Actually, one of the reasons is to spend money on private prisons. Private prisons, bigpharma, lawyers make a lot of money on defending AND putting people to prison for stupid things, things that were delegalized by sponsored bills. We've known for years that alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than marijuana, yet, there are lobbies that benefit a lot from jailing people for having 5g of weed.
The idea that lawyers are part of a conspiracy to make _money_ by running more people through the criminal justice system is completely senseless.
To start, criminal justice is easily in the running for least highly remunerated category of law. The median pay for public prosecutors with with 11 - 15 years of experience is only $81,500. For public defenders (who handle roughly 80% of all felony cases [1]), the median pay for someone with 11 - 15 years of experience is only $62,550. Oh, these fat, fat cats in criminal justice! And if anyone here thinks the work life balance in SV companies leaves something to be desired, I encourage you to read about the bat-shit hours that the average criminal attorney puts in. 20 hours of overtime a week would not raise any eyebrows.
And basically those salaries are not affected by caseload. Whether 100 or 50 people go to prison makes no financial difference to lawyers on either side. Some prosecutors have bonuses contingent on conviction rate or volume, but such agreements are rare and when they do exist, the bonuses are never contingent on sentencing, so there would be no incentive to send people to prison. There is no equivalent for defense attorneys.
And all of the above just speaks to your claim's stunning lack of circumstantial evidence, to say nothing of the lack of actual evidence that lawyers are intentionally putting more people in prison to make money.
The US justice system is rife with problems. But the idea that a root cause of those problems is lawyers trying to make more money just doesn't make sense.
That's strange of you to say. Haven't lawyers conspired to do just that before?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
> To start, criminal justice is easily in the running for least highly remunerated category of law.
Is it not well understood that people who are less highly remunerated are more prone to seeking out illegal sources of additional funds? This is the justification for extremely high ministerial salaries in Singapore - to avoid such corruption.
Are you really making the argument that lawyers all across the US are systematically making deals such as the ones that took place in Luzerne County, therby leading to high incaceration rates? Do we have evidence to lead us to believe that the kind of deals found in Luzerne County are widespread? Honestly, I find the suggestion preposterous.
The criminal justice system in the US is in dire need of reform and it's infuriating that discussions of said reform are often distracted by these kinds of baseless conspiracy theories.
If you ask me, the US's world leading incarceration rates probably have much more to do with the outsized sentence lengths, drastically underfunded public defense funds, mandatory sentencing requirements, lack of due prosecutorial discretion, overcharging and abuse of plea bargains, and insane drug legislation to name a few things.
Oh, but that's so complicated. It's probably just all those greedy criminal lawyers. /s
[+] https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...
This is really off the mark.
Having prisons and jails owned by the government does not mean that there's no incentive to increase the inmate population - in fact, the US is proof positive of that, because, for all the press that private prisons get, the number of them is quite small, and most of the worst abuses occur in state-run prisons.
This isn't going to be a popular opinion here, but I should point out that, in general, people tend to underestimate the extent of the prison-industrial complex in Western/Central Europe, and particularly its effect on ethnic and religious minorities. It doesn't help that a lot of the countries that have problems with this also make it either difficult or illegal to access that data officially, so it's not discussed nearly enough.
How are food, clothes, supplies, etc. sourced? Who builds the prison? Is this all done by the government down to the farmer? Or is there a supply chain that makes profit by selling to prisons? If so, there is a prison industrial complex.
How about the staff? Are they paid? Do they have a union?
If there is a profit motive, there is a potential for political lobbying / corruption.
I'd say you are now pretty clearly arguing for diluting the meaning of the "military-industrial complex" context to nothingness.
However, in the US it is common for major inter/national firms to service entire state prison systems. This is surely a representation of the prison industrial complex, and that's what I was getting at.
Simply having publicly run prisons does not preclude this type of situation, a major firm holding large contracts and thus having an incentive to grow the criminal population, unless it would be wholly socially and politically unacceptable to do so.
On the other hand, there are also plenty of people who want to reduce the amount of crime that happens, and then they are more concerned with if the justice system actually achieves this goal. Pain based justice plainly doesn't.
The other 92% doesn't lobby for laws that result in more prisoners, but a billion dollar industry does.
So the 8% statistic is a red herring.
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/07/us/political-gains-by-pri...
For example, the 6 states with the lowest incarceration rates (New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Maine) have no private prisons. And 9 out of the 10 states with the highest incarceration rates do have private prisons.
- Percent of privately incarcerations: https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...
- Incarceration rates by state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_incarce...
The private prison issue is one of reddit's favorite topics to blow out of proportion. Can we not bring it here as well?
I've never seen such thread on reddit.