Mass Incarceration: The Silence of the Judges | Hacker News Reader

Mass Incarceration: The Silence of the Judges

nybooks.com

47 pointssergeant345 comments

We all know what ultimately needs to happen.

Marijuana needs legalized. Minimum sentencing guidelines need to be replaced with maximums. For-profit prisons need to disappear. More work needs put into counseling and mentoring at-risk youths.

But how do we get there? Do we find another politician to hang our hopes on? Last time I voted for someone campaigning on Hope and Change we saw more civil rights disappear than ever, and Gitmo is still running.

Why use Gitmo as an example when there are plenty of other areas where you can bash Obama, like continuing many of the Executive Order programs? At least he genuinely tried to shut down Gitmo and was blocked from doing so.

I think believing a single person/president/whatever can fix all problems is wishful thinking, and indeed a system in which that was possible would likely not be a democracy.

Start by blaming all the representatives who pushed for or voted against ending the programs you don't like, and voting accordingly. Look at the voting histories of candidates rather than what they say. Look at who funds the candidates , not at what the candidates say. Actually, listen to everything other than what candidates say during election season; the game is set up in such a way that you will always be disappointed if you simply believe what is said, no matter the candidate.

There are plenty of other examples where he's let me down, and plenty of good he's done, but the fact remains that Gitmo is still running.

He's literally the leader of the armed forces, he has all the power he needs to shut that place down any time he wants.

This is factually and legally incorrect. The President cannot use any federal funds to modify the prison at Gitmo, or to transfer prisoners. This was part of the budget in I believe 2012, and has been every year since. (Should you need citations I will find them when I return home later.)

Point is that shutting down Gitmo was something the Administration attempted to do and that Congress forcefully blocked.

The POTUS has, and I quote, the following:

"The President...shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment."

Article II, Section 2, Clause 1

They are detainees of the USA. He has full power to bestow each and every one of them a full unequivocal presidential pardon for all crimes accused and committed against the US. No if's, and's, or but's.

Extremes should not be remedied with extremes.

You're right. Those presidential pardons are reserved for important people.

Side note: Presidential pardons are the ultimate answer to any argument for "torture the terrorist to stop the nuclear bomb" scare-stories.

If you aren't willing to gamble that you'll need/get a Presidential pardon, then you clearly don't know enough to justify what you're about to do to the suspect.

Maybe if he threatened to pardon them they might get trials?

That'd be a little less extreme, and a little more, I dunno, constitutional?

Pardon isn't on the table, his plan was to move them to a mainland US prison. I don't think he's ever said anything other than the people there are dangerous. Which, based on the way they were captured and held for over a decade without charges or rights, is kinda disgusting in itself that he supports that.

Obama has been President since 2008. The fact is he pissed around while he had the ability to close gitmo at the beginning of his presidency, and has blamed his failure on the rethuglicans as a convenient scapegoat.

Let me tell you a story..Mr Lincoln did not free the slaves...Congress did by enforcing martial law until the South Legislatures passed new state Constitutions and allowed Blacks to vote..time taken ten years after CW ended.

Gitmo does not get closed by one lone person..it takes Congress

> He's literally the leader of the armed forces, he has all the power he needs to shut that place down any time he wants.

Actually, the Congress governs the armed forces; the Constitutional designation of the President as Commander-in-Chief simply means limits the Congress, in adopting rules governing the military, from appointing someone else as supreme commander of the military within those rules.

The President isn't the King of the military, or anything else.

Bottom up. Which is why local (1) entities and jurisdictions are going to increase in favor, once again.

Akin: Employment. Personally, I am finished watching my local labor force hollowed out because some version of... "labor arbitrage", I guess, can save a buck an hour moving the work over a border. (And, as often as not, that saving is being indirectly paid for by me, anyway: Outsized military to secure energy interests used for attendant goods transportation. Inflated retail prices feeding telecom oligopolies whose networks, while I like the connectivity, similarly afford displacement of intellectual labor.)

Is such localization perfect? No. But, you asked what/how things might change.

People will start tending to their own communities, as a priority, if and when they want them to get better.

There will be significant downsides to this, as well (e.g. the potential for increased prejudice, perhaps). But, as one old supervisor used to like to state, "everything is a pendulum." I'm not sure I entirely agree with that, but as I get older and my perspective... "matures?", there does seem to be a lot of it around.

1. For various and significantly differing values of "local".

As a non-american, i wonder - is there even an agreement among the population about what needs to happen ? And do most of the population even care about those unjust things , or each group cares about their own problems ? And do they care enough to do something about it ?

No. A good portion of the population never has to see this problem ever and gets uncomfortable by the implications of why that is.

Another possibly overlapping portion believes the executive and judicial branches need more power to do their jobs correctly. That usually means legislating away rights and reducing accountability for those involved.

And yet another portion is being too systemically harassed and locked up on a massive scale to have a real front for public discourse.

The rest/majority don't give a shit unless it becomes their problem and it rarely does.

I just watched a local news story (FL) about a vacationing couple that got caught having sex on the beach. They're looking at serious prison time, possibly 15 years (they had just been convicted and were getting ready for the sentencing phase of the trial). And of course, they'll both have to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives.

WTF? I would have expected a fine and maybe some community service. The prosecutor was practically gloating: "We want people to know we take this sort of behavior seriously."

People seem to forget that bad prosecutors are a local issue, and as such, if people were involved more in their local government, they can have a say in these matters.

People seem to think that by bragging that they don't vote, they're somehow showing the system who's the boss.

And people who seem to think exercising my right to abstention in a system I don't think works anymore means I lose my right to free speech when I want to complain about irresponsible, negligent politicians who lie repeatedly to the public.

But I'm not really sure what any of this adds to the thread..

People seem to forget that prosecutors tend to reflect the attitudes of the voters in their districts.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/22/florida-couple-sex-... ("This time, Emily Hall, a concerned parent, called police. According to a probable cause affidavit, she told cops that she became 'very upset' because her 4-year-old daughter 'witnessed the couple having sex.' She wasn't alone. Six witnesses filed complaints against Alvarez and Caballero.")

Granted this shouldn't have taken place on a public beach but I still do not understand America's prudishness when it comes to sex. It's like they've never seen and fantasized about it before.

There have been cultures that are prudish about sex for thousands of years. If you can't understand them, it says a lot more about you than it does about them.

Why attack someone who admits not understanding something? And really, since you seem to think it says something about the parent, why not just say what you think it says?

One could also say (without actually saying anything) that your comment says a lot more about you than it does about the parent.

Or perhaps they've never even visited a farm, or observed wild animals, without major damage to their delicate sensibilities... very baffling.

prison population by type of crime (2012):

    violent: 47.7%
    property: 17.1%
    drug: 20.5%
    public order: 13.8%

"public order" includes drunk driving, weapons possession, and prostitution. Source http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...

Recidivism rates (2005):

    violent: 71.3%
    property: 82.1%
    drug: 76.9%
    public order: 73.5%

Source: http://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/Pages/welco...

I'm curious how the "drug" category breaks down in terms of dealing vs. possession/use. I support legalization, but I also think that if we nullify the black market for drugs, we'd better be ready with alternative non-criminal opportunities for those who currently are involved that trade.

Maybe drug tax income could be earmarked for educational funding in underfunded districts... Create a school to employment pipeline.

Unlikely. Street level drug trade is a minimum wage job. In general, we systemically don't give a hoot about people in that situation.

We will never really know what the breakdown is, because definitions have been deliberately blurred. There are many ways possession can be turned into a charge for dealing (e.g. did they find two or more baggies? it's "packaged for sale") and plea bargains that reduce dealing back down to possession.

One of the well known problems with statistics for "dealing" is that a common plea bargain tactic is to reduce the charges in exchange for the defendant naming someone else as their "supplier". This works out well for actual dealers, as they often know people they can throw the charges at. Unfortunately, one of the common targets is the former (or current...) girlfriend that is only tangentially involved if they even knew about the dealing at all. They usually don't have a name to offer for a plea deal, so they end up serving time for the dealing charge.

So I don't believe it is actually possible to know what the breakdown really was. What we do know is that the sentencing doesn't really line up with the actions of the people involved; often the correlation is inverted from what it should be.

/* obviously, legalizing this entire mess so it can be regulated is the proper solution */

I wonder, though: How many of the violent crimes are drug-related? That is, if a drug dealer shoots another over territory, is that reported as "violent", or as "drug"?

My guess is that it is reported as violent, and therefore that legalization would reduce crime more than you would expect from the 20.5%.

Unfortunately, "legalization" means marijuana. It doesn't mean all drugs. That means that there will still be drug crimes, and violent drug-based crimes, over cocaine and heroine and meth and on and on. And I'm not sure that legalizing the other drugs would be beneficial. Even more, I'm sure it's not going to happen any time soon. That means that legalization would only eliminate the marijuana-related crimes which, while many, are by no means all the drug-related crimes.

For prostitution the U.S. ought to follow the Swiss (I think) model: to sell is legal, to buy is criminal, for the reason that the buyer inherently victimizes the seller.

Drugs? I suppose some form of regulation would be better. Governments get scary when they attempt to legislate morality. Drug use is immoral (IMO), but perhaps it shouldn't be illegal.

Do you drink coffee? Wine? Smoke cigarettes? Take Aspirin? Are those immoral? Sure, some drugs are worse for the user than other drugs, but you could make the same argument for eating sugary foods or not exercising enough. A bad idea, probably, but not immoral.

>for the reason that the buyer inherently victimizes the seller

you'll have to explain here, because it seems to me that under a legal regime, a prostitute making a clear decision to sell sex is no more a victim than the owner of a convenience store deciding to sell slurpees.

It's contentious— there is certainly a class of sex worker who is empowered and fully in control of the economic transaction being carried out. But there are also many, many who are trapped and not making their own decisions, especially when drugs are part of the picture.

Ban an entire market because sometimes the sources of labor are repugnant?

What percentage of the market has to be drugged-out sex slaves (often imported from some other countries, if the horror stories are true) before it's acceptable to shut down the whole market by criminalizing it?

Does criminalizing the market help those drug-addicted sex slaves, or does it make their situation worse?

Criminalizing the market us why its run by the same groups that run the illegal drug trade and why the people working in it often feel they have no recourse against abuse -- it is, in other words, the reason why there are drugged out sex slaves. If it was legal, well-regulated, with effective workplace protections, the character would be radically different.

Lots and lots of women enter prostitution when they are <18yo, many of them manipulated by older men(pimps).

And that should/would remain a crime. By legalizing the 'profession' you open it up to more scrutiny.

Prostitution is illegal as a matter of public health, codified by religious texts. It doesn't jibe well with the notion of individual liberty, nor does the personal use of drugs, defended also as a matte of "public health."

These types of laws (cascading down to the less oppressive blue laws) are attempts to create a unified morality. The problem is fares poorly with human behavior, hence the inevitable creation of black markets.

> For prostitution the U.S. ought to follow the Swiss (I think) model: to sell is legal, to buy is criminal, for the reason that the buyer inherently victimizes the seller.

Is there evidence that the Nordic model (of prostitution laws - go after buyers, not sellers) accomplishes anything, or is it a feel-good law that at first glance looks like it has the right law enforcement incentives (don't punish the sex workers), but doesn't deliver on making sex workers safer or improving their lives?

http://reason.com/blog/2014/06/04/criminalizing-sex-work-cli...

http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2014/02/25/european-parlia...

From "The Nordic Model" paper:

>> Since the introduction of the law, street prostitution has decreased (while increasing dramatically in Sweden’s neighbors) and Sweden has become an undesirable destination for pimps and traffickers. In addition, the new law has influenced attitudes regarding the purchase of sex: from 1996 (before the law) until 2008, the number of male sex buyers decreased from 13.6% to 7.9%.

The first table seems off given other data, e.g. http://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offens..., which seems to represent drug related crime at a much higher rate.

You source appears to be for federal prisons only. Those numbers only add up to about 200k inmates. Most people are imprisoned by the state or county.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/may/21/mass-in....

The author, Jed Rakoff, is a prominent federal judge in New York. It's good to hear him speak out on the issue.

The prison companies are probably bad actors that should be disbanded; their assets liquidated & distributed to the wrongly incarcerated & taxpayers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com