25 years of evidence for repealing the Prison Litigation Reform Act
prisonpolicy.org
prisonpolicy.org
"When the PLRA was being debated, lawmakers who supported it claimed that too many people behind bars were filing frivolous cases against the government."
We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, have an abusive plea bargain process to more efficiently railroad people in, avoid oversight of our prisons, and once prisoners get out they are often unemployable.
Just to offer one example, until 1970 plea bargaining was generally considered unconstitutional because it offers such large incentives for innocent people to not even attempt to defend their rights, no matter how flimsy the evidence against them. Today over 95% of cases are decided by plea bargains. The rate varies by crime. For drug offenses it is around 97%. And yet in most cases the actual investigation is no more than a faulty field test that is inadmissible in court. See https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/how-a-2-roadside... for verification of that.
Whatever your opinion on our war on drugs, it is clear that a lot of people going to jail for drugs are actually innocent.
See https://innocenceproject.org/an-end-to-plea-bargains/ for more.
When ever this issue is debated the supporters of the drug laws often claim only people that want to get high support legalization, I have no desire to use drugs, I want to have my rights protected, and not be railroaded by a flawed legal system or have my house raided under flimsy "evidence"
The Constitution supposedly protects us against "unreasonable search and seizure". To "combat drugs" we introduced the idea of civil forfeiture. The police, on very flimsy evidence, take your stuff and money, then sue it. If you try to show up and cite the Constitution, you're thrown out of the court because you are not being sued (your stuff is), and so you have no standing. Thereby doing an end run around the Constitution.
How prevalent is this? Well, let's put it this way. Today if your money is taken, it is more likely to have been taken by police using civil forfeiture, than by burglars. And if there is a legal fight about it, it is more likely between different police forces who are arguing about the division of the spoils than about whether, just maybe, it was wrongly taken!
100% agree, civil forfeiture is but one of the MANY MANY ways they have done clever end runs around the US Constitution.
>How prevalent is this? Well, let's put it this way.
Dont travel with cash more than 100 dollars or so.... if a cop finds it, it is gone.
A famous quote from Lysander Spooner talking about government abuse includes the lines ".The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side and, holding a pistol to his head," sadly today that is exactly what the government does... ohh what what 150 years of "progress" brings
I know that there was a ruling in 1970 that plea bargaining is constitutional. But was there ever actually a prior ruling that said the opposite?
> Today over 95% of cases are decided by plea bargains. For drug offenses it is around 97%.
> Whatever your opinion on our war on drugs, it is clear that a lot of people going to jail for drugs are actually innocent.
I don't see how this follows. Given the proof-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standard needed for a conviction if I reject a plea bargain, I'd certainly never accept one for something I wasn't actually guilty of.
Perhaps an important part of the puzzle is the fact that it requires a significant amount of money to defend yourself in a full court trial, as well a significant amount of time.
Time during which the defendant's life is, essentially, on hold.
Additionally, while in the eyes of the legal system, an actual conviction is required, in the eyes of the public, a mere accusation is rather damningly destructive. Business relationships get ruined, opinions formed ("would not have been charged if they were truly innocent"), et cetera.
Isn't the point of public defenders to protect people who don't have this amount of money?
> Time during which the defendant's life is, essentially, on hold.
Isn't this only true in cases where bail isn't offered?
> "would not have been charged if they were truly innocent"
Who's actually ever said anything like that?
Second, successfully defending a federal case takes an average of over a million dollars. And publicly talking about the case, for example to solicit donations from those you know to help you pay for it, is strongly frowned on my judges and you WILL be likely to lose because of it.
Third, if you choose to fight, you will face a sentence that is usually many multiples of the plea bargain. Considering the difference in resources available to you and the state, you are likely to lose. Even if you are innocent of the crime.
Fourth, it is true that the point of public defenders is supposed to be to protect people. But they are part of the system. Public defenders typically have dozens of clients at a time, and the more efficiently they can process them, the better they do. The vast majority of the time this means efficiently negotiating a good plea bargain for you, and convincing you to take it. A public defender who lightly lets you exercise your right to trial will quickly fall behind on your other clients, so they try to avoid that.
Fifth, people who are out on bail are very much not free. They typically must suffer arbitrary inspections, follow curfew, avoid being in a variety of places where other criminals might be, and so on. You aren't behind jail bars, but you're still made to feel a prisoner.
I used to think as you do. But after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz committed suicide, I became curious and learned a lot about the system. And the more I learned the worse it looked.
That...is not an example. The Court in Bram did not have before it a question about “plea bargains as current practiced”. Or plea bargains at all, arising, as it did, out of a case in which the defendant had plead not guilty, been tried, and been convicted after trial.
I've never heard of such a thing, despite a lot of people crowdfunding legal defenses. Can you provide an example of it happening?
> you are likely to lose. Even if you are innocent of the crime.
I think this is our fundamental disagreement. I think it's very rare that an innocent person who goes to trial ends up being convicted.
> Fifth, people who are out on bail are very much not free. They typically must suffer arbitrary inspections, follow curfew, avoid being in a variety of places where other criminals might be, and so on.
I know curfews and inspections are ordered sometimes, but are they really "typical"?
> I used to think as you do. But after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz committed suicide, I became curious and learned a lot about the system. And the more I learned the worse it looked.
I thought Aaron Swartz actually did break the laws he was accused of breaking, and the reason that what happened to him was unjust was that the laws he broke were unfair (e.g., violating ToS being a felony). I see his case being an argument to repeal or gut such laws, and an argument in favor of jury nullification, but not to change how plea bargains work.
One thing plea bargaining does is make it cheap for muni's and counties to throw people in prison. But the money for prisons comes from State and Federal dollars.
It seemed unfair that a 3L was dismissing habeas petitions without the underlying case file, but the alternative didn’t seem real workable either.
The same era saw the 3 strikes law. Which saw relative progressives like Hillary Clinton giving speeches about how it was needed to get "black super-predators" off of the streets. And if you were accused of being soft on crime, well, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Horton demonstrated that a Republican could win in 4 out of 5 states (despite starting behind in the popular vote) by harping on that enough.
> "But we also have to have an organized effort against gangs," Hillary Clinton said in a C-SPAN video clip. "Just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators — no conscience, no empathy.
Which is why https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/aug/28/reince-pri... calls this claim mostly true.
I also doubt she was targeting black kids consciously. Even if many people (including herself) tended to think of gang members as young and Black.
If she thought gang members were predominantly young and black and she talked about combating them like the mob, labeling them as super predators with no empathy or conscience etc… what do you think she was consciously imagining? This is a weak defense if ever there was one.
Without thinking through the the nuances of the long history of racial oppression that led the gang members to become criminals in the first place.
The same way that people who were combating the mob didn’t consider the history of oppression that lead to the creation of the Sicilian mafia.
I would argue that in this situation she was shortsighted and yes lacked empathy. But I don’t think there was any conscious racial animus there the way quoting “black super predators” makes it sound. I doubt she considered the racial component at all.
Associating the phrase "predator" specifically with black and hispanic criminals was already well-established in politics. Particularly because of the the Willie Horton ad from 1988.
I absolutely believed both then and now that she intended it as a racial comment. And her only reasonable defense would have been, "...but not ALL blacks..." However the policies that her husband pursued lead to the largest increase in blacks behind bars in history to that point, and had the effect of devastating black communities. So even that excuse would be thin.
(Note, Bill Clinton is also the one who flew home during the 1992 primary campaign to witness the execution of a mentally retarded black man. About which he said, "Nobody can accuse me of being soft on crime.")
But people have been referring to criminals of every race as predators well before 1988 and they have continued doing to this day.
If you look at usage of the word predator, my bet is it is associated with generic criminals (particularly sexual criminals) far more frequently than it’s deliberately used as a dog whistle.
When Clinton made this speech, it aired on C-Span and would have been forgotten but for opposition research. I think it’s very unlikely, she deliberately chose the word to send out a dog whistle to racists who happen to be watching the ostensibly liberal President’s wife on C-Span.
I think the more likely explanation is that a speech writer thought it sounded punchy because they’d heard it being used, and she didn’t think twice about using the term to refer to gang members.
That doesn’t mean that many uses of the word don’t have racist meanings. Or that it’s impossible that Clinton used it with racists invent. It does mean that it’s a big logical leap to say:
Some racists refer to young Black criminals as predators, and Hilary Clinton uses the word to refer the superset of young gang members, therefore Hilary Clinton deliberately and with racist intent used the word specifically to refer to young Black gang members.
Particularly to the level of confidence that you’re quoting her as saying “black super predators”.
Notably Bill Clinton is never on record as having used the word, and he is the one who met with the guy who coined it.
If he inteneded to co-opt the word to use as a racist dog whistle, why did he never use it himself? And why did his wife only use it the one time?
As far as I can tell, https://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/26/whichhillary_blackliv... describes the event where it resurfaced. Now maybe the activist had the information planted. Maybe not. But I've disliked her since meeting her in 1994 (at Dartmouth College, for a speech on health care). Disliked her more when she ran for Congress. Disliked her more again when I donated to Barack Obama's campaign to make sure she didn't become President in 2008. Disliked everything that I heard of her as part of Obama's cabinet. And also disliked her in 2016.
And as context, here is my bias.
I correctly predicted what Trump would be, but could not bring myself to support Hillary because I don't know which I consider worse. Even today, despite the Jan 6 events, I'm not sure that the worse candidate won in 2016.
If Trump gets back in office and manages to dismantle Democracy, then Trump was in retrospect worse. But if he fails at take 2 like a buffoon should, then I prefer how things actually turned out over Hillary's blend of hypocritical incompetence.
> The full context of this incident does link children and superpredators, but nowhere in the speech does she directly label African-American youth this way.
Furthermore, the whole point of mentioning the Clinton factoid seems to have been to show that Clinton had a racist slip; but the reasoning here seems like it's underlied by the racist premise that all street gang members all black, so "of course that a gangbanger would be black".
The phrase "predator" to refer to black and hispanic gang members was very well established racist dog whistle back in the days of Reagan and Bush Sr. The phrase "superpredator" was built on the existing term about a year before Clinton used it. You can read the original essay reprinted at https://web.archive.org/web/20160307234335/http://www.weekly.... The author of that essay later reported that the Clinton's met with him to talk specifically about this article. There is no question that this article is where she got the phrase from.
It absolutely was a racist term. Everyone at the time knew it, including Hillary Clinton.
It is only through lacking that context that anyone today can argue that it was anything else.
This is my IANAL opinion. But I'd be willing to stand by it in court.
And she later did a lot to try to claim a progressive mantle. Particularly when she ran for President.
But yes, Bill Clinton got elected in part by "moving to the center". Which was moving to the right relative to the Democratic base. Given that the Democratic base as moved sharply left since, comparing past and present positions can be quite jarring.
That said, the move leftward has been much sharper on race and sexual minorities. But not non-existent for economics. Particularly when it comes to social justice.
For example, Bill Clinton signed into law a bill that pushes people off of welfare and into work, or simply dumps them into severe policy. This disproportionately made single mothers and blacks worse off. His position was slightly to the right of most Democrats at the time. But the Democratic party today is strongly for increased access to a wide variety of assistance programs for those in need. And programs that disproportionately hit the economically needy would not be supported by major Democrats today.