[HN Gopher] US newspapers are deleting old crime stories, offeri...
___________________________________________________________________
US newspapers are deleting old crime stories, offering subjects a
'clean slate'
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 136 points
Date : 2025-01-04 15:33 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| janice1999 wrote:
| > One in three U.S. adults has been arrested by age 23.
|
| Does that seem crazy to anyone else? I'm in Ireland and can't
| think of one person in my extended family and friends that has
| any interaction with the police beyond routine insurance/DUI
| checkpoints or reporting incidents like car accidents.
| tylerflick wrote:
| Meh, we're a rebellious group. Honestly though I would be more
| interested in what percentage of this ratio are repeat
| offenders.
| threatofrain wrote:
| > Meh, we're a rebellious group.
|
| Definitely not the explanation.
| erehweb wrote:
| Really high, and crazy, but apparently legit -see https://pmc.n
| cbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4443707/#:~:text=Br....
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| The fact that it's self reported makes me wonder how close to
| the actual number it is. Also, how did they choose their
| sample.
|
| Edit: Link to original paper
| https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/32982174/Turner_-
| _Appe...
| blakesterz wrote:
| Looking at the PDF they link to, it doesn't say "has been
| arrested" it says "has criminal record". Maybe those 2 things
| are the same, but I'm not so sure.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| Criminal records would include all misdemeanors.
|
| You can get a misdemeanor without ever being arrested. In
| some cases trivial things like speeding can be a misdemeanor
| requiring a court appearance.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| 25 years ago I got a misdemeanor citation for rollerblading
| on the sidewalk in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia,
| which required me to make a court appearance and pay for a
| VERY expensive lawyer to get the charge thrown out. If
| instead I'd paid the $25 fine, I'd have had a permanent
| misdemeanor charge on my record.
| rayiner wrote:
| Same thing in Maryland. Speeding is a criminal charge
| here.
| 1over137 wrote:
| Having a record of such a minor infraction doesn't seem
| to me a problem, in and of itself. The problem would be
| if such records were public, available to potential
| employers, etc. If the records were private to the
| courts, that'd be something else. Not sure how it is in
| USA.
| profile53 wrote:
| In the USA it is public record which in practice means
| anyone with money can get the record. This is potentially
| a large part of the high US recidivism. Once you have
| been convicted once, most employers will see the record
| and refuse to hire you forever.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| No, it means anyone with -- or without -- money can get
| the record right here:
|
| https://www.judyrecords.com/
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Adult criminal records are public in the US (juvenile
| records vary by state but are usually confidential, and I
| think in most states also automatically expunged after a
| certain period or age.)
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's a difficult balance. On one hand, privacy is
| important. On the other hand, visibility into the system
| is an important check on the power of law enforcement.
| It's especially important for arrests; you really, really
| do not want the police to be allowed to secretly jail
| people. But it's important for other things too. In this
| example, if the police were using rollerblading citations
| as a way to harass a certain group of people, it's good
| to have access to that information to be able to discover
| this.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| So you're saying I should have paid the fine and had the
| charge recorded, creating a criminal record for myself?
| wat10000 wrote:
| Not in the least. I'm just saying there are good reasons
| for everything that did happen to be public record. (And
| some good reasons for privacy. There's a conflict and a
| balance to be found.)
| atq2119 wrote:
| The solution is to make summary statistics available to
| the public but no names.
|
| Just publicize that there have been 471 citations for
| rollerblading without listing the names of those
| affected.
| phil21 wrote:
| > Not sure how it is in USA.
|
| Assuming the record was as an adult, it will be reported
| publicly by the county (or other jurisdiction) court
| system and be on public record. This used to be a musty
| records keeping office somewhere you'd have to go in
| person and request the records of the individual in
| question - so without prior knowledge of where a
| conviction was it was difficult to "background check"
| people without extensive investigation.
|
| Then these became digitized and put on-line most places.
|
| The larger issue is data brokers who aggregate the
| records of literally everyone in the entire US (or close
| to it) into one database you can pay them to make lookups
| into. They send someone to every courthouse in the US
| (well, they sub-contract others who sub-contract, etc.)
| and get all new records. This builds a nationally
| searchable database that more or lives on indefinitely.
| All legal since the records are public information.
|
| You can get records sealed and such by court order, but
| once it's aggregated it's basically a game of whack-a-
| mole. You can go further and get it expunged which
| typically requires a state governor signature or similar,
| where then you might have better luck with said data
| brokers as the penalties for reporting it are heavy in
| some states.
|
| It's a very fractionalized system, built out of bailing
| wire and duct tape like most such records are in the US
| for historical reasons.
|
| Some employers simply have a binary policy of "zero
| criminal records" and don't go any further into detail
| beyond that. Other employers are more lenient, but the
| more desirable a job is the more likely you are to run
| into the former policy.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I was charged with misdemeanor reckless driving for going
| the speed limit in heavy rain and hydroplaning into
| another car. My fault for sure, but a criminal charge
| seems over the top.
|
| Spent $1,500 on a lawyer who negotiated it to a trivial
| "failure to maintain control" ticket with a maybe $100
| fine.
|
| The system is dumb. Or maybe it's smart, giving people
| with means, like us, favorable treatment without having
| to outright say "poor people aren't worthy."
| Filligree wrote:
| Frankly, I think the original sentence was accurate. If
| that had been a cyclist instead of a car then they'd be
| dead.
|
| The speed limit is a limit, not a requirement. Driving
| fast in conditions where you can hydroplane is absolutely
| reckless.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Restricted access highway, no cyclists allowed or
| present.
|
| I don't think "reckless" is the right word. Clueless,
| really. I didn't know there was a problem until I lost
| traction.
|
| Whatever you want to call it, do you really think that's
| worth a criminal charge? Possibly destroying my
| livelihood over this? Do you think the possibility of
| criminal charges is what stops me from doing it again,
| versus the potential damage to life and property,
| including my own? Lay it out for me.
| Filligree wrote:
| I was taught not to drive fast on roads like that,
| specifically due to the risk of hydroplaning.
| Significantly slower than the likely speed limit, unless
| the speed limit on your highway was 60 kmph. You never
| _do_ know how good your braking action is going to be, so
| preemptively slowing down is the only option.
|
| I don't believe your driving was safe. I also don't
| believe you were taught driving correctly, assuming
| you're American, and I might also believe that driving
| slowly would have been equally dangerous, if the other
| cars did not.
|
| Furthermore, I don't believe a reckless driving charge
| without injury should be a criminal matter _or_ that a
| criminal conviction should destroy someone's livelihood.
|
| However, four wrongs don't make a right. It just makes a
| mess.
| wat10000 wrote:
| From your use of "kmph" I'm going to guess that you live
| in a country with decent driver training.
|
| I'm in the US, where driver training goes just slightly
| beyond checking if the candidate is capable of fogging a
| mirror. I learned in a northern state so we learned a lot
| about how to deal with ice and snow, but I don't think
| there was anything about rain. If there was, I'd
| forgotten it in the 20+ years since I last had any
| training or check.
|
| I agree with you that my driving was unsafe and I wasn't
| taught well. I don't think my behavior even came close to
| criminal.
|
| I am confused about your assessment of my charge. You
| previously said it was correct. Now you think it
| shouldn't have been a criminal charge?
| Filligree wrote:
| Well, I originally missed the "criminal" bit. I was
| agreeing that it was reckless. A misdemeanour wouldn't be
| considered a criminal charge where I live; it goes
| through a similar system, but has far fewer implications.
|
| The original fine seems reasonable.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Ok. Unfortunately that bit was the entire point. If it
| had been a "reckless driving" traffic ticket I wouldn't
| have a problem with it and wouldn't be commenting about
| it here.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| You hit another vehicle, at excessive speed, in poor
| weather. Fortune meant that the occupants of that other
| vehicle were not injured or worse.
|
| Writing it off as "Oh, I was just clueless" is a little
| downplaying.
|
| Yes, it's a one off instance, but the stakes in vehicles
| can be very high, hence our requirements for licensing
| and insurance.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Well I met those requirements and still didn't know
| enough to avoid this.
|
| On one hand, there's a responsibility to seek further
| knowledge and self-evaluate. I accept responsibility for
| not doing that here.
|
| On the other hand, having the government sign off on your
| training as officially adequate, then threatening to jail
| you and put a conviction on your record when it wasn't,
| seems rather uncool. Hold me liable for damages? Sure.
| Ticket me? Ok. But charge me with an actual crime?
| ghaff wrote:
| People gain more experience. Many/most also naturally
| become more cautious with age. I know there's a school of
| thought here that if we just made licensing more time
| consuming and expensive--whatever the cost in employment
| possibilities etc.--problems would go away. But I'm not
| sure how much classes, beyond a certain point, for a
| young driver really help.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > I was charged with misdemeanor reckless driving for
| going the speed limit in heavy rain and hydroplaning into
| another car. My fault for sure, but a criminal charge
| seems over the top.
|
| If they charged every rain related accident in Arizona as
| a criminal offence the court system would be clogged up
| for months after the monsoon season...
| daggersandscars wrote:
| It says both. The 1 in 3 refers to those under 23.
|
| > One in three U.S. adults has been arrested by age 23.
|
| The has a criminal record refers to the population as a
| whole.
|
| > [...] between 70 million and 100 million--or as many as one
| in three Americans--have some type of criminal record
|
| Linked PDF: https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/202
| 2/08/Americ...
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| That seems exceptionally high, and I'm assuming the study was
| mostly (all?) urban subjects, which could skew the results
| heavily. I can't think of more than 2 people I know that have
| an arrest history, and I know a LOT of (non-urban dwelling)
| people.
| thrance wrote:
| It's kind of my experience too, we all live in our
| (socioeconomic) bubbles. You are much more likely to get
| involved with the police if you were raised by poor parents. Or
| rather, you are much less likely to get involved with the
| police if you were raised by (comparatively) rich parents.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| You can figure this for anything, and prepare to be shocked.
| The variables are the number of incidents per period, the
| population during that period, and the expected duration an
| incident could occur. For example, in San Francisco, there are
| about 4700 car related injuries and deaths per year; about
| 800000 people; and the life expectancy is high at 83. This
| gives you 41 years for a cumulative 25% chance to have been
| involved in your first car injury.
|
| It is crazy. Everyone should be pissed off. Do this for guns,
| diabetes, etc. Think about the people you know, and how the
| further you venture into acquaintances, you know someone who
| has been arrested, injured by a car, injured by a gun, has
| diabetes, etc.
|
| Some will be looking for math flaws. It's an exponential model
| for time until first event, "constant hazard." It's actuarial.
| Nothing unorthodox. If you couldn't calculate the durations
| until events insurance couldn't work. The biggest factors are
| numerator, denominator and eligible period (ie rate of
| incidence). The biggest factors are NOT other things...
|
| The reason you doubt this stuff, that you think it's crazy,
| isn't because the math is wrong. You believe very strongly that
| people involved in crimes and car crashes and guns have
| personal agency. The discount for panopticon approved safe
| driving is a pathetic 5-10%! If agency is all it was, auto
| insurance would be way cheaper.
|
| This is all about the myth about what kinds of agency matter.
| You cannot be much of a "better" driver. You can't be a "safer"
| criminal. Even if you never drove, due to the rate of injuries,
| it takes 41 years. I didn't give the figure for causing
| injuries, just being involved in one, on purpose: we're primed
| to assume it's all about agency. Consider if there were only
| ONE criminal who commits the same rate of crimes: they're still
| going to arrest a ton of people! Or ONE driver who hits
| everybody: you're still going to be involved.
|
| The math is easy to understand but people absolutely refuse to
| question their beliefs about agency.
| luckylion wrote:
| > For example, in San Francisco, there are about 4700 car
| related injuries and deaths per year; about 800000 people;
|
| 800k permanent residents.
|
| > In 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic more than 26
| million visitors travelled to San Francisco.
|
| That changes your statistics quite a bit.
| brookst wrote:
| Indeed. If we assume two days per visitor, that would be
| 140k additional people.
| thefaux wrote:
| I don't think it does unless you assume that San Francisco
| roadways are on aggregate dramatically safer or more
| dangerous than other places.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > For example, in San Francisco, there are about 4700 car
| related injuries and deaths per year; about 800000 people;
| and the life expectancy is high at 83. This gives you 41
| years for a cumulative 25% chance to have been involved in
| your first car injury.
|
| It doesn't account for the fact that people can be injured
| more than once. Taking that into account, the number would be
| closer to 50 years. It also makes agency more relevant if
| most of the injuries are concentrated in a smaller group of
| people (ex: bikers).
|
| > The discount for panopticon approved safe driving is a
| pathetic 5-10%!
|
| Well, in France, the maximum discount for safe driving is
| officially -50%, and the maximum penalty for unsafe driving
| is +250%, calculated based on your history of at-fault
| accidents. That's a 7x difference! Not only that but if you
| get into too many accidents, the insurance company may cancel
| your contract, usually forcing you to go for insurance
| companies that specialize in high risk customers, which are
| even more expensive. I don't know about the insurance system
| where you live, but a 5-10% difference seems crazy.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > 5-10% difference seems crazy.
|
| Well. That's what it is. It's crazy only because of how
| deeply you believe in agency.
|
| If you instead think deeply about the numbers, and then the
| fact that you are comparing two completely different
| driving environments, one thing becomes clear: the way the
| driving environment is designed and driving culture is
| administered in France might be much better and safer!
| Then, agency plays a relatively larger role, by definition,
| even if it is absolutely small everywhere. Whereas in
| America, such as in San Francisco and many other
| communities, a lot of injuries are probably attributable to
| the environment and culture. This is at least the expert
| consensus is, not just the consensus of insurance
| companies.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| When I went to a boxing gym in Maryland there were a lot of
| young black guys. For them going to prison was totally normal
| thing. Often they themselves had been to prison or their
| relatives. Some had scars from gunshots. I can't even imagine
| how it is to grow up in that environment.
| ocschwar wrote:
| I had a surreal experience riding a Greyhound bus where I was
| the only passenger who hadn't just gotten out of prison. They
| were comparing conditions in various prisons the way you and
| I might compare coffee shops.
| gjm11 wrote:
| It'll vary a lot by demographic. It's not that 1/3 of every
| group of US adults has ever been arrested, it's that there are
| some groups where hardly ever have and some groups where a huge
| fraction have, and it averages out to 1/3.
|
| In particular, I bet that if you look at poor black men who
| live in US cities the figure is very very high. Maybe it's
| close to 100%.[1] If you look at middle-class white women
| living in the suburbs, not so much.
|
| Also: the fact that the report is about the US and you're in
| Ireland is very relevant; the US has a _lot_ more arrests than
| Ireland. (I would guess, though I haven 't looked at stats and
| I don't know whether they exist, that the US also has more
| racial divergence in the figures than Ireland.)
|
| (I shall not get into the highly contentious and political
| question of _why_ these things are the case.)
|
| I'll guess that your extended family and friends are mostly (1)
| not in the US, (2) white, (3) middle class, and (4) not living
| in city centres. All of which makes them drastically less
| likely to end up having difficult interactions with the police.
|
| [1] I did some crude arithmetic on the figures at
| https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ...
| and got an estimate that 108% of black men in the US have a
| criminal record. That seems unlikely to be correct :-) but
| suggests that the real figure is probably pretty high. (I
| suspect it does also indicate that the "up to 1/3" is an
| overestimate.)
| gruez wrote:
| >[1] I did some crude arithmetic on the figures at https://ww
| w.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ... and got
| an estimate that 108% of black men in the US have a criminal
| record. That seems unlikely to be correct :-)
|
| How are you calculating the proportion of black men with
| criminal records? The pdf mentions that black men are 6x more
| likely to be _incarcerated_ , but that's not the same as
| having a criminal record.
| gjm11 wrote:
| Yeah, that's one reason why the arithmetic is crude. The
| PDF says the following things:
|
| About 1/3 of US adults _have been arrested by age 23_.
|
| About 1/3 of US adults _have a criminal record_.
|
| Black men in the US are about 6x more likely _to be
| incarcerated_ than white men in the US.
|
| These figures aren't all about the same thing -- different
| classes of (alleged) offence, and also "adults" versus
| "men" -- and indeed the black:white ratios may be different
| for arrests, and criminal records, and incarcerations.
|
| It's not obvious to me whether we should expect the
| black:white ratio to be much higher for incarcerations than
| for arrests or criminal records. If it is, then that would
| indeed be one of several possible explanations for how the
| crude calculation ends up with more than 100% of black men
| in the US having a criminal record.
|
| Anyway, my calculation just pretended that the black:white
| ratio is the same for arrests / criminal records (take your
| pick, both are alleged to be up to ~1/3 of US adults) among
| adults as for incarcerations among men. Probably false, but
| I was just looking for a ballpark figure.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Also: the fact that the report is about the US and you're
| in Ireland is very relevant; the US has a lot more arrests
| than Ireland.
|
| While some of the effect may be more frequent and longer
| incarceration per arrest, the US (until recently being passed
| last year by El Salvador) has had the highest incarceration
| rate in the world, so its a good bet that it has a higher
| than typical arrest rate for the developed world, as well.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I live in Cincinnati and I'm continually surprised to meet
| African Americans who all seem to have an immediate family
| member who has been shot. And that's without the subject even
| coming up with a lot of them. At this point, I would be
| afraid to ask. (Most are not involving police)
|
| Among whites the only person I know to have been shot dropped
| his shotgun and accidentally blew half his forearm off while
| hunting.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> I bet that if you look at poor black men who live in US
| cities the figure is very very high
|
| Blacks are 14% of the population, so black men would be under
| 7%, poor black men who live in cities would be less than
| that.
|
| So that doesn't explain the statistic.
| ternnoburn wrote:
| 20% of the world's prisoners are housed in America.
| Interactions with police and arrests are very common here.
| guerrilla wrote:
| 4.25% of the world's population live in the US.
| rafram wrote:
| Right, so the US incarceration rate is almost five times
| the global average.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Yes but the US is a safer place to live and conduct
| business than most of the world. And it has a population
| that's far more diverse than any other country. Looking
| at this metric requires context. And it could be that
| these are great numbers for what you get in return.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Policing and imprisonment are very aggressive here. Arrests
| very often don't turn into convictions because the police are
| rewarded for wielding force any way they choose regardless of
| whether it's justified - their right to do this is legally
| protected via qualified immunity.
| lostlogin wrote:
| You may already know of Peelian Policing, but if not: Several
| countries practice a very different model, described as as
| 'policing by consent'. Police try to work with and not
| against citizens, recognising that they are citizens too.
|
| Ireland polices its population this way, USA doesn't.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The US is, by comparison to the rest of the developed world
| (and much of the rest of the world, besides) a very high police
| interaction regime, owing in no small part to the institutional
| and cultural aftereffects of the history of slavery and the use
| of the criminal justice system as a direct substitute for
| private chattel slavery when it was abolished.
| yuliyp wrote:
| I'm trying to figure out where that number comes from. The link
| to The Sentencing Project claims this, but the link to NCSL
| instead states "Approximately 77 million Americans, or 1 in
| every 3 adults, have a criminal record."
|
| Like, this feels like it's got to include speeding tickets in
| the mix to get something that high.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Speeding tickets are not criminal.
| WalterBright wrote:
| In the 1960s, the Air Force decided that they had too many
| candidates for pilots, and to winnow it down all candidates
| with a speeding ticket were disqualified.
|
| I've often felt this was unwise, as you want fighter pilots
| to be aggressive.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > Like, this feels like it's got to include speeding tickets
| in the mix to get something that high.
|
| Speeding is a civil, not criminal, infraction.
|
| You can't have the highest prison population in the world for
| decades and not end up with a bunch of people with criminal
| records.
| yuliyp wrote:
| The U.S. prison population is around 2M people. I'm not
| sure how that translates to 77M people with criminal
| records. (I'm serious about wanting to know more about
| these statistics and how they're generated. My brief
| searches trying to find where the data claimed in the
| linked infographics comes from got me nowhere.
|
| EDIT: I found the [National Longitudinal Survey of
| Youth](https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm) and as far as I
| could tell from some super quick excel formulas it's about
| 32% of interview subjects (people born 1980 - 1984)
| reported being arrested at least once by 2021.
| phil21 wrote:
| The vast majority of those with criminal records do not
| serve prison time. They plea bargain for work release,
| probation, diversion programs, etc.
|
| For example some types of DUI (drunk driving) is a felony
| in many states, but extremely common in the population as
| a whole. Very few do actual prison time unless especially
| egregious, are repeat offenders, or if they hurt someone
| during the commission of that crime.
|
| Many other examples abound - ranging from felony (over
| $1,000 in most places) shoplifting, breaking and
| entering, bar fights, etc.
|
| Felonies used to mean "high crimes" and were intended to
| be exceedingly rare and for exceptional crimes, but they
| have lost any meaning whatsoever over the interceding
| years.
|
| I believe "criminal records" also includes folks with
| misdemeanors which is even more common and almost never
| has associated prison time included in sentencing.
|
| Not sure if the statistics you're referencing re:
| "criminal records" even includes arrests in that. Many
| arrests don't result in further prosecution on top of all
| the above.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| I used to know this guy that got two felony DUIs in a
| week (both with injuries) and all he ended up with was
| six months in county jail (plus, I'm guessing, a shitton
| of fines) after all was said and done.
|
| Dude totaled at least his two cars (don't know what
| happened to the cars he hit), hurt some people and
| obviously didn't care since he did it _twice_. Of course
| it was over a woman...
| rychco wrote:
| The prison-industrial complex in the United States encourages
| this. While less than 10% of prisoners are in "for-profit"
| prisons, there's a large industry of private companies beyond
| this that profit off federal prisons; in addition to providing
| cheap prison labor or goods made by prison laborers (AKA modern
| slavery)
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Many of those private prisons also have clauses with their
| contracts that the city/county/whatever is required to pay
| per bed, regardless of occupancy. "If we're paying for it,
| might as well use it".
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| It's an obviously incorrect figure. It must include things like
| traffic tickets. The guardian is a highly activist and biased
| publication by their own admission, and not truly
| "journalistic".
| lostlogin wrote:
| It's trivial to search and check. The numbers appear to be
| accurate.
|
| However that is misleading, the below link talks about
| problems with the definition of a 'criminal record.'
|
| https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-
| cuo...
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Yes it seems crazy but this map is crazy too.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
| ocschwar wrote:
| The US isn't one country.
|
| When you read things like this, compare the EU to the US, not
| Ireland to the US.
|
| The Southern US is an archipelago of police states that
| regularly throw black and poor white citizens into jail on
| flimsy pretexts. New England, meanwhile is another country
| altogether.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Well arrested doesn't mean thrown in jail. Sometimes you are
| arrested then just given a citation. Open intoxicant, noise
| violation, underage drinking, speeding, bonfire in a field,
| peeing behind the bar, etc. I can see it.
| nickfromseattle wrote:
| As a nerdy, middle class, white guy, I and many of my male
| friends have been arrested between ages 18 - 25. Usually for
| drinking underage, public intoxication, or small amounts of
| marijuana.
| dougi3 wrote:
| thank god for the wayback machine
| markx2 wrote:
| https://www.judyrecords.com/ probably has it.
| ternnoburn wrote:
| I'm ok with this, as long as it's systemic. Otherwise it's just
| another way for people with means to get a leg up on people
| without means. If it's, "we delete all crime stories after N
| years", then fine, especially for low level, non violent stuff.
|
| The punishment for crimes should come from the justice system and
| people should be able to pay their dues and move on.
| coliveira wrote:
| > especially for low level, non violent stuff
|
| This is codeword for financial, white collar crimes. So, it is
| definitely a policy serving the rich.
| another-dave wrote:
| Minor drug offences could also fit that though -- possession
| or even someone dealing weed mightn't be directly involved in
| any violence at all
| lofenfew wrote:
| Or petty theft, shoplifting etc.
| cynicalkane wrote:
| It's generally the disadvantaged and poor who get hit for
| low-level, non-violent stuff.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Are they the ones also committing more of them
| statistically - is that why (or are you saying they are
| targeted)? And if so why is that the case - there are
| plenty of people who are disadvantaged and poor and don't
| commit crimes. Look at various immigrant minority groups
| for example.
| worik wrote:
| > It's generally the disadvantaged and poor who get hit for
| low-level, non-violent stuff.
|
| In my country (New Zealand) judges let off young people who
| look like them, regularly.
|
| "This young man [not but almost always a man] has a great
| future and he should not be burdened...."
|
| That is if they are an aspiring accountant, laywer, sports
| star, etcetera
|
| If they are a young bricklayer, welder, etcetera it is
| tough luck
|
| It is absolutely disgusting. No wonder so many people want
| to burn the whole thing down
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I think GP probably meant "stupid stuff young people do"
| minor drugs, drinking underage or even DUI, fighting, theft,
| vandalism.
|
| If you were under ~25, and it was "stupid kid stuff" why ruin
| someone's life.
|
| If you're 40 with a good job and get caught embezzeling,
| totally different in my view. Old enough to know better.
| ternnoburn wrote:
| More or less, yeah, you got it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Shoplifting is low level, non violent, and very very common.
| The only shoplifting I've heard of by the rich is a famous
| actress who had a shoplifting fetish.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| You're describing punishment by the state. One is entitled to
| move on from a fine or imprisonment. One is not entitled to a
| clean social or occupational reputation. There's a good reason
| those consequences exist.
| Filligree wrote:
| It's useful for society if there's a way for criminals to
| reintegrate into society.
|
| If potential employers can always check for a criminal
| record, and refuse to hire criminals, then guess what those
| criminals will do? The answer isn't "starve to death".
|
| Previously there were practical limits to how long a sentence
| could follow you. If you moved across the country, you might
| lose whatever family you still have, but at least you could
| get a fresh start. Nowadays that's effectively impossible.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There are employers who don't care about criminal records,
| at least up to a point. Most trade unions don't, and many
| other blue-collar employers don't. A criminal record isn't
| going to prevent you from working, but it might limit your
| choices.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It depends on the crime and the job. I wouldn't hire an
| embezzler to do the books, for example.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Why is that useful? To me it sounds like society's law
| followers would be taking risk to the benefit of the
| criminal. I think certain crimes that are petty - like
| traffic violations or whatever - sure reintegration makes
| sense. But burglaries, robberies, assault, murder, etc - I
| think keeping them jailed is probably best for everyone.
| ternnoburn wrote:
| People learn, change, and grow. People experience things
| and change their perspectives. The person I am at 45 is
| not the person I was at 25.
|
| Also, some folks believe crime has root causes in systems
| outside the self -- poverty, violence, compulsion --
| helping people out of those systems and then seeing if
| they can contribute in society without those pressures
| against them.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >One is not entitled to a clean social or occupational
| reputation
|
| In plenty of jurisdictions people are entitled precisely to
| that. Here in Germany the entire basis for punishment is a
| _right to full reintegration after you have been punished_. A
| just community punishes _once_ , not five hundred times over
| and that goes both for the people and the state (which are
| the same thing in a democracy, the latter punishes on behalf
| of the former). If you come out of prison and you've paid
| back your debt only to be ostracized and arbitrarily pursued
| by a witch hunting public that's not a just society, it's a
| mob. It's worth repeating, if someone goes to prison _you 're
| putting them there_, it's "we the people vs X". "The state"
| is exercising power on your behalf.
|
| That's the basis of a working social contract. You harm the
| community, you pay, but afterwards we have an actual duty to
| resocialize you, otherwise we just acted in arbitrary and
| disproportionate fashion. Criminals have rights in a
| civilized society, including to privacy and not be
| discriminated against, by say employers.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I believe it's Scandinavia, or maybe Denmark, where there
| is no punishment for escaping or attempting to escape
| prison.
|
| The courts, community has decided the need to be free is a
| fundamental human drive, and cannot be punished.
|
| Sure, when you're caught, you'll be taken back to complete
| your sentence, but you won't get additional punishment for
| the effort.
| bill_joy_fanboy wrote:
| > we have an actual duty to resocialize you
|
| You may feel that you have this duty. I do not feel that I
| have this duty. You are placing upon me an obligation that
| I will not accept.
| hooverd wrote:
| Personally, I like living in a liberal democracy where we
| reintegrate criminals.
| quesera wrote:
| You might be misunderstanding the word "resocialize".
|
| It has nothing to do with you.
| reader9274 wrote:
| Ah yes, rewrite history to not offend, what got us here in the
| first place
| systemstops wrote:
| As AI tools become more powerful and are used by the public to
| analyse the news, I suspect we'll see a lot more deletions of
| news articles to prevent "harmful" narratives from forming.
| nicce wrote:
| Would it better to punish the publishers and users of such AI
| tools instead? A better solution.
| frereubu wrote:
| This isn't about not offending people.
| mmooss wrote:
| What are you referring to and how did that 'get us here'?
| tokai wrote:
| I know Library of Congress has a newspaper database. But does
| anyone know if newspapers are covered by mandatory deposit in the
| US? Many European countries archive all national newspapers,
| printed or digital, so they won't be lost for posterity if
| deleted by their publisher.
|
| To me it seems unreasonable to require publishers to keep an
| immutable record. Shouldn't be forced by law to keep up your blog
| posts. National Libraries and legal deposit were literally made
| to solve this issue.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The local newspaper here recently shut down. They had close to
| 100 years of archives, went to the dump. They tried to give
| them to the library, to the local university, to anyone. No
| takers.
| tokai wrote:
| Again I don't know the scope of US mandatory deposit. But in
| the countries such as the UK, the Scandinavian countries, or
| Germany tall issues of such a newspaper would already be in
| the archive of the national library, in two copies.
| ghaff wrote:
| Basically, as I understand it, there is none. If you want
| to collect copyright infringement damages, you have to
| register for copyright, pay, and deposit a copy. Otherwise
| you have a copyright on creation and don't need to deposit
| anything. The vast majority of created works are not
| deposited anywhere.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| What newspaper was this?
| waiwai933 wrote:
| The US has a very weak legal deposit scheme compared to e.g.
| the UK. IIRC, legal deposit is only required where the author
| applies for copyright registration, so it's extremely unlikely
| that a newspaper would be subject to the legal deposit scheme.
| veny20 wrote:
| This is Orwellian gaslighting. These papers should no longer be
| viewed as authoritive keepers of the public record. Any
| institution that engages in this kind of memory-holing forfeits
| all credibility. They can no longer be trusted whatsoever.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Imagine someone who got pardoned by the state for a minor crime
| (so a clean criminal record) but who still had a newspaper
| article about them. That would be a raw deal.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Not a raw deal, just the truth. Why should information be
| deleted? That IS Orwellian.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Because people are prejudiced, and the newspaper article
| doesn't include an addendum that it should be taken with
| little to no value, so the impact it could have on
| someone's life due to people's stupidity is unwarranted.
|
| If we lived in a perfect universe where people were
| thoughtful and wise I wouldn't care.
| veny20 wrote:
| If it was reported in a newspaper, then it was deemed to be
| newsworthy, and that record should be preserved for
| posterity, for myriad reasons.
| evujumenuk wrote:
| I understand this is the general policy in a few places, like
| Germany. The general idea seems to be that it is more beneficial
| to a society if criminals are given a viable avenue to lead non-
| criminal lives again, with the alternative being people going "ah
| fuck it, I guess I'm a criminal now".
|
| I'm surprised at this concept spreading in the US, since the
| system would generally benefit from having perpetual perpetrators
| percolating through the prison slavery system.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| It's almost like there are multiple competing interests at play
| in a country of 340 million people...
| dingnuts wrote:
| take your tinfoil hat off. the US isn't one system
| conspiratorially doing one thing or another. it is a myriad of
| competing individuals and groups.
|
| journalists have different incentives than private prison
| operators and tend to be more progressive for whatever reason.
| they often are activists.
|
| it should not be surprising that journalists might take a
| softer view and than prison industrialists in a country with
| free thought and expression
| cj wrote:
| The article isn't strictly talking about prisoners.
|
| In the example in the article, a kid vandalized a tombstone in
| a graveyard, and can't find a job years later.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The negative knee jerk reaction to things has become comical.
| It's to the point where schools will not allow the parents of
| a student that has a record to come on school campus. They
| don't even care what the offense was for; they only look that
| there's not a clean slate.
| worik wrote:
| > schools will not allow the parents of a student that has
| a record to come on school campus
|
| It is even wider than that. I have noticed in my wider
| circle of friends. Deciding somebody is "bad" and
| ostracising them.
|
| Often when people are at their most vulnerable and need to
| wrapped in love by their friends they get the opposite.
| ggreer wrote:
| I'll be honest, I want to know more about the monument
| vandal. The article mentions that after graduating high
| school, a man "became rowdy with some friends and broke a
| small stone monument".[1]
|
| If the reason he couldn't get a job was that every employer
| googled his name, discovered what he did, and decided not to
| hire him, then clearly his actions were something that most
| people would want to know. If it was as inconsequential as
| the journalist claims, then why did his actions disqualify
| him from employment? Without details of the case (which would
| likely reveal the man's name), we can't decide whether
| memory-holing his past was beneficial to society or not.
|
| And that's exactly my point: People want to decide for
| themselves whether a person's past disqualifies them from
| becoming an employee, a friend, or even a lover. There are
| some crimes that most people are willing to overlook,
| especially if they happened long ago and the perpetrator has
| turned their life around. Nelson Mandela is an excellent
| example of that. But there are some crimes that most people
| are willing to shun someone for. The actual harm inflicted
| doesn't matter as much as how the actions reflect upon the
| person's character. For example: If you knew someone had been
| caught keying cars on three separate occasions, wouldn't you
| be a little hesitant to associate with them? The harm they
| did was minimal, but such actions say something about that
| person's psyche. Should their actions be googleable for all
| time? I don't know, but I know that I want to judge for
| myself whether those actions can be overlooked or if they're
| beyond the pale. I don't trust others to make that decision
| for me.
|
| Most importantly, if people realize that they can't trust
| public information, then they will be less trusting of
| strangers who can't prove their bona fides. They'll revert to
| how people solved this problem before the internet:
| preferring to hire relatives, former classmates, people who
| go to the same church, friends of friends, relying on
| stereotypes, and so on. It will become harder for someone to
| without the right connections to get their foot in the door,
| and it will hurt social mobility.
|
| 1. https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2015/09/help_us_imagine_
| ho...
| Yeul wrote:
| Before things like the FBI and the telegraph it was quite
| common for Americans to find a new life in another state. You
| could be married in New York but nobody in Montana would know
| unless they actively started an investigation. The world has
| become a village.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's one of those feudal villages you can't leave.
| nine_k wrote:
| It's not because we're indentured, but because we're on an
| island, and now most of the island is as transparent as a
| village.
| jackstraw14 wrote:
| it was the main selling point of the US for quite a while.
| FredPret wrote:
| There are private prisons in the US that benefit from more
| prisoners.
|
| But there are many more people and organizations there that
| benefit from _fewer_ prisoners.
|
| For most purposes, a country is not a singular thing.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| As I've gotten farther in my career as a product manager, I
| have to do more and more slicing and dicing of markets to
| understand who I'm building something for, identify
| opportunity.
|
| It's been really eye-opening to start realizing just how many
| people refer to a collective as a unit. And how many beliefs
| are dependent on not inspecting that fallacious thinking.
| teachrdan wrote:
| > It's been really eye-opening to start realizing just how
| many people refer to a collective as a unit. And how many
| beliefs are dependent on not inspecting that fallacious
| thinking.
|
| This is the top comment in a chain of siblings that are
| dogpiling on the parent for no good reason. I'm replying
| because I think it's a case of pointing out a distinction
| without difference, which is a low value response up there
| with "But correlation isn't causation!"
|
| In this case there are many different groups that benefit
| from a higher prison population. Private prisons are
| perhaps the most commonly cited, but they hold a tiny
| percent of the total prison population.
|
| But there are many, many private businesses that sell to
| prisons. Sudexo-Marriott makes millions selling services to
| private and public prisons. I once toured a "super max"
| prison in Ohio and saw that they had tens of thousands of
| dollars in commercial Hobart restaurant equipment.
|
| The knee jerk response here is, "Of course a prison pays
| for commercial dining services and equipment! That's not
| surprising, it's inevitable!" But that's my point. It's
| inevitable that there's billions of dollars being made off
| the US's prison population. And that's not including
| industries based specifically on exploiting prisoners, like
| prison phone and teleconferencing services that overcharged
| the incarcerated and their families by billions of dollars.
|
| There are many utterly conventional businesses that use
| slave labor from prisons. This is not hyperbole --
| prisoners are often forced to work for $1 a day or less.
| They are punished with solitary confinement or even
| additional prison time if they refuse.
|
| The final rebuttal would be, "Well not everyone in America
| benefits from a large prison population!" But if you read
| carefully, that's exactly what the parent comment is
| saying. But enough different and powerful stakeholders _do_
| benefit from a large and growing prison population that it
| 's difficult to enact reforms to make that number smaller.
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sudexo-
| Marriott+prison+sales&t=ffa...
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=prison+video+conferencing+busines
| s...
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=who+uses+prison+labor&atb=
| v...
| FredPret wrote:
| It's completely fair to say that private prisons have too
| much pull and that there are bad incentives like you
| point out.
|
| It's completely unfair to express surprise that Americans
| would come up with a way to reduce their prison
| population because of the notion that they've all been
| captured by the private prison industry.
| teachrdan wrote:
| > they've all been captured by the private prison
| industry
|
| This is a straw man argument, which is also discouraged
| on HN. Literally no one -- besides you and the sibling
| comments below -- has suggested that everyone has been
| captured by private prisons.
|
| Instead there are businesses all along the spectrum of
| those that incidentally do businesses with prisons to
| those that exclusively do business with prisons to those
| that are (private) prisons. And that doesn't even include
| police and sheriffs departments or politicians who
| benefit from prisons.
|
| I sincerely suggest that you engage with the discourse at
| hand rather than dismissing it with straw manning and
| other logical fallacies.
| FredPret wrote:
| Now you're strawmanning. Read the thread.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42596079 says:
|
| > "I'm surprised at this concept spreading in the US,
| since the system would generally benefit from having
| perpetual perpetrators percolating through the prison
| slavery system."
|
| A sweeping statement about the entire conceptual space of
| a huge country based on ideas about the private prison
| system manipulating an entire country.
| jbmchuck wrote:
| I suspect that is true but here is the difference:
| organizations that benefit from fewer prisons have a
| multitude of other things they benefit from (and can lobby
| for). Private prison operators on the other hand really only
| have one thing that can improve their bottom line at the end
| of the day - more prisons.
|
| Outside of a few non-profit orgs I suspect there aren't a lot
| of dollars lobbying for fewer prisons, it's not a great look
| and it's easily to spin as "company X doesn't want to lock up
| violent criminals!
|
| On the other hand that's really the only agenda item private
| prison operators put their lobbying dollars toward.
| plemer wrote:
| "Dispersed cost, concentrated gain"
| epicureanideal wrote:
| We need a way to concentrate the gains of things going in
| the other direction as well.
| eadmund wrote:
| > There are private prisons in the US that benefit from more
| prisoners.
|
| So do public prisons! Their employees -- and those employee's
| unions -- want to make money just as much as anyone.
|
| I don't think that public vs. private is material here.
| EasyMark wrote:
| and a lot overestimate the percentage private prison
| systems greatly. However, I think systems like Alabama that
| abuse prisoners to output widgets for corporations should
| be dealt with by the Feds as well. It's clearly cruel and
| unusual punishment. It's a complicated union but calling
| prisoners "slaves" is a far left talking point that they
| continuously use with no nuance allowed.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > the prison slavery system.
|
| extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is
| the enslavement?
| nashashmi wrote:
| Slave is sometimes also referred to as captured person or
| captive. An imprisoned person is a captive.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| There's usually a work component, though.
|
| An imprisoned person may or may not be enslaved as part of
| that imprisonment. If they get paid a reasonable wage,
| they're a prisoner with a job. If they're not forced to
| work, they're a prisoner but not a slave.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| But there's no purchase or sale of a human. So where's the
| slavery?
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Only chattel slavery involves purchase or sale of a
| human. Any forced labor is slavery, it just might not be
| chattel slavery.
| EasyMark wrote:
| You see no difference between being a legal prisoner and
| being a captive?
| krapp wrote:
| Read the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution: "Neither
| slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for
| crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall
| exist within the United States, or any place subject to their
| jurisdiction."
|
| The US penal system is _explicitly_ a continuation of the
| former slave system. Slavery wasn 't outlawed in the US, just
| made a monopoly franchise of the US government. It isn't
| coincidental that so many prisons were built on former
| plantation property, or that the incarceration rate of black
| men is so high.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Not sure who's downvoting this because the comment is
| objectively correct [1][2][3].
|
| The practice of "convict leasing" _is_ modern day slavery.
| This system should be abolished or, at a minimum, the
| prisoners should be paid _at least_ minimum wage so we don
| 't have the state to pay to lock people up and then some
| private corporation to profit off slave labor.
|
| [1]: https://harvardpolitics.com/involuntary-servitude-how-
| prison...
|
| [2]: https://innocenceproject.org/how-the-13th-amendment-
| kept-sla...
|
| [3]: https://www.newsweek.com/book-american-slavery-
| continued-unt...
| smsm42 wrote:
| > the prisoners should be paid at least minimum wage so
| we don't have the state to pay to lock people up and then
| some private corporation to profit off slave labor.
|
| Minimum wage is supposed to cover sustainable food,
| shelter, clothing and other basic physical needs (leaving
| aside the question whether it really does, it is the
| intent). The prisoner has these basic physical needs
| already taken care of. Therefore, it makes no sense to
| pay both prisoner and a free low-wage worker the same.
| Moreover, if it were the situation, the very next day
| every paper would have a headline "Workers are being paid
| prisoner wages - outrage!"
|
| However, if the prisoners are allowed to work for
| commercial for-profit companies, the company that
| benefits from this work should be asked to cover a
| substantial part of the prisoner's sustenance bill -
| which also would be to the taxpayer's benefit. Of course,
| participation in such programs should be strictly
| voluntary - I imagine prison life is not too fun, so
| there should be a number of people who would agree to do
| it even for a relatively very low wage. That said, it
| could be incentivized e.g. by taking successful work
| experience into account for parole decisions, etc.
| worik wrote:
| > Minimum wage is supposed to cover sustainable food,
| shelter, clothing and other basic physical needs
|
| * Many people locked up (in my country) are their
| families breadwinners * Many would if they could pay
| compensation, and victims would, if they could, receive
| it and improve their lives * Many leave prison with
| nothing. The ones not in the first clause often do not
| have families, nor friends left on the outside *
| Prisoners have, or can learn, valuable skills
|
| Put it all together, please.
|
| People (our fellow citizens, our comrades) should be sent
| to prison as punishment. Not for punishment. If they do
| not come out better than they went in (often a low bar)
| then we have failed.
|
| We can do so much better
| musicale wrote:
| Good points. And as you note, the punishment is (or
| should be) being deprived of one's freedom, not being
| mistreated in prison.
|
| It occurs to me that prisoners are usually exempt from
| child support payments (for example), but it might be
| better if they could actually contribute.
| jmyeet wrote:
| "Voluntary" is a very blurry line, which is why I think
| the prisoners should be meaningfully paid.
|
| The US prison system uses "commissary" to further extract
| wealth from prisoners and their families. We give
| prisoners substandard food and (usually) insufficient
| calories. How do they make that up? By paying out of
| pocket at commissary. And of course everything is
| overpriced.
|
| Prison phone companies have historically gouged prisoners
| to keep in touch with family.
|
| We even give female inmates insufficient sanitary
| products and, to get more, they need to see a doctor. But
| don't worry, we've financialized that too, as many states
| require a "co-pay" that might be $6 to see a doctor.
|
| Now that doesn't sound like a lot. But remember if you
| have a prison job, which you pretty much have to in many
| prisons, you might be makihng 30 cents an hour.
|
| So on top of forced incarceration, paid for by the state,
| we just have all these private profit opportunities that
| prisoners are coerced into.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Minimum wage is supposed to cover sustainable food,
| shelter, clothing and other basic physical needs (leaving
| aside the question whether it really does, it is the
| intent).
|
| You've simply made this up. This is what you think
| minimum wage should be, so this is what you've decided it
| was meant to be.
| musicale wrote:
| > "Workers are being paid prisoner wages - outrage!"
|
| As I understand it, in a number of US states workers are
| being paid prisoner wages.
|
| However regular workers aren't locked up in a prison and
| don't have to eat prison food. On the down side, they
| might have to pay for their own health insurance.
| bdangubic wrote:
| people that don't have a fucking clue about slavery in
| their own country are the ones downvoting
| tzs wrote:
| I would guess it is being downvoted because while what it
| says about the 13th Amendment is correct it isn't really
| relevant to the question it was answering.
|
| The question was whether or not US prisons use slavery.
| He answered the question of whether or not it would be
| legal for US prisons to use slavery. While is it legal,
| it is not _mandated_.
|
| A proper answer would examine the labor requirements
| actually in use in US prisons, compare them to labor
| requirements in other first world country prisons (and
| yes, several other first world countries make prisoners
| work), define just what they mean by slavery, and then
| try to make the case that the differences between what
| the US does and what other first world countries with
| required prison labor do is enough to make it slavery in
| the US.
| like_any_other wrote:
| > The US penal system is explicitly a continuation of the
| former slave system.
|
| Penal labor is not exclusive to the US:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour
|
| > It isn't coincidental that so many prisons were built on
| former plantation property, or that the incarceration rate
| of black men is so high.
|
| 32% of prisoners are Black: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I
| ncarceration_in_the_United_St...
|
| 56% of homicide perpetrators are Black: https://en.wikipedi
| a.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...
|
| Using homicide as indicator of general criminality because
| it's hard to fudge the numbers or inflate them with over-
| policing. Granted the correspondence is surely not perfect,
| but given that we have such a parsimonious explanation,
| we'd need strong justification to reach for conspiratorial
| alternatives.
| bdangubic wrote:
| you seriously asking this or joking?????!
| Brybry wrote:
| To add to sibling comments about the 13th amendment's
| exception clause (which is what legally allows forced prison
| labor[1]): forced prison labor has been a state-level ballot
| issue in recent years.
|
| Colorado voted to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude
| as punishment for crime in 2018 (though enforcement is
| reportedly poor). [2][3]
|
| In other states voters have upheld forced labor[4] but
| sometimes it's because of issues with how it's worded[5].
|
| You can argue it's involuntary servitude instead of slavery
| but to most people that's a meaningless distinction.
| Especially while they are being beaten for not working.[6]
|
| [1] https://action.aclu.org/send-message/congress-end-forced-
| lab...
|
| [2] https://www.npr.org/2018/11/07/665295736/colorado-votes-
| to-a...
|
| [3] https://www.npr.org/2023/11/13/1210564359/slavery-prison-
| for...
|
| [4] https://calmatters.org/politics/elections/2024/11/califor
| nia...
|
| [5] https://lailluminator.com/2022/11/17/the-story-behind-
| why-lo...
|
| [6] https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-
| inve...
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > You can argue it's involuntary servitude instead of
| slavery but to most people that's a meaningless
| distinction.
|
| The purchase and sale of humans, or the lack of such
| transactions is a meaningless distinction?
| bdangubic wrote:
| _The purchase and sale of humans, or the lack of such
| transactions is a meaningless distinction?_
|
| by which definition of slavery do we have "purchase and
| sale of humans" as part of that definition?!
|
| _Article 1(1) of the 1926 Slavery Convention: "Slavery
| is the status or condition of a person over whom any or
| all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are
| exercised."_
|
| just because you are not purchased/sold does not mean
| your condition cannot be defined as slavery
| quesera wrote:
| > _by which definition of slavery_
|
| "Chattel slavery".
| jfengel wrote:
| Given the for-profit prisons, it comes very close to
| being the purchase and sale of humans.
|
| It's not full chattel slavery such as was legal before
| the 13th Amendment, but the word "slavery" has always
| encompassed definitions short of that, e.g. in ancient
| Rome.
| Brybry wrote:
| Yes, it's my opinion that it's meaningless pedantry to
| argue involuntary servitude is not included in the
| definition of slavery when used in casual speech on a
| forum.
|
| I don't believe there's a need to soften language to
| attempt to weaken the narrative of a "prison slavery
| system". If one is a proponent of forced labor for
| convicts then just say so: plenty of people will agree
| (and plenty will disagree).
| jmyeet wrote:
| There's a much broader problem here: unnecessary background
| checks. If you're applying for a job or to rent an apartment it
| absolutely shouldn't matter that you vandalized something 15
| years earlier.
|
| It's likely automated systems building up these profiles too so
| what if you happen to just have the same name as someone who
| was convicted of something in a news article?
| impossiblefork wrote:
| There are enormous problems with this kind of thing though,
| especially when for example, a murderer is part of the
| establishment or is cuddled by the big established entities.
|
| There was a guy who was a motor journalist for a major Swedish
| newspaper (Dagens Nyheter) who stabbed a man to death while his
| friends prevented the man's escape, and you basically don't get
| to hear about. It's even been removed from the journalist's
| Wikipedia page.'
|
| I think truth is much more important and I think what a court
| does must be inherently public and I see a court, is as a proxy
| for going before the people itself to deal with a matter that
| can't be decided privately (and obviously, when somebody is
| dead, there's private way to make up), and therefore I believe
| their decisions have to stand forever and should be as public
| as possible.
| like_any_other wrote:
| What is this journalist's name? I couldn't find any
| information on this, but I don't have much to go on - Dagens
| Nyheter being a newspaper means "Dagens Nyheter murder"
| surfaces a lot of results of the newspaper reporting on
| murders.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| Jacques Wallner.
| dsego wrote:
| Historically criminals from Germany would find a new life in
| Argentina. And they mostly lived out plain unremarkable lives,
| so this does work. Not sure everyone appreciated the benefits
| to society though.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > The general idea seems to be that it is more beneficial to a
| society if criminals are given a viable avenue to lead non-
| criminal lives again, with the alternative being people going
| "ah fuck it, I guess I'm a criminal now".
|
| It really boggles my mind that so many people have difficulties
| understanding this concept, and prefer it when the general
| public wants blood. Peed in public? Capital punishment it is.
| xrd wrote:
| A flip side to this is that you can go here to see archives of
| newspapers:
|
| https://news.google.com/newspapers
|
| After reviewing lots of southern papers during the 1960s,
| shockingly (!) entire months are gone. I was really hoping to
| read their editorials saying what they thought MLK really was at
| that time, and then see what they wrote today. I figured this
| would be more fun than paying attention to Trump on inauguration
| day, which weirdly falls on the same day as MLK day.
|
| Let's be frank, there probably isn't ad revenue for old crime
| stories that aren't sensationalized. So, the newspapers owners
| are not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, or their
| thoughts on the criminal justice system.
|
| How about instead, they agree moving forward to not publish crime
| stories about poor people at all? That I could get excited about.
| irrational wrote:
| What would happen to people's perception of crime if only the
| crime perpetuated by the rich and powerful was reported on?
| xrd wrote:
| It's probably just me, but it feels like reporting on crime
| is very lopsided and slanted against the powerless.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| The powerless are usually the victims, not the criminals.
| Criminals are by definition exerting their power (usually
| through physical violence) over people who have even less
| "power."
|
| Not everything is about power dynamics, and crime rarely
| is. Far more often it is about selfishness.
| xrd wrote:
| Again, would love to be proved wrong, but I think
| physical violence is far and away the majority of crime
| reported, but the minority (in my own definition) of
| crimes committed.
|
| As an example, I think RealPage and the rent collusion
| they were doing clearly is illegal. And, has impacted
| hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.. But,
| you'll see a lot more reporting on a shooting in every
| newspaper, even though in most cases that would directly
| impact only a few people.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| I suspect the majority of crime committed to be civil
| infractions and petty crime (speeding, parking
| violations, minor theft, vandalism, then on to things
| like drug use and DUI). Then you get to violent crime. By
| sheer quantity, I'd guess there are more violent crimes
| than fraud.
|
| Fraud may impact far more people at once, but there are a
| lot fewer instances of it than of violence, if we're
| talking quantity of commission and not quantity of
| victims.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| This is just CRT nonsense.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Where in my comment did I bring up race?
|
| The comment I was replying to claimed criminals were
| criminals because they were powerless. I think most
| criminals are criminals because they're bad people (the
| opposite of CRT's Marxist analysis).
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Hackers are down voting your comment, but anybody who has
| been "on the inside" in dealing with criminal cases knows
| you are speaking the truth. Criminals usually seek out
| their victims among the people with the least power:
| Children, youths, addicts, isolated people, mentally
| weak.
| qup wrote:
| I only hear about poor people committing crimes usually on
| the local news.
|
| Everything else is billionaire did this, politician did
| that, corporation did both of those and more.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| Sure, you don't read other places' local news. But those
| places' residents do.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| It's just you.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| This is a huge disservice to the public. Lots of offenders are
| repeat offenders, and the public needs to know who they are. Or
| maybe someone just wants to look up an old news story they
| remember. More fundamentally, this type of action is just a
| manipulation of the public and not journalism, which should be a
| neutral way of sharing information.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| No just lots but almost all.
|
| 63% of violent offenders reoffend but that actually undercounts
| the amount of crimes that are caused by repeat offenders
| because there are some people offending 10+ times.
|
| A three strikes rule would eliminate nearly half of all violent
| crime because nearly half of violent crime is committed by
| people who have already been convicted of 3+ other violent
| crimes.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| In the Seattle area there's a huge trend of reoffending
| criminals performing larger crimes as time goes, because they
| face no real consequences. This is happening because activist
| judges, who typically run unopposed and don't face
| consequences themselves, are releasing dangerous criminals
| back into the public. As a recent example, an activist judge
| released a teen who committed felony robbery back into the
| public, against prosecutors' pleas, and he ended up stabbing
| and disemboweling another teen.
|
| https://komonews.com/news/local/everett-lions-park-
| stabbing-...
| mmooss wrote:
| > there's a huge trend of reoffending criminals performing
| larger crimes as time goes
|
| Is there evidence of it? In my experience, people take a
| few incidents as ammunition for their reactionary attacks
| on 'activists'. But that doesn't mean it is or isn't
| happening.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > A three strikes rule would eliminate nearly half of all
| violent crime because nearly half of violent crime is
| committed by people who have already been convicted of 3+
| other violent crimes.
|
| LMAO. Twenty-nine states have a three strikes rule, and their
| violent crime hasn't decreased by half.
|
| Source: https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/three-
| strikes...
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Maybe it has dropped relative to what it would have been
| otherwise.
| tantalor wrote:
| This article fails to include any context and background that
| "right to be forgotten" was first legally established in Europe
| in 2014.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| There's a lot of research on ban-the-box policies[1]. I assume
| this applies here as well.
|
| [1]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=ban+the+box
| gruez wrote:
| >I assume this applies here as well.
|
| That it won't have much effect, and might actually be
| counterproductive?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_the_Box#Impact
| musicale wrote:
| Hiring discrimination is hard to control, and background
| checks are still legal.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| This doesn't work well. It results in additional
| discrimination. The state of the art is, as I understand it,
| "Fair Chance employment", where the employer explicitly agrees
| to hire people with criminal records. We're well on our way to
| the majority of employers opting in, it's snowballed nicely.
| And it gives jobseekers a big red flag if the company doesn't
| have that policy.
| rsanek wrote:
| that's not how fair chance works -- it just means the company
| will consider whether or not the offense(s) are relevant to
| the job. the employer isn't committing to hire more people
| with criminal records
| musicale wrote:
| > the company will consider whether or not the offense(s)
| are relevant to the job
|
| I doubt many employers would consider armed robbery to be a
| relevant job skill.
| Schiendelman wrote:
| We are saying the same thing. :)
| steelframe wrote:
| I used to work with someone who was arrested for having a beer in
| his possession when he was 20 years old. The circumstances were
| pretty colorful, and so it made the local news. He had since
| worked his way into management at the company we worked for. One
| day he mentioned that the article about his arrest finally fell
| off the Google index after more than a decade, and he was
| relieved about that. One of his reports in the room immediately
| jumped on Google and used their tool for re-indexing sites to get
| the article back in the results for his boss, and then he proudly
| announced how he "solved that problem!"
|
| Of all the career-limiting moves I've witnessed in my lifetime,
| that one was pretty near the top.
| ocschwar wrote:
| I'm honestly surprised that after 20 years of the Internet
| "never forgetting" things like this, we haven't gotten a lot
| better about forgiving them instead.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| Much has been written about Gen Z having a tiny appetite for
| risky behavior, and the causes are attributed to all sorts of
| stuff. But my entirely unscientific bet is that there is a
| real chilling effect to growing up as the first generation
| that had entirely digital "permanent records" and zero
| tolerance policies for their entire lives. Very little room
| for error when, regardless of whether you learned anything
| from it or not, your mistake is recorded forever and
| searchable by anybody. And because the rest of society didn't
| grow up with that level of retention, they'll still judge you
| for it being documented.
| meroes wrote:
| Or, keep the info but change our perceptions.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| I'm so glad people are finally starting to think of the
| criminals.
| mmooss wrote:
| This could create an imbalance of power:
|
| It could prevent the public from knowing of the past misdeeds of
| the powerful. It's much different to give someone with no power
| an opportunity to move forward, compared to removing an essential
| check on people who have power.
|
| Also, it seems likely that powerful people will still have access
| to this data, in news databases, in the data accumulated in the
| profiles of marketing and surveillance companies, etc.
| krapp wrote:
| >It could prevent the public from knowing of the past misdeeds
| of the powerful.
|
| In a world where books, radio, movies, television and the
| internet didn't exist, and where people had memories like
| goldfish, maybe.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| What's the name of the most powerful drug trafficker in your
| region?
| krapp wrote:
| I don't know, I don't use drugs and I'm not involved in
| organized crime.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Powerful people can pay professionals to erase their crimes
| from the internet. You can barely find any specific information
| about everybody involved in the 2008 mortgage fraud, because
| everybody involved had it scrubbed.
| gojomo wrote:
| Reminds me of a laugh-out-loud closing paragraph in a 2009 NYT
| article about the clash between Wikipedia & German lawyers over
| some infamous murderers' right-to-be-forgotten.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13wiki.html
|
| Read the whole thing for maximum effect, but for me it
| beautifully demonstrates the contrast between the
| USA/Wikipedia/NYT ethos of "the truth is always printable and
| your speech is by default 'on the record'" and alternate
| expectations elsewhere.
| realityking wrote:
| Worth noting that both Germany's highest criminal court and the
| European Court of Human Rights in the end decided that the
| people in question don't have a right to get their names
| expunged from archives (or Wikipedia).
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Sedlmayr#Murder
| Animats wrote:
| Is this being proposed to get Trump off the hook?
| krapp wrote:
| How could it possibly get Trump off the hook?
| FpUser wrote:
| This whole criminal record piece of shit is a crime on its own. I
| believe that records of people who served their time or just have
| been arrested/carded and then let free must be sealed and not
| accessible to general employers.
|
| Some obvious exceptions can apply but generally people should not
| be penalized for what they've been penalized already.
| rangestransform wrote:
| This sort of paternalism by "elites" who are "enlightened" and
| "know better than the proles" is why there is a global pushback
| against elitism. If people feel like they need this information
| to protect themselves or their businesses, however misguided, who
| are you to tell them otherwise?
| pessimizer wrote:
| > If people feel like they need this information to protect
| themselves or their businesses
|
| The "people" you are referring to here are the "elites."
| Conservatives adopting left-wing rhetoric has confused
| everybody for some reason. The people who own everything and
| can keep you from working, attending school, or having a place
| to live are the elites.
|
| > who are you to tell them otherwise?
|
| The person who the information is about. It's worth making an
| argument as to why that person shouldn't have a say, instead of
| railing against the "elites."
| bb88 wrote:
| IRL I knew someone who was charged with child sexual abuse. He
| went to prison awaiting trial, but the prosecution dropped the
| charges before it got there. He was released and went about his
| life.
|
| Meanwhile his mug shot photo in the local paper was the number
| one google search result for his name. And then it reached
| syndication for other news sites as well.
|
| Ideally those news paper articles should be updated to say the
| prosecution dropped the charges, but the reality is that at where
| I live, the arrest makes news but the prosecution dropping
| charges does not.
| Yeul wrote:
| In the Netherlands media never names suspects.
|
| But it's more of a cultural thing people just mind their own
| business.
| tiku wrote:
| To clarify, we name them partially. The first name and then
| the first letter of the lastname. So John Doe would be John
| D.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Thankfully we have the Internet Archive. </s>
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Presumably this will increase business sand value for the various
| private companies that sit on silos of such data that you access
| for a price.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| It is a hard job to figure out where the boundaries go on what
| and whom should be forgotten.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to amending articles related to people who were
| accused of crimes they didn't commit, and were later acquitted or
| had those charges dropped--that's a matter of correcting the
| record. I disagree with destroying the historical record itself,
| if the expunged stories were factual accounts of real events.
| Those things ought to be immutable. Journalists engaged in real
| journalism have special protections because they have special
| responsibilities in society, one of which is to truthfully
| document history as it unfolds. If they just give up those
| responsibilities, people may eventually start questioning what
| makes them different than everybody else with a hot take on the
| internet.
| vldmrs wrote:
| I have a good story related to the topic of discussion :)
|
| I am the author of one site - a dictionary of the English
| language, which, in addition to the definition of a word from
| several dictionaries, shows the use of words in different
| contexts. One of the contexts is news - so for example for the
| word "window" it shows several news headlines containing the word
| "window".
|
| So, about 10 years ago, I received a very rudely written email
| demanding that I remove a reference to a certain person from the
| text of a news story. The news story was about a misdemeanor that
| a certain person had committed. Since the email was very rudely
| written and since I hadn't broken any law, I just ignored it and
| forgot about it. Over the course of about six months, this person
| bombarded me with dire threats and also wrote complaints to my
| hosting provider. The hosting company forwarded these letters to
| me and asked me to look into it, but did not demand anything
| because no law had been broken.
|
| One day, after many e-mails with threats of legal action, and
| about 6 months, I received the first normal message, in which the
| person asked what he should do to make me delete the information
| he wanted.
|
| Here I need to mention that for all this time this person has
| parroted me quite a lot with his threats and I had no desire to
| meet him halfway.
|
| I wrote that I would delete the necessary information as soon as
| I received a request from him, written in the form of a short (!)
| verse.
|
| Another month or so passed, during which this person argued and
| tried to change my mind (instead of sending a short verse)
|
| ...
|
| As soon as he did, I connected to the database with a smile,
| deleted the entry he asked for and wrote him an email wishing him
| good luck. I hope he is doing well now :)
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I'd feel better about a "right to comment":
|
| So instead of deleting the record of my arrest, I could add some
| kind of comment explaining that I was not convicted in the end.
| cvalka wrote:
| The right of rebuttal!
| bdangubic wrote:
| rebuttals are never read by anyone. there are numerous examples
| of this like in our modern age a completely bogus story will
| "go viral" and will be shared / read by millions and millions
| while a retraction will go completely unnoticed.
|
| even more serious, bogus scientific studies like the one that
| started the whole "vaccines cause autism" while fully disputed
| cannot be undone with a retraction/rebuttal
| maginx wrote:
| I also think search engines sometimes remove results based on
| subject requests - at least I've seen such notices in Google
| search results, that some hits were removed due to 'right to be
| forgotten' policies.
|
| Unpopular opinion (it seems): I think it is OK to some extent.
| Not for serious crimes (violence, murder etc.) but there's an
| awful lot of 'lesser crimes' reported with full names where I
| think subjects might deserve a clean slate or where people have
| some right to privacy. In the extreme case, everything court-
| related and all infractions could be public and subject to auto-
| generated news, and forever searchable: traffic fines, civil
| cases, neighbor complaints (either way) etc. All parts of an
| immutable record for everyone to look up by name. I personally
| think that is a violation of privacy, so it has to be balanced.
| Maybe the best balance is not to write the names to begin with.
|
| In Denmark where I'm from, court cases are almost always public
| and the subject names are read aloud as well; however the names
| are not listed on the court lists or in the publicly accessible
| version of the verdicts. In order for the media to learn the
| name, a journalist has to physically go and see the trial. This
| already prevents automation and ensures prioritization by the
| media. Furthermore, most news media have a policy of only writing
| the subject's name after a guilty verdict has been found and even
| then only if the verdict was of some severity (unless it is a
| public person). I just checked on media outlet and their policy
| was to only write the name in case of a custodial sentence of at
| least 24 months. If it weren't for such policies, even relatively
| small cases would be reported with full name and be searchable
| forever.
| bko wrote:
| I wish newspapers were more concerned about being an objective
| system of record rather than trying to push social goals by
| helping rewrite history. They should post follow-ups for those
| wrongly convicted or after the fact caveats but completely memory
| holeing news stories strikes me as deeply disturbing
| scarab92 wrote:
| I would like them to refrain from naming people until/unless
| they are actually convicted.
|
| Heck, I would probably go a step further and update defamation
| laws to make publishing allegations (legal or otherwise)
| considered equivalent to making allegations. Far too many lives
| have been ruined by media "just reporting on allegations"
| fossislife wrote:
| IMO it would be much better to redact names instead of deleting
| the entire stories. Newspapers in other countries like Germany
| never write the full names, anyway.
| baxtr wrote:
| You often find them on X though.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I don't usually call thing "dumb" but this seems like a bad idea
| and overly forgiving. This is coming from someone who has hire
| nonviolent offenders in the past because I think it's a good
| thing to give people a second chance. You don't fix things by
| hiding the past.
| wsintra2022 wrote:
| Isn't that Wilson's job in 1984 if I recall correctly, been a
| while since reading it.
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