Upgrade your jail cell for a price
latimes.com
latimes.com
It's also tragic that there is direct equivalence to the charter/public school debate. A lot of the arguments for/against charters schools can be simply applied by swapping school for prison. And just like test-scores/teaching-philosophy, you have a superior scandinavian approach.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/100000002996576/foota...
At this point she was restrained on a gurney, surrounded by no less than 4 guards. She said something rude and as a result was tazed not once but 3 times.
After I bailed her out we went to the sherrifs office and requested an investigation. After a few days they claimed to not be able to find any video of this happening. They conceded that there are multiple areas where the cameras can't see.
I also found out that the guards at the jail are not sheriff deputies, but employed by a private corporation. But they wear the same uniform as the deputies, sans badge.
The criminal justice system in this country is disgusting. Truly disgusting. If I'm ever fortunate enough to be financially secure (long term) I plan to dedicate my time to induce change in this area of our society.
One interest effect this had on me was respect for local law enforcement. I used to have some level of respect for them and what I had observed as professionalism. That's all out the window now, and I have 0 respect for them. Instead of being polite and reasonable I am now combative and uncooperative in any encounter. They can taser me all they want, Ill just use it as a public campaign against them.
Just remember: they can get away with anything. It's their word against yours, and they will always win. If you are lucky enough to have any evidence against them, it will just get lost eventually (your case in point).
> They can taser me all they want, Ill just use it as a public campaign against them.
No one in a position to do anything about it will listen. You'll just be adding insult to your injury.
When encountering law enforcement, it's best just to "yes sir"/"no sir" them, and hope you don't come out of it with a charge, or worse. Every question they ask you is an attempt to get you to incriminate yourself. They are not there to help you. It's in your best interest to do everything you can to end the encounter as soon as possible.
I agree that they are never here to help. I don't answer questions as a matter of course.
Anecdotally I've known multiple people pretty well before they became cops. They were all good people and believed everyone had rights. Then, the gang mentality set in. Now is "us" versus "them". It got to the point where I no longer associate with them.
It sure is a tough problem.
Are you serious? Or being sarcastic?
The whole point of the "bad apples" metaphor is that the bad apples cause the good apples to rot.
https://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/one+bad+apple....
Plenty of "good apples" apply, but are spoilt.
And I don't see why that's not feasible.
In addition, being 'perfectly rational' does not always mean doing the correct thing every time, with the benefit of hindsight. You can be rational, but in real life we have imperfect information. Innocent people are sometimes hurt because of this imperfect information, even if everyone behaves rationally. It sucks, but is unavoidable.
And as has been said elsewhere, she was restrained all throughout.
Emphasis is key. Grappling, weaponry, and mediation are each taught, but it's individuals that decide on application.
The parent poster immediately shifted "partial" blame to the victim because she is a "criminal".
Until we change the perception that criminal = bad person and therefore subject to any punishment nothing of importance will change.
Because law enforcement is made up of the same imperfect, mistake making humans as the bone-headed civilians that committed the offense.
I don't agree with her and I do not believe she is to blame. The system worked on her and she has subordinated to the system.
My opinion is that it is not OK to blame the victim. She was assaulted. That is illegal. She posed no physical threat to the guards. She was strapped down and out numbered 4:1.
Would you blame a woman for being held down and gang raped because she dressed provocatively and said hello to these men? Of course not.
I am not saying that police and prison guards don't abuse prisoners, but people in custody aren't always right either.
- she was seen leaving the scene strapped to a gurney en route to jail
- the taser marks were visible for weeks in 3 separate areas of her body
- she was psychologically damaged. Literally broken for weeks emotionally. It still manifests in strange ways over a year later.
- we ran into another girl she was in jail with at court during pre trial. She was really concerned for my friends emotional well being after "what happened in there".
I didn't say she is fully to blame, but you can't deny she was an instigator by being belligerent and/or drunk. Or rather, her actions were a catalyst to what happened to her.
You can fully expect law enforcement officials to be emotionless machines, but the reality is that they are human as well and sometimes make incorrect choices based on circumstantial triggers.
The bad thing isn't that cops are human, it's that their status insulates them from responsibility when they screw up in all but the most high-profile cases.
Who watches the watchers?
I contend that it's irrelevant.
If some guy on the street is calling me ugly, fat, or stupid and I walk to him and clock him in the jaw, it's still assault and I would still be charged. The same should apply to jail guards.
I agree that if a jail guard just walked up to somebody who spoke ill of them on the street and punched them, they should be charged.
But I don't think that things should be simplified that much in the correctional environment because there is a big difference. If inmates were loudly talking down to guards and acting belligerent, that would present a disruption to the orderly running of the institution. It would also set a standard for other inmates to act in that manner. Does that mean I'm saying corrections personnel should feel free to beat inmates at any opportunity? No. But the jail and prison environment has more complex factors at play when inmates act up than just somebody is making fun of me.
I will never agree that beating helpless and restrained detainees is an acceptable response to any scenario in a correctional facility.
There are things like taking away TV privileges or being demoted to janitorial duty that can be an effective deterrent to many behavioral issues in a facility.
I say many (as opposed to most) because our jails/prisons are regularly used to house the mentally ill these days which creates another layer of complexity. We should fix that problem and remove that layer first and foremost.
I've known this woman for most of my adult life and have never found her to be one to embellish a story for theatre.
There is no situation where it's okay for LE to shoot or tase someone because of non-threatening words.
ftfy
You pay for the best jail you can afford. If you are found innocent, your accuser/prosecutor has to reimburse your costs. If you are found guilty, you have to pay restitution to your victims (or their still-living representatives), and the justice service provider handling your case will take whatever measures may be appropriate to protect their subscribers from you after your release. If you can't immediately make restitution, there may be a supervised work program around that will help you finance your jail boarding and court judgments. Or maybe the judge will work out a deal to reduce your weregeld bill, perhaps in exchange for something like submitting to a specific torture, or having a warning tattooed across your forehead.
If you're a really hard case, you just get named outlaw, and someone kills you for the bounty.
For most people, instead of paying taxes to a county, you would pay a subscription fee to a company that provides all-in-one security, dispute resolution, arbitration, rehabilitation, and property and casualty insurance. You might pay $99/month to a reseller agent of Brinks Allstate, and your neighbor might pay $119/month directly to Alfa Pinkertons through their website. If your kid's bike gets stolen, the cop-adjuster comes by to take your report, helps you file your claim, and determines whether it would be cost effective to investigate and prosecute. If they do, and it turns out your neighbor's cousin was operating a bike theft ring out of their garage, the Alfa Pinkertons arrest him, put him in their jail, and provide him with defense counsel. Brinks Allstate and Alfa Pinkerton have a pre-existing extradition agreement in place, engage Wopner-Brown-Scheindlin as their arbitration subcontractor, who in turn sub-subcontracts some jurors from YourPeers. (You might also need to have a separate justice provider through your workplace.)
After the neighbor is found guilty, he has to pay back the cost of reimbursing the bike owners. Perhaps a few of them are willing to buy their stolen bikes back with [a portion of] their insurance money. Until his checks clear, he stays in the Alfa Pinkerton jail's sweatshop, working off that debt at $X/hour. After he's out, he goes right back to being that creepy guy living above your neighbor's garage, and his credit score goes back up with that "RESTITUTION PAID IN FULL" line on his report.
As bad as this all sounds, our actual, real-life criminal control system is in some ways worse.
Part of me wants to be a libertarian/anarchist, but the way their ideas resemble freshman physics explanations that ignore friction and wind resistance really turns me off.
A libertarian world really is a nightmare for the people who believe that the government world does not essentially do exactly the same thing, but with better PR, and maybe different price points. The government version of freshman physics assumes a spherical cow. The libertarian version assumes a spherical pig. The Internet argues about the flavor of the milk.
The truth is that no one will admit there may be warts on their favorite goblin baby until they are growing one right on the end of their pointy little green nose. I have already spent an awful lot of time on the Internet arguing both for and against libertarian ideas. The only good thing that can really be said about the adherents of alternate political views is that at least they recognize that change is only possible if you try something different. You can't really ever predict the outcome of a system when you divorce its ideal workings from the real people who will eventually be running it.
Their families pay $1100/mo to Triple Canopy, which eventually wins its protracted firefight with Blackwater, securing my capture.
The market takes notice. Soon the only protection services in demand are those provided by the company which can wield the most force.
And we're back at government.
I pay $349/mo to Uncle Enzo's Thing, who kidnaps the CEO of Blackwater, cuts off his ear, and douses him in gasoline. My neighbor is a lifetime OG in the local Compton Crips franchise, and the worldwide org takes out 80% of the board of Triple Canopy with simultaneous drive-by shootings. Sachs-Chase-Salomon-ExxonMobil-GE-AT&T-Shinra drops a nuke on all of us. The Lysistrata Society shorts contraceptive stocks. Hydra-TransUnion-NewsCorp merges with SPECTRE-Facebook-Experian and changes the combined corporate motto to "Evil: It Makes Good Money." Real estate prices for secret volcano lairs rise steeply. The King of Tonga sends two war canoes up the Potomac and decisively conquers a barbecue stand in Northern Virginia, forcing it to put pineapple on its pork sandwiches. Cats and dogs, living together--mass hysteria! Chaos!
They say an armed society is a polite society. Mutually assured destruction is a whole lot scarier when you have competitors waiting in the wings to snatch up your dissatisfied customers that want to switch providers because jaw-jaw costs them much less than war-war.
As mentioned in a cousin post, the assumptions embedded in the hypothetical scenarios make the imagined outcomes useless, just like that novice physics student neglecting wind resistance.
There's many ways in which a dystopian automated system of surveillance and justice would be preferable, but society tends to love organizing its own systems of award and punishment.
I was distraught reading that whole thing until the last sentence. You're right- in many ways it is better than our current system. And that's really scary.
Also can't help but notice the problem with making this more widely available. The violence in regular jail is a consequence of being locked up with violent people. If you move them to these easier jails they would bring the violence with them
Monetary wealth translates to social power more often than not.
If rich people experience the same jail as poor, they will push in society to improve it. If you let the rich opt-out they'll never see it and won't be motivated to induce change.
I have spent a couple nights in jail. I know what it's like, and it's not acceptable for anyone to be exposed to this. Change is needed whether you're rich, poor, black, white or purple.
Isn't that the only part that's even there?
As a side benefit, you avoid seeing rich people swinging from lampposts instead of serving time.
Uhm, could it be that you have a typo in your posts, like a missing not? Because i have a hard time finding logic in the argument as written.
YT: Hoosegow, no question.
Cop: You know, we get a kickback from The Clink for every suspect we bring in.
YT: How much do you want?
Cop: How about a hundred? Swipe your card through the reader.
YT: Done. Enjoy your bribe.
Cop: The Clink it is.
YT: My union will hear about this.
Short-term incarceration (less than two years, and that's not an arbitrary figure) leads to much different conditions than long-term incarceration. There's different effects on humans and different changes in valuated needs.
Rape tends to be the province of those expecting little to no change in their long-term experience. A little different from murder in incarceration, in that the victim has opportunity for reprisal.
America's jails are places where people got to get abused rather than get rehabilitated, so what is the big deal about some people paying for a better environment?
Because it incentives the private prison to make the situation even worse for those who fail to pay. Effectively the worse they make the "free" the more money they make.
To use an analogy, it is like Amazon Prime, when Amazon Prime first started free shipping was at $25 minimum order. Last year free shipping was at $49. Why? To incentivise Prime memberships. Only competition from Walmart forced them to bring it back down to $35.
So back to prisons... If this became popular, we'd see more prisons who offer zero privacy as the "free" option (e.g. shared bunk beds) all as a means to "incentivise" (blackmail) prisoners into paying for a semi-private or private room.
Plus when you take into account the safety aspect, the whole thing becomes immoral. You're literally forcing prisoners to pay so they can sleep safely at night, otherwise they might get shanked while they sleep (or not get any sleep due to fear). US prisons are already much less safe than most European, Canadian, or AUS/NZ prisons.
Because the general ideal for justice is punishment to be based on guilt, not ability to pay for a lessening of guilt.
And allowing some to pay for not going there may be seen as furthering the problem, by making influental people less likely to suffer the same consequences and inspire prisons to treat "second class" inmates worse to increase the motivation to buy an upgrade to "first class"
EDIT: As to the idea that this somehow reduces the effective punishment: while that might be true for the ultra-rich for whom $10k is irrelevant (but since when do they go to prison anyways?), for everyone else, having to fund your own incarceration [directly, in addition to funding everyone else's via taxation,] seems to offset that.
Like, if you pay ransoms when terrorists take Americans hostage, you're funding kidnap-Americans-and-ransom-them businesses. If you pay prisons for more humane treatment, you're funding imprison-people-and-threaten-them-with-inhumane-conditions businesses.
IMO, it should be illegal for prisons to get money from prisoners. There's a bunch of really shitty things that inevitably happen. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/us/steep-costs-of-inmate-...
We can. By simply releasing basically every prisoner. Literally less than 1% are truly such threats to society as to require the kind of sequestration that only prison can provide.
Does it suck because not everyone can afford it? Sure
Does that mean we should just screw everyone equally simply to claim we're fair? IMHO no. Not unless you also want to close down UPS, FedEx, and Greyhound. And not unless you are willing to come out and openly say that YOU consider rape, abuse, and neglect to be an official part of our rehabilitation strategy (because that is all that county and federal prisons excel at)
Alternatives are allowed even if incumbents can change...
(The point is: the people providing alternatives are under no obligation to fix anything. Isn't HN all about disrupting bad models?)