, a habitual drunk driver deserves punishment (up to and including jail).
--
By sheer numbers, the US will have more convictions for drunk driving due to the vast number of cars. There will be some portion of the population that drives drunk. A portion of that that drives drunk a second time. A portion of that will get a third conviction. So on, so forth. I don't think it is unreasonable to punish someone for a third DUI/DWI conviction.
This isn't stop and frisk or police/government overreach. You literally have to drink enough to be over the legal limit (which everyone with a license knows), get in a car, and drive (and honestly it has to be bad enough that you get pulled over for it). You have to then be convicted (probably receive probation and classes) for the first offense. You then have to repeat that a second and third time... That is a series of choices that are made. Why do you think more leniency is needed at that point?
Problem is the article is entirely wrong to be dismissive of the effects of the drug war. The author says that prisons aren't full of low level drug offenders, and I believe them. But that doesn't mean it's not full of people who
• violently assaulted a user who stole or didn't pay for drugs.
• violently assaulted a dealer in order to steal their drugs and or cash.
• murdered someone they believed was cooperating with the police and implicating them in drug trafficking.
• sold drugs while being armed with illegal weapons in order to protect themselves and their illegal business.
• etc.
The entire premise of the article is wrong, rendering it moot.
>it’s not primarily the War on Drugs that’s driving this beast. Instead, it’s an all-out assault that “extends a brute egalitarianism across the board.”
My interpretation is that they trying to make the point that it's not just the "War on Drugs" that is causing this massive spike in prison population but is instead being driven by increasing penalties across the board, including increasing the number serving life, stated or otherwise, without possibility of parole.
They make this point while acknowledging that the "War on Drugs" does disproportionately affect African Americans and women.
Throughout the article they make several statements that indicate to me they think there should be more discretion allowed on deciding which punitive actions should be taken.
My take-away is that not only has some discretion been dis-allowed, but that some discretion is still allowed but stays unused, for some reason. Tough-on-crime and all that.
Discretion is a big part of how we ended up with "three strikes" and mandatory minimums. People have not forgotten the outrageous abuses of discretion that were common in the '70s and '80s; activist judges abusing their discretion are not a figment of the right wing knuckle dragger imagination and it was routine for some judge to create a headline with lenient sentences that offended all sensibility.
The problem extends to prosecutorial discretion as well; this [1] sort of headline from this past Wednesday -- again illustrating the failure of the justice system and reinforcing our current state of affairs -- is still very common and does not escape notice, no matter how much you might wish it would. Then you have the abuses we see on the national stage regarding "prosecutorial discretion" in immigration policy, selective prosecution of violations of classified information handling we've seen recently, and many, many others.
It only takes a few activist judges or prosecutors to polarize an electorate. Right or wrong that's the actual world we live in and ignoring that reality won't ever work.
I also struggled with that "brute egalitarianism" phrasing but settled for what you said. I also speculated that it might mean that the same punishment ("LIFETIME. NO PAROLE. "THREE STRIKES AND YOU ARE OUT.") is given for a bunch of unrelated trivial crap crimes.
1. Drunk driving (no victim of course)
2. Evading arrest
3. Apparently you had sex with your girlfriend when you both were 15.
Welcome to Oz, citizen!
Oh, you can no longer vote, so forget that "citizen" part.
That's not a real thing. Pardons and commutation still exist, parole exists and is regularly used (not in the federal system, but the vast majority of criminal prosecution is state-level prosecution); mandatory minimums exist, as do some zero-tolerance policies, but those policies are selectively enforced and mandatory minimums aren't mandatory equal sentences and don't stop selective choice of charges. There is no brute egalitarianism in the criminal justice and, in fact, enforcement is radically unequal on both racial and class bases.
Also, the area where the policies linked to that alleged "brute egalitarianism" are most prominent are drug offenses and areas related to violence against police officers sold largely by the violence in the war on drugs, so even if they did produce a "brute egalitarianism" it wouldn't be "across the board", it would still stem directly from the war on drugs.
What is not a real thing? The article argues (correctly or incorrectly?!) that while parole etc still exists, the leeway which still exists in the system, is increasingly used to stop parole, judge the harshest sentence allowed by law, etc.
That the leeway in the past was more often used the other way. Consider attenuating circumstances etc.
The point is not that the criminal justice system is egalitarian, but that our attempts to brute force egalitarianism have often lead to longer sentences and higher incarceration rates.
>
Blacks in Minnesota are about eleven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, giving Minnesota the country’s highest black-white disparity in imprisonment. But Minnesota also has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the country. So overall, African Americans are less likely to be sent to prison in Minnesota than in the South, which is a more equal opportunity incarcerator
He is not disputing that the war on drugs is a proximate cause of our higher incarceration rates. He is saying that attempts to solve the problem by releasing non violent drug offenders can't solve the issue alone.
> Unfortunately, the issue is getting framed in a way that’s too narrowly focused on the War on Drugs. In fact, if we released everyone now serving time in state prisons whose primary charge is a drug offense, we would reduce the state prison population by only 20 percent
OK. That was a longer read than I expected. And it had some good parts.
The premise, however, is not supported by the text, for several reasons.
The most obvious is that, other than a brief mention of prohibition as a "proximate" cause of incarceration, there is no analysis of the degree to which drug prohibition is an underlying cause of violent and other crime, for which the author correctly points out sentences have become longer and commutations more rare.
Although the exact value of the illicit drug trade in the United States is difficult to measure with precision, most researchers agree that it's in the neighborhood of $100 billion on in retail trades alone.
The reality of life in poverty, and especially urban black poverty, is that there is no other market of similar size where entry-level jobs are as available or unencumbered.
And this giant market, of course, lives almost entirely outside the civil justice system or any other mechanism for peaceful resolution of disputes.
In addition, there are many people who, instead of rising the ranks of criminal enterprise and eventually becoming kingpins, become addicted ("high on their own supply") and are then in a position of constantly needing to rob or steal to pay back debts to heavy-handed, higher-ranking drug dealers.
In short, I think that if the author accounts for the number of violent criminals incarcerated for crimes committed as a consequence of the drug trade, it is very likely that "it is just the drug war (and yes, some overzealousness about 'sex crimes')."
Do the people on the receiving end of drug related violence consistently report it to the police?
I sort of think not. And most violent crime isn't murder (which police will tend to investigate if there is a body, so less dependence on reporting there).
I imagine that most convenience stores that get held up by a drug addict probably do report it. If your drug dealer breaks your legs because you didn't pay them back, you may not report that... so I would hypothesize that there is likely a pretty good mix of reported and unreported drug related violence.
> Someone committing a robbery with drugs in their system would usually be included in drug crime
"included" in what context? Are you saying that publications like the FBI uniform crime report have a designation, "drug crime" under which these things fall? Can you link me to that?
I don't think that the interviewee would dispute the role of the war on drugs in creating the problem. If you look at the text, the stronger statements minimizing the war on drugs are all made by the interviewer.
The point the interviewee is trying to make is that the debate is to focused on releasing non-violent drug offenders and ignores the bigger context and other solutions.
In addition to ending the war drugs, the interviewee is advocating:
> If you care about reentry and about keeping people out of prison in the first place, there’s no public policy that you should support more strongly now than Medicaid expansion. Medicaid expansion gives states huge infusions of federal money to expand mental health services, substance abuse treatment, and medical care for many of the people who are most likely to end up in prison.
And:
> We need comprehensive sentencing reform, and not just for drug crimes. We have to look at the hard cases like child pornography. We also need to roll back these very punitive sentences for people who’ve committed some pretty serious crimes — like homicide
>And this giant market, of course, lives almost entirely outside the civil justice system or any other mechanism for peaceful resolution of disputes.
It's not just people in the drug trade who don't have access to the civil justice system for peaceful resolution of disputes; anyone who's lower than upper-middle-class is priced out of the justice system by the insanely high fees and lawyer costs involved.
That's why small-claims court exists. You don't need a lawyer and in some places are forbidden from retaining one to sue or defend yourself in such a court. The drawback is that there's a cap on actual damages in order for small-claims court to have jurisdiction, but most disputes between individuals are likely to fall well under that cap.
Beyond ignoring the side effects of prohibition and all the crime it creates one thing about the article I found eyebrow-raising was the dismissive tone they took towards ending the drug war. It's only 20% of the incarcerated population. Ending it would ONLY save the lives of millions of innocent Americans.
It's definitely not the whole story, not even the majority, but 20% is ENORMOUSLY significant. And the most crucial thing is that it's a no-brainer. It's easy. It is the first of many steps, but it's the first and that's important in a way I think the article misses. If we can't convince the electorate to stop brutalizing innocent people who prefer safer and healthier alternatives to alcohol in the privacy of their own home, for example, how will we ever get to the point where we can consider releasing a serial drunk driver before 20 years of being beaten and raped and humiliated?
The biggest change the drug war has made is to the law enforcement apparatus. It has given law enforcement unlimited power because it has turned everyone into a criminal: drugs are ubiquitous, especially in poorer communities, and proving that someone possesses something is MUCH easier than proving someone has done something in court. When everyone's a criminal and it's easy to prosecute all of a sudden you get enormous power concentrated in the hands of LEOs and prosecutors, it's all about who they choose to exact punishment upon. Prosecutors will get lazy and instead of going after someone for a real crime, use the drugs to force them into a plea and call it a day. It's quick, cost effective, and serves some sense of justice -- you get the person you've decided is the "bad guy". Getting rid of the war on drugs would stop this, so prosecutors would have to drop cases or prosecute real crimes, which I'd imagine would lead simultaneously to more prosecutions of those problem crimes with huge sentences mentioned in the article and fewer convictions. It's another factor.
I didn't get the sense that the article was opposed to ending the drug war. It's like if you're laying out the problems facing public health in Africa: it's much bigger than just AIDS, but that doesn't mean solving AIDS wouldn't be worthwhile.
>If we truly want to help people who are coming out of prison or to keep people from going to prison, then we need a public-sector expansion with real jobs that pay a living wage, not the contingent kind that pay a minimum wage.
What kind of jobs would these be? Construction, administration, or what? It's not clear how the public sector creates hundreds of thousands of meaningful jobs. I don't count the TSA as meaningful, BTW.
Of course the money isn't there, you guys spent it all on war during the last 3 decades. 14trillion dollars! Imperial trillions, of course, but even so... Let that number sink in.
I know we do, but most of it is transient. A road job constructing the expansion of I-69 north of Indianapolis takes 6 years. That's great. People can be employed 6 years on that job, maybe (seems to go in spurts, don't know if they get paid for the downtime). At the end of that 6 years, construction moves on. Money goes to another state, or another part of the state outside of a commute. What do you do then?
If properly constructed, that 6 year road project won't need more than minor maintenance for years. Sure 6-ish guys keep a job in the area, but the several hundred lose theirs. This pattern of popup work repeats across the country.
Federal expansion programs are not sustainable. They can help, but ultimately you need the private sector to create jobs by selling goods and services.
I agree with every point. But while they are employed, they have money to spend both in the economy, and potentially to save for learning new skills.
It's not a cure in-and-of itself, but it is something which can help jumpstart everything else (and it frankly needs to be done regardless of the side benefits of providing employment).
Is the federal government sustainable? How many employees is enough? Have we already passed that?
Would it be better if we privatized the road crews?
> [Programs] ... They can help, but ultimately you need the private sector to create jobs by selling goods and services.
Well, you do need to create value as opposed to just shuffling it around. But creating roads is enabling much of that private sector earning.
Couldn't we imagine this with a minimalist government and a network of private toll-roads that collected the same or greater "tax" on the local businesses? How does the private aspect help?
> At the end of that 6 years, construction moves on. Money goes to another state, or another part of the state outside of a commute. What do you do then?
I imagine they'd total up the road length across the state, divide by maximum lifespan, and hire enough people to fix every mile by the time it would fall apart.
Yes, in a big state you're unlikely to circulate the same people from corner to corner, but thankfully roads tend to be found in close proximity to people, so I imagine the road crews could all be kept busy (for the most part) around where they each live.
We already do this - my city employs full-time construction people forever. The only decision would be to hire more, and how many is too many.
But if we aren't fixing each bit of road by the time it falls apart (and we are not) then we know we don't have enough.
Gottschalk uses a term I'm unfamiliar with: "race liberals". Does anyone know what the definition or typical usage pattern of this term is? Is it specific to some particular academic field or political clique? I'm not finding very good examples with Google (which thinks that "race, liberals" and "race. Liberals" are good matches).
> "...race liberals ran roughshod over deep concerns expressed by other liberals and some experts on crime and punishment that the quest for more proceduralism untethered to substantive goals in criminal justice would yield a more punitive criminal justice system"
Outside the actual meaning intended for 'race liberals' it does seem like a case of labelling with the intent to paint a non-neutral narrative. The 'race liberals' ran roughshod. The other liberals concerns were deep, and supported by experts, and the proceduralism was apparently not tethered to any goals.
This paragraph at least seems more fiction than non-fiction.
The sentence is a little tough to unpack but it's saying that emphasizing procedure (rules) with a focus on race rather than improving criminal justice more broadly could yield a more punitive system. It's describing a difference of opinion, and this opinion seems reasonable.
I assume a "race liberal" is someone who is liberal with respect to race just as a "social conservative" might be pro union and pro welfare but anti gay and anti abortion.
> ...emphasizing procedure (rules) with a focus on race rather than improving criminal justice more broadly could yield a more punitive system... I assume a "race liberal" ...
I'm not aware anyone in this thread is having difficulty 'unpacking' the sentence, or extrapolating the broad meaning of the term 'race liberal'.
If you read the parent's comment in a more generous frame of mind you'll realise that they were probably interested in exactly how this term has been applied in the past.
My own comment was regarding the way the author presented a narrative, using labels without describing who she was actually talking about, criticising their actions without describing what they actually did.
This narrative proclaims that a group did something without evidence or even goals, against the deep wishes of others, including experts.
Does it seem likely that they didn't have goals (after all the qualifier 'substantive' is deeply subjective)?
Does it seem likely that all the experts were opposed?
Does it seem likely that only the opposing side had deep concerns?
It's a similar construction to "fiscal conservative" or "social liberal", i.e. in this case people who had liberal views on racial issues in the 1940s-70s debate over the civil-rights movement. I think this particular phrase is a bit idiosyncratic to Gottschalk, though. It's intended to give her a concise phrase that includes social liberals, conservatives who had liberal views on civil rights (common among northern conservatives at the time), etc., rather than having to constantly repeat a construction like "those who had liberal views on racial issues".
Being a prosecutor and having compassion are largely incompatible. If you can't smother that part of yourself, you get fed up with putting people in prison--essentially for being poor--and quit in disgust.
That creates a vicious cycle, wherein the cruelty of disproportionately severe prosecutions drives out those who would not pursue them. When the people with the most convictions and longest sentences for the worst offenses get promoted, whether the criminals deserved them or not, it affects the workplace culture.
Perhaps it would be better to force the state's criminal-court attorneys to spend equal time as prosecutors and as public defenders, and promote based on criteria other than win-loss ratio.
> Perhaps it would be better to force the state's criminal-court attorneys to spend equal time as prosecutors and as public defenders
That's a brilliant idea.
What better way to find systematic holes in the system than by making the same people fight against them half the time, and making their reviews based on an equal amount of prosecution and defense? Even if we still just went by the numbers (which we would, it's easy) at least it wouldn't be so one-sided.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadWhy? Because from the 1980s all branches, police, judges and legislators have together increased sentences for all crimes. A LOT. Probably needlessly if going by recidivism.
So we are using these sentencing laws to send EVERYONE to prison for a long time, regardless of the crime. It makes me wonder how many crimes actually land you in prison? Probably some things I don't even know about will put you there.
Seems to be mainly robbery, drug possession and drunk driving convictions.
I do wonder if there is some cause and effect in play with robberies and the assaults. Being from a poverty stricken area, most of the robberies and assaults I witnessed (in my area) were just from poor people arguing about what little value they have. Or drugs.
I also would like to see the drug possessions broken down into type of drug. I suspect marijuana possession is still a large part of that. <1G of weed is different than heroin.
We might want to look at what is causing you to drunk drive (addiction, which should be a medical issue and not a legal one), but something should be done after your third time.
maybe if you are living daily in such a broken environment it starts to feel more normal, but seriously guys... get a grip and try to come up with something that actually solves problems and not just destroys lives permanently.
I don't want to travel to US for same reasons I don't travel to Afghanistan or South Sudan - some good people, but messed up system and you don't want to accidentally see the darker side of it
Look, I'm left of left, but there should be punishments for negative behavior.
I work in Academia. There's signs everywhere about consent. "Women can't give consent when drunk" is the canard. In Indiana, that's not the law. But in many states, that's true. Now, if someone cannot give consent to do something, or sign legal documents, how can it be legal to charge someone with a drunk driving charge?
The decision to drive was not based in consent, but instead based in intoxication. Therefore they were not in the right state of mind, either to decide to drive or drive.
Then again, I also think that bars with parking lots are a significant issue as well, as it encourages patrons to drive there, drink (possibly to drunk) and then leave in their vehicle.
If I sign away my house while drunk, I'm getting fucked.
If I run over you in a car while drunk, you're getting fucked.
Signing those would be invalid. No informed consent was given, due to being in a mind-altered state due to pharmaceuticals. It's likely going to be a long court case, but there is precedent in having these types of coerced actions (signature) rescinded.
My argument was that drunk driving was made in a coerced state of mind. The journey to "drunk" is one thing, but there certainly is question about actual liability.
Also yes in a better world getting people to sign shit from a hospital bed absolutely shouldn't leave them liable. I don't know exactly how many people have been bankrupt because an ambulance drove them to the ER but I know it's a hell of a lot higher than any sense of justice should allow.
I somehow have the feeling that bars WITHOUT parking lots will have less clients ...
A solution could be bars with parking lots 1 mile away and courtesy bikes, but I guess that cycling accidents and bycicle thefts would have an instant surge ...
More seriously, you drive to the bar parking lot, and while you are perfectly sober, you decide to get drunk (beyond legal limits).
While you may well be right that the decision to drive is based on intoxication, the decision to get intoxicated is taken based on consent, knowing that you got there driving a car...
AFAICU legal limits are fairly low so you should be sober enough when you order the "yet another" drink.
People can certainly consent while drunk, they can commit crimes while drunk as well.
Also our public services practically beg people to drive drunk, most public transit in most cities completely or mostly shuts down shortly before or exactly when the bars close.
Near as I can tell, this is basically what the article is about. Our huge prison population is mostly due to extremely harsh sentences for serious crimes, not people with a little bit of weed. If you want a long prison term for some number of DUI convictions, then I hope you're okay with having prison populations much higher than any other first-world country, because they're the same thing. There's no way to cut that number down much without more lenient sentences for DUI, sex crimes, assault, murder, etc.
TLDR; Yes, a habitual drunk driver deserves punishment (up to and including jail).
--
By sheer numbers, the US will have more convictions for drunk driving due to the vast number of cars. There will be some portion of the population that drives drunk. A portion of that that drives drunk a second time. A portion of that will get a third conviction. So on, so forth. I don't think it is unreasonable to punish someone for a third DUI/DWI conviction.
This isn't stop and frisk or police/government overreach. You literally have to drink enough to be over the legal limit (which everyone with a license knows), get in a car, and drive (and honestly it has to be bad enough that you get pulled over for it). You have to then be convicted (probably receive probation and classes) for the first offense. You then have to repeat that a second and third time... That is a series of choices that are made. Why do you think more leniency is needed at that point?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/...
Looks like numbers for January 2017 isn't in yet.
The entire premise of the article is wrong, rendering it moot.
>it’s not primarily the War on Drugs that’s driving this beast. Instead, it’s an all-out assault that “extends a brute egalitarianism across the board.”
What that does even mean?
They make this point while acknowledging that the "War on Drugs" does disproportionately affect African Americans and women.
Throughout the article they make several statements that indicate to me they think there should be more discretion allowed on deciding which punitive actions should be taken.
Discretion is a big part of how we ended up with "three strikes" and mandatory minimums. People have not forgotten the outrageous abuses of discretion that were common in the '70s and '80s; activist judges abusing their discretion are not a figment of the right wing knuckle dragger imagination and it was routine for some judge to create a headline with lenient sentences that offended all sensibility.
The problem extends to prosecutorial discretion as well; this [1] sort of headline from this past Wednesday -- again illustrating the failure of the justice system and reinforcing our current state of affairs -- is still very common and does not escape notice, no matter how much you might wish it would. Then you have the abuses we see on the national stage regarding "prosecutorial discretion" in immigration policy, selective prosecution of violations of classified information handling we've seen recently, and many, many others.
It only takes a few activist judges or prosecutors to polarize an electorate. Right or wrong that's the actual world we live in and ignoring that reality won't ever work.
[1] http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/drunk-driving/thirteen-t...
For example zero-tolerance, mandatory sentencing, not doing pardons anymore, not releasing people on parole when they behave well and so on.
1. Drunk driving (no victim of course) 2. Evading arrest 3. Apparently you had sex with your girlfriend when you both were 15.
Welcome to Oz, citizen!
Oh, you can no longer vote, so forget that "citizen" part.
Also, the area where the policies linked to that alleged "brute egalitarianism" are most prominent are drug offenses and areas related to violence against police officers sold largely by the violence in the war on drugs, so even if they did produce a "brute egalitarianism" it wouldn't be "across the board", it would still stem directly from the war on drugs.
That the leeway in the past was more often used the other way. Consider attenuating circumstances etc.
> Blacks in Minnesota are about eleven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites, giving Minnesota the country’s highest black-white disparity in imprisonment. But Minnesota also has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the country. So overall, African Americans are less likely to be sent to prison in Minnesota than in the South, which is a more equal opportunity incarcerator
He is not disputing that the war on drugs is a proximate cause of our higher incarceration rates. He is saying that attempts to solve the problem by releasing non violent drug offenders can't solve the issue alone.
> Unfortunately, the issue is getting framed in a way that’s too narrowly focused on the War on Drugs. In fact, if we released everyone now serving time in state prisons whose primary charge is a drug offense, we would reduce the state prison population by only 20 percent
The premise, however, is not supported by the text, for several reasons.
The most obvious is that, other than a brief mention of prohibition as a "proximate" cause of incarceration, there is no analysis of the degree to which drug prohibition is an underlying cause of violent and other crime, for which the author correctly points out sentences have become longer and commutations more rare.
Although the exact value of the illicit drug trade in the United States is difficult to measure with precision, most researchers agree that it's in the neighborhood of $100 billion on in retail trades alone.
The reality of life in poverty, and especially urban black poverty, is that there is no other market of similar size where entry-level jobs are as available or unencumbered.
And this giant market, of course, lives almost entirely outside the civil justice system or any other mechanism for peaceful resolution of disputes.
In addition, there are many people who, instead of rising the ranks of criminal enterprise and eventually becoming kingpins, become addicted ("high on their own supply") and are then in a position of constantly needing to rob or steal to pay back debts to heavy-handed, higher-ranking drug dealers.
In short, I think that if the author accounts for the number of violent criminals incarcerated for crimes committed as a consequence of the drug trade, it is very likely that "it is just the drug war (and yes, some overzealousness about 'sex crimes')."
I sort of think not. And most violent crime isn't murder (which police will tend to investigate if there is a body, so less dependence on reporting there).
"included" in what context? Are you saying that publications like the FBI uniform crime report have a designation, "drug crime" under which these things fall? Can you link me to that?
https://www.bjs.gov/content/dcf/duc.cfm
The point the interviewee is trying to make is that the debate is to focused on releasing non-violent drug offenders and ignores the bigger context and other solutions.
In addition to ending the war drugs, the interviewee is advocating:
> If you care about reentry and about keeping people out of prison in the first place, there’s no public policy that you should support more strongly now than Medicaid expansion. Medicaid expansion gives states huge infusions of federal money to expand mental health services, substance abuse treatment, and medical care for many of the people who are most likely to end up in prison.
And:
> We need comprehensive sentencing reform, and not just for drug crimes. We have to look at the hard cases like child pornography. We also need to roll back these very punitive sentences for people who’ve committed some pretty serious crimes — like homicide
It's not just people in the drug trade who don't have access to the civil justice system for peaceful resolution of disputes; anyone who's lower than upper-middle-class is priced out of the justice system by the insanely high fees and lawyer costs involved.
It's definitely not the whole story, not even the majority, but 20% is ENORMOUSLY significant. And the most crucial thing is that it's a no-brainer. It's easy. It is the first of many steps, but it's the first and that's important in a way I think the article misses. If we can't convince the electorate to stop brutalizing innocent people who prefer safer and healthier alternatives to alcohol in the privacy of their own home, for example, how will we ever get to the point where we can consider releasing a serial drunk driver before 20 years of being beaten and raped and humiliated?
The biggest change the drug war has made is to the law enforcement apparatus. It has given law enforcement unlimited power because it has turned everyone into a criminal: drugs are ubiquitous, especially in poorer communities, and proving that someone possesses something is MUCH easier than proving someone has done something in court. When everyone's a criminal and it's easy to prosecute all of a sudden you get enormous power concentrated in the hands of LEOs and prosecutors, it's all about who they choose to exact punishment upon. Prosecutors will get lazy and instead of going after someone for a real crime, use the drugs to force them into a plea and call it a day. It's quick, cost effective, and serves some sense of justice -- you get the person you've decided is the "bad guy". Getting rid of the war on drugs would stop this, so prosecutors would have to drop cases or prosecute real crimes, which I'd imagine would lead simultaneously to more prosecutions of those problem crimes with huge sentences mentioned in the article and fewer convictions. It's another factor.
>If we truly want to help people who are coming out of prison or to keep people from going to prison, then we need a public-sector expansion with real jobs that pay a living wage, not the contingent kind that pay a minimum wage.
What kind of jobs would these be? Construction, administration, or what? It's not clear how the public sector creates hundreds of thousands of meaningful jobs. I don't count the TSA as meaningful, BTW.
If properly constructed, that 6 year road project won't need more than minor maintenance for years. Sure 6-ish guys keep a job in the area, but the several hundred lose theirs. This pattern of popup work repeats across the country.
Federal expansion programs are not sustainable. They can help, but ultimately you need the private sector to create jobs by selling goods and services.
It's not a cure in-and-of itself, but it is something which can help jumpstart everything else (and it frankly needs to be done regardless of the side benefits of providing employment).
Is the federal government sustainable? How many employees is enough? Have we already passed that?
Would it be better if we privatized the road crews?
> [Programs] ... They can help, but ultimately you need the private sector to create jobs by selling goods and services.
Well, you do need to create value as opposed to just shuffling it around. But creating roads is enabling much of that private sector earning.
Couldn't we imagine this with a minimalist government and a network of private toll-roads that collected the same or greater "tax" on the local businesses? How does the private aspect help?
> At the end of that 6 years, construction moves on. Money goes to another state, or another part of the state outside of a commute. What do you do then?
I imagine they'd total up the road length across the state, divide by maximum lifespan, and hire enough people to fix every mile by the time it would fall apart.
Yes, in a big state you're unlikely to circulate the same people from corner to corner, but thankfully roads tend to be found in close proximity to people, so I imagine the road crews could all be kept busy (for the most part) around where they each live.
We already do this - my city employs full-time construction people forever. The only decision would be to hire more, and how many is too many.
But if we aren't fixing each bit of road by the time it falls apart (and we are not) then we know we don't have enough.
Outside the actual meaning intended for 'race liberals' it does seem like a case of labelling with the intent to paint a non-neutral narrative. The 'race liberals' ran roughshod. The other liberals concerns were deep, and supported by experts, and the proceduralism was apparently not tethered to any goals.
This paragraph at least seems more fiction than non-fiction.
I assume a "race liberal" is someone who is liberal with respect to race just as a "social conservative" might be pro union and pro welfare but anti gay and anti abortion.
I'm not aware anyone in this thread is having difficulty 'unpacking' the sentence, or extrapolating the broad meaning of the term 'race liberal'.
If you read the parent's comment in a more generous frame of mind you'll realise that they were probably interested in exactly how this term has been applied in the past.
My own comment was regarding the way the author presented a narrative, using labels without describing who she was actually talking about, criticising their actions without describing what they actually did.
This narrative proclaims that a group did something without evidence or even goals, against the deep wishes of others, including experts.
Does it seem likely that they didn't have goals (after all the qualifier 'substantive' is deeply subjective)?
Does it seem likely that all the experts were opposed?
Does it seem likely that only the opposing side had deep concerns?
That creates a vicious cycle, wherein the cruelty of disproportionately severe prosecutions drives out those who would not pursue them. When the people with the most convictions and longest sentences for the worst offenses get promoted, whether the criminals deserved them or not, it affects the workplace culture.
Perhaps it would be better to force the state's criminal-court attorneys to spend equal time as prosecutors and as public defenders, and promote based on criteria other than win-loss ratio.
That's a brilliant idea.
What better way to find systematic holes in the system than by making the same people fight against them half the time, and making their reviews based on an equal amount of prosecution and defense? Even if we still just went by the numbers (which we would, it's easy) at least it wouldn't be so one-sided.