Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

As a non-US person watching certain American series on Netflix just blows my mind. For example, my wife is currently watching "Good Girls" in which we see the following things that really make me never want to live in the US (I wonder if this really happens though, can someone confirm?):

- You can pay to stay out of jail so only poor people stay in jail after a crime, before the trial (guess OP proves this is real).

- The poor people have the worst lawyers and thus the worst chances, and even though they are innocent can be left in debt by the process.

- A couple has a daughter, she needs a kidney. They need to pay 80.000 euro (forcing a choice between crime and the life of the daughter, easy choice I'd think)

- A guy stole crutches because he needed to pay 400$ to take them home (can't walk without them)

- Woman tells ambulance personnel to leave her alone so she can take an Uber to the hospital to reduce cost of healthcare after being shot

- A guy working at something like a loan shop (where people just seem to pile on debt) wants to use the address of a customer so his nephew can get into university (I guess it matters where you live?)

- The couple from point 1 needs to choose between electricity/water and healthcare, decide to mix up checks they send to the companies to buy some time.

I mean the point is already nicely made by "Breaking Bad", how do you want to reduce crime in a society when civilians are constantly forced into such impossible choices? It makes for good TV of course but the stress you must feel when you can just make ends meet in he US must be extreme. I mean there are so may series where the criminals are just perfectly reasonable and lovable, doesn't that tell you something is wrong?

If you want to learn more about the US judicial and prison system you should listen to the third season of Serial.

>Serial is heading back to court. This time, in Cleveland. Not for one extraordinary case; instead, Serial wanted to tackle the whole criminal justice system. To do that we figured we’d need to look at something different: ordinary cases.

>So we did. Inside these ordinary cases we found the troubling machinery of the criminal justice system on full display. We chose Cleveland, because they let us record everywhere — courtrooms, back hallways, judges’ chambers, prosecutors’ offices. And then we followed those cases outside the building, into neighborhoods, into people’s houses, and into prison.

https://serialpodcast.org/

It's after an arrest -- whether or not there was a crime is determined at trial.

The idea is both to make sure that people show up for court and to have a bounty to give to bounty hunters if they do not to enforce compliance, rather than putting that on the police themselves, because there just aren't enough cops around to round up everyone who simply wouldn't show up otherwise.

But yeah, being poor is effectively a punishment in and of itself and not just in this circumstance, either.

>As a non-US person watching certain American series on Netflix just blows my mind.

As a US person it amazes me the level to which many in the US will defend normative practices simply because they are. It amazes me further their willingness to provide and accept post hoc justifications for systems that were explicitly created with racist intent.

1. You don't pay, you just deposit money. If you show up to court, you get the money back. If you don't have that money on hand, its common to take out a loan.

2. Everyone has the right to a free public defender. I don't know if there's any study on how they compare to private lawyers.

3, 4, 5, and 7. Low income people are eligible for Medicaid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid

6. I've never heard of location mattering

I wouldn't really base my worldview of something on what I see in fiction, since the purpose of these shows is to show drama, rather than to be informative. It wouldn't be as exciting to watch people solve their problems by applying for welfare.

> You don't pay, you just deposit money. If you show up to court, you get the money back. If you don't have that money on hand, its common to take out a loan.

If you're rich, yes. In practice, poor people can't round up enough money, so they must rely on a bondsman. So they'll pay something like 10% of the bail, and the bondsman will post the rest of the loan. The bondsman keeps the 10% at the end though.

Often people can't even round up the 10% and have to just stay in jail.

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