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Tias posted:I'm sorry if this is either stupid or obvious (non-US citizen, and not so acquinted with the politics), but isn't it because a new group of voters with prison background could launch and support a candidate running on prison reform? The thing is you had to actually be a felon to lose your voting rights. Some places it was permanent, some places it wasn't, but you couldn't lose your voting rights for minor poo poo. Generally it's a felony if it's a serious crime or the prison sentence was longer than a year. This was for things like rape, murder, massive fraud, and grand theft. For a long time you couldn't lose your right to vote for things like petty theft, drug possession, public drunkenness, getting into a fight, etc. It wasn't considered a huge deal because it was really, really hard to lose your voting rights and you had to do major poo poo that would separate you from society for a long time anyway. The problem is that this "let's be tougher on crime" mentality is seeking to make more and more things felonies or have longer prison terms. You have people getting like 15 years for what amount to minor drug charges. Actually you understand American politics perfectly well now. Elected officials are almost impossible to vote out. If memory serves like 91% of elections are won by incumbents. As much as people obsess over the presidential election the ones that really matter are senatorial and representative ones, which are posts generally held by the same people for decades. With all the redistricting going on these elections have been warped into corrupt insanity. Part of the reason the two party system sticks around is tribalism and gerrymandering but that's too big a thing for one post and the details aren't relevant to this thread. In particular the Republican party wants people that don't vote for them to just stop loving voting. One thing to note is that black people with drug charges tend to get much nastier sentences than white people. Meanwhile, white people tend to use cocaine, black people tend to use crack, the latter of which has severely harsher sentences, often past the magic number of a year. Guess which party black people tend to vote for? The American prison system is not for reforming criminals. In a lot of places the system is specifically designed for ex-cons to fail. Cole posted:What kind of situation are you putting yourself in that cops are busting down your door to plant narcotics? It doesn't need to be putting yourself in a situation. In a lot of places police can just decide you're guilty of something, end of story. SCOTUS decided rather recently that "I don't know, I thought I smelled weed, I guess" is reason enough to smash in somebody's door, ransack the place, and arrest somebody. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Jul 30, 2013 |
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Jul 30, 2013 17:36
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Here in Denmmark it's more "wow, you looking at me wrong son?!" and a massive loving beatdown. And they always, always, make sure to break your phones and cameras by accident.
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Jul 30, 2013 17:40
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ClemenSalad posted:What does exonorating people on new technology like DNA evidence have to do with the rates of police planting false evidence on people? Because these cases where conducted before cops knew DNA evidence could exonerate someone. It gives a pretty clear picture of how much bullshit they trump up to make convictions.
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Jul 30, 2013 17:41
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Cole posted:Cops don't convict people. I think we need to get a definition of "do" for this one.
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Jul 30, 2013 17:45
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MechPlasma posted:Alright, I'll bite: what makes you think the police or government is out to get black men? The overwhelming institutional bias that every phase of the justice system, particularly those handled by the police, displays against minorities and especially black people?
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Jul 30, 2013 18:57
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I don't know if we still have a CotB thread or what, but this is just staggering
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Jul 30, 2013 21:14
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Rutibex posted:Because these cases where conducted before cops knew DNA evidence could exonerate someone. It gives a pretty clear picture of how much bullshit they trump up to make convictions. Or the much simpler and logical answer to your mass evidence planting conspiracy theory is that prior to the invention of advanced forensics the gold standard of evidence was much lower than in the past.
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Jul 30, 2013 21:27
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ClemenSalad posted:Also surprised no one brought up that you can indeed get your voting rights back. Sometimes, in some places, under some circumstances, and usually under onerous conditions for the ex-felon. In the meantime, plenty of states, particularly Southern (surprise!) ones have effectively disenfranchised a significant proportion of their minority populations. But I'm sure you'll let us know how that's just a coincidence and law enforcement is color-blind though.
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Jul 30, 2013 21:47
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ClemenSalad posted:Or the much simpler and logical answer to your mass evidence planting conspiracy theory is that prior to the invention of advanced forensics the gold standard of evidence was much lower than in the past. Yeah, generally the cop's word was enough.
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Jul 30, 2013 22:36
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SedanChair posted:Coerced confessions, for one thing. Just one. You know that. Main Paineframe posted:The overwhelming institutional bias that every phase of the justice system, particularly those handled by the police, displays against minorities and especially black people? But blah blah cultural factors blah economic differences blah blah location blah blah unfamiliar faces blah Ebolics blah I think you've all heard this before. MechPlasma fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Jul 30, 2013 |
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Jul 30, 2013 23:48
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Cole posted:What kind of situation are you putting yourself in that cops are busting down your door to plant narcotics? 
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Jul 30, 2013 23:55
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Soulcleaver posted:The police getting the address wrong and ruining your life anyway. Cops wouldn't attack your house if you didn't do something bad, now would they? So is the issue corruption or ignorance?
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Jul 31, 2013 00:12
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Both! Everybody "wins". 
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Jul 31, 2013 00:19
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MechPlasma posted:
Having a permanent underclass is useful economically. Not sure exactly why you need a motive, though. The evidence is there, plain to see.
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Jul 31, 2013 00:54
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MechPlasma posted:Alright, I'll give you that. I don't like "DNA exonerations" as a reason, since that could easily just be, y'know, unintentional. But I can't argue with this. There doesn't have to be a sinister man in a white hood behind the scenes for there to be demonstrable, undeniable, systemic racism. Black men are disproportionately more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, charged, convicted, and then sentenced more harshly.
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Jul 31, 2013 01:52
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MechPlasma posted:I'm looking for a motive. If we treat correlations as causations, sure, we can say that black people are treated the worst. But by the same measure, Asians and Native Americans are treated the best. I've never heard anyone say the police are totally bending over backwards for those other minorities. No, I'm pretty sure black people are treated the worst regardless of causations. And Native Americans are treated disproportionately badly too; they make up less than 1 percent of the US population, yet make up nearly two percent of the current, federal prison population alone - to say nothing of state prisons and ex-cons who have been released from prison with a felony on their record. If you're asking what the motive could possibly be for racism, then I think that's going to swing so far off-topic that you should probably make your own thread. I'm not sure this is really the place to ask basic fundamental questions like "why would people be racist?" or "why are some minorities treated worse than other minorities?".
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Jul 31, 2013 03:15
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People in positions of strength will always vilify those in positions of weakness, and they'll always have a justification for it. Try and reduce any cruelty down and you'll wind up there eventually. Human beings just like to feel strong and in control and sometimes hurting other people is the easiest way to do that.
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Jul 31, 2013 10:26
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Compensation for Daniel Chong, who was forgotten in a DEA holding cell for four days.quote:US man 'abandoned' in US jail gets $4m in compensation
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Jul 31, 2013 12:34
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Warchicken posted:People in positions of strength will always vilify those in positions of weakness, and they'll always have a justification for it. Try and reduce any cruelty down and you'll wind up there eventually. Human beings just like to feel strong and in control and sometimes hurting other people is the easiest way to do that. No, people in illegitimate positions of strength will do that, because they need to keep other parties hurt, destitue, incarcerated etc. - if you are where you are because you've done people a lot of good, and they trust you because you deserve it, you don't really have to.
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Jul 31, 2013 14:55
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Tias posted:No, people in illegitimate positions of strength will do that, because they need to keep other parties hurt, destitue, incarcerated etc. - if you are where you are because you've done people a lot of good, and they trust you because you deserve it, you don't really have to. Yeah, then your subordinates do it and keep you out of the loop.
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Jul 31, 2013 15:27
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You're not doing good, if you let others do the crime for you, are you now? I know the real world is a lot more Boardwalk Empire than we'd like to believe, but I don't think all positions of strength = abuse or vilification of others.
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Jul 31, 2013 15:54
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Good thing that wasn't in one of the states where compensating someone for wrongful imprisonment is explicitly outlawed! (Yes, this is really a thing.)
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Jul 31, 2013 18:16
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Zeitgueist posted:Good thing that wasn't in one of the states where compensating someone for wrongful imprisonment is explicitly outlawed! Fairly sure that law wouldn't apply in this case. Although it is a disgusting law.
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Jul 31, 2013 21:57
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I just finished watching 'The House I Live In' (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125653/) on Netflix--it's about the War On Drugs in a pretty broad sense, and includes a lot of David Simon. I highly, highly recommend it. I'll be damned if I haven't ever been this depressed by a film. I know it's shouting at the void but what the gently caress can we do? It all seems so bleak and so hopeless. There's so much money entwined in the war on drugs, and there's no way a politician can get enough capital to run on an anti-drug war platform. Burn it all down. Goddamnit.
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Aug 3, 2013 22:23
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Waffles Inc. posted:I just finished watching 'The House I Live In' (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2125653/) on Netflix--it's about the War On Drugs in a pretty broad sense, and includes a lot of David Simon. I highly, highly recommend it. Well, the obvious thing to do is to fix the problem of money. Money doesn't exist, no matter what weird economics majors say to you. It's an abstraction that runs America and as such we have an awful lot of people very concerned about money and not at all concered about what the money is actually for. It's like purchasing an orchard and being upset that you've lost the cash--you have the wealth of the orchard, yet somehow feel deprived of the useless matter that is the money. If the system is mucked up due to corruption or money, we simply must correct the system's reliance upon it. I mean, really, what value does money even have today? There's no gold standard. What is it based upon? What's to stop the government from just secretly printing more money without telling anyone about it?
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Aug 5, 2013 06:03
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And what exactly would it even hurt? Heck just print a trillion dollars and stealthily invest it in poor people and I bet quality of life all over the nation would improve, but rich people's money would be devalued. Win/win!
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Aug 5, 2013 07:13
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BottledBodhisvata posted:What's to stop the government from just secretly printing more money without telling anyone about it? Warchicken posted:And what exactly would it even hurt? Heck just print a trillion dollars and stealthily invest it in poor people and I bet quality of life all over the nation would improve, but rich people's money would be devalued. Win/win!
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Aug 5, 2013 10:48
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I still think a convict party is viable. But then, I don't know a lot about US politics.. It just seems to be that outlawing prisons for profit, separating private sectors and incarceration, and removing mandatory minimum sentences would go a long way.
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Aug 5, 2013 11:55
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MechPlasma posted:The bureaucracy. Unless, of course, you think the bureaucracy isn't big and convoluted enough to stop it from happening. ...unless you're not talking about corruption and thinking of a government in good faith causing massive inflation. I'm not explaining what's wrong with that. Who is the bureaucracy and how do they stop anything? Do you mean Congress? Or just the red tape involved in the money printing places? I most certainly was not talking about expanding either of those two things. And no, inflation is a Bad Thing--but my issue is, why do we even have inflation? Money isn't a good by itself, and if it is considered such than we have a problem. Money is more meaningless than ever, so we either restructure the dollar or we pump so much money that it becomes all useless and we start a new currency system. Or heck, maybe just base our money off our levels of production and export rather than off...gold or positive thinking.
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Aug 5, 2013 14:59
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Tias posted:I still think a convict party is viable. But then, I don't know a lot about US politics.. The problem with a convict party, besides the fact that a lot of convicts can't vote, is that voters hate convicts. That's how mandatory minimum sentences and three strikes laws come around in the first place: politicians love to pass "tough on crime" laws because they're super popular among voters and hardly anyone opposes them, so they're not controversial and therefore they're free popularity points. Conversely, politicians don't like to loosen those laws, since it doesn't benefit them and gives their opponents ammunition against them. Every time someone on a supervised release or treatment program instead of prison commits a crime, a new attack ad is born against the politician that proposed that supervised release program. A convict rights party will go nowhere unless the American people are on board with it, but as things are now, I'd be surprised if a majority of people were even in support of stopping prison rape. BottledBodhisvata posted:Or heck, maybe just base our money off our levels of production and export rather than off...gold or positive thinking. You really should make your own thread for this, because explaining the basic economic concepts behind "money" to you has very little to do with prison. Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Aug 5, 2013 |
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Aug 5, 2013 15:09
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Main Paineframe posted:A convict rights party will go nowhere unless the American people are on board with it, but as things are now, I'd be surprised if a majority of people were even in support of stopping prison rape. I'd be surprised if a majority of people were not opposed to stopping prison rape. It's very popular.
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Aug 5, 2013 15:23
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Ratoslov posted:I'd be surprised if a majority of people were not opposed to stopping prison rape. It's very popular. Yeah, even stories of white kids who got raped don't trigger calls for ending prison rape. They trigger calls to legalize marijuana, so there's more room for the "scary" "types" of criminal to endure rape as a part of their sentencing.
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Aug 5, 2013 17:11
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SedanChair posted:Yeah, even stories of white kids who got raped don't trigger calls for ending prison rape. They trigger calls to legalize marijuana, so there's more room for the "scary" "types" of criminal to endure rape as a part of their sentencing. Only tangentially related and I do not intend to cause a huge derail, but as I watch more Orange is the New Black I am becoming more and more convinced that the way to making prison reform more palatable to the general populace is by focusing first on women's prisons and on white female test cases. If we can stop the ladies from getting abused first then we can move on to the fellas. That it needs to be done this way is of course horrible and disgusting, but if it actually gets traction then it's worth a try. Ultimately I still think that the first step is doing away with insane sentencing guidelines, and dealing with inhumane conditions is secondary because the best way to reduce inhumane treatment is to make sure people aren't incarcerated in the first place and to minimize the time they spend there.
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Aug 5, 2013 18:28
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MechPlasma posted:The bureaucracy. Unless, of course, you think the bureaucracy isn't big and convoluted enough to stop it from happening. ...unless you're not talking about corruption and thinking of a government in good faith causing massive inflation. I'm not explaining what's wrong with that. Yeah, it'd all end up in their hands anyway. We need to tax them for a trillion dollars then spend that on poor people.
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Aug 5, 2013 18:30
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amanasleep posted:Only tangentially related and I do not intend to cause a huge derail, but as I watch more Orange is the New Black I am becoming more and more convinced that the way to making prison reform more palatable to the general populace is by focusing first on women's prisons and on white female test cases. If we can stop the ladies from getting abused first then we can move on to the fellas. I agree with you. I hadn't really thought of framing it from the female perspective, but it makes a hell of a lot of sense. And yes, sentencing guidelines are what everything else flows from, which the CCPOA knows very well.
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Aug 5, 2013 18:32
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Obdicut posted:I agree with you. I hadn't really thought of framing it from the female perspective, but it makes a hell of a lot of sense. And yes, sentencing guidelines are what everything else flows from, which the CCPOA knows very well. It's also worth noting that female non-violent incarceration rates are increasing even faster than the rates for male non-violent offenders, partially because the pre-drug war rates of female incarceration were so low but also because sentencing guidelines scoop them up and reverse the frequent mitigating factors in historical sentencing (well-known propensities for rehabilitation, family appeals, low rate of violence in commission of other crimes, and maybe even a bit of old-school paternalistic "reverse-sexism"). As a matter of dramatic portrayal, incarcerated female offenders are most certainly the easiest to humanize. If this can be accomplished in sentencing guidelines, then we can parlay that into "what's good for the goose..." arguments in favor of male offenders.
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Aug 5, 2013 18:55
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I had a former client kill himself (and only himself) in a very public way recently. He was a nice guy with no contacts with the system until he made a mistake with major consequences that turned into a political prosecution. As a result of this and some other tragic events, he had some massive mental health issues. Last time I talked to him we'd set up a plan to get him back on track. I'm not sure what happened. Of course, the comments of the article involving him (never read the comments) talk about what a scumbag he was because he was a convicted felon. Fuckers.
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Aug 6, 2013 04:47
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nm posted:I had a former client kill himself (and only himself) in a very public way recently. He was a nice guy with no contacts with the system until he made a mistake with major consequences that turned into a political prosecution. As a result of this and some other tragic events, he had some massive mental health issues. Last time I talked to him we'd set up a plan to get him back on track. I'm not sure what happened. That's terrible. But for our societal compulsion to punish somebody if something sad happens, he'd probably still be living a productive life of quiet obscurity. Instead we turn his life to poo poo and saddle him with conditions and restrictions that make it impossible to return to the life that he had (while requiring him to do so) - and punishing him if he slips or fails. It sounds like he was doing about as good as he was able before this all started, and the additional heapings of coals were too much for him. Katherine Mansfield posted:At that moment the boss noticed that a fly had fallen into his broad inkpot, and was trying feebly but deperately to clamber out again. Help! help! said those struggling legs. But the sides of the inkpot were wet and slippery; it fell back again and began to swim. The boss took up a pen, picked the fly out of the ink, and shook it on to a piece of blotting-paper. For a fraction of a second it lay still on the dark patch that oozed round it. Then the front legs waved, took hold, and, pulling its small, sodden body up, it began the immense task of cleaning the ink from its wings. Over and under, over and under, went a leg along a wing, as the stone goes over and under the scythe. Then there was a pause, while the fly, seeming to stand on the tips of its toes, tried to expand first one wing and then the other. It succeeded at last, and, sitting down, it began, like a minute cat, to clean its face. Now one could imagine that the little front legs rubbed against each other lightly, joyfully. The horrible danger was over; it had escaped; 1t was ready for life again. joat mon fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Aug 6, 2013 |
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Aug 6, 2013 14:30
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MechPlasma posted:Please tell me that's a badly-conveyed sarcasm and you don't seriously think massive inflation is good and that there's no correlation between people spending and business leaders earning. Massive inflation would be awesome! Everyone's debts are fixed dollar amounts, if a loaf of bread costs $1million and the average salary is $100million a day then that $400,000 mortgage or $100,000 student loan doesn't look so bad.
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Aug 6, 2013 15:12
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Powercrazy posted:When the federal government allowed state/local municipalities to keep the money/assets they seized from drug busts, drug busts increased tremendously. Basically the federal government directly supports the states war on drugs, and implicitly causes all the abuses of the justice system therein.
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Aug 7, 2013 04:51
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