For real though, fines that aren't adjusted to the offenders wealth seem to give legal impunity to the wealthy. But performing that adjustment without a floor essentially gives legal impunity to people at rock bottom. The trick is finding some middle ground where all criminals, poor and rich, can be effectively punished to deter crimes of opportunity.
You're certainly not alone, but it was eye-opening as fuck for me getting arrested at 25 and finding out I was about to be charged thousands of dollars for a single night stay in the county jail.
Wow, that's exactly what USSR under Stalin would do. Except that they would jusr charge you for yearly robes and not for the daily pleasure to stay under gulag.
I too knew nothing about this and honestly find that frightening. How many other grotesquely perverse laws are on the books?
Someone needs to create a hall of shame for these laws index by federal and for every state.
This is perverse on so many levels. It’s not only ongoing punishment but it disincentivizes people from getting their lives in order and probably increases recidivism rates quite a bit. So in the end I wouldn’t be surprised if it costs more.
> … "and probably increases recidivism rates quite a bit."
I'm fairly sure that's intentional, as prisons are "big business" in the USA (which also probably explains the ridiculously high rate of imprisonment here).
The “/s” is Internet forum code for “sarcasm” which is a type of humour. This indicates the author knows it’s not true, but perhaps thinks it’s it would be funny if it was true.
Many (most?) bills that have contributed to skyrocketing prison populations have actually been straight up directly written by private prison industry lobbyists. In one case a senator even accidentally left the logo of the lobbying group on the proposed bill
Also wild to think about the fact that many states take away voting rights for prisoners (e.g. Florida which voted to stop this practice but Santis managed to undo that)
Another extremely dystopian reality we live with daily and rarely stop to question.
When the 13th Amendment was proposed, one of the big compromises the South fought for was the "except as punishment for crime" clause. And, of course, immediately after it was passed there was a big cultural shift in racist stereotypes of Black men from being effeminate and cowardly to being big scary criminals. Basically just a rush to recreate the slavery apparatus by imprisoning Black people
>When the 13th Amendment was proposed, one of the big compromises the South fought for was the "except as punishment for crime" clause.
The south didn't really get a say in the text of the 13th since they weren't around. That clause was included so as not to screw with the established prison labor systems of the states that were in the union. The 13th was in the over at a time when union support for the war was low and it wasn't a boat anyone felt like rocking. It wasn't a contentions clause and was basically seen as a common sense exception at the time. If it wasn't then you'd think some of the more abolitionist states would have tried to abolish that too or you'd at least have some period correspondence about it you could refer to.
>And, of course, immediately after it was passed there was a big cultural shift in racist stereotypes of Black men from being effeminate and cowardly to being big scary criminals.
You're early by a century. The lazy and up to no good criminal black man is a stereotype that mostly came around in the 1960s after we incentivized urban minorities to quit working above the table (and quit getting married) with asinine welfare eligibility rules. As an aside, president Johnson actually has some very quotable quotes on this subject.
In the many decades between the civil war and great depression blacks increasingly moved north and moved to urban areas (mostly in the north and midwest but some in the south) to get jobs in the industrial economy and because the alternatives in the south sucked. Throughout this time period they were stereotyped as tireless workers with some cultural differences much the same way other cultural groups have been over the years.
This seems a common theme in the US. In 2018, there was a nation-wide prison strike across all states in the US. The largest prison strike in world history basically. Many prisoners died or were injured.
I remember checking NYTimes and CNN's frontpages and being shocked to see nothing written about it. The strike lasted nearly a month
Really wild to think about how this could've gone down in history books for immense historical significance if we just... paid any attention at all. Instead hardly anyone knows about it
Similarly there's an immigrant detention center near where I live in California. The detainees recently went on strike. They have to work to earn money in order to buy food. The work is "volunteer" so they can get away with paying them $1 for a full day's work. A bag of beans costs $3 and a 15-minute phone call is $2.50. So a full week of work gets you a phone call and some beans. The prison guards use intimidation tactics like "the judge won't like hearing about your bad behavior when your case is up" to keep them from organizing. Lots have gotten sick from the black mold growing in their cells too. It's straight up modern slavery and the only media source I've seen even mention it is LaborNotes[0]
We can just call those camps, and simolar ones across Europe for refugees, what they are: Forced labour and concentration camps. Since they only contain the "right" people us privileged (I mean that unironically as one of that group) don't care. Those few that do don't matter in the bigger picture.
Every day I find new reason to believe the American penal system unconscionable.
Not only is slavery permitted, the US is the subject of the ire of the United Nations over it (the ILO, specifically). For-profit prisons with state minimum occupancy clauses. Charging prisoners for their time there. And one of the highest incarceration levels and worst recidivism rates in the world.
The reality is that there are so many crimes in the United States that the set itself is uncountable. There have been a number of attempts to count. I guarantee you that you have, today alone, accrued enough legal liability to put you away for the rest of your life.
Part of what makes this difficult to even count in the first place are bills like the Lacey act which makes it a felony for you to violate any other countries fish and wildlife laws - if you ever came into possession of a dead lobster less than 6 inches long for any reason - felony.
What happens is the folks who end up in prison haven't accrued any more of less liability - instead they drew attention.
If you'd like to learn more I recommend Three Felonies a Day. [1]
I guess the question I have for you is why aren't you in prison now? Why did you choose to commit all those crimes, and what makes you exempt?
Further if your argument is then 'well I shouldn't be in prison because I didn't get caught' - now you're no longer arguing that these people shouldn't have 'done crimes' your argument is they should have been better at it?
>What happens is the folks who end up in prison haven't accrued any more of less liability - instead they drew attention.
>If you'd like to learn more I recommend Three Felonies a Day. [1]
It's hard to take that book seriously when the book fails to state how the average person actually commits felonies a day. According to the top critical review[1], it doesn't seem like most of the people in prisons are because of the reasons listed in the book.
Fair point, but I'm also not going to read a 392 page book just because a hacker news commenter recommended it. The title of "three felonies a day" certainly seems provocative and unexpected. It seems at least somewhat fair for someone making such an outrageous claim to be responsible for substantiating it. Why don't you furnish some sort of review/summary that lists what the three felonies are?
I haven't committed any violent crimes nor have most people. A substantial number of prisoners have. In fact countless murderous and rapist criminals go free.
Of course that's just your opinion, with no link to back it up. I tend to follow the information where I see police abuse, the abuse of rights by the courts/prosecutors, etc etc. You want to blow your mind? Follow a guy named Greg Doucette on the bird app. He routinely lists the violations of civil rights by authorities. It might open your mind.
Well with murders there are bodies. It’s the easiest crime to see the gap between incarceration and the injustice of freely roaming murderers. Much harder to convict on rape so you can imagine how many more are out there free!
First of all, conceding that 5% of people in jail could be wrongfully imprisoned should be MORE than enough reason to want to tear the entire system down.
Second, many of these "crimes" had no victim, so maybe it's not the people living their lives who are at fault, but rather an overzealous government who imprisons otherwise free people for doing no harm other than some abstract "moral" rule-breaking.
Thats one of the worst things about these criminals. If there were dramatically fewer crimes it'd be easier to find out who is innocent. Or devote more resources to it.
Imagine if we decriminalized every "crime" that didn't have a victim. We might actually be able to prevent more real crime, like violent crime and sexual assault and large-scale theft and fraud!
A majority of prisoners are in for violent crime; or committed a violent crime and pled down. IF more resources were devoted to fighting heinous crimes prison populations would increase since many murders and to a much larger extent rape go unsolved. Not to mention fraud and child abuse.
A lot of that violence is the obvious and inevitable side effect of the government pretending it can ban certain marketplaces. Much of that violence disappears if you stop forcing people to conduct business as outlaws.
I believe it’s reasonable to assume that far more than 5% of people behind bars are actually innocent.
I was raised by two career long LEOs and if even a small fraction of other LEOs were as bad as my folks, it would be safe to assume that there are a lot of innocent people behind bars.
Given what I keep hearing about laws in general, I assume almost everyone is guilty of enough stuff that if you could prove it and the sentences were consecutive, they'd die in prison.
But at the same time, I'd be surprised if less than 5% of convicts had done the specific crime they were sentenced for even under the assumption of the entire law and justice system being fair, impartial, and skilled.
(I don't have a word for what I am: I don't believe in anarchy, but I would radically liberalise as much as possible. I would also wildly reduce the punishments for most of the remaining laws are enforced so that perfect enforcement wasn't completely bonkers, and then make enforcement perfect. Normally I see people aiming for one or the other, perfect enforcement or liberalisation, not both).
Making money of course! Once you realise that the idea of jail is to make money for the people who run the jails it makes sense.
It's not about public safety or rehab or reintegration into society. It was always about making money.
Jail operators have every incentive to keep inmates "dangerous" and encourage them to rescind once they get out, because then the prison gets a new customer.
The only group who can "directly compete" with the prison industry is the death penalty industry. Because when an inmate is sent to death sentence, they can no longer be a customer for the prison industry.
>[...] For-profit prisons with state minimum occupancy clauses. [...]
>What exactly is the point of any of this?
At least for that there's a pretty simple non-nefarious explanation. The state wants to outsource their prisons/jails to some private entity. They agree to pay the private entity per prisoner housed. However, since the private entity needs to invest upfront cash to build the facility, they want some sort of assurance that the demand will materialize and they won't be left with a facility that's only 50% used, hence the minimum occupancy clause.
I haven't seen the actual minimum occupancy clauses, but realistically speaking they probably involve the state paying for the minimum occupancy even if actual prisoners are less (eg. if minimum occupancy is 800 prisoners but actual occupancy is 700, they still pay for 800 prisoners). It's not like the state has to come up with 100 extra prisoners to meet their obligations.
I agree this causes skewed incentives (ie. the marginal cost of imprisoning someone can potentially be zero), but if you're deciding to lock someone up or not hinges on whether it costs $30k or $0, you probably have other issues. If a convict is dangerous then he should be locked up, if he's not he shouldn't be. Money shouldn't play a factor in this.
> At least for that there's a pretty simple non-nefarious explanation. The state wants to outsource their prisons/jails to some private entity. They agree to pay the private entity per prisoner housed.
That sounds pretty nefarious to me because the state has a duty of care for its citizens - of which this is a clear and flagrant abdication.
> I haven't seen the actual minimum occupancy clauses, but realistically speaking they probably involve the state paying for the minimum occupancy even if actual prisoners are less (eg. if minimum occupancy is 800 prisoners but actual occupancy is 700, they still pay for 800 prisoners). It's not like the state has to come up with 100 extra prisoners to meet their obligations.
Probably worth not speculating. [1] At the end of the day this is the same thing - the state should be paying less when there's less crime. It should be incentivized to stop crime from happening in the first place.
It should be spending that money not on guaranteeing profits for corporations but instead on programs that reduce criminality. The state should feel the burden of higher criminality and reap the reward of lowering it.
>That sounds pretty nefarious to me because the state has a duty of care for its citizens - of which this is a clear and flagrant abdication.
Which part of it constitutes "a clear and flagrant abdication"?
>At the end of the day this is the same thing - the state should be paying less when there's less crime. It should be incentivized to stop crime from happening in the first place.
>It should be spending that money not on guaranteeing profits for corporations but instead on programs that reduce criminality.
This ignores the basic economic reality that the upfront investment needs to be paid somehow. Without it, you end up with too little prison capacity and overcrowded prisons, which is also inhumane. The alternatives aren't much better:
1. if the upfront investment is funded by the taxpayer, and it ends up getting underutilized, the taxpayer is still on the hook for the opportunity cost of the investment
2. if prisons are privatized but without guarantees, the state will need to pay more to make up for the uncertainly, leaving the taxpayers on the hook.
> It's simpler just to make the privately run prisons illegal so as to avoid any moral hazards.
What are the moral hazards here? The people running the prisons aren't the ones sentencing/convicting criminals.
>If the facility is under utilized less investment will be needed in the future and conditions can be improved for existing inmates.
What's the difference between wasting money because the state didn't meet the minimum inmate quota, and wasting money because the state invested in a 1000 inmate prison but there's only 600 prisoners?
The people running the prisons give money to politicians, judges, sheriff's who are elected and make and enforce the laws.
In one instance 2 judges were being bribed directly to sentence juveniles to maximimum sentences cutting out the middleman and directly selling minority children into slavery like it's 1822 rather than 2022.
> The people running the prisons give money to politicians, judges, sheriff's who are elected and make and enforce the laws.
under this interpretation you should probably ban police/correctional officers as well, because they have the same moral hazard. Same goes for anyone else that is involved in institutions that profit off human suffering (eg. hospitals).
In the prior example you considered the separation between lawmaker, prosecutor, and jailer sufficient to provide objectivity in theory ignoring while making no study of the actuality where money flows from prison companies directly to lawmakers.
Now you make a spurious connection between prison and hospital because I guess suffering happens in both institutions? Yes in theory EVERY institution may advocate for positions that advance their interests over the populace but none other is so odious as to advocate for more people to be in chains so they may directly trade the hours and years of their lives for gold nor selling the labor of the slaves it has so corruptly acquired by advocating for greater bondage.
It seems to me obvious that police officers, correction officers, and hospital staff are all absolutely necessary for the function of our society. Having private prisons which only house 8% of inmates at this time absolutely isn't.
Oh come on now. There are MUCH worse prison and criminal justice systems. Let me name a few where I’d not want to be: 1) all of Russia; 2) Sabaneta Prison, Maracaibo, Venezuela; 3) North Korean Camp 22; 4) Diyarbakir Prison, Turkey; 5) Gitarama Prison, Rwanda; 6) Gldani Prison, Georgia; 7) Ciudad Barrios Prison, El Salvador
There are many more. These above make the pay to stay seem tame in terms of impact.
It's not a race to the bottom. There are MUCH better ones as well, and maybe we should be striving to be enlightened instead of being better than a couple of shitholes.
Appeasing greed and a notion of vengeance. The Americans I personally know are quite punitive, and do believe in an eye for an eye, which is odd because they are also Christians (it's honestly unsurprising, they're just out of practice, I guess).
Generally I wonder if people comprehend that prisons should be (for the majority of inmates) intended to reform people; that is, to make them better and show them a better path. I'm not clear how people think throwing a bunch of criminals together in a featureless pen to lift weights, fight and fraternize is going to achieve anything. If anything, these people warrant more social investment than the average person, with the intent of educating them and building honest skills in them, so that they have new opportunities that they didn't have previously, when they made their mistakes the first time around.
I guess this sentiment is seen as sappy, unrealistic and saccharine, and of course socialist. Of course it has to be paired with having decent socialized healthcare and education, but I think we have seen in practice how the contemporary American school of thought for prisons does not work, and we have seen in other countries what is possible, and how reformist and sympathetic attitudes to incarceration, combined with strong social support generally can produce better outcomes in regards to crime.
> Generally I wonder if people comprehend that prisons should be (for the majority of inmates) intended to reform people; that is, to make them better and show them a better path.
I tried bringing up this line of reasoning one time with two coworkers I was close with. Both had the attitude of "why should I be paying for these criminals to be comfortable and get an education and stuff while I'm working and supporting a family and not committing crimes". A roof over their head and 3 really basic meals per day was all they really wanted to provide.
"Sit in the corner and think about what you did" is a method for punishing little kids, but my coworkers couldn't be convinced we probably need to adapt our strategies for adults.
One of the ideals and goals of the Progressive Movement in the early 20th Century was prisoner rehabilitation. But the US is just too punitive in nature to ever want to rehabilitate prisoners. We don't want to help non-criminals, so why on Earth would we want to help those who have made mistakes?
As Articbull mentioned, slavery is permitted in the Constitution for prisons. So even our noble eradication of slavery after the Civil War was incomplete. And surprise, surprise, what population group is over-represented in prison?
I sent a friend a link to a YT video showing the prison conditions in Norway. He thought that was nuts. How will they learn the error of their ways if they don't suffer?
Even trying to appeal to practical concerns like recidivism rates doesn't work. To the cold-hearted, that just proves that these felons are incorrigible and deserve to be locked away forever.
> For-profit prisons with state minimum occupancy clauses.
That kind of clause is common for a supply contract (e.g., Buyer promises to purchase goods/services from supplier, minimum order of X units per year.). If a state purchased more units from a prison service provider than it needed, then I can imagine that state trying to re-sell the services to a neighboring state, but I can’t imagine them locking up more people so that they don’t have to pay for unused services. If that happens then a state should just negotiate its contracts differently in the future.
What drives me absolutely insane about stories like this is that so many of the people suffering under these policies are guilty of little more than market participation. The government strains, at extraordinary expense, to pretend they can stop drugs from being made, bought and sold, but they can't. They simply can't. Countless laws, countless billions of dollars and countless ruined lives later, drugs are no less popular or accessible than they ever were in the past. The government gave it their best shot, failed in spectacular fashion over generations, and anyone who still supports this approach is either hopelessly brainwashed or, maybe, just not very smart.
Most of the time, supporters of these laws aren't brainwashed or stupid. They just prefer the status quo that these laws uphold, which tends to overlay nearly perfectly with class lines.
>Supporters say the collections are a legitimate way for states to recoup millions of taxpayer dollars spent on prisons and jails.
Wait there are supporters of this? You're telling me if I asked 100 people on the street, there'd be someone that said "oh yeah this is a pretty fair and reasonable law to charge the inmates 5-star hotel prices"??
> You're telling me if I asked 100 people on the street,
Confronting people on the street with questions like this won't give you a representative sample of what people really think. The sort of people who support the system to maintain their class/lifestyle are likely to ignore your question or to perceive your activist intent and lie to you to avoid getting sucker punched by the 'crazy person on the street.'
In America ? Yes. I’m willing to bet a good part of the reason why our prisons they way they are is because many see it as a means of revenge and not rehabilitation. No one cares if a rapist or pedo is saddled with debt , much less of they leave out of there alive.
Based on the comments in the "NYC is owed a bajillion dollars in parking tickets" thread from a couple days ago I bet you could get an easy dozen if you just dropped the phrase "five star hotel prices". People are strongly in favor of harsh punishments for the type of crimes they don't ever see themselves committing, like not paying a ticket apparently.
The NYC parking tickets thing has a few other dimensions, like the fact that the worst scofflaws are actually the diplomatic corps of other countries (there for the UN) that claim immunity to avoid having to pay the tickets. So not only do you get to bash elites, they’re other country’s elites and not countries that the US has warm relations with.
There was actually a sigh of relief in many circles when New York lost the 2012 Olympics bid, because many people did not see the benefit of holding the games being worth the massive headaches of infrastructure overload.
Can you give me some reference, or a keyword? I can’t find much about it; what I found is that they can work and get paid, but I didn’t find anything about being forced to.
This is a problem of Stated preference vs. Revealed preference. You ask them what they think and they'd tell you "that's awful, I can't believe that, that's so unfair" but you put them up on the ballot at the midterms and get them to repeal it and all of a sudden it's about being "tough on crime" and "keeping our streets clean".
Also, prisons are often located in depressed small town as a stable source of government jobs. Those people don’t want to go back to being in a depressed economy.
The most extreme example of this is that the site of the 1970 Lake Placid Winter Olympics was designed to be used post games as a prison, which it is today.
Not really, you are assuming the people vote on a lot of decisions, which is not true. This is a problem related to permanence of executive power. The "cardinal Richelieu" problem (You know that while the government changes, he is above the government and stays. Most of the executive does not change at all when power changes hands at the legislative level).
Ever notice that executive power is the same everywhere? They think the laws are unfair to them, because they have to implement totally unrealistic laws, and get blamed harshly for "small" problems (you know, "harshly" except it doesn't carry any consequences for them, except, at best loss of face).
They respond by not following laws, refusing even to implement judicial directives and the like. Their own (sometimes personal) interest, for them, trumps laws and the directives of judges. They have largely made sure their names are never revealed to the people they serve, as they no longer have the support of the people, and they feel they cannot be replaced.
Many are, particularly conservatives. Many aren't, and, well, that's good, but there's a significant enough majority who are and so the status quo prevails.
Is that not implicit in democracy? Things are the way they are, because the People willed it as such?
The actual mechanism probably has many more links including the voting of politicians who share the People's values, who then pass laws in the People's interest. But the underlying axiom of democracy is rule of the People, indirect as the American implementation is, is it not?
Very true, though the US had an outsized role in convincing other governments to enact zero-tolerance drug laws under multiple UN conventions. It's only in the last 20 years we've seen nations willing to buck the trend.
Not clear how that's relevant to the comment you were replying to, unless you're suggesting that being jailed for minor controlled substance offenses is far more common in the US than the many other developed countries with similar laws?
Correct. It's a statistic many people are not aware of.
Additionally, if you look at the racial breakdown of who's incarcerated in the USA, it's disproportionately black relative to number of blacks per capita residing in the country. Blacks are incarcerated at 5x the rate of whites, and make up 40% of all incarcerated individuals.
Sadly it's even worse in Australia, where it's closer to 10x the rate for indigenous vs non-indigenous. I'd be horrified to find out they were expected to pay for their time behind bars though.
Also important to note that indigenous people in the US are also often disproportionately affect by these policies. Oftentimes at even higher rates than Black Americans
In the US, the idea is that poor people commit more crimes than rich people, and whites are more likely to be rich. Whether that is actually true, I have no idea.
Socioeconomic factors are the most obvious. The second is the (currently) taboo cultural issue of fatherhood and stable families in these communities. I won’t speculate any more, but I recommend Glenn Loury’s discussions on this topic:
Why would kids growing up in a remote community with no work, surrounded by drug and alcohol abuse, in a culture that tolerates child sex abuse, whose brains are cooked from day one by FASD and inhalants _not_ commit more crime.
There may be well elements within certain cultures that appear on the surface to tolerate child abuse to a degree that seems alarming, but it's a stretch to claim any culture as a whole does so (and at any rate, first nation peoples in Australia emphatically do not share a single culture).
If we really knew the answer to that we'd probably have worked out how to solve the problem of higher incarceration rates.
At the end of the day though white colonists took away their mode of existence that had worked for them for 10s of 1000s of years. Those have chosen to fully adopt the trappings of modern/Western civilization have done well enough for themselves generally, but is it reasonable to expect they should all make that choice?
There are systemic issues, prejudices, and discrimination that put dark skinned / people of color at a disadvantage at almost every point in the system. American society is rigged against these folks.
Example from yesterday, a black pastor was arrested for watering his neighbors plants because he "looked suspicious":
I have major problems with using stories like these to promote the idea that the police did something wrong.
The police don't know who that man was, or why he was on property that didn't belong to him. They're not mind readers. If he had provided the identification (or at least his name/DOB) that they had asked for, then it probably would have become clear to them that he was telling the truth. But by REFUSING to give them any information that would prove his story true, he escalated a situation that could have been resolved without his arrest.
People seem to forget that we ask police TO INVESTIGATE. Not just walk up, accept whatever story they are given and then drive away.
> They're aren't mind readers but they made a decision that he was commiting a crime or about to commit one. They escalated it, not him.
No, actually that's not what they decided.
They decided that, before they just walk away from their SWORN DUTY to investigate without knowing who he was or whether he actually belonged at that property, they would actually do their jobs and find that out that information by doing a simple thing like asking him to identify himself.
I know some people really don't like police officers, but, in the future, you should try to make sure that that dislike doesn't make you completely irrational.
If they cannot be sued for a breach of it, do they have it?
SCOTUS opined: “Nothing in the language of the Due Process Clause itself requires the State to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens against invasion by private actors.”
(DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services (1989) 489 U.S. 189).
I have no idea why you think what you posted has anything to do with what I said or the interaction that is being discussed. The Due Process clause is not the only source of the state's power to enact laws and regulate the conduct of citizens. The police powers of the government existed long before the Due Process clause was enacted.
But even if you take the position that the police are not REQUIRED to do anything (and I would disagree with that position), that does not mean that they CANNOT do anything. In this case, the police CHOSE (to use a term more suitable to your position) to investigate. And nothing precludes them from choosing to do so. Or do you take the position that the police are neither required to, nor can they choose to investigate when called?
No, police have no "sworn duty" to investigate - you literally made this up out of your head.
“I, (state name), do solemnly swear or affirm that I will faithfully execute the duties of (state position) of the State of Texas, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States and of Texas, so help me God.”
"I do solemnly affirm that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the position of ______________________ according to the best of my ability and perform my duties in a manner consistent with the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of New York."
They're all like this.
----
No, seeing a black guy watering flowers is not grounds for anything, even if they are someone else's flowers. I cannot believe I have to make this point.
> "I do solemnly affirm that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the position of..."
So I assume those "duties" they're referring to don't include investigating when they are assigned a call. Perhaps you think "duties" just refers to sitting in their car eating donuts?
> "No, seeing a black guy watering flowers is not grounds for anything, even if they are someone else's flowers. I cannot believe I have to make this point."
Again, you have to pay attention to the actual facts when you participate in these discussions.
The police were not just driving down the street and, upon seeing a black man watering some flowers, say to themselves "he must be up to no good". They were specifically CALLED by a neighbor to the property to investigate a suspicious person on their neighbor's property (you know, the typical 'looking out for your neighbor' thing). Your position seems to be that the police should not have done anything. Simple looked at him, shrugged their shoulders and walked away.
Because that's exactly what you would want the police to do if YOU were away and your neighbor saw someone on your property and called the police to investigate. You'd absolutely want them to not find out who that person was or why he was on your property.
I was detained for 20 minutes for cutting across what I perceived as some empty field, 300 meters down the street from my brother's house. Turns out it was private property, and we weren't in the UK. I presume some busibody at their window called the police. It's a pretty posh subdivision. The land is literally much more valuable than other people's, and I went and walked on it like a wild animal.
But that leaves the fact that white me had no reason to get my back up, because I knew the white cop wasn't being racist. So I handed him my ID and sat quietly on a privately owned rock until he was done with it.
It really has nothing to do with race and everything to do with upbringing.
How come black people (specifically African-Americans) are the only people who seem to have these "racism" issues with police? What about other minorities? How many Indians do you see on TV fighting with police or getting shot? What about Hispanics or Asians? Hell, what about African immigrants? It seems quite strange to me that for all this talk of "systemic racism", none of the other minorities seem to have these issues.
It's almost as if the racist police don't have any issue with any minority OTHER than black people. Which makes me think that it really has nothing to do with race and everything to do with what some people are being taught.
There was a video a few weeks ago of young black children (probably around 5-8 years old) taunting, cursing and HITTING police in Minnesota.
Now, you tell me, who taught that child to behave that way? And when that child grows up, what possible interaction could he have with police that DOESN'T end up with him being beaten, shot or killed?
Everyone wants to look at one side of the issue and ignore what is going on everyday in black families and communities that leads to these confrontations.
I get the feeling you don't really understand how racism works. It doesn't mean "I think everyone from a different ethnic background is somehow a worse person". It's often completely subconscious - your reaction to the observed behaviour of another person is nearly always coloured to some extent by the degree you consider them part of some category largely based on their superficial physical appearance (skin colour, hair colour/style, eye or nose shape etc.). Racism is when you let that colouring adversely affect the way you treat such individuals. It might even be assuming that because they look, say, Jewish you treat them with an expectation of being more intelligent than average.
Well, I actually agree with you to some extent. I've been saying for a long time that everyone is prejudiced in some way. But that is never going to change. Human beings are, by nature, tribal. Even if we do it only on a subconscious level.
To that point, some of the most racist people I know are black people. Growing up as a black person myself in Brooklyn, and hearing it spoken often, I can tell you that there is no one that black people around here dislike more than Jews. It's an irrational kind of hatred based on the normal nonsense "they own all the banks, they own all the property", etc. If you messed up your credit and can't get a loan, it's the Jews fault. If someone gets evicted because they didn't pay their rent for 6 months, its' the Jews fault. That kind of thing. Racism and prejudice exists in all of us.
But you're right, I probably don't really understand how racism works. Because I have never actually experienced real racism. But, to be fair, neither has 99.9% of the people you see on your TV, social media or in the streets screaming about racism because a white person put their hair in dreadlocks or some other such nonsense. What was the most recent one, Drew Barrymore frolicking in the rain was somehow "erasing black people"?
Look, no one denies that there are actual racist people in the world. But the current state of discourse on this topic is a complete joke. REAL racism is largely a thing of the past. The problem is that what people are trying to classify as real racism these days are just wildly over exaggerated claims based on there being a racist boogeyman around every corner.
The truth is that the 'everything is racist' mantra, or the overexaggerated claims of racism, is actually funded and promoted by global elites and politicians who would very much like to create as much division as possible to keep us focused on non-issues like race instead of the fact that every time one of these "crises" occurs, their net income doubles. We are sadly being played as pawns.
> But the current state of discourse on this topic is a complete joke.
I want to make it clear that I agree with you 100% on that much. We're more polarized this year than last year, and we already thought it was very polarized then. I was born in the 70's, I'm an attentive and perceptive dude, and I've never seen anything close to this. People tell me it was worse right before I was born. Someone here gave me a book about the Weather Underground but I haven't finished it yet.
I think it's a blessing in a way that everyone lives in their phone. If the culture war were playing out predominately in meat space, way more people would be dying.
The kids call ideas from 20 years ago reactionary. Wait, hold up. Too many of the kids -know- and believe they -need- the word reactionary, what the fuck, and I'm not talking about vocab.
But I still maintain that the policed do not bear more responsibility than the police. The police are the professionals, and they're the ones empowered to kill people.
That's exactly what I said to my ever-so-slightly conscious girlfriend 25 years ago. I still feel embarrassed about it to this day. Even my long gone grandparents wondered so, socratically.
A bit more constructively: I suppose if everyone everywhere taught their kids the police are there to help, the way the Electric Company taught me, then that specific problem might be alleviated. Perhaps with unintended consequences. But I basically had to unlearn it, and for them it would require a comfort with a level of cognitive dissonance that I'm sure no individual can sustain, let alone a whole community. At least if you accept their history is separate. Like, my ancestors on my dad's side came here in the 1600's too, but they were on the top of the boat.
The national news does largely focus on African American people. I don't attempt to have an explanation for that, but it is noted and acknowledged.
Living in Denver for three years and having great HD over the air TV I'd watch the local news while cooking meals. The local news spent considerable time discussing the issues plaguing the refugees with their relationships with certain local law enforcement agencies, as well as the large Hispanic populations. I spent a lot of time hanging out with some refugees and it was interesting to hear their perspectives versus that of my barber who was Hispanic. Not once was my refugee ever asked to prove they were here legally, but my barber was nearly every time he had any kind of interaction with the police where they had some reason to fish for a reason to ask for identification.
Where I live in Central Texas now, it's largely about Hispanic interactions in the news or the continued coverage of the most recent large school shooting here. A huge complexity added to many Hispanic populations around the US is the ability to comfortably and freely voice their frustration without risk of deportation. A lot of abuse they suffer at the hand of law enforcement goes unnoticed on the national scene because they don't want to take to the streets about it and risk losing literally everything they own including the clothes they are wearing when they are arrested.
I'm only 1/4th Hispanic and while I haven't ever been pulled in Central Texas, in the the Dallas suburb of McKinney Texas, where I lived for about a decade I got pulled over all the time and every time they were baffled when #1 I don't know Spanish at all, beyond basic food names from eating at food trucks, #2 I have a slight southern accent because I grew up in Arkansas and sound like everyone else I was around, and #3 I wasn't some easy score for them.
Of the 30+ times I got pulled over on the east-side of McKinney, not once was I ever given a ticket or arrested me but it came pretty freakin' close and I can't imagine how much differently if I didn't immediately register as "he actually might be white".
I have done the following in McKinney, Allen, and/or Frisco Tx:
* Had to do the stupid human tricks on the side of the road before noon, because they claimed I was swerving and they smelled a hint of alcohol on my breath.
* Blown in a breathalyzer in the parking lot of an elementary school because the law enforcement officer camped out using the school as place to nail speeders said I was driving erratically and was staggering as I got out of my car. The erratic driving was specifically around having issues parking. Due to an injury I needed to be able to open my car door all the way open and when I realized I couldn't, I decided to back up and move over a bit more so I could open it all the way. That was the bad driving. The stagger was actually a limp if I put too much pressure on my left leg.
To add insult to injury, the final kick in the balls, etc. was when he started trying to imply I was there for questionable reasons when I was actually there to drop off lunch to my wife who had taught at the school for several years at that point and I routinely volunteered at the school which meant I had actually passed a more rigorous background check than he did to get his job.
* Been accused of having a fake id drivers license because for whatever reason their inability to find something about me to give me a ticket or arrest me on resorts to petty accusations to attempt to get a rise out of me so that they can escalate it even more till they can arrest me for making them scared, or worse they can use their terrible training and end up panicking and pulling their weapon and firing on the extreme end outcome of things.
Too many times to count I was told in parting words I could avoid these problems staying out of the east side of town because that is where all the problems are, or for the times I got pulled over close to home in the more ...
If you're implying that blacks incarcerated at 5x the rate of population is evidence of racism, then is men being incarcerated at 10x their population rate evidence of sexism?
I'd say it is. As in, a significant part of the reason men are likely to commit more crimes than women is due to social expectations around how men should act vs how women should. But there's no denying significant biological differences play a part too. The problem with trying to discern whether biological differences play a part in explaining incarceration rates between different "races" is there's no reliable method for objectively determining someone's race.
My guess would be that most developed countries see prison not as a revenge but as the start to learn to function in society. America's system is more or less all about revenge.
There isn’t enough profit there though for that to be the driving force. Prisons as an industry make far less than industries with little to no political sway for even trivial protectionist policies.
I believe you are wrong about for-profit prisons. It is 100% the reason that the US has so many incarcerated. Any time you can get government to foot the bill for something cottage industries will spring up around it.
> It is 100% the reason that the US has so many incarcerated. Any time you can get government to foot the bill for something cottage industries will spring up around it.
That doesn’t make sense. Building a prison in itself doesn’t induce crime nor does it induce prison sentences. Judges and juries have no quotas to fill based on vacancy.
Some private prison corporations and judges both felt it was profitable enough.
Two Pennsylvania judges received $2.8M in bribes from private prisons to send 4,000 kids to the private prisons with long sentences; apparently ruining 4,000 kids lives was profitable enough to justify $2.8M in bribes. One of the judges has managed to get released early.
Right, you’ll see pockets of individual corruption but that doesn’t account for why there is a systemic overpopulation. Unless you are suggesting every judge is on the take, in which case no amount of law reform will matter without first removing all of the judges.
I am suggesting that this example of corruption is evidence that there is sufficient profit in private prisons to motivate efforts (legal and illegal) to affect policy.
E.g., private prisons likely spend at least as much in legal lobbying efforts to maintain high prison populations as they do in bribes.
Prisons serve more than on purpose: reinsertion and punishment are two of them, but another one I think is the most important is that it limits the ability for dangerous individuals to do harm. I would rather have murderers and rapists behind bars than next door.
If you accept the idea of the "war on drugs", it also goes for drug offenses: by putting drug dealers behind bars, you prevent people from buying drugs and harming themselves.
I don’t think it’s a right way of framing it. It’s not about acceptance. If you look at the statistics on consumption, harm suffered from abuse or how the illegal trade is doing between highly repressive countries and countries which have legalised drugs or don’t jail consumers but try to help them kick their addiction, you can factually say that the “war on drugs” is an abject failure leading to more harm than good like prohibition before it.
The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs is probably the most harmful thing the USA ever did to the world.
That would mean for 2mm prisoners there would be 1.1mm murderers, rapists, and manslaughterers. That seems like way too large a number to be realistic with the declining rate of murder, rape, and manslaughter.
Presumably murder, rape, and manslaughter carry longer sentence terms.
If a rapist spends five times as long in prison compared to a drug offense, then there will be five times as many rapists behind bars if the quantity of the two crime's convictions are comparable.
Only statistic which I could find on short notice (literally first google result ...) but considering it's federal, I trust a small sample size more than random numbers from someone on the internet without quotation, especially if they are off by an order of magnitude from other countries.
The clue is: It looks like the numbers are reversed which would make a lot more sense.
It’s relevant because part of the reason that number is so high is recidivism. And part of the reason recidivism is so high is because of policies like these, explicitly designed to make it that way.
I wonder what percentage are in jail for gun-related crimes. The easy availability of guns is one thing that distinguishes America from other advanced economies.
Edit: I found a variety of sources that suggest 18% of state and 15% of federal prisoners. Nowhere near as high as I was expecting.
Many of those gun crimes are people who previously committed a crime and were thus barred from owning guns. It’s an easy way to keep people rotating back into the carceral system.
That's still quite high. But the real thing that contributes to the US' crazy high incarceration rates is we tend to have much longer sentences than other countries
The US doesn't actually have that much higher crime rates than other countries otherwise though
Another issue, like this article points out, is that once you're in even if you get out your life is pretty much ruined and you're much more likely to go back in
If you assume that the original intent was to find the most socially acceptable way to criminalize minorities and "social undesirables" (e.g. hippies) and go all in on it, it makes a lot more sense.
You might assume that, but it would be a questionable assumption. Opium was banned in China (where is was used by ordinary denizens of that country, not minorities) well before the West followed suit.
Assumptions aren't needed as there is a well-documented history of the US using drug laws to attack certain minority groups. That's not the end all, be all of drug laws (in my opinion) but it is an important part of the history of drug prohibition.
Swap “drugs” for “guns” and you’d have the majority of HN flip out.
The Government isn’t a magical entity of absolute perfection. Large classes of banned substances are indeed banned for good reason. Their effects on individual/societal well being documented quite heavily.
Two things can be true at the same time:
1. Some substances that are detrimental to human health need to be controlled.
2. The US government and its present approach to enforcing laws is equally harmful and needs a complete overhaul.
You can really only swap drugs for guns if gun related imprisonment is high. Are there are lot of people in prison for illegal gun possession / dealing?
Are there are lot of people in prison for illegal gun possession / dealing?
Yes. Tons of petty criminals and low level nonviolent felons are behind bars because whatever they were doing it they did it while packing heat or had a gun in their possession when their door got kicked in.
Packing while committing some other crime is a felony by itself in many places and in the case of federal crimes (e.g. drug trafficking) a multiplicative effect on your max sentence and raises the minimum by a ton. Many/most states also have laws that copy the federal law.
This is why why drug dealers who've made it big pay someone else to pack for them and/or store their product as soon as their business can support that.
> 1. Some substances that are detrimental to human health need to be controlled.
I'd rather the law be more around information than control. If one believes in the idea of freedom and liberty in the US, then one should support a model where individuals are allowed to make their own decisions, but ensure the facts around such substances are well researched and publicized.
Alcohol kills, and yet is not actually very well controlled at all. Marijuana doesn't kill anyone directly, and yet the lies told about it has kept it tightly controlled, even as the real facts continue to come out.
I don't believe the government really has any obligation to keep us safe from our own poor decisions, assuming those poor decisions can be argued to be have been informed using truthful information.
To your point 1. no one is disputing that they need to be controlled. Alcohol is controlled, tobacco is controlled. The point is that making the illegal is an extreme way of controlling them (that doesn’t work).
Guns also need to be controlled (in my opinion way more that they currently are) but that doesn’t mean that I am advocating for them to be illegal.
Its very simple calculation really. Just look at the rest of the world if you're blinded by existing US system. 10s of countries have solved both of these problems in strikingly similar ways (similar as in similar for each problem not across the problems). So, why is US different? Answer: It's not. Majority of US folks need to just grow up to the fact that US humans aren't different than ROW humans and accept what data has been saying to them for generations. No point in being an outlier and trying to defend it tooth and nail.
Problem is, is there are no "US" folks - we're not a homogeneous population and different areas have vastly different priorities and needs, while federal overreach continually undermines state autonomy.
Let’s pull the stats on stabbing or blunt force trauma and ban baseball knives, kitchen knives and nail clippers as well ?
Terrorists ran people over with vehicles. So of course, renting a Uhaul van now has to come with a lengthy background check?
The absurdity of the comparison astounds me, and I’m willing to bet, would certainly astonish you were you to step outside the bubble you seem to be in. Have you met anyone that’s known or was a user of synthetics? Read up on the opioid crisis and the societal impact that’s had. It’s a crying shame that it isn’t taught in schools or spoken about even more than it is at present.
I don't know what ax you're grinding, but if you want less dead people from drugs, stop supporting laws that force people to engage with violent underground marketplaces to buy impure drugs of unknown origin.
Let me explain how civil conversation works. You put forth an assertion, and usually, a good response has a counterpoint, seriously or in jest to show you that your position may have not considered the whole thing.
When you draw an absolute line saying drug abuse has no victims, I laugh and point out other “crimes” that do and by your logic are thus different and must be banned.
Now, if you make another point about “forcing people to buy from violent underground marketplaces”, this is where your original comment becomes entirely irrelevant and you’re projecting some unsubstantiated paranoia of yours as a factual argument.
These are addictive substances. Many if not most of them leave permanent psychological scars and inhibit normal human functioning in ways that, unlike naturally occurring substances such as coffee are considered DETRIMENTAL to societal health and safety. By limiting exposure of society to synthetics or dangerous drugs, we limit their harm.
Your argument seems to be everyone in the US population wakes up everyday thinking “where can I get five ks of that sweet sweet Birria” ?
Stop acting like a dickhead if you don’t have any experience with rehabilitating the victims of these idiotic policies you’re proposing and go outside your moms basement once in a while.
With fentanyl being so potent these days and most guns never winding up killing anybody I wouldn't be surprised if the body count per "retail transaction" wasn't on the same order.
This isn't your 70s hippie weed or 80s crack. Dealing in hard drugs these days is a business with a pretty high body count due to the low LD50 of the substances involved. It's like the addictive substances equivalent of giving dynamite to teenagers. A lot of fun will be had but a lot of bad outcomes too.
So yeah, I'd say that dealing often has a victim too.
Synthetics are more potent and technically the opposite of impure.
They’re also sourced from China, a geopolitical adversary where political figures routinely point to the opium wars and revenge for that period on the west.
I don't get your point. If we want to save lives, let's stop forcing people to buy drugs from black markets. Lives will be saved if people aren't forced to buy unknown drugs and essentially "guess" what the right dose might be. That's how most deaths from illegal drugs occur.
There is a separate issue of doctors over-prescribing dangerous drugs and people abusing those drugs. I think preventing those overdoses and deaths takes a totally different approach.
You understand what “addictive substances” means , right? Your solution to protecting a population from being hooked on drugs is . . . Give them more and without restriction?
Sometimes the naïveté in the tech community amazes me.
What about people driving while high (or the people they hit if they have an accident)? What about people who become addicted to drugs like heroin? What about people who OD on heroin?
I suppose you could argue that none of these people were injured or killed by the drugs--they were injured or killed by someone misusing the drugs.
But that same argument works guns too. Good luck trying to find some convincing way to distinguish the two.
Portugal is an excellent role model, there are numerous studies on their approach to drugs[0]. While I am not an expert on the subject the model is morally appealing to me, and I believe public order is maintained. Begin researching on your own if you're interested in this subject. I feel for anyone who loves a drug user.
Separately I just learned fentanyl test strips are not legal in all 50 states. Given that fentanyl is a leading cause of death, giving access to test strips can save lives. I don't know how heavily this law is enforced, but it's a great example of cutting your nose to spite your face. To me it's a litmus test that reinforces the notion the USA's stance on drugs was never about harm reduction.
The George Floyd protests are the largest protests in all of human history. Anywhere between 15 and 26 million people in the US and countless others across 60 different countries participated. 96.3% of the 7,305 demonstrations identified by the Nonviolent Action Lab and Crowd Counting Consortium involved no injuries and no property damage
Even if you wanna weasel your way out of this and just say it's just "a contributing factor" (literally everything could be) how could you possibly even tie those things together?
Seriously, the suggestion that an opiate makes you aggressive is very funny. The high is just like, pure happiness.
Also fentanyl is a big thing because opiates are illegal. If people had a choice they'd stick to the good stuff like oxycodone, which is significantly less dangerous.
I assume your experience must be common to explain the prevalence of opioid addiction. But, my experiences are a counter-example-- opioids are not pleasant for everyone.
The first time, I was given an opioid (after surgery) I felt irrationally angry-- as in completely irrational anger at e.g., the color the walls were painted. After snapping at my girlfriend who was being super sweet and supportive, I immediately stopped taking them. This was pills, but I do not recall the name. The angry feeling passed within hours after missing the next dose. The period of apology lasted much longer. I can believe that someone experiencing similar irrational anger could do more than verbally snap at someone.
The second time, was Dilaudid via IV while recovering in hospital (machine with button to press to self-dose when in pain). No bad reaction this time.
I wouldn't describe either experience as euphoric. The first experience was negative and the second, other than helping with pain, was neutral.
"More than 932,000 people have died since 1999 from a drug overdose. In 2020, 91,799 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States. The age-adjusted rate of overdose deaths increased by 31% from 2019 (21.6 per 100,000) to 2020 (28.3 per 100,000)."
Fentanyl is very deadly and will start spiking these numbers fast. This means we will have 180k+ yearly deaths in 2.32 years (if it didn't get worse than 2020). wtf. Fentanyl is illegal (a felony in most areas). I agree the War on drugs didn't work. But we are about to lose millions of citizens.
> I don't know how heavily this law is enforced, but it's a great example of cutting your nose to spite your face. To me it's a litmus test that reinforces the notion the USA's stance on drugs was never about harm reduction.
Plenty of countries, especially in Asia, but also the UAE and possibly others, have successfully stopped nearly all drug use and trade with heavy-handed policies.
You may not like what it took to get done, but it did work. I'm not advocating for the heavy-handed approach, but it's intellectually dishonest to say that it can't work.
Also, the other countries have done it with a much smaller imprisonment per capita.
It is intellectually dishonest to say drug prohibition can work in the United States. It has been tried and has failed comprehensively and over multiple generations.
You are making a very different argument - that if the US was an entirely different type of society with a different government, culture and history, then this approach might work.
Do we honestly do prohibition though, or are we just running a treadmill for lower level offenders?
I understand the desire to not needlessly arrest people, on the other hand, I think leaving them to their own devices so they can do drugs in campers illegally parked on the side of the street is no honestly solution either.
I'm all for drug confiscation. If you're caught with drugs, we just take them and destroy them. No arrest and processing, just straight surrender of the illegal substance. Use this as an opportunity to enroll users into programs and get them off of their habits and back on their feet. Use the additional manpower to truly target those who import and traffic in these substances.
You have no right to possess drugs. They are illegal. If you are arrested, do you get your drugs back when you're bonded out or even if the DA drops the charges against you? If not, how is this actually any different?
Frankly, it sounds like you think this phenomenon is so unique that only a particular expert class is allowed to have opinions on it; and you're making wild guesses as to my experience in order to discount my opinion without actually putting forward the necessary arguments.
That's the entire problem right there. It's also mostly untrue - with very few exceptions there are legal ways to possess an use lots of drugs, including cocaine for example. But drug possession should never be a crime. It is a wildly illiberal approach.
"Plenty of countries have solved the drug problem by eliminating their populations; it would be dishonest to say that it cannot be done".
My preference is with a society that supports the freedom of the individual. One side-effect of that kind of society is that the unlucky and irresponsible are ill-protected. All told, I prefer that situation to an authoritarian, totalitarian, or fascist society.
It's a calculus with numerous concessions on all sides. I suspect we're highly programmed to support the perspective that corresponds to our geographic origins, even though mine's the best.
It can't work. Prisons in places like Indonesia and the Philippines are objectively degrading and inhumane. That's not winning, and that's not a working system. That's focusing on one aspect of a greater whole at the expense of our humanity.
America has had more than a fair go at a heavy handed anti-drug policy and it was and continues to be a spectacular failure. To sit here at the end of it and say that they didn't go hard enough, (particularly after horrific actions such as poisoning marijuana and therefore smokers with paraquat) is monstrous.
Outside Japan (I haven’t been there often enough to know), the others it’s definitely not true. It is easy to get, many people use, foreigners and natives. I got offered (I stick to beer) on many business meetings. It’s not so public probably, but what does that say?
Just to be clear, “heavy-handed policies” include the death penalty for trafficking in (at the very least) Singapore and the UAE. It would be intellectually dishonest to not name these things by name.
This argument veers a little bit into “sure it’s harsh but their trains do run on time” territory, at least for me.
What authoritarian countries are able to achieve at the cost of human rights would preferably not serve as inspiration, or even as a point of comparison.
And "trafficking" is defined to include things like "possessing the amount of weed HN types by for themselves to get the bulk discount" not just "getting on a plane with bags of coke strapped to you.
Religious and social taboos might have helped as well.
> have successfully stopped nearly all drug use and trade with heavy-handed policies.
Like Indonesia for instance? It has one of the strictest drug laws in the world supposedly. Yet 70% of the people imprisoned in the country were convicted of drug related crimes. They had this policy for many years, yet this is what their president said a few years back:
On July 21, 2017, Jokowi stated that Indonesia was in a state of emergency due to widespread drug use, consequently instructing law enforcement officers that “if [narcotics suspects] resist a little bit, just shoot them immediately.”
Which would that their strict policies, far from having stopped nearly all drug trade and consumption, were a complete failure.
Also around 2% of all people in the country are active drug users.
> but it did work
So no, it didn’t
> but it’s intellectually dishonest to say that it can’t work
Yes. Theoretically if you imprison or shot every drug user fast enough and your police force is not thoroughly corrupt it might work. Not sure both of these things can ever be compatible in practice, though.
> Plenty of countries, especially in Asia, but also the UAE and possibly others, have successfully stopped nearly all drug use
What nonsense is this? Countries with capital punishment on drugs like thailand, Philippines and singapore (and before malaysia who cancelled the death penalty but are still strict) are rife with dope; you can buy it everywhere; I mean it is literally shoved in your face on every corner. Which countries are you talking about? I been to many, I only drink (by the way; a dangerous, addictive harddrug; people tend to forget alcohol as drug), but I got offered everywhere, all the time. And there are many native users, you can see them all over the place.
Look at how many people will lose their jobs if this shuts down. The people who support this are often just happy to see minorities and poor people get fucked if it means their stupid brother in law stays on at the local prison. They view these people as human waste, so they don't care how much they get hurt, as long as their people are getting something out of it. Trying to stop this means figuring out how to unfuck these people's mentality. That is even harder than stopping drugs.
Murder happens despite being illegal, and will continue to
I don’t understand how you can compare murder with drug use (or even selling drugs). Nobody says “let me try murder today and see if I like it” but plenty of people say (and do) “let me try drugs for fun today and see if I like it”.
> The government strains, at extraordinary expense, to pretend they can stop drugs from being made, bought and sold, but they can't.
My point is that whether or not something still happens once illegal does not have much bearing on whether it should remain so. Nor does it signal failure of the policy as long as there is reduction.
Because marijuana being illegal did reduce the production, and consumption.
Did it? You're relying on surveys on people self-reporting illegal activity and comparing it to post-legalization data. There is a lot to think about in regards to these issues and I suggest you maybe read up on it some more if you are interested.
In the meantime, before legalization, weed only become stronger and more readily available. Many teenagers could get it more easily than booze. That was with the government at all levels doing everything it could to stop marijuana use. With many ruined lives of otherwise free people coming with those polices.
Honestly, I don’t know, when the initial google searches confirm what I see around me, I don’t spend that much time diving in. It is laziness on my part.
At least in my circles, usage has gone up significantly.
Then why are the places with the least restrictive drug laws arguably where the problem is the worst by a large margin? If these laws don't work at all. Not saying I fully support them or anything, I am just curious what your thoughts are.
I would consider flipping causality. I think those places, typically cities and ports, are disposed to having larger drug populations, be that from abundance of supply or some other factor. Then, those places end up passing lenient laws as a result of the problem, and instead cope via non-criminal programs like safe injection sites.
It’s not like Vancouver or SF decided first to have safe injection sites, and then suddenly had huge heroin problems.
> The government strains, at extraordinary expense, to pretend they can stop drugs from being made, bought and sold, but they can't.
Sure they could. They just don't try because the current system is very very good for them.
Other countries like Portugal and the Netherlands have done a fantastic job on lowering their drug use rate dramatically.
And it's very simple - they treat drug consumption as a medical problem, first and foremost. Possessing drugs, any drugs, for your own personal consumption is _not_ a crime in either place.
Indeed, both countries go out of their way to provide facilities for addicts where they can safely take their drug and get medical treatment and counseling with no fear of being arrested.
----
If the United States wanted to end the drug war, they could simply look at the examples that worked and copied them. But they are much more interested in oppressing hapless addicts and jailing them.
I've come to expect this. Hopefully the larger message with the student loan debt forgiveness isn't that they are forgiving 10k in student debt, or even that the people complaining about it had millions in PPP loans forgiven... but instead that they forgave near a trillion in PPP loans, some wealthy individuals having several million forgiven, but the most they can afford for low-income students is 10k.
Leave it to America to reward the rich and shit on the poor.
I am against student loan forgiveness and am not rich or in any position of power. I am against the government spending tax money to benefit a subset of the country.
I'm not following. Being in debt restricts what jobs are available?
A student takes a loan to get an education. When taking the loan they agreed to the terms which includes paying it back. There is no stipulation in the loan agreement on what jobs they take to pay back the loan. Being in debt does not change what jobs are available.
When I toured the Tower of London I was told this happened to many improsined in the dungeon there. People would sometimes be held indefinietely for small crimes as they wouldn't be able to pay off their initial "accomodation". It seemed an insanely unfair practice and even though I knew US prison system is fucked, I had no idea it was this bad.
Not just in the Tower - this was pretty common practice up until the mid to late Victorian era I think - eg it features in Dickens's writing to some extent.
Doesn't the US pride itself on having abolished debtor's prison due to the immorality of incarcerating people for unpaid debts? That the converse is happening; forcing people to rack up huge debts for being incarcerated seems unbelievably mean and downright farcical.
In the UK it costs the taxpayer about $60K per year per prisoner to keep them locked up, according to official figures. However if you take the overall annual budget for the prison service and divide by the number of prisoners I think the figure is closer to $100K. I’ve often wondered what the cost might be to house that population somewhere else, somewhere less expensive, like Turkey or Greece.
"the transportation of convicts to his Majesty's colonies and plantations in America ... is found to be attended with various inconveniences," - one of the ways the British parliament described the American war of independence, Marilyn C. Baseler, "Asylum for Mankind": America, 1607-1800, p.124-127 via Wikipedia.
too late. those seeking asylum are forced to 'remain in Mexico' and others flown back into dangerous places. Instances where people are forcibly deported somewhere they have never spent time as an adult, have no family, no money, etc.
I find the whole system disgusting.
The US Govt purposefully restricts opportunities to request asylum in the way in which our govt deems 'legal.' e.g. a few people at a time through sparse border crossings.
And then prosecute those who cross the border because it's the only way to state their claim.
Shameful.
The propaganda of 'invasion' and 'replacement' has really made this a politically toxic issue. A dangerous one at that.
Not quite, Australia wasnt an independent country at the time. It only gained independence in 1901. The last prisoner was shipped to the penal colony around 1870. So there was no Australian state to sign any agreement with. UK was until very recently in the EU with Greece. Might even get the prisoners superior conditions, some of UKs jails are Victorian in construction and very overcrowded.
Unfortunately for those people, they hadn’t formed a state or anything approaching one, and were still busy fighting each other along tribal lines. I suppose the colonists could have tried a deal with the largest tribe at the time, who could have then imposed their agreement on the other tribes by force.
Or being put on a prison hulk with up to 30% yearly death rates.
Also at least in Britain the number of capital crimes increased almost exponentially in the late 17th and the 18th centuries. So I’m not sure that’s quite right.
UK prisons are overcrowded, in poor condition, expensive, and the land for those 127 prisons could be used to provide inexpensive housing for the poor here.
In Sweden the officially reported number is about $110k/year/prisoner or about $300/day/prisoner. Your comment makes me think I should try to sanity-check that number.
(And no, we don't charge them the cost afterwards.)
I absolutely think we should buy these services from other EU countries where costs are lower. I don't get why the EU single market legislation shouldn't apply to this.
Here we have nearly 130 prisons, and could build tens of thousands of houses for the poor on that land. Some of them are in or near desirable cities now, where once the land was considered low grade/flood risk/etc.
I just checked the official annual budget for all of the penal institutions in Turkey. The 2022 budget is 3.2 Billion Liras[1] ($180M) for about 300.000 inmates in total. Dividing, you get about $600 per inmate per year! (and honestly it doesn't even sound that absurd considering the low cost of living here)
Turkey was an example, as was Greece, of a cheaper provider. The dividend would not be purely financial. It would be almost 130 large sites upon which to build housing for the poor. Conditions in UKs prisons have been internationally condemned. It would be an opportunity to improve conditions for the incarcerated, save money, and provide housing for the poor on reclaimed sites.
former inmate here. I remember having to discharge nearly 30 grand in bankruptcy my second day out of the klink because I couldnt honest to god afford anything. I'd moved back in with an old roommate and was going to trade tech school.
other things that cost money include:
soap, toilet paper, toothpaste, and basic analgesics like aspirin. phone calls are around $9 a minute. a letter is around $4. if you had an accident or need serious medical care it will be billed to you during your stay and comes out of your commissary.
oh and any supervised release after your sentence? that costs money too.
You shouldn't be downvoted here, this is true. As tax revenues decline, they are trying to shift the burden directly onto the inmates to pay for the whole works.
This looks like a scheme to keep ex-inmates underwater. To rejoin the society they need legal income. Prisons watch out for such "deserters" and take half of their income, so they won't have enough for rent or food, and would have to go back to crime, and eventually to a prison.
Where is the profit for prisons? It's twofold: forced labor where inmates make license plates and some basic goods, and admin fees for managing prisons where taxpayers foot the bill.
It's almost like burdening people who have been to prison with immense debt makes them *more* likely to end up back in prison; allowing them work, learn and improve skills, and save up some money for getting back on their feet makes them *less* likely to end up back in prison. Who would've thought?!
It almost seems like someone wants people in prison, as if someone is profiting off of it or something. Hmmmm....
Makes one question does the system even want to keep these people out. Or give them chances to not reoffend. Each time it sounds like there is zero intent to have them reintegrate in society. Even if so many programs and other things are run. But the basics are not covered...
Norway is relatively small and homogenous compared to the US. And doesn't have a puritanical and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps culture.
EDIT: I don't mean to defend the US here. It's a terrible system. Rather just point out the societies are so different I don't think what works in Norway can transfer directly to the US.
There is no "fair" comparison, because quite frankly the US is quite unique in this respect.
(Well, I guess you could say that countries like North Korea are worse, but even the thought of having to compare against North Korea should give a hint on how bad things really are.)
Homogeneous societies may have different rates of crime or at least different issues. For example in the US there is historic and systemic racism that affects the incarceration issue. Which isn't to say profiteering from incarceration is the answer. Rather that things which work in more cohesive societies may not directly transfer to more heterogeneous ones.
Years ago, I got a speeding ticket. I worked nights at the time, and the office to make the payment at had very strange hours because it was from a tiny town. My schedule made it difficult to make it over to the office during open hours, and one of the times I tried it was closed randomly over lunch because again, small town. (I learned later there was only one person who ran the whole office.)
A day after my speeding ticket payment was due, I was pulled over, arrested for driving on a suspended license (quite roughly, I might add), and hauled to jail, where they booked me, processed me, and charged me thousands upon thousands of dollars for the privilege of being arrested. The whole process was structured around profit.
It absolutely demolished my meager savings account at the time, and damn near kept me from being able to attend the code bootcamp I was enrolled in. It taught me a serious lesson about the law: They exist only for power and profit. The entire experience cost me over $3000 for a speeding ticket of 5 mph over the stated limit. I've got a nice little arrest mention on my criminal record now, though, so that's nice.
I was told in the 1980s that personal finances in Australia were such.. that many independent adults did not own their own autos, but that ownership and insurance were arranged through their employer, typically a large company or government agency.
They do in NZ as well, but there are times when you need to pay additional taxes for some reason. E.g.earn extra income that isn't through an employer you need to declare and pay taxes on.
I guess it's for those cases you use the Pay Taxes option in my banks app. I've used it a few times and it's really useful
Same in Azerbaijan, everything can be paid through banking apps. Electricity, gas, internet, mobile, fines, taxes, gov, services, couriers and so on...
I got jailed for a DUI in the USA and I was not allowed to use debit or credit card for bail... I had to have cash... but of course the bail company was able to electronically transfer the money.
The Government want you to use cash only when it's convenient for them....
I have always been able to pay online, over the phone or via mail for my tickets with check, cash, card, or money order. This is in two states: California and North Carolina. For anything more serious than a speeding ticket in NC is a mandatory court visit depending on severity, California has a few more things you can just pay a fine than NC afaik.
The office seem to cater to services where only the able and 9-5 crowd can easily access it. It seems more of a failing of this office to not provide an online alternative means to pay.
> where only the able and 9-5 crowd can easily access it
I'm not sure it's conveinient for that crowd either. It's always puzzled me how you were expected to make it to government offices open roughly 9-5 while most people work those same hours.
I thought of lunch too, but the lines are pretty long at most of these places (in MI I could make appointments, which still require waiting a significant amount of time).
That is frustrating, but when were you planning to pay? Couldn’t you have mailed it in?
Suspended license driving is anti-social. Any law with a firm cutoff or deadline, and no gradual increase of penalty, sucks for those who barely miss complying with it. There needs to be some kind of consequence, though.
Yes. Like the other responses, you’re only seeing the original ticket when replying to a comment about driving on a suspended license.
As I alluded to, a gradual system of consequences building to suspension, or some other method of easing into or helping avoid the penalty state, would be more fair, especially for light offenses like the OP’s.
That does not change that we expect people not to drive on public roads when they’re barred from using them.
> It taught me a serious lesson about the law: They exist only for power and profit.
I understand your frustration, but the law does not exist ONLY (or at all, if I'm being honest) for power and profit. The law exists to provide each person with a baseline to guide their interactions, whether it be between them and other individuals, or between them and their government.
Now, obviously you have abuses and especially when some in the government/beaurocracy find out they can get funds by abusing their authority (e.g. civil asset forfeiture), but that's not why the law exists, and it doesn't happen everywhere. That's just a symptom of a lack of oversight by we, the people (chiefly).
Also a clear lack of empathy. I mean, sure, the person did something wrong. But have they stopped being human? Where is the humanity in squeezing every penny out of someone already broken and poor ($250/day is more than what many Americans earn in a day). Then taking away 50% of any hope/real shot at living they have. This sounds like profiteering at their expense. (Edit: this is evil).
Jail time and a permanent record is more punishment than it sounds. It severely affects future employment, even things like renting an apartment or getting a car loan (the ubiquitous background checks are done to weed such people out).
I agree that what happened to him should not have happened. But we're the ones who let this stuff happen. We're the ones who vote in the people (or neglect to vote them out) who put these policies in place.
> That's just a symptom of a lack of oversight by we, the people (chiefly).
So your argument is that it is not the fault of the people who are paid to do this job, out of our tax money, but it is somehow our fault, even though your average person has literally no input whatsoever into any of this?
That's just false.
I mean, almost 90% of Americans live in a non-swing state where their vote is entirely meaningless.
At some point American has to shut down this horrible failed experiment with mass incarceration. I feel like I'm watching the end stages of it where they try to make it as absurd as possible and get the last bit of cash out of everyone. I sincerely hope this whole system collapses soon.
> Former Connecticut inmate Fred Hodges, who served more than 17 years in prison for killing a man while trying to retrieve his son’s stolen bicycle, came into $21,000 after his car was totaled in a 2009 traffic accident. The state claimed half of that, he said. After paying his lawyer, he was left with about $3,000.
That's not coming into money. His $21k was compensation for the vehicle he no longer has. He was more liquid for some time but not in any way richer. It's grossly unfair for the state to interpret that money as something they could go after, even if such pay-to-stay laws were fair (which I don't think they are). What replacement vehicle is he going to get with $3k now?
Counterpoint question to most of the comments I’m seeing here:
Who then is supposed to pay for a criminal’s stay in prison? Law-abiding tax-payers?
Laws that SEND people to prison (like drug possession laws) can be fairly painted as ridiculous, but when it comes to paying for the actual prison infrastructure… it seems a lot less ethically clear.
> Who then is supposed to pay for a criminal’s stay in prison? Law-abiding tax-payers?
Absolutely yes.
If society is improved by the removal of these individuals from free association therein, and the decision is made to do so, then society should be responsible for the costs necessary to make it happen.
Cost of enforcement should be a limiting factor on the expansion of laws. If nothing else, it is a proxy for the number of people criminalized, which is a measure of social acceptability (and/or lack of negative impact) of the behaviour itself.
Oh, no, it is extremely clear, ethically. Charging someone $249 per day for years is literally extortionate. Even a short sentence can destroy someone's opportunities for life.
If society decides to, temporarily or for ever, lock some members away (in democracies that happens yhrough laws and courts), well, yes then society has to pay for it. And those locked away have to be treated fairly and humane. Just because someone is in jail doesn't make that person less human.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 351 ms ] threadHeh.
For real though, fines that aren't adjusted to the offenders wealth seem to give legal impunity to the wealthy. But performing that adjustment without a floor essentially gives legal impunity to people at rock bottom. The trick is finding some middle ground where all criminals, poor and rich, can be effectively punished to deter crimes of opportunity.
What? Had no idea about this whatsoever and I consider myself a well-read person. Damn.
Someone needs to create a hall of shame for these laws index by federal and for every state.
This is perverse on so many levels. It’s not only ongoing punishment but it disincentivizes people from getting their lives in order and probably increases recidivism rates quite a bit. So in the end I wouldn’t be surprised if it costs more.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/17/pennsylvania...
I'm fairly sure that's intentional, as prisons are "big business" in the USA (which also probably explains the ridiculously high rate of imprisonment here).
/s
Lmao there's definitely a ton of people who would make that comment unironically.
Jokes aside, the government and the largest market players are extremely intertwined.
Another extremely dystopian reality we live with daily and rarely stop to question.
When the 13th Amendment was proposed, one of the big compromises the South fought for was the "except as punishment for crime" clause. And, of course, immediately after it was passed there was a big cultural shift in racist stereotypes of Black men from being effeminate and cowardly to being big scary criminals. Basically just a rush to recreate the slavery apparatus by imprisoning Black people
The south didn't really get a say in the text of the 13th since they weren't around. That clause was included so as not to screw with the established prison labor systems of the states that were in the union. The 13th was in the over at a time when union support for the war was low and it wasn't a boat anyone felt like rocking. It wasn't a contentions clause and was basically seen as a common sense exception at the time. If it wasn't then you'd think some of the more abolitionist states would have tried to abolish that too or you'd at least have some period correspondence about it you could refer to.
>And, of course, immediately after it was passed there was a big cultural shift in racist stereotypes of Black men from being effeminate and cowardly to being big scary criminals.
You're early by a century. The lazy and up to no good criminal black man is a stereotype that mostly came around in the 1960s after we incentivized urban minorities to quit working above the table (and quit getting married) with asinine welfare eligibility rules. As an aside, president Johnson actually has some very quotable quotes on this subject.
In the many decades between the civil war and great depression blacks increasingly moved north and moved to urban areas (mostly in the north and midwest but some in the south) to get jobs in the industrial economy and because the alternatives in the south sucked. Throughout this time period they were stereotyped as tireless workers with some cultural differences much the same way other cultural groups have been over the years.
I remember checking NYTimes and CNN's frontpages and being shocked to see nothing written about it. The strike lasted nearly a month
Really wild to think about how this could've gone down in history books for immense historical significance if we just... paid any attention at all. Instead hardly anyone knows about it
Similarly there's an immigrant detention center near where I live in California. The detainees recently went on strike. They have to work to earn money in order to buy food. The work is "volunteer" so they can get away with paying them $1 for a full day's work. A bag of beans costs $3 and a 15-minute phone call is $2.50. So a full week of work gets you a phone call and some beans. The prison guards use intimidation tactics like "the judge won't like hearing about your bad behavior when your case is up" to keep them from organizing. Lots have gotten sick from the black mold growing in their cells too. It's straight up modern slavery and the only media source I've seen even mention it is LaborNotes[0]
[0] https://www.labornotes.org/2022/08/immigrant-detainees-strik...
Not only is slavery permitted, the US is the subject of the ire of the United Nations over it (the ILO, specifically). For-profit prisons with state minimum occupancy clauses. Charging prisoners for their time there. And one of the highest incarceration levels and worst recidivism rates in the world.
What exactly is the point of any of this?
Part of what makes this difficult to even count in the first place are bills like the Lacey act which makes it a felony for you to violate any other countries fish and wildlife laws - if you ever came into possession of a dead lobster less than 6 inches long for any reason - felony.
What happens is the folks who end up in prison haven't accrued any more of less liability - instead they drew attention.
If you'd like to learn more I recommend Three Felonies a Day. [1]
I guess the question I have for you is why aren't you in prison now? Why did you choose to commit all those crimes, and what makes you exempt?
Further if your argument is then 'well I shouldn't be in prison because I didn't get caught' - now you're no longer arguing that these people shouldn't have 'done crimes' your argument is they should have been better at it?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
>If you'd like to learn more I recommend Three Felonies a Day. [1]
It's hard to take that book seriously when the book fails to state how the average person actually commits felonies a day. According to the top critical review[1], it doesn't seem like most of the people in prisons are because of the reasons listed in the book.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R29XT1DSN5VBWK
Of course that's just your opinion, with no link to back it up. I tend to follow the information where I see police abuse, the abuse of rights by the courts/prosecutors, etc etc. You want to blow your mind? Follow a guy named Greg Doucette on the bird app. He routinely lists the violations of civil rights by authorities. It might open your mind.
Second, many of these "crimes" had no victim, so maybe it's not the people living their lives who are at fault, but rather an overzealous government who imprisons otherwise free people for doing no harm other than some abstract "moral" rule-breaking.
I was raised by two career long LEOs and if even a small fraction of other LEOs were as bad as my folks, it would be safe to assume that there are a lot of innocent people behind bars.
But at the same time, I'd be surprised if less than 5% of convicts had done the specific crime they were sentenced for even under the assumption of the entire law and justice system being fair, impartial, and skilled.
(I don't have a word for what I am: I don't believe in anarchy, but I would radically liberalise as much as possible. I would also wildly reduce the punishments for most of the remaining laws are enforced so that perfect enforcement wasn't completely bonkers, and then make enforcement perfect. Normally I see people aiming for one or the other, perfect enforcement or liberalisation, not both).
It's not about public safety or rehab or reintegration into society. It was always about making money.
Jail operators have every incentive to keep inmates "dangerous" and encourage them to rescind once they get out, because then the prison gets a new customer.
The only group who can "directly compete" with the prison industry is the death penalty industry. Because when an inmate is sent to death sentence, they can no longer be a customer for the prison industry.
>What exactly is the point of any of this?
At least for that there's a pretty simple non-nefarious explanation. The state wants to outsource their prisons/jails to some private entity. They agree to pay the private entity per prisoner housed. However, since the private entity needs to invest upfront cash to build the facility, they want some sort of assurance that the demand will materialize and they won't be left with a facility that's only 50% used, hence the minimum occupancy clause.
I haven't seen the actual minimum occupancy clauses, but realistically speaking they probably involve the state paying for the minimum occupancy even if actual prisoners are less (eg. if minimum occupancy is 800 prisoners but actual occupancy is 700, they still pay for 800 prisoners). It's not like the state has to come up with 100 extra prisoners to meet their obligations.
I agree this causes skewed incentives (ie. the marginal cost of imprisoning someone can potentially be zero), but if you're deciding to lock someone up or not hinges on whether it costs $30k or $0, you probably have other issues. If a convict is dangerous then he should be locked up, if he's not he shouldn't be. Money shouldn't play a factor in this.
That sounds pretty nefarious to me because the state has a duty of care for its citizens - of which this is a clear and flagrant abdication.
> I haven't seen the actual minimum occupancy clauses, but realistically speaking they probably involve the state paying for the minimum occupancy even if actual prisoners are less (eg. if minimum occupancy is 800 prisoners but actual occupancy is 700, they still pay for 800 prisoners). It's not like the state has to come up with 100 extra prisoners to meet their obligations.
Probably worth not speculating. [1] At the end of the day this is the same thing - the state should be paying less when there's less crime. It should be incentivized to stop crime from happening in the first place.
It should be spending that money not on guaranteeing profits for corporations but instead on programs that reduce criminality. The state should feel the burden of higher criminality and reap the reward of lowering it.
[1] http://www.njjn.org/uploads/digital-library/Criminal-Lockup-...
Which part of it constitutes "a clear and flagrant abdication"?
>At the end of the day this is the same thing - the state should be paying less when there's less crime. It should be incentivized to stop crime from happening in the first place.
>It should be spending that money not on guaranteeing profits for corporations but instead on programs that reduce criminality.
This ignores the basic economic reality that the upfront investment needs to be paid somehow. Without it, you end up with too little prison capacity and overcrowded prisons, which is also inhumane. The alternatives aren't much better:
1. if the upfront investment is funded by the taxpayer, and it ends up getting underutilized, the taxpayer is still on the hook for the opportunity cost of the investment
2. if prisons are privatized but without guarantees, the state will need to pay more to make up for the uncertainly, leaving the taxpayers on the hook.
If the facility is under utilized less investment will be needed in the future and conditions can be improved for existing inmates.
What are the moral hazards here? The people running the prisons aren't the ones sentencing/convicting criminals.
>If the facility is under utilized less investment will be needed in the future and conditions can be improved for existing inmates.
What's the difference between wasting money because the state didn't meet the minimum inmate quota, and wasting money because the state invested in a 1000 inmate prison but there's only 600 prisoners?
In one instance 2 judges were being bribed directly to sentence juveniles to maximimum sentences cutting out the middleman and directly selling minority children into slavery like it's 1822 rather than 2022.
You actually don't see the moral hazard here?
under this interpretation you should probably ban police/correctional officers as well, because they have the same moral hazard. Same goes for anyone else that is involved in institutions that profit off human suffering (eg. hospitals).
Now you make a spurious connection between prison and hospital because I guess suffering happens in both institutions? Yes in theory EVERY institution may advocate for positions that advance their interests over the populace but none other is so odious as to advocate for more people to be in chains so they may directly trade the hours and years of their lives for gold nor selling the labor of the slaves it has so corruptly acquired by advocating for greater bondage.
It seems to me obvious that police officers, correction officers, and hospital staff are all absolutely necessary for the function of our society. Having private prisons which only house 8% of inmates at this time absolutely isn't.
There are many more. These above make the pay to stay seem tame in terms of impact.
Generally I wonder if people comprehend that prisons should be (for the majority of inmates) intended to reform people; that is, to make them better and show them a better path. I'm not clear how people think throwing a bunch of criminals together in a featureless pen to lift weights, fight and fraternize is going to achieve anything. If anything, these people warrant more social investment than the average person, with the intent of educating them and building honest skills in them, so that they have new opportunities that they didn't have previously, when they made their mistakes the first time around.
I guess this sentiment is seen as sappy, unrealistic and saccharine, and of course socialist. Of course it has to be paired with having decent socialized healthcare and education, but I think we have seen in practice how the contemporary American school of thought for prisons does not work, and we have seen in other countries what is possible, and how reformist and sympathetic attitudes to incarceration, combined with strong social support generally can produce better outcomes in regards to crime.
I tried bringing up this line of reasoning one time with two coworkers I was close with. Both had the attitude of "why should I be paying for these criminals to be comfortable and get an education and stuff while I'm working and supporting a family and not committing crimes". A roof over their head and 3 really basic meals per day was all they really wanted to provide.
"Sit in the corner and think about what you did" is a method for punishing little kids, but my coworkers couldn't be convinced we probably need to adapt our strategies for adults.
As Articbull mentioned, slavery is permitted in the Constitution for prisons. So even our noble eradication of slavery after the Civil War was incomplete. And surprise, surprise, what population group is over-represented in prison?
I sent a friend a link to a YT video showing the prison conditions in Norway. He thought that was nuts. How will they learn the error of their ways if they don't suffer?
Even trying to appeal to practical concerns like recidivism rates doesn't work. To the cold-hearted, that just proves that these felons are incorrigible and deserve to be locked away forever.
That kind of clause is common for a supply contract (e.g., Buyer promises to purchase goods/services from supplier, minimum order of X units per year.). If a state purchased more units from a prison service provider than it needed, then I can imagine that state trying to re-sell the services to a neighboring state, but I can’t imagine them locking up more people so that they don’t have to pay for unused services. If that happens then a state should just negotiate its contracts differently in the future.
The other stuff I agree with you on.
Wait there are supporters of this? You're telling me if I asked 100 people on the street, there'd be someone that said "oh yeah this is a pretty fair and reasonable law to charge the inmates 5-star hotel prices"??
"Is it fair to incarcerate individuals for their preference of intoxicant in a free and liberal democracy?"
"Should drug users and other junkies be taken off the streets to keep them safe for the rest of us?"
"Do you think prisoners should be charged $250/night for their incarceration?"
“Should prisoners pay the price of their stay in prison, including room, board, food and security?”
Confronting people on the street with questions like this won't give you a representative sample of what people really think. The sort of people who support the system to maintain their class/lifestyle are likely to ignore your question or to perceive your activist intent and lie to you to avoid getting sucker punched by the 'crazy person on the street.'
Idioms are hard! Want to apologize on behalf of the English language.
There was actually a sigh of relief in many circles when New York lost the 2012 Olympics bid, because many people did not see the benefit of holding the games being worth the massive headaches of infrastructure overload.
Prison conditions in the US are infamous for the degrading of the human experience to a point of no return.
Open rape culture, radicalization, utterly despicable behavior that even barbarians would shiver at openly covered in popular culture as fact.
As someone who grew up outside the US, it is truly astonishing how fucked up the system is.
The most extreme example of this is that the site of the 1970 Lake Placid Winter Olympics was designed to be used post games as a prison, which it is today.
Ever notice that executive power is the same everywhere? They think the laws are unfair to them, because they have to implement totally unrealistic laws, and get blamed harshly for "small" problems (you know, "harshly" except it doesn't carry any consequences for them, except, at best loss of face).
They respond by not following laws, refusing even to implement judicial directives and the like. Their own (sometimes personal) interest, for them, trumps laws and the directives of judges. They have largely made sure their names are never revealed to the people they serve, as they no longer have the support of the people, and they feel they cannot be replaced.
Sorry but wtf?! Read Manufacturing Consent. Don't demonize us. We're not down with this shit.
I haven't been to them, so I can't say whether they're up to the level one would expect, but they're listed as five star hotels.
The actual mechanism probably has many more links including the voting of politicians who share the People's values, who then pass laws in the People's interest. But the underlying axiom of democracy is rule of the People, indirect as the American implementation is, is it not?
This gives the USA the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world.
The next four?
* Rwanda
* Turkmenistan
* El Salvador
* Cuba
[1]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/incarcera...
Additionally, if you look at the racial breakdown of who's incarcerated in the USA, it's disproportionately black relative to number of blacks per capita residing in the country. Blacks are incarcerated at 5x the rate of whites, and make up 40% of all incarcerated individuals.
This is insane.
https://i.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/300304290/mori-youth-ke...
And I wouldn’t rush to the notion that you need to be justified in using hyperbolic/metaphorical language before you can criticize the problem.
[1] https://youtu.be/LC4Qxq0KMBc
[2] https://youtu.be/lOKiKZeYZbU
Why would kids growing up in a remote community with no work, surrounded by drug and alcohol abuse, in a culture that tolerates child sex abuse, whose brains are cooked from day one by FASD and inhalants _not_ commit more crime.
Example from yesterday, a black pastor was arrested for watering his neighbors plants because he "looked suspicious":
https://news.yahoo.com/black-alabama-pastor-says-wrongfully-...
The police don't know who that man was, or why he was on property that didn't belong to him. They're not mind readers. If he had provided the identification (or at least his name/DOB) that they had asked for, then it probably would have become clear to them that he was telling the truth. But by REFUSING to give them any information that would prove his story true, he escalated a situation that could have been resolved without his arrest.
People seem to forget that we ask police TO INVESTIGATE. Not just walk up, accept whatever story they are given and then drive away.
Exactly. They're aren't mind readers but they made a decision that he was commiting a crime or about to commit one. They escalated it, not him.
No, actually that's not what they decided.
They decided that, before they just walk away from their SWORN DUTY to investigate without knowing who he was or whether he actually belonged at that property, they would actually do their jobs and find that out that information by doing a simple thing like asking him to identify himself.
I know some people really don't like police officers, but, in the future, you should try to make sure that that dislike doesn't make you completely irrational.
If they cannot be sued for a breach of it, do they have it?
SCOTUS opined: “Nothing in the language of the Due Process Clause itself requires the State to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens against invasion by private actors.”
(DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services (1989) 489 U.S. 189).
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/489/189
But even if you take the position that the police are not REQUIRED to do anything (and I would disagree with that position), that does not mean that they CANNOT do anything. In this case, the police CHOSE (to use a term more suitable to your position) to investigate. And nothing precludes them from choosing to do so. Or do you take the position that the police are neither required to, nor can they choose to investigate when called?
No, police have no "sworn duty" to investigate - you literally made this up out of your head.
“I, (state name), do solemnly swear or affirm that I will faithfully execute the duties of (state position) of the State of Texas, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States and of Texas, so help me God.”
"I do solemnly affirm that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the position of ______________________ according to the best of my ability and perform my duties in a manner consistent with the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of New York."
They're all like this.
----
No, seeing a black guy watering flowers is not grounds for anything, even if they are someone else's flowers. I cannot believe I have to make this point.
So I assume those "duties" they're referring to don't include investigating when they are assigned a call. Perhaps you think "duties" just refers to sitting in their car eating donuts?
> "No, seeing a black guy watering flowers is not grounds for anything, even if they are someone else's flowers. I cannot believe I have to make this point."
Again, you have to pay attention to the actual facts when you participate in these discussions.
The police were not just driving down the street and, upon seeing a black man watering some flowers, say to themselves "he must be up to no good". They were specifically CALLED by a neighbor to the property to investigate a suspicious person on their neighbor's property (you know, the typical 'looking out for your neighbor' thing). Your position seems to be that the police should not have done anything. Simple looked at him, shrugged their shoulders and walked away.
Because that's exactly what you would want the police to do if YOU were away and your neighbor saw someone on your property and called the police to investigate. You'd absolutely want them to not find out who that person was or why he was on your property.
But that leaves the fact that white me had no reason to get my back up, because I knew the white cop wasn't being racist. So I handed him my ID and sat quietly on a privately owned rock until he was done with it.
How come black people (specifically African-Americans) are the only people who seem to have these "racism" issues with police? What about other minorities? How many Indians do you see on TV fighting with police or getting shot? What about Hispanics or Asians? Hell, what about African immigrants? It seems quite strange to me that for all this talk of "systemic racism", none of the other minorities seem to have these issues.
It's almost as if the racist police don't have any issue with any minority OTHER than black people. Which makes me think that it really has nothing to do with race and everything to do with what some people are being taught.
There was a video a few weeks ago of young black children (probably around 5-8 years old) taunting, cursing and HITTING police in Minnesota.
https://nypost.com/2022/07/12/video-shows-child-hit-and-swea...
Now, you tell me, who taught that child to behave that way? And when that child grows up, what possible interaction could he have with police that DOESN'T end up with him being beaten, shot or killed?
Everyone wants to look at one side of the issue and ignore what is going on everyday in black families and communities that leads to these confrontations.
To that point, some of the most racist people I know are black people. Growing up as a black person myself in Brooklyn, and hearing it spoken often, I can tell you that there is no one that black people around here dislike more than Jews. It's an irrational kind of hatred based on the normal nonsense "they own all the banks, they own all the property", etc. If you messed up your credit and can't get a loan, it's the Jews fault. If someone gets evicted because they didn't pay their rent for 6 months, its' the Jews fault. That kind of thing. Racism and prejudice exists in all of us.
But you're right, I probably don't really understand how racism works. Because I have never actually experienced real racism. But, to be fair, neither has 99.9% of the people you see on your TV, social media or in the streets screaming about racism because a white person put their hair in dreadlocks or some other such nonsense. What was the most recent one, Drew Barrymore frolicking in the rain was somehow "erasing black people"?
Look, no one denies that there are actual racist people in the world. But the current state of discourse on this topic is a complete joke. REAL racism is largely a thing of the past. The problem is that what people are trying to classify as real racism these days are just wildly over exaggerated claims based on there being a racist boogeyman around every corner.
The truth is that the 'everything is racist' mantra, or the overexaggerated claims of racism, is actually funded and promoted by global elites and politicians who would very much like to create as much division as possible to keep us focused on non-issues like race instead of the fact that every time one of these "crises" occurs, their net income doubles. We are sadly being played as pawns.
I want to make it clear that I agree with you 100% on that much. We're more polarized this year than last year, and we already thought it was very polarized then. I was born in the 70's, I'm an attentive and perceptive dude, and I've never seen anything close to this. People tell me it was worse right before I was born. Someone here gave me a book about the Weather Underground but I haven't finished it yet.
I think it's a blessing in a way that everyone lives in their phone. If the culture war were playing out predominately in meat space, way more people would be dying.
The kids call ideas from 20 years ago reactionary. Wait, hold up. Too many of the kids -know- and believe they -need- the word reactionary, what the fuck, and I'm not talking about vocab.
But I still maintain that the policed do not bear more responsibility than the police. The police are the professionals, and they're the ones empowered to kill people.
A bit more constructively: I suppose if everyone everywhere taught their kids the police are there to help, the way the Electric Company taught me, then that specific problem might be alleviated. Perhaps with unintended consequences. But I basically had to unlearn it, and for them it would require a comfort with a level of cognitive dissonance that I'm sure no individual can sustain, let alone a whole community. At least if you accept their history is separate. Like, my ancestors on my dad's side came here in the 1600's too, but they were on the top of the boat.
Living in Denver for three years and having great HD over the air TV I'd watch the local news while cooking meals. The local news spent considerable time discussing the issues plaguing the refugees with their relationships with certain local law enforcement agencies, as well as the large Hispanic populations. I spent a lot of time hanging out with some refugees and it was interesting to hear their perspectives versus that of my barber who was Hispanic. Not once was my refugee ever asked to prove they were here legally, but my barber was nearly every time he had any kind of interaction with the police where they had some reason to fish for a reason to ask for identification.
Where I live in Central Texas now, it's largely about Hispanic interactions in the news or the continued coverage of the most recent large school shooting here. A huge complexity added to many Hispanic populations around the US is the ability to comfortably and freely voice their frustration without risk of deportation. A lot of abuse they suffer at the hand of law enforcement goes unnoticed on the national scene because they don't want to take to the streets about it and risk losing literally everything they own including the clothes they are wearing when they are arrested.
I'm only 1/4th Hispanic and while I haven't ever been pulled in Central Texas, in the the Dallas suburb of McKinney Texas, where I lived for about a decade I got pulled over all the time and every time they were baffled when #1 I don't know Spanish at all, beyond basic food names from eating at food trucks, #2 I have a slight southern accent because I grew up in Arkansas and sound like everyone else I was around, and #3 I wasn't some easy score for them.
Of the 30+ times I got pulled over on the east-side of McKinney, not once was I ever given a ticket or arrested me but it came pretty freakin' close and I can't imagine how much differently if I didn't immediately register as "he actually might be white".
I have done the following in McKinney, Allen, and/or Frisco Tx:
* Had to do the stupid human tricks on the side of the road before noon, because they claimed I was swerving and they smelled a hint of alcohol on my breath.
* Blown in a breathalyzer in the parking lot of an elementary school because the law enforcement officer camped out using the school as place to nail speeders said I was driving erratically and was staggering as I got out of my car. The erratic driving was specifically around having issues parking. Due to an injury I needed to be able to open my car door all the way open and when I realized I couldn't, I decided to back up and move over a bit more so I could open it all the way. That was the bad driving. The stagger was actually a limp if I put too much pressure on my left leg.
To add insult to injury, the final kick in the balls, etc. was when he started trying to imply I was there for questionable reasons when I was actually there to drop off lunch to my wife who had taught at the school for several years at that point and I routinely volunteered at the school which meant I had actually passed a more rigorous background check than he did to get his job.
* Been accused of having a fake id drivers license because for whatever reason their inability to find something about me to give me a ticket or arrest me on resorts to petty accusations to attempt to get a rise out of me so that they can escalate it even more till they can arrest me for making them scared, or worse they can use their terrible training and end up panicking and pulling their weapon and firing on the extreme end outcome of things.
Too many times to count I was told in parting words I could avoid these problems staying out of the east side of town because that is where all the problems are, or for the times I got pulled over close to home in the more ...
Or is there other factors?
That doesn’t make sense. Building a prison in itself doesn’t induce crime nor does it induce prison sentences. Judges and juries have no quotas to fill based on vacancy.
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/18/1118108084/michael-conahan-ma...
Some private prison corporations and judges both felt it was profitable enough. Two Pennsylvania judges received $2.8M in bribes from private prisons to send 4,000 kids to the private prisons with long sentences; apparently ruining 4,000 kids lives was profitable enough to justify $2.8M in bribes. One of the judges has managed to get released early.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/08/11/139536686...
https://boingboing.net/2013/08/06/judge-who-accepted-private...
E.g., private prisons likely spend at least as much in legal lobbying efforts to maintain high prison populations as they do in bribes.
If you accept the idea of the "war on drugs", it also goes for drug offenses: by putting drug dealers behind bars, you prevent people from buying drugs and harming themselves.
I don’t think it’s a right way of framing it. It’s not about acceptance. If you look at the statistics on consumption, harm suffered from abuse or how the illegal trade is doing between highly repressive countries and countries which have legalised drugs or don’t jail consumers but try to help them kick their addiction, you can factually say that the “war on drugs” is an abject failure leading to more harm than good like prohibition before it.
The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs is probably the most harmful thing the USA ever did to the world.
Shocking that 55% of inmates are in for violent crimes such as murder, rape, and manslaughter.
source: https://felonvoting.procon.org/incarcerated-felon-population...
That would mean for 2mm prisoners there would be 1.1mm murderers, rapists, and manslaughterers. That seems like way too large a number to be realistic with the declining rate of murder, rape, and manslaughter.
If a rapist spends five times as long in prison compared to a drug offense, then there will be five times as many rapists behind bars if the quantity of the two crime's convictions are comparable.
I got it wrong. It's actually only 3.7% in for drug possession, not 4.5%.
I'll let you figure out your mistake from there.
The clue is: It looks like the numbers are reversed which would make a lot more sense.
Land of the free
Edit: I found a variety of sources that suggest 18% of state and 15% of federal prisoners. Nowhere near as high as I was expecting.
The US doesn't actually have that much higher crime rates than other countries otherwise though
Another issue, like this article points out, is that once you're in even if you get out your life is pretty much ruined and you're much more likely to go back in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHz2Hmq7soo
Just note that this story is about Jails, not Prison. They are different.
Rough numbers reported a lot are 1mm uighurs, 1.6mm ukrainians through Russian 'filtration' camps (though most aren't held long term).
The Government isn’t a magical entity of absolute perfection. Large classes of banned substances are indeed banned for good reason. Their effects on individual/societal well being documented quite heavily.
Two things can be true at the same time: 1. Some substances that are detrimental to human health need to be controlled. 2. The US government and its present approach to enforcing laws is equally harmful and needs a complete overhaul.
Yes. Tons of petty criminals and low level nonviolent felons are behind bars because whatever they were doing it they did it while packing heat or had a gun in their possession when their door got kicked in.
Packing while committing some other crime is a felony by itself in many places and in the case of federal crimes (e.g. drug trafficking) a multiplicative effect on your max sentence and raises the minimum by a ton. Many/most states also have laws that copy the federal law.
This is why why drug dealers who've made it big pay someone else to pack for them and/or store their product as soon as their business can support that.
I'd rather the law be more around information than control. If one believes in the idea of freedom and liberty in the US, then one should support a model where individuals are allowed to make their own decisions, but ensure the facts around such substances are well researched and publicized.
Alcohol kills, and yet is not actually very well controlled at all. Marijuana doesn't kill anyone directly, and yet the lies told about it has kept it tightly controlled, even as the real facts continue to come out.
I don't believe the government really has any obligation to keep us safe from our own poor decisions, assuming those poor decisions can be argued to be have been informed using truthful information.
Let’s just publish the literature online and let people choose their dosage of Ivermectin.
Guns also need to be controlled (in my opinion way more that they currently are) but that doesn’t mean that I am advocating for them to be illegal.
Let’s pull the stats on stabbing or blunt force trauma and ban baseball knives, kitchen knives and nail clippers as well ?
Terrorists ran people over with vehicles. So of course, renting a Uhaul van now has to come with a lengthy background check?
The absurdity of the comparison astounds me, and I’m willing to bet, would certainly astonish you were you to step outside the bubble you seem to be in. Have you met anyone that’s known or was a user of synthetics? Read up on the opioid crisis and the societal impact that’s had. It’s a crying shame that it isn’t taught in schools or spoken about even more than it is at present.
When you draw an absolute line saying drug abuse has no victims, I laugh and point out other “crimes” that do and by your logic are thus different and must be banned.
Now, if you make another point about “forcing people to buy from violent underground marketplaces”, this is where your original comment becomes entirely irrelevant and you’re projecting some unsubstantiated paranoia of yours as a factual argument.
These are addictive substances. Many if not most of them leave permanent psychological scars and inhibit normal human functioning in ways that, unlike naturally occurring substances such as coffee are considered DETRIMENTAL to societal health and safety. By limiting exposure of society to synthetics or dangerous drugs, we limit their harm.
Your argument seems to be everyone in the US population wakes up everyday thinking “where can I get five ks of that sweet sweet Birria” ?
Stop acting like a dickhead if you don’t have any experience with rehabilitating the victims of these idiotic policies you’re proposing and go outside your moms basement once in a while.
This isn't your 70s hippie weed or 80s crack. Dealing in hard drugs these days is a business with a pretty high body count due to the low LD50 of the substances involved. It's like the addictive substances equivalent of giving dynamite to teenagers. A lot of fun will be had but a lot of bad outcomes too.
So yeah, I'd say that dealing often has a victim too.
They’re also sourced from China, a geopolitical adversary where political figures routinely point to the opium wars and revenge for that period on the west.
There is a separate issue of doctors over-prescribing dangerous drugs and people abusing those drugs. I think preventing those overdoses and deaths takes a totally different approach.
You understand what “addictive substances” means , right? Your solution to protecting a population from being hooked on drugs is . . . Give them more and without restriction?
Sometimes the naïveté in the tech community amazes me.
I suppose you could argue that none of these people were injured or killed by the drugs--they were injured or killed by someone misusing the drugs.
But that same argument works guns too. Good luck trying to find some convincing way to distinguish the two.
Separately I just learned fentanyl test strips are not legal in all 50 states. Given that fentanyl is a leading cause of death, giving access to test strips can save lives. I don't know how heavily this law is enforced, but it's a great example of cutting your nose to spite your face. To me it's a litmus test that reinforces the notion the USA's stance on drugs was never about harm reduction.
[0] https://substanceabusepolicy.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1...
is this satire?
Even if you wanna weasel your way out of this and just say it's just "a contributing factor" (literally everything could be) how could you possibly even tie those things together?
https://famous-trials.com/george-floyd/2648-george-floyd-the...
What an absurd thing to say. Even a cursory Google search proves this to be utterly false.
Also fentanyl is a big thing because opiates are illegal. If people had a choice they'd stick to the good stuff like oxycodone, which is significantly less dangerous.
The first time, I was given an opioid (after surgery) I felt irrationally angry-- as in completely irrational anger at e.g., the color the walls were painted. After snapping at my girlfriend who was being super sweet and supportive, I immediately stopped taking them. This was pills, but I do not recall the name. The angry feeling passed within hours after missing the next dose. The period of apology lasted much longer. I can believe that someone experiencing similar irrational anger could do more than verbally snap at someone.
The second time, was Dilaudid via IV while recovering in hospital (machine with button to press to self-dose when in pain). No bad reaction this time.
I wouldn't describe either experience as euphoric. The first experience was negative and the second, other than helping with pain, was neutral.
Fentanyl is very deadly and will start spiking these numbers fast. This means we will have 180k+ yearly deaths in 2.32 years (if it didn't get worse than 2020). wtf. Fentanyl is illegal (a felony in most areas). I agree the War on drugs didn't work. But we are about to lose millions of citizens.
https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/deaths/index.html
Was it ever framed as harm reduction?
You may not like what it took to get done, but it did work. I'm not advocating for the heavy-handed approach, but it's intellectually dishonest to say that it can't work.
Also, the other countries have done it with a much smaller imprisonment per capita.
You are making a very different argument - that if the US was an entirely different type of society with a different government, culture and history, then this approach might work.
I understand the desire to not needlessly arrest people, on the other hand, I think leaving them to their own devices so they can do drugs in campers illegally parked on the side of the street is no honestly solution either.
I'm all for drug confiscation. If you're caught with drugs, we just take them and destroy them. No arrest and processing, just straight surrender of the illegal substance. Use this as an opportunity to enroll users into programs and get them off of their habits and back on their feet. Use the additional manpower to truly target those who import and traffic in these substances.
Frankly, it sounds like you've never really researched or grappled with this particular social issue. Or participated in it.
Frankly, it sounds like you think this phenomenon is so unique that only a particular expert class is allowed to have opinions on it; and you're making wild guesses as to my experience in order to discount my opinion without actually putting forward the necessary arguments.
That's the entire problem right there. It's also mostly untrue - with very few exceptions there are legal ways to possess an use lots of drugs, including cocaine for example. But drug possession should never be a crime. It is a wildly illiberal approach.
"Plenty of countries have solved the drug problem by eliminating their populations; it would be dishonest to say that it cannot be done".
My preference is with a society that supports the freedom of the individual. One side-effect of that kind of society is that the unlucky and irresponsible are ill-protected. All told, I prefer that situation to an authoritarian, totalitarian, or fascist society.
It's a calculus with numerous concessions on all sides. I suspect we're highly programmed to support the perspective that corresponds to our geographic origins, even though mine's the best.
America has had more than a fair go at a heavy handed anti-drug policy and it was and continues to be a spectacular failure. To sit here at the end of it and say that they didn't go hard enough, (particularly after horrific actions such as poisoning marijuana and therefore smokers with paraquat) is monstrous.
This argument veers a little bit into “sure it’s harsh but their trains do run on time” territory, at least for me.
What authoritarian countries are able to achieve at the cost of human rights would preferably not serve as inspiration, or even as a point of comparison.
> have successfully stopped nearly all drug use and trade with heavy-handed policies.
Like Indonesia for instance? It has one of the strictest drug laws in the world supposedly. Yet 70% of the people imprisoned in the country were convicted of drug related crimes. They had this policy for many years, yet this is what their president said a few years back:
On July 21, 2017, Jokowi stated that Indonesia was in a state of emergency due to widespread drug use, consequently instructing law enforcement officers that “if [narcotics suspects] resist a little bit, just shoot them immediately.”
Which would that their strict policies, far from having stopped nearly all drug trade and consumption, were a complete failure.
Also around 2% of all people in the country are active drug users.
> but it did work
So no, it didn’t
> but it’s intellectually dishonest to say that it can’t work
Yes. Theoretically if you imprison or shot every drug user fast enough and your police force is not thoroughly corrupt it might work. Not sure both of these things can ever be compatible in practice, though.
*https://ppid.bnn.go.id/konten/unggahan/2020/10/Drug-Abuse-Pr...
And where do they get that statistic… the reality will be higher I think.
What nonsense is this? Countries with capital punishment on drugs like thailand, Philippines and singapore (and before malaysia who cancelled the death penalty but are still strict) are rife with dope; you can buy it everywhere; I mean it is literally shoved in your face on every corner. Which countries are you talking about? I been to many, I only drink (by the way; a dangerous, addictive harddrug; people tend to forget alcohol as drug), but I got offered everywhere, all the time. And there are many native users, you can see them all over the place.
UAE I don't know; I would never go there.
With the legalization of marijuana consumption has gone up. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220719162133.h...
So to say they failed is not fact, very few laws eliminate the act that is illegal. Murder happens despite being illegal, and will continue to.
I would agree the cost is too high, that the policy is wrong, but it is pretty clear the illegality reduces consumption.
I don’t understand how you can compare murder with drug use (or even selling drugs). Nobody says “let me try murder today and see if I like it” but plenty of people say (and do) “let me try drugs for fun today and see if I like it”.
Not all illegal activities are the same.
> The government strains, at extraordinary expense, to pretend they can stop drugs from being made, bought and sold, but they can't.
My point is that whether or not something still happens once illegal does not have much bearing on whether it should remain so. Nor does it signal failure of the policy as long as there is reduction.
Because marijuana being illegal did reduce the production, and consumption.
In the meantime, before legalization, weed only become stronger and more readily available. Many teenagers could get it more easily than booze. That was with the government at all levels doing everything it could to stop marijuana use. With many ruined lives of otherwise free people coming with those polices.
At least in my circles, usage has gone up significantly.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2022/08/25/cannabi...
It’s not like Vancouver or SF decided first to have safe injection sites, and then suddenly had huge heroin problems.
Sure they could. They just don't try because the current system is very very good for them.
Other countries like Portugal and the Netherlands have done a fantastic job on lowering their drug use rate dramatically.
And it's very simple - they treat drug consumption as a medical problem, first and foremost. Possessing drugs, any drugs, for your own personal consumption is _not_ a crime in either place.
Indeed, both countries go out of their way to provide facilities for addicts where they can safely take their drug and get medical treatment and counseling with no fear of being arrested.
----
If the United States wanted to end the drug war, they could simply look at the examples that worked and copied them. But they are much more interested in oppressing hapless addicts and jailing them.
Leave it to America to reward the rich and shit on the poor.
A student takes a loan to get an education. When taking the loan they agreed to the terms which includes paying it back. There is no stipulation in the loan agreement on what jobs they take to pay back the loan. Being in debt does not change what jobs are available.
I find the whole system disgusting.
The US Govt purposefully restricts opportunities to request asylum in the way in which our govt deems 'legal.' e.g. a few people at a time through sparse border crossings.
And then prosecute those who cross the border because it's the only way to state their claim.
Shameful.
The propaganda of 'invasion' and 'replacement' has really made this a politically toxic issue. A dangerous one at that.
It had been occupied for 65000 years by people that might have argued otherwise though!
Also at least in Britain the number of capital crimes increased almost exponentially in the late 17th and the 18th centuries. So I’m not sure that’s quite right.
(And no, we don't charge them the cost afterwards.)
I absolutely think we should buy these services from other EU countries where costs are lower. I don't get why the EU single market legislation shouldn't apply to this.
[1]: https://www.sbb.gov.tr/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/2022_Yili_...
And if reducing costs is your only goal. Well there are other options to get rid of criminals..
Or you could just them as free labor to build those house for the poor.
Better example would be Norway or Netherlands: more expensive prisons, but least prisoners per capita: https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2014/04/the_netherlands_has_ex...
The point of prison system should be rehabilitation not keeping prisoners down for life.
other things that cost money include: soap, toilet paper, toothpaste, and basic analgesics like aspirin. phone calls are around $9 a minute. a letter is around $4. if you had an accident or need serious medical care it will be billed to you during your stay and comes out of your commissary.
oh and any supervised release after your sentence? that costs money too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_fee
Where is the profit for prisons? It's twofold: forced labor where inmates make license plates and some basic goods, and admin fees for managing prisons where taxpayers foot the bill.
It almost seems like someone wants people in prison, as if someone is profiting off of it or something. Hmmmm....
Norway is relatively small and homogenous compared to the US. And doesn't have a puritanical and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps culture.
EDIT: I don't mean to defend the US here. It's a terrible system. Rather just point out the societies are so different I don't think what works in Norway can transfer directly to the US.
(Well, I guess you could say that countries like North Korea are worse, but even the thought of having to compare against North Korea should give a hint on how bad things really are.)
The person profiled in the article owes 1.5 million after 17 years, so will never be able to accumulate any sort of wealth.
And is it politically incorrect to say that this is essentially a form of slavery?
A day after my speeding ticket payment was due, I was pulled over, arrested for driving on a suspended license (quite roughly, I might add), and hauled to jail, where they booked me, processed me, and charged me thousands upon thousands of dollars for the privilege of being arrested. The whole process was structured around profit.
It absolutely demolished my meager savings account at the time, and damn near kept me from being able to attend the code bootcamp I was enrolled in. It taught me a serious lesson about the law: They exist only for power and profit. The entire experience cost me over $3000 for a speeding ticket of 5 mph over the stated limit. I've got a nice little arrest mention on my criminal record now, though, so that's nice.
Fines, taxes and some big companies appear there.
It hasn't been a loophole for years (fringe benefits tax took care of that), but many older people still do it anyway.
You can also pay them by credit or debit card online, but there is a small processing fee for doing so.
Not taxes though. My tax is automatically deducted from my salary and paid by my employer every month. All employers do this.
I guess it's for those cases you use the Pay Taxes option in my banks app. I've used it a few times and it's really useful
Even many third world countries offer that...
The Government want you to use cash only when it's convenient for them....
I'm not sure it's conveinient for that crowd either. It's always puzzled me how you were expected to make it to government offices open roughly 9-5 while most people work those same hours.
Suspended license driving is anti-social. Any law with a firm cutoff or deadline, and no gradual increase of penalty, sucks for those who barely miss complying with it. There needs to be some kind of consequence, though.
No, there just need to be better laws - or at least, more fit to the "crime" response.
In fact, if he was indeed "5 mph above the speed limit" he shouldn't even have been fined in the first place.
Police can and should use discretion (and they often/mostly do, this was just a shitty move in a shitty district).
Not to mention that, even given the fine was ok, there should have been an online/bank transfer way to pay...
If so, why would him having a debt to the state matter? Clearly him mailing the cash or not wouldn't change his risk profile for driving.
The anti-social thing here is to leverage what is ostensibly a safety concern into a tool of compliance.
As I alluded to, a gradual system of consequences building to suspension, or some other method of easing into or helping avoid the penalty state, would be more fair, especially for light offenses like the OP’s.
That does not change that we expect people not to drive on public roads when they’re barred from using them.
I understand your frustration, but the law does not exist ONLY (or at all, if I'm being honest) for power and profit. The law exists to provide each person with a baseline to guide their interactions, whether it be between them and other individuals, or between them and their government.
Now, obviously you have abuses and especially when some in the government/beaurocracy find out they can get funds by abusing their authority (e.g. civil asset forfeiture), but that's not why the law exists, and it doesn't happen everywhere. That's just a symptom of a lack of oversight by we, the people (chiefly).
Jail time and a permanent record is more punishment than it sounds. It severely affects future employment, even things like renting an apartment or getting a car loan (the ubiquitous background checks are done to weed such people out).
So your argument is that it is not the fault of the people who are paid to do this job, out of our tax money, but it is somehow our fault, even though your average person has literally no input whatsoever into any of this?
That's just false.
I mean, almost 90% of Americans live in a non-swing state where their vote is entirely meaningless.
Sigh, another kid who has not faced life.
That's not coming into money. His $21k was compensation for the vehicle he no longer has. He was more liquid for some time but not in any way richer. It's grossly unfair for the state to interpret that money as something they could go after, even if such pay-to-stay laws were fair (which I don't think they are). What replacement vehicle is he going to get with $3k now?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtV5ev6813I
Who then is supposed to pay for a criminal’s stay in prison? Law-abiding tax-payers?
Laws that SEND people to prison (like drug possession laws) can be fairly painted as ridiculous, but when it comes to paying for the actual prison infrastructure… it seems a lot less ethically clear.
Absolutely yes.
If society is improved by the removal of these individuals from free association therein, and the decision is made to do so, then society should be responsible for the costs necessary to make it happen.
Cost of enforcement should be a limiting factor on the expansion of laws. If nothing else, it is a proxy for the number of people criminalized, which is a measure of social acceptability (and/or lack of negative impact) of the behaviour itself.
$10 Slave-labor Breakfast
$5 Leasure time
$10 bathroom access
$5 Billy club smack
$5 radio access
$15 Slave-labor lunch
$30 sunshine
$20 Slave-labor dinner
$10 tv
$10 phone
$129 Cage rental