[HN Gopher] In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poo...
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In Jail Without a Lawyer: How a Texas Town Fails Poor Defendants
Author : ceejayoz
Score : 102 points
Date : 2025-03-25 18:59 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Texas is not known as a bastion of civil rights.
| jp191919 wrote:
| Depends on the civil rights in question. Champion of some, not
| so much on others.
| bsder wrote:
| Wait until minorities start open carrying lots of guns.
|
| That's how California wound up with gun control under Saint
| Reagan (hack ... spit).
| nadermx wrote:
| "Two men were released after The Times asked about them, half a
| year after their sentences had been completed."
|
| Horrific. This egregious human rights violation is something
| you'd think you read about in a developing nation, not a
| developed nation.
| kurthr wrote:
| Sounds really expensive for the municipality.
|
| The local jailers are probably doing well, though sticking it
| to the local rubes who support them.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Many people are happy to spend money to hurt members of out-
| groups.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| If you or I did the same thing, we'd be in jail shortly for
| kidnapping and false imprisonment. Here, at best, it just
| means the local taxpayers pay a settlement.
| jMyles wrote:
| Developing nations don't have the funds for elaborate systems
| of slavery such as incarceration. Slavery in developing nations
| is usually managed by an imperial colonizer.
| wtcactus wrote:
| Colonization ended 50 years ago and yet, there were never as
| many slaves in the world as there are today.
|
| There are more than 40 million people enslaved now.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Slavery_Index
| jMyles wrote:
| Colonization has only ended in express terms. In many parts
| of the world, including essentially all of the developing
| nations where slavery has expanded in the past half-
| century, the dominant economic activity are forms of
| extraction at the behest either multinationals, OPEC,
| China, or USA.
| saghm wrote:
| My immediate thought when reading this was that the number
| of people is much higher today than 50 years ago, but
| before my kneejerk reaction I decided to check the math.
| Assuming the results of a quick google can be trusted, we
| have around 4 billion more people today than 50 years ago,
| which means that entire percent of the population growth in
| the past 50 years are people in slavery. That's
| staggeringly higher than I would have estimated before
| reading any of this.
| reliabilityguy wrote:
| > Slavery in developing nations is usually managed by an
| imperial colonizer.
|
| Please, read this wiki article:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery
|
| Slavery was not invented by "colonizers". There are plenty of
| examples of slavery, where no conquest had happened at all,
| e.g., peonage.
| milesrout wrote:
| Slavery has existed for all of human history, and is sadly
| the natural state of things. It was stamped out by the
| British empire, a colonising power, because of the relentless
| campaigning of Christian moralists.
|
| Imprisonment is indeed a newer development. In the past they
| chopped off your hand and let fate deal with you, or they
| just executed you. Nobody was going to feed some peasant who
| couldn't even work. Imprisonment was for aristocrats and
| their children, not for criminals.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > is sadly the natural state of things
|
| Sadly, the _even-more-natural_ state of things involves the
| total extinction of all known forms of life and nothing but
| the cold vacuum of space.
|
| So we should be very careful not to equate that particular
| kind of "natural" with other concepts like "unavoidable" or
| "acceptable".
| milesrout wrote:
| My message was correcting ahistorical misinformation, not
| talking about what is good or bad or acceptable.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Imprisonment is indeed a newer development.
|
| Ancient Greece and Rome are "newer"?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamertine_Prison was built in
| the 7th century _BC_.
| geodel wrote:
| I mean those were just centers for vigorous debates on
| natural philosophy :-)
| milesrout wrote:
| The linked article says:
|
| >Imprisonment was not a sentence under Roman statutory
| law,[2] though detention is mentioned in the Twelve
| Tables and throughout the Digest.[3] "Detention",
| however, includes debt bondage in the early Republic;[4]
| the wearing of chains (vincula publica), mainly for
| slaves; and during the Imperial era a sentence of hard
| labor at the mills, mines or quarries.[5] Slaves or
| lower-status citizens sentenced to hard labor were held
| in prison camps.[6]
|
| >Incarceration (publica custodia) in facilities such as
| the Tullianum was intended to be a temporary measure
| prior to trial or execution; abuses of this principle
| occurred but were officially censured.[7] Located near
| the law courts, the Tullianum was used as a jail or
| holding cell for short periods before executions and as a
| site for executions.
|
| So yes, as I said, imprisonment is a newer development.
| Holding people temporarily is jailing. Imprisonment, in
| the "sentenced to prison for a period of time or
| indefinitely" is a modern idea. It was considered
| barbaric by some cultures historically, but it also was
| just not viable. There was a small surplus of food, which
| was for the aristocracy to siphon off the top (ostensibly
| to fund the defence of the realm), not for feeding common
| criminals.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The article goes on to say:
|
| > In general, long-term incarceration was more widely
| practiced in the later Empire, and from the 4th century,
| under Christian rule...
|
| I don't consider that recent, either.
|
| (Nor do I really think "prison camp", "sentenced to hard
| labor", and "debt bondage" are all that meaningfully
| different from imprisonment.)
| jMyles wrote:
| Please - and I ask this with calmness and a sincere
| urging:
|
| Stop trying to make incarceration seem like a long-
| running historical phenomenon. It is profit-driven
| propaganda, the promulgation of which began promptly in
| 1865.
|
| Incarceration, in the Western legal tradition, is very
| new in relative terms, and its growth has been
| overwhelmingly the result of the experience of the USA
| transforming slavery into something marginally more
| politically acceptable.
|
| You probably already know this, given your knowledge of
| the history, but some plantations, such as Angola, never
| even bothered closing down; they just transformed into
| penitentiaries and continued business as usual. The 13th
| amendment to the constitution, against the better
| judgment of many objectors, is specifically worded to
| facilitate this transformation.
|
| Incarceration is not a legal tradition. It is a way to
| shoehorn slavery economics into one.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| > Horrific. This egregious human rights violation is something
| you'd think you read about in a developing nation, not a
| developed nation.
|
| bruh you have no idea. seriously. the "justice system" in the
| US should not be called a justice system, but a slavery and
| penal system:
|
| > Thirteenth Amendment, Section 1:
|
| > Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, _except as a
| punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly
| convicted_ , shall exist within the States, or any place
| subject to their jurisdiction.
|
| the US also has private prisons. do you understand? e.g., there
| are about 1000 prisoners in california that are also
| firefighters _getting paid $10 a day_. do you think they _cost_
| $10 a day to california?
|
| EDIT: I was possibly mistaken about this example specifically
| (see below) but only as of 2022-2023 (the fire fighters program
| has been around for much longer than 2022-2023). there are many
| other examples; if you've ever seen prisoners stamping license
| plates in a movie, the allusion is exactly to this kind of
| "work":
|
| https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/national-veri...
|
| damning pull quote:
|
| > Two out of three people incarcerated in state and federal
| prisons are also workers, the American Civil Liberties Union
| (ACLU) estimated in a June 2022 report.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| It's also a "wealth transfer from people not part of the
| system to people who are" system.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| it's lots of gross things that many educated americans
| refuse to engage with/consider and rather deny as "behind
| us".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > the US also has private prisons. do you understand? e.g.,
| there are about 1000 prisoners in california that are also
| firefighters getting paid $10 a day.
|
| "E.g." is is misused here: California prison firefighters are
| not an example of private prisons (California does not employ
| private prisons.)
|
| > do you think they cost $10 a day to california?
|
| Well, yeah, they are state prisoners in state prisons, whos
| do you think is paying the $10/day to the prisoners?
| decimalenough wrote:
| The previous poster's point is, I presume, that the upkeep
| of a prisoner costs a hell of a lot more than $10/day.
| Specifically, the California Dept of Corrections quotes
| $133,000/year.
|
| https://www.lao.ca.gov/PolicyAreas/CJ/6_cj_inmatecost
| Terr_ wrote:
| I'd have less of a problem with prisoners being paid a
| pittance for helping out if it weren't for how the
| spending-side of prison commissaries [0] and phone calls
| [1] are often unconscionably overpriced.
|
| [0] https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-
| prison-c...
|
| [1] https://www.vera.org/news/the-fcc-is-capping-
| outrageous-pris...
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| you're partially right (i was mistaken) and only as of very
| very recently:
|
| https://www.thepomonan.com/news/2023/10/2/7investigative-
| cal...
|
| > AB32 included exemptions which allowed private prisons to
| focus on other profitable "community corrections" programs,
| such as day reporting centers, counseling facilities,
| halfway houses, rehabilitation centers, medical offices,
| and mental health facilities. Currently, these exemptions
| are worth around $200 million a year. Included are
| locations that mimic detention facilities and are run by
| organizations that also run private prisons in California.
|
| https://www.ilrc.org/biden-administration-partners-
| private-p...
|
| > 09/26/2022
|
| > Pasadena, CA - Today, an en banc 11-judge panel of the
| Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that GEO could block
| California's AB 32 (People not Profit, Bonta) from going
| into effect for the duration of the lawsuit, pending
| further review from District Court. AB 32 is a state law
| signed in 2019 which banned private prisons and private
| immigration detention centers in the state.
|
| I do not know if this applies to the Conservation (Fire)
| Camp Program
| alistairSH wrote:
| _something you 'd think you read about in a developing nation,
| not a developed nation._
|
| Sadly, we have become one of the shit-hole nations Trump loves
| to rant about. And we (the voting public) have been 100%
| complicit.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| _> This egregious human rights violation is something you 'd
| think you read about in a developing nation, not a developed
| nation._
|
| Yes, but a note of hope. "The future is unevenly distributed"
| cuts both ways, the good and the bad. At least we _know_ about
| some of the atrocities happening here, and good that we haven
| 't been warn down and we still recognize them as such. One tip
| to deal with a firehose of bad news: rank it based on physical
| proximity. That way you won't be overwhelmed and lose
| perspective. "Life is suffering" as the Buddhists say. I
| believe that if you could empathize with even 1% of the
| suffering of humans _this moment_ you would be overwhelmed.
| Egregious failures of the state, like in the OP 's piece, must
| ultimately be solved by those that caused it. Our desire to
| swoop in and fix other people's problems needs appropriate
| caution. Consider the lessons of US intervention in the Somali
| Civil War in the 90's.
| IsTom wrote:
| Another reason why "the richest third-world nation" monicker
| holds.
| exhilaration wrote:
| Gift link: https://nyti.ms/421I5Ox
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Standing out in any way in a small, socially conservative
| community can have some pretty terrible consequences.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Can confirm. A friend of mine got death threats for reading the
| constitution aloud on the steps of town hall. This was not in
| Alabama. It was in the Massachusetts hill towns.
| crooked-v wrote:
| Merely "fails"? That sounds like apologetic underemphasis to me,
| like so many other Times stories. The system described is more
| like active oppression.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Half of the country will do olympic level mental gymnastics to
| justify government misdeeds so long as those misdeeds happen
| from behind a desk and the other half will do the same if those
| misdeeds happen at the hands of someone with a badge and a gun.
|
| Doesn't surprise me that a county that has both problems this
| exists somewhere.
| DistractionRect wrote:
| It's amazing how understated some parts are. Like they just
| casually mention
|
| > Like most Texas county judges, he does not have a law degree.
|
| I'm sorry, what? Anyone off the street can be a judge? That one
| line begs soo many questions, and at least some outrage, which
| is simply glossed over.
|
| Doing my own research, I guess I see why it's glossed over,
| because apparently this isn't uncommon - a quick search says
| that only 28 states require judges presiding over misdemeanors
| have a law degree. In 14 of the remaining 22, you can request a
| new trial from a lawyer-judge if you receive a jail sentence
| from a non lawyer-judge.
|
| I take it for granted, to me it's common sense, that a judge
| should a law degree. I mean, how can one preside over and act
| as arbiter in legal matters without knowing the law?
| frakkingcylons wrote:
| It's the appropriate language for a news organization. Making
| the language more charged doesn't change the facts that they
| are presenting and it's what I want as a subscriber.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| It is not uncommon in certain rural Louisiana towns to have the
| local sheriffs/police make up some traffic offense and have you
| sit in the local jail for a weekend because the judge isn't going
| to show up until Monday if they don't like you being around there
| as an outsider/activist.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Or just don't like you and want you to lose your job when you
| don't show up to work Monday.
| AngryData wrote:
| Anyone who has ever dealt with the US justice system as just some
| regular bloke knows it is broken. 90% of it is about extorting
| the population for funding for the courts and cops. If you can't
| afford a lawyer, they will provide you with a joke. And if you
| can afford a lawyer, now its just a question if you are willing
| to spend more on your lawyer than the state is hoping to extort
| from you. If you are, you will get off no problem, if you aren't
| or can't, most courts are going to try and screw you over. Oh
| whats that, you want to actually fight your charges in court? Now
| you better not lose because you are on the hook for all of the
| money the court wants to believe it cost them to prosecute you.
| Oh you don't want to risk that and just settle for whatever minor
| fine the law says you might owe? Don't worry, the courts will
| still fuck you with the addition in mandatory minimum court fees,
| additional fees and fines not stipulated under the law you broke,
| inflated "programs" that they get kickbacks from, and an even
| better excuse for cops in the future to try and screw you over by
| painting you as some wanton criminal.
|
| Just like healthcare, US justice is only for people with money.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| > Anyone who has ever dealt with the US justice system as just
| some regular bloke knows it is broken.
|
| and just like re healthcare, this is the rub of communicating
| about this: 90% (to pick a random number out of thin air) of
| hn's target demo has had perfect/sheltered lives and has never
| come into contact with the "law". so they believe all the
| political and institutional rhetoric around it.
|
| the other 10% know it's a myth but fail to be able to convince
| the 90% because it would cause deep cognitive dissonance to
| accept that the US is deeply deeply inequitable and unfair and
| that it's not accidental but systematic. when i was younger i
| was in jail a handful of times (not prison thankfully). it's
| impossible to explain to someone how fucked up it is that's
| never experienced it. i stopped talking about the "justice
| system" a long time ago to co-workers/friends/etc and i don't
| tell anyone about my experience (only my wife knows).
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| I think the most inconvenient thing is actually that it's
| both (largely) accidental _and_ systematic.
|
| If you go looking for the source of "evil" breaking these
| systems, you'll surely find a few bad folks purposely fucking
| it up, but removing them is almost certainly not going to fix
| anything. The vast majority of these systems' behavior (good
| or bad) is effectively not driven by individuals whatsoever.
| almostgotcaught wrote:
| i wish people, before they commented on really really
| serious things, did a bit of reflection.
|
| > effectively not driven by individuals whatsoever
|
| the agency of individuals in totalitarian/authoritarian
| institutions has been examined/analyzed/written about at
| enormous length since the rise of fascism in the early
| 1900s. the short answer is you're wrong but i'm not going
| to try to convince you (you have to want to learn to be
| receptive). instead i recommend a book:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Eichmann-Jerusalem-Banality-
| Penguin-C...
|
| EDIT: i'm being rate limited. to the guy below
|
| > how even a system full of good intentions
|
| you're just proving all of my points - you just can't
| fathom that the laws really were written with immoral
| intentions because "the law" is sacrosanct for you.
|
| i note again: the 13th amendment abolished slavery _except
| for in prisons_. it 's written explicitly in section 1 (no
| bad faith interpretation needed). please discuss for me the
| "good intentions" therein.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| The vast majority of bad outcomes of big systems are not
| because they're principally _designed for evil_ and just
| lacking a few dissenters.
|
| Most systems today are intended to produce outcomes that
| most people agree would be good, and they're full of
| people trying to achieve those outcomes, and yet reliably
| failing to produce them.
|
| There have been books written about this topic as well,
| but it's not as flashy as comparing "every system that
| produces some bad results" to actual Nazis, I have to
| admit.
| TimorousBestie wrote:
| Having it read it again just last year, I'd like to
| emphasize _Eichmann in Jerusalem_ does support the point
| being made here.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| If good people can't run the system right the system is
| broken and good people ought to support its reform or
| replacement.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Of course! If the codebase gets non-performant or hard to
| maintain, all you have to do is rewrite it to be not-
| that.
|
| Typically makes sense to fire anyone who wrote the broken
| version too, just to get a fresh set of eyes on it.
|
| Not sure why there's any non-performant or unmaintainable
| code in light of this fact.
| psd1 wrote:
| Irony noted, but I think it's rare for the horrors of a
| codebase to be deliberately inflicted for self-enrichment
| or cruelty.
| askvictor wrote:
| I appreciate the irony, but it doesn't have to be that
| drastic. In Australia we have the Law Reform Commission,
| which looks to gradually make laws better. Is the legal
| system perfect? Far from it. Does it get political? All
| the time. Is it getting better? I would argue yes,
| slowly.
|
| To your analogy, it's possible to incrementally improve a
| code base. It's also possible to stop it getting worse.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Right, which no one (to my knowledge) is opposed to.
| askvictor wrote:
| > you'll surely find a few bad folks purposely fucking it
| up, but removing them is almost certainly not going to fix
| anything
|
| So you you think, without those few bad folks, these
| systems would not tend to break, or that these few bad
| folks are not being challenged? I.e. do you think these few
| bad folks are completely inconsequential at a systemic
| level?
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| > do you think these few bad folks are completely
| inconsequential at a systemic level?
|
| Pretty much yes, and so are the good ones. Such is the
| nature of systems. A thing becomes visible as and labeled
| as "a system" only after it's quite stable and resilient,
| i.e. after it has developed effective responses to common
| "attacks" (deliberate or otherwise). Achieving
| fungibility of 99.9% of individual humans is like
| objective #1 and the systems that fail to achieve it
| don't exist long enough to be problematic.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Dirty and thuggish cops are way more common than Americans
| think. The more benign form is detail and overtime fraud.
| But I'd bet the dollar amount easily rivals property crime
| value in your town.
|
| Theft and fraud in businesses is more common than software
| people think. Kickbacks to purchasing managers, for
| example. You're less likely to encounter this than a
| casually dirty cop, but it's out there.
| stult wrote:
| There's a long running historiographical debate about the
| relative influence individuals have over the ultimate
| course of historical events compared to systemic factors
|
| For many years, it was popular (particularly in revisionist
| circles) almost entirely to deny individual agency and to
| rely instead exclusively on systemic arguments which
| highlighted the power of geography, ecology, culture,
| technology, and other complex systems to shape human
| events. That revisionist approach emerged partially in
| reaction to the near universal overreliance of prior
| generations of historians on the so-called "Great Man"
| theory of history, which assumes events are largely
| attributable to the decisions of a select group of
| politically powerful individuals. Nearly all of those
| individuals happened to be white, male, and wealthy, and
| thus Great Man history suffered not only from blindness to
| systemic factors that can shape events, but also to the
| experiences, contributions, and agency of anyone who was
| not rich, not white, not a man, or even simply not
| politically powerful enough to count. In other words, they
| ignore nearly everyone who has ever lived.
|
| Although academic history has long since moved away from
| the Great Man theory, it remains a popular trope of low
| quality popular history books, and increasingly it has
| become clear that purely systemic, revisionist approaches
| with no consideration for the effects of individual actors
| are also inadequate to explain historical events.
|
| Sometimes systems are more powerful than people, and no
| amount of good will or effort is going to fix a problem.
| The Vikings abandoned Greenland during the Little Ice Age
| because they had no way of controlling the climate or
| adapting efficiently to the changes. The climate system was
| more powerful than any individual Norse settler or group of
| settlers could ever hope to be.
|
| Sometimes systems are weaker than people, and leaders can
| bend them to their will. After nearly 1000 years of
| independence from secular authority and mostly uncontested
| religious domination in England, the Catholic Church in the
| 16th century formed an incredibly powerful institutional
| system of religious control built on vast endowments of
| land. It was by and large extremely popular with the common
| people and historically served a critical role in
| bolstering the king's position by promoting a respect for
| hierarchy that naturally encompassed both their own
| elevated status as priests and the position of secular
| authoritarian rulers, who ruled as God's representative on
| Earth. Despite the Church's enduring local popularity, its
| immense wealth, its deep connections with the broader
| Christian world, and the powerful hold fear of
| excommunication and damnation had on most Christians, King
| Henry VIII managed to completely transform the
| institutional, legal, and property-managing system of the
| medieval English Catholic Church, sundering it entirely
| from Rome, depriving it of essentially all of its land
| holdings, and subordinating its institutions entirely to
| royal authority. And he accomplished this in a shockingly
| short period of time, only around a decade.
|
| Why did Henry decide to throw his lot in with the
| Reformation? Was it because he saw the injustice of monks,
| priests, and friars siphoning off so much of his subjects'
| wealth to Rome simply to subsidize the already luxurious
| and decidedly un-Christian lifestyle enjoyed by the pope?
| Not at all, in fact in the years before his marriage to
| Katherine of Aragon soured, he wrote a book defending the
| pope, who promptly named the king Defender of the Faith in
| gratitude and recognition of his scholastic achievement.
| Did Henry instead recognize an opportunity to enrich
| himself? Probably not, the evidence suggests he wasn't that
| savvy about money, but luckily for him, he had Cromwell to
| take care of the pounds and the pennies. Ultimately, he
| just needed a divorce. Because if he failed to produce an
| heir, the danger of civil war would be intolerable, and
| Katherine was clearly beyond her childbearing years. But
| the pope wouldn't give him one, and Henry was a raging
| narcissist willing to burst through any boundary in service
| of his own ego, even risking his soul to break from Rome.
|
| So individual idiosyncrasies can also affect the course of
| events, we can't just look at systems, and we can't just
| look at individuals, we need systems too. The relative
| influence of each over how a complex institution like a
| justice system develops is a highly contingent and fact-
| specific analysis. Sometimes the climate can push winters
| to be too cold even for the hardiest settlers. Sometimes an
| entire nation's centuries-long, enduring religious beliefs
| and ideologies can depend solely on the whims (and lust) of
| a single egotistical dictator. And sometimes when such a
| basic function is this messed up, you might actually find
| that there are indeed a limited number of individuals
| responsible, and that replacing them with competent or less
| malicious individuals will actually solve the problem.
|
| That's the trick though, and where the systemic and
| individual-focused explanatory variables start to bleed
| into each other. If it is systematically impossible to find
| good people to staff these institutions, then yes merely
| swapping out individuals will not fix the situation because
| by definition you are swapping out bad people for other bad
| people. However, I seriously doubt that it is impossible to
| do so in this case, because even if the US justice system
| is messed up and broken, this is about the most messed up
| and broken that it gets. I think it's fair to say that
| 99.999% of the country does not experience systemic justice
| problems to the same extent as Maverick County, which is
| why so many people are reacting to this story with
| justifiable shock. So even assuming _ad arguendo_ that it
| is systemically impossible to find truly _good_ people to
| work in law enforcement or the judicial system, we know it
| 's at least possible to find _better_ people than they have
| in Maverick County.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| It sounds like... you did get caught?
| psd1 wrote:
| Absolutely flabbergasted in the canteen one day when my
| colleague said, unironically, "well, if they stop you, you
| were probably doing _something_"...
|
| White South African
|
| Yes, working eyeballs
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| Forget actual legal culpability, the range of outcomes in the
| American legal system ranges from cops killing you at worst,
| to the stacked legal system making you wish they had _only_
| killed you at best.
| redczar wrote:
| Part of the problem as I see it is that we Americans are
| incredibly vengeful and seek retribution. We are particularly
| incensed when someone poorer (or otherwise different than us)
| seemingly gets a "light sentence".
| kubb wrote:
| Is this where the whole Europe bashing on social media comes
| from? US needing to believe that a better society, rule of law,
| social services isn't real in Europe and impossible in general?
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| Not only that, but it explains the disdain for Europe in the
| current American government. European society proves that
| Americans could have true freedom and quality of life if it
| weren't for corporations and oligarchs effectively owning our
| government. Fascists hate a counterexample.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Seems like "they hate us for our freedom!" has done a
| complete 180 as of late.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| My understanding is the root of the evil is in our
| overcriminalisation of day to day life. Is this accurate? Or
| would reducing the prison population through reduced sentencing
| not alleviate the worst of the problems?
|
| (Reduced sentencing loads mean you can raise standards for
| court-appointed counsel, possibly ban plea deals, _et cetera_.)
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I think it is less to with "overcriminalization" in the sense
| of legislation, and more to do with the enforcement process.
| In some sense I think we need _more_ criminalization, in that
| the types of malfeasance described in the article (e.g.,
| keeping people imprisoned beyond their sentence, failing to
| provide an attorney, etc.) should result in long jail
| sentences for the officials who perpetrated them. The problem
| is that in the US we have become accustomed to an enormous
| gap between the law and its implementation.
| Avshalom wrote:
| The purpose of a system is what it does.
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