Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

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> Judges receiving kickbacks to throw minors into juvenile jail

He's probably referring to "Kids For Cash" [0].

> racial bias in sentences

You can look at federal and state incarceration statistics for yourself. African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans serve, on average, longer sentences for the same crimes as their Caucasian counterparts. Here's one source.[1]

> jail for marijuana

Mandatory minimums for possession (especially "with intent to sell") have been part of federal drug enforcement policy for the last 50 years. Here are a few of them.[2]

> private prison etc

It was only this year that the DOJ finally committed to eliminating private prisons in the federal system.[3] They're still a massive part of state penitentiary systems (see: cash for kids).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

[1]: https://www.aclu.org/issues/mass-incarceration/racial-dispar...

[2]: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/snitch/primer/

[3]: https://www.justice.gov/opa/blog/phasing-out-our-use-private...

Mandatory SSC post going into more detail than anyone probably wants to on the actual statistics of this stuff:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-m...

TLDR: "There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail. There is ambiguity over the level of racial bias... There seems to be little or no racial bias in arrests for serious violent crime, police shootings in most jurisdictions, prosecutions, or convictions."

I misread that as "Judges receiving kickbacks to:" 1) throw minors into juvenile jail, 2) racial bias in sentences, 3) jail for marijuana, 4) private prison 5) etc.

But the kickbacks was in the cash for kids scandal -- hopefully isolated criminal corruption in judges. The others are definitely negative and indications of a broken system, but not the level of "judges taking cash for sentences" corruption. Thank you for the clarification.

Anybody who actually wants to be a judge in the American system is corrupt. The American system of justice is so obviously flawed that only a person corrupt in their thinking would want to become a judge.

[Removed]

Is a loving husband, devoted father, kind neighbor, etc etc person who drove trains for the Nazi's a good person?

I feel that most people are in (considerably less extreme) versions of that situation: kind, generous people in general, who simply don't think about how the fairly banal things they do every day are part of really bad stuff. The distributed, banal nature of modern evils -- and they were intentionally structured that way so people wouldnt think about it -- is really what allows evil to flourish in modern society.

Yeah, it wasnt a big deal you flipped a train switch (or filled out mortgage loan paperwork a little shoddily, etc), and likely someone else would've done it instead, but if we all refused to do it, the world would be a better place.

I think many US judges are similar: they're good, a little bit selfish people who just don't think about the evil they contribute to.

Enforcing unjust laws, even fairly, is evil. And (almost) all US judges are guilty of that. (Eg, mandatory minimum drug laws, which empirically just cause harm.)

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