Bail reform could give justice to poor, minorities
newsobserver.com
newsobserver.com
"It is evident that such a legislation is hostile to the poor and favorable only to the rich. The poor man has not always security to produce, even in a civil case; and if he is obliged to wait for justice in prison, he is speedily reduced to distress. A wealthy person, on the contrary, always escapes imprisonment in civil cases; nay, more, if he has committed a crime, he may readily elude punishment by breaking his bail. Thus all the penalties of the law are, for him, reduced to fines. Nothing can be more aristocratic than this system of legislation. Yet in America it is the poor who make the law, and they usually reserve the greatest advantages of society to themselves. The explanation of the phenomenon is to be found in England; the laws of which I speak are English, and the Americans have retained them, although repugnant to the general tenor of their legislation and the mass of their ideas."
History class in grade school was nowhere near as interesting as history books as an adult.
For example...?
Also, that the US didn't really do much from a combat perspective (though financing the whole thing for the Allied Powers certainly helped).
Mind=blown.
1) The founders cast off autocratic tyranny and invented power checks, individual rights and the rule of law.
While monarchs in Russia, France and Spain frequently cited tradition, religion and even pagan mysticism to certify their absolute rule, things were a bit different in England. Republican government and rights of the ruled were part of the English system for a long time before 1776. They were mostly hard won by nobels (mostly for nobels) but none the less, proto constitutional law like Magna Carta, Parliament and the Civil Service preceded the founding by many years. American government may have been born of revolution but it was just an evolution of ideas and practices that had been developing for centuries.
2) America, and particularly Lincoln fought the Civil War in a nobel effort to end slavery.
While obviously the Civil War was triggered by the inability to resolve the issue of slavery the motivations of the primary participants aren't clear. From Robert E. Lee's initial opposition to secession to Lincoln's writing, "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that." it's clear that the war wasn't about "what was right" but what the individual actors wanted. What's really stunning about the narrative told in schools is just how close the government came to not abolishing slavery. The 13th amendment actually failed to pass the house once and that was with no Southern states holding seats at the time.
3) The Americas were largely empty when Europeans discovered them.
They weren't.
4) Neolithic people and hunter gatherers largely lived in peace with the planet and each other. For lack of a better term, they lived as "nobel savages".
To the contrary, the lives of these people are characterized by frequent skirmishes between bands, blood feuds and ritual killings. "Nobel savages" living all over the globe managed to drive extinct more than 50% of large mammal species well before recorded history. They also shaped the earth and warped plant life far from anything you could rightfully consider "natural".
I could go on about Martin Luther, the "Fall" of Rome and the Russian Revolution but I gotta get back to work.
The UK has no concept of "cash bail", either you may go free, or you are a danger or flight risk and so you're held in jail by the state on its dime to avoid that.
The court can set fairly broad rules for bail, it just doesn't [this used to say "can't" but see the example below which proves that they actually can] ask for cash, e.g. "You must give us your passports and other travel documents so that you can't fly" or "You mustn't go near Jimmy who says you assaulted him" or even "You must go see the police once per week between now and your court date". If you break any of the rules, then you may stop qualifying for bail and get sent to prison until trial.
They rarely do so, but the highest profile one in recent times was when Julian Assange slipped off to that ground floor flat in Knightsbridge and cost his supporters the thick end of £100k
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Ju...
I feel hopeless that this will ever change. In a extremely liberal city like San Francisco, where nearly every citizen follows progressive politics, NIMBYs have passed laws the enrich wealthy renters and make it hard for the poor to afford to live in the city.
If San Francisco cannot get this right, no one can.
From an outsider perspective San Francisco strikes me as a culture that is, and has been for decades, a creation of the affluent class.
Hippies and tech founders alike have all talked a good game about an equal society, but both groups are primarily seeded from the children of the rich and well educated and have worked to preserve the status quo.
New York City, for all its superficial associations with finance and Wall Street culture, has always seemed to be a much more genuinely diverse and empathetic place in actual day to day policy and practice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_%C3%9Cber_Alles
for appropriate relevancy nearly 40 years later.
If you get the public defender, you'll likely see about a 6 minute pretrial to set your bail if you get one. its factory-like in its efficiency, and you're lined up with 20 other inmates that were just loaded off a bus from the local jail. The judge is half-asleep, likely overworked, or just too jaded to care anymore. assuming you havent killed anyone, you'll get around a 50k bail. mine was just shy of $34,000 USD.
If you dont have the cash for bail, you can attempt to secure a bail bond at 10% of the face amount. youll do this through family members sometimes, but youll use the jail phone. Using the jail phone is about nine dollars per phone call as its managed by a private phone company. your access to this phone is often once per week, because jails are massively overcrowded and youre scheduled a 5 minute phone call.
After sleeping on a yoga mat in a group cell for about 2 weeks, you'll finally make bail. This often comes with a processing fee from the county or city. depending on your city, you'll also be issued a bill or invoice for your stay in jail. If you were assaulted or sent to medical, your bill will include any treatment. some jails can use this to refuse your bail paperwork...so no matter what you got for a bail bond, its now useless. and behavior? Anything at all can be used to refuse bail processing.
Once I'd made restitution and been released from prison, the bond fee had been paid, and I was a free man. Or so you'd think. Most bail bond agencies have their own team of bounty hunters and they dont maintain accurate paperwork for many orders. Due to a misfiling, I was labeled as a skip-jump. Before even checking with the state for a warrant, their 'team' had tackled me in a taco bell parking lot at 8 am on my way to work. I spent nearly an hour in the back of a police cruiser until I was released. I was not given the option to press charges.
But usually you cannot bail out of prison, right? You get arrested, and go to a city jail, where you can get bailed out. If you are found guilty, you go to county or prison to serve a sentence.
But to what you're thinking of, I believe that is correct; bail is for short-term incarceration pending a trial. If you've been tried and sentenced, you can't bail.
acquitted of all charges but this took six months of my life. Bail only works for rich people. In my opinion its easier to just do the time and work with the judge. Bail bonds also wrecked my credit.
Bail can change, too. The judge could just "decide" they dont want you in jail and release you under monitored conditions. this type of amnesty is very popular for rich people...especially if you have a winning complexion.
For example, without the threat of forfeiture how do you ensure people actually show up to court?
Without bail bondsmen how do you fund the extra police/marshals/sheriffs to find and arrest those who do not show up for court?
Without the ability to set bond amounts based upon offense characteristics and individual financial circumstances and criminal history, how do you prevent especially violent offenders with a likelihood of committing more violent acts while on pretrial release from committing new violent offenses? Keep in mind there are some jurisdictions where you are constitutionally entitled to bail of some amount.
There is much (justified) lamenting on the evils of the use of the bail bond industry, but after bail reform in the Federal system which effective ended the use of the industry for the Federal criminal system -- do people really think the Federal system is better? If so why?
If you want to go the other direction and eliminate money bail, do you really want to police/prosecution to able to indefinitely incarcerate people until trial?
Do you want to seriously jack up the criminal penalties for failure to appear in lieu of money forfeiture? That is going to screw over a lot of people.
Again, there are serious problems, but I haven't heard significantly better solutions.
Because my life is fucked worse than it already is if I don't show up. If that's not the case, then that's almost the working definition of "flight risk", and you don't release them for any amount of money.
This is already the case, but surprisingly people (including those accused of crimes) do not always make choices which are in their long-term self interest.
> If that's not the case, then that's almost the working definition of "flight risk", and you don't release them for any amount of money.
So how do you determine who is a "flight risk"? Past FTA? Past convictions? Don't own property? No family ties to community? From the wrong part of town? Wrong skin color? These are the types of things that will end up going into detention decisions when you take the posting of security off the table and start trying to decide who is a "flight risk". The reason we have our bail system, including in many places a constitutional right to bail for non-capital offenses, is before that Courts would simply deny bail willy-nilly for certain crimes or people they didn't like.
But let's go with your thinking. Let's use money, instead of those factors in your second paragraph. But you know what having money for bail might mean? You own property, have family ties to the community, are from the right part of town, and statistically probably have the right skin color. I mean, I see where you're going with this, but in the end I think it's a wash. You've either got money, or you are found pleasing to the judge's eye, and either way it means you're likely white and wealthy.
So I don't know what the solution is. But as others have commented, the UK seems to get away without having to post money for bail (though some have pointed out the exact problems you worry about).
And yet, people skipping court dates for traffic violations is extremely prevalent. In many areas, there are varying degrees of enforcement of failure to appear arrest warrants because of how common they are. (They'll have like amnesty days and stuff like that to encourage people to appear.)
The basic problem is that poor people have very little to lose by not showing up to court.
At least in CA, the money you pay before or instead of trial on a traffic ticket is a default bail, and you have the option of pleading no contest and forfeiting the bail as your fine, or you can contest the ticket. If you contest the ticket, at your arraignment you will be assessed for the need for and amount, if any, bail much as for any other offense.
Since that's expressly a factor in deciding on whether to grant money bail and in what amount, that's not a new problem that eliminating money bail would raise, and money bail is (on top of all it's other problems)) imposingntial costs on different defendants people arbitrarily if we don't already have a reasonable solution.
So you can't really use that to question the elimination of money bail.
You do it the way Washington D.C. does, and has for a couple decades.
> Without bail bondsmen how do you fund the extra police/marshals/sheriffs to find and arrest those who do not show up for court?
With general taxes, rather than taxes on the criminally accused.
> Without the ability to set bond amounts based upon offense characteristics and individual financial circumstances and criminal history, how do you prevent especially violent offenders with a likelihood of committing more violent acts while on pretrial release from committing new violent offenses?
Money bail doesn't prevent that; pretrial supervision or outright bail denial can, and so that's how you do it, choosing the least invasive level of supervision that provides adequate security in the circumstances.
> If you want to go the other direction and eliminate money bail, do you really want to police/prosecution to able to indefinitely incarcerate people until trial?
Before trial isn't indefinitely except at the choice of the accused, because of the right to a speedy and public trial.
> Do you want to seriously jack up the criminal penalties for failure to appear in lieu of money forfeiture?
Yes, I want to punish the actually guilty in preference to punishing the merely accused. Do you seriously prefer the other way around?
You can pay for those people through taxes.
Currently Cash bail, and pretrial incarceration is used as a punishment and serves no other purpose.
[0]: http://www.thebronxfreedomfund.org/our-work/ [1]: http://www.thebronxfreedomfund.org/dollarbailbrigade/
Is it possible that people guilty of crimes are more likely to be convicted and guilty people are less likely to make bail?
https://www.aclunc.org/article/california-money-bail-reform-...
Once the accused is released, we monitor the court calendars and notify them of court dates and changes. After attending court and regardless of the verdict, guilty or innocent. The bail payment is refunded by the court and returned to the token holders along with a share of the fee collected.
YouTube videos: http://youtube.com/c/mainpriseio
I don't understand this bit: if it's a fee, why return any of it? Is the returned part of the fee to cover extra cost in cases where they don't go to court? Otherwise that extra part is not a fee, just extra bail.
Bail, it it's current form and enforcement, is a problem. Providing bail services is a way to use this problem to make money. It's better than putting your hands in your pocket, but unless you're using some amount of your fees generated to lobby for bail reform (thus harming your platform in the long term) you're just another bail bondsman.
What this platform does is match bail requests with people willing to make small contributions to helping to pay someone's bail. Knowing that if the bail is paid in full it's returned by the courts when the accused attends trial.
It would be the same as someone putting up a gofund me page. Except it happens much faster and it's already funded.
My thesis: Bail shouldn't exist, it creates a 2 tied system, and creating a platform, business, whatever, that exploits that system to make money isn't "being a super nice person who just wants to help" it's profiting off the prison industrial complex unless you spend all they money you made solely to reform the system.
It sounds like they're trying to help. This doesn't mean they're not also making money by attaching themselves to the problem. The world is shades of gray. I'm sure the bail bondsmen sleep at night saying they're helping people get back to their families faster.
The book weapons of math destruction goes into the issues with machine learning and the prison system.
https://weaponsofmathdestructionbook.com
> Families apply for bail on the platform.
The fact that you focus on a family's ability to pay just highlights one way in which the system is biased against people without family support.
Yes, I'm sure your AI will be magically free from bias when fed data from a biased system. >_>
Also, the blockchain side of this is completely and utterly pointless. Use a database.
We don't want dangerous criminals set loose without proper guarantees, and we don't want the less wealthy pleading guilty because they can't make bail.
So the real solution seems to be to roll back as many non-violent criminal offenses as possible and perhaps simply live with people serving plastic straws that 99.9% won't wind up in the oceans instead of throwing them in jail for 6 months, or at least make them into civil offenses.
https://www.gov.uk/charged-crime/bail
https://www.inbrief.co.uk/court-proceedings/remand-in-custod...
If this was attempted in the United States, and we wanted to maintain the due process protections afforded by our Constitution, we would have to fund our indigent defense programs at levels far, far beyond what anyone has been willing to do.
There are also no bail bondsmen/bounty hunters; that role is taken on by the police. Failing to surrender can be punished with an increased sentence and being denied bail in the future - if you're caught.
The article also notes that "In 1991, Washington, D.C., ended its bail bond system and now releases nearly 90 percent of pretrial defendants."
If they think you'll probably flee, you just go to jail.
If they think you'll hurt somebody before the trial, you just go to jail.
Otherwise they figure out some rules (like "Don't go to Bill's house" or "Don't hang out with Frank and Simon") and then tell you that you need to come back for your trial and meanwhile you must obey the rules.
If you break the rules, they might arrest you, and decide you now need to go to jail until the trial.
If you forget to come back for the trial (obviously a few people deliberately flee, but remember these aren't like bank robbers or murderers, they're shoplifters or people who got into a fist fight, so most cases genuinely forgot, overslept, etcetera) the court tells the police you didn't show up, the police find and arrest you for breach of bail. Then you spend a night or two in a cell, awaiting your new court date. Since you were in a cell, ensuring you appear this time is much easier.
For the type of people who forget, the humiliation and inconvenience of spending a night in a cell waiting for the new trial date is adequate "punishment" for their foolishness and wasting the court's time, they mostly look a bit forlorn when I've seen them, they're Spud from Trainspotting, not Begbie, or even Renton.
Sadly, in the West we are hell bent on pursuing unbridled capitalism while more disciplined countries (e.g. Sweden) just shake their heads in disbelief.
A child could see that it is incredibly regressive (in the economic sense of the word).
Hardly.
Edit: Currently at -1. For those who -1'ed me, I'd like to hear your arguments why state imprisonment prior to a guilty verdict isn't extreme duress, or a violation of "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"
You're drawing an equivalence that just isn't there, and I think you know that.
Like, I don't think I'd care how innocent I was - I'd want to get out asap. If your options are presented as "get out now" or "stay locked up for an indefinite amount of time, with no hope for compensation for the time lost even if you win" then it's an easy choice.
For starters, many people do die in police custody without being convicted
But "kidnapping" does not require a threat of death to have a real impact on your life. If your choice is to "confess" to a minor crime with time served, or lose your job/home/etc due to being locked up without trial, it's a no brainer for many people to falsely "confess", and it's absolutely under duress
Which is somewhat ironic since the foundation of our bail system originates from UK common law and the limitations on it (e.g. the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) originate from limitations put into place after abuses of bail in the UK legal system. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excessive_Bail_Clause#Origins
officer chesna and vera adams in weymouth, ma -- gunned down with his own service weapon by a savage whose bail was reduced ($5k to $500). this asshole then murdered an elderly woman on her own porch who witnessed the murder.
marine combat veteran kevin quinn -- killed in a head on crash by another low-life who was freed because his bail was reduced (from $35k to $1k).
it's comical that this topic is positioned as "rich vs poor" issue. in reality, criminals who are a serious threat to society, are being let loose and innocent civilians become the collateral damage.
Yet, the article has the opposite view.
Somewhere along the road our society has flipped and now virtue is vice and vice is virtue.
The legal system in the US is in large part a horrific dumpster fire.
Maybe the problem is that bails don't distinguish between truly dangerous individuals and the rest of the people.
If they're truly a "savage", don't offer bail as an option. That's the judgment call that needs to be made.
If $5000 is a better bail for this person than $500, that is a lucky accident. It is not as if $50,000 would automatically be a better number either.
Risky individuals either need to be kept in jail (or perhaps closely tracked). Keeping bail bond profitable is not a successful strategy here.
Pose a threat to society -> Jail pending trial
Not a threat -> Released pending trial
There shouldn't be an option for:
Pose a threat to society + Rich -> Bail pending trial
I'd suppose most serious crimes by well-off people are either economical, or done by hired hitmen. OTOH a previously lucky criminal may possess quite enough loot from crimes yet uncovered to pay a large bail.
Besides bail just allows cases just like you mention to happen, just that it's rich guys. Take a look at Robert Durst, posting $300,000 bail then stalking his brother with a gun. And Durst isn't the only guy to do this, what about Roman Polanski? What about Robert Vesco? Criminals who are a serious threat to society, are being let loose and innocent civilians become the collateral damage in money bail systems.
My answer is "both". Bail reform advocates typically say they want people to be kept out of jail before their trial, for free, if they pose no flight risk or danger to the community (ie, violent criminal past) and want people kept in jail if they pose a flight risk or a danger to the community. There is not a perfect solution, but we can do much better.
TL;dr- not all crimes are the same, not all criminals are the same, and we both agree the system is broken. The difference seems to be that you're not actually advocating for any specific solution, just pointing out that bad people have done bad things.
The system "works" by law of averages like my simple test for cancer - you don't have it. That answer is right far more often than not and lacks false positives by definition.
Really there are two problems made into one - fiscal inequity and reoffense. The theory of monetary bail was deterrence but it doesn't seem to work that well with irrational defendants and sufficiently rich, screwed, or underworld connected defendants which make the calculation rational to transgress.
All that the "extreme" demand is that wealth not be a consideration for bail. Either they are a sufficient flight or repeat crime before trial risk or they are not. Judging that is in itself a hard problem of great importance to liberty and security.
A no release before ever philosophy would be equitable but extremely problematic to liberty and expensive. It could be mitigated with very expedient trials but a proper investigation takes time. Downright luxury jail conditions could mitigate this some but the fundamental loss of freedom remains no matter how gilded the cage.
A release literally everyone before sentencing approach would also not work well barring fantastic and powerful technologies like being able to teleport them or unremovable and unblockable trackers.
It also goes along with the idea: pay for a bigshot attorney, get out of murder charge. Be poor accused, get public defender and a guilty charge.
In Indiana, you can even expunge felonies up to a certain criminal threshold. Do you know what the primary criteria is? You have to PAY for them to expunge.
The USA has always been pay-for-play. Now, its being called out for what it is. This country, the legal system, elections; you name it. The more money you have, the more influence you have, and the "better" the system is for you.
How do we fix this? The simple answer is to elect people who have more liberal mindsets that try to get rid of these poor=disenfranchised laws. That's a long term, and not even guaranteed to work. What do we have short term? I have no clue.
That argument is bogus because political power closely tracks wealth -- and thus unlimited inequality facilitates a society where we are not equal under the law.
But I’ve never seen a woman become a man or a white person become a POC. So that’s pretty immutable.
I’ll take examples from either category though.
Since race is a social construct and has no provable scientific reality, lots of people "pass" as other races depending on where/when they are being observed. Mixed-race people have always done this, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose.
Race is not a “social construct”. If that were true, I wouldn’t be able to blindly tell your race via a dna test.
Where does all this anti-science rhetoric come from? I guess global warming and evolution is a myth too?
Everything is a social construct then.
This statement is not true. The racial information which can be determined via a DNA test does not necessarily match up with what that person, or others, would consider their race to be.
Saying "words are a social construct so you could mean anything" is not a good faith contribution to discussion.
When you say race is a social construct because we may visually ascribe a person wrongly to a race seems pointless in an era of dna tests. The possibility of being factually wrong doesn’t suddenly make something a social construct.
If I see bear cub from a distance and then find out it was actually a dog, it doesn’t mean I should shrug and say that a bear and a dog are social constructs, so I wasn’t wrong because these distinctions are fluid based on the social norms of our day.
Why you seem to deny that science can blindly determine your ancestral origins (and thus race) with astonishing accuracy is beyond me.
It's true that there is a difference between gender (and gender identity) and biological sex, but biological sex is more complicated than simple binary distinction, too, and done biological sex features correlate with gender identity better than those we have historically mostly relief on to set socially ascribed gender.
Perhaps in the future, we can do a better job at first-impression gender assignment as well as avoiding blaming the victim when we get it wrong.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the guidelines by using HN primarily for political arguments. That's something we ban accounts for, because it's destructive of what this site exists for (i.e. intellectual curiosity). Can you please stop doing that?
How is it not political when someone else says a man surgically inverting his penis into his body cavity magically becomes a woman?
But when I point out that the man still has the wrong chromosomes to be a woman, it’s somehow political?
Who’s arguing ideology and who’s arguing science in this scenario?
If that’s your idea of “intellectual curiosity” just ban me now. Please.
Correct. The surgery aligns genitalia with gender identity; social norms have evolved to align ascribed gender with gender identity irrespective of genitalia, so even viewing "man" and "woman" as labels of ascribed gender rather than identity the surgery is largely beside the point.
By fallout, I mean women are starting to realize that men identifying as women isn’t in their best interest. Feminist are already split on this issue.
In the US, the state of Connecticut has biological boys who identify as girls competing in female sports and blowing them away, displacing biological girls on teams and soon in athletic scholarships.
This throws well-intentioned gender based laws into chaos. Title 9 will be challenged as biological men displace biological women in sports at larger scales. The Olympics will be dominated and world records will be shattered by biological men in female gender events.
Then there’s the guy in Canada that spent $50 to change his gender to female and saved $1,400 on his auto insurance.
This era of self identification will end since sincerity is not an objective truth and can’t be measured.
Or, another possibility, all laws attempting to promote equality between sexes and races will be made useless.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
I can give examples of each if you don't believe me.
So you would rather see bail set at a percentage of net worth? That would make things equal?
> Police can only hold you for up to 96 hours without charging you with a crime. Once you are charged with something and awaiting trial, you have to be tried within 56 days. If you are not tried within those 56 days you have to be released on unconditional bail. Police can set up bail before the trail, but it cannot involve money - frequently it involves staying at a particular address, reporting to the police station daily, not contacting certain people etc - it depends on the severity of the crime, you cannot be released on bail for acts of violence or armed robbery for example.
Police get to optionally, at their discretion, set bail?
That seems ripe for abuse.
At this point in history, I would NEVER look to the UK as a model for anything state related. It barely qualifies as a western democracy these days.
Care to explain?
Freedom of the press: The Tommy Robinson episode which is the first time I had heard of the broad government ability to ban news stories from being reported. You don’t have to agree with Robinson’s politics, you just need to realize the precedent it sets.
Freedom of speech: Chelsea Russell - https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/woman-wh...
Mark Meechan - https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-scotlan...
I’m not defending these people, but think about the chilling effect this has on speech.
Right to self defense: U.K. took away the right to legally own hand guns in 1996. Since then knife violence has been on the rise. London is now considering “common sense knife control”. There is no longer any legal weapon you can carry that will give you a force multiplier over an attacker. This is especially dangerous for women.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfr...
What about what I said is nonsense?
Are you saying that you have freedom of speech while a 19yr old posting lyrics from a rap song on her private Instagram page is censured and fined for doing so?
Are you saying your government can’t censor media outlets from certain topics?
Are you saying you have the right to defend yourself with some sort of force multiplier?
If you’re willing to explain why I’m wrong factually or philosophical, I’m willing to listen.
The judges correctly found a real risk of prejudicing the jury and like it or not, the UK judiciary take potential infringements on the fairness of a trial very seriously.
A right to a fair trial for others is at least as important as his free speech.
With the gun point I disagree strongly. London has a rate of 1.45 homicides per 100,000 people. Potentially 180 murders this year. This is fewer than most large cities in the US. Most people in the UK don't carry weapons and the rates of murder are significantly lower than in the US. Access to guns increases the ease of homicide. New York has decreased it's rate (although it's still above London's rate) by limiting access to guns.
You argued that the restrictions on press are justified, said nothing about free speech, and that you hopefully don’t need to defend yourself.
So it sounds like we agree on the basic premise I set forth, but disagree on the importance of it.
Whether it's lobbies, tort-reform, whatever we always sortof seem to be expecting reforms to come from people with incentive for these systems to stay the way are.
In practice, it was liberals who enacted heavy sentences on crack usage.
California, an extremely liberal state, voted in a 72% majority referendum for the three strikes policy.
So, I’m just curious why liberals have some sort of lock in the minds of people as being on the “side of the poor”.
Also they do have a large portion of the working class - just not definitively over the white part who traditionally bear the name. Perhaps related to their strong hold on minorities that made them not stand out as a distinct bloc. Parts of their other coalition having views at odds with theirs and friction related is not new (see the Hard Hat Riots for one and environmentalists vs industrial workers). Similarly Republicans have long been reaching them on social issues as well - pre civil rights act related inversion even arguably.
Regardless of one's moral opinions facing their overtures largely rejected and power diminished why should the democrats try to serve them at the cost of others strategically? They aren't special or numerous enough which makes the political capital better spent elsewhere.
Blue-dogs exist and are run where locally favorable but they aren't nationally prominent for a reason.
Incorrect. In 1994, when the three strikes legislation passed, CA was a purple state with a moderate Republican governor.
It is the anti-immigrant rhetoric around Prop 208 in 1996 that undermined the GOP in the state, by driving the majority of the young and non-white into the arms of the Democrats.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_strength_in_...
Fun fact: the government wins almost all of its cases against the "bigshot attorneys" too. The DOJ secures a conviction in 90%+ of white collar, official corruption, and organized crime cases, comparable to the conviction rate for narcotics convictions: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao/legacy/2011....