Privatizing Poverty
thebaffler.com
thebaffler.com
That is the most logical as a fine is supoosed to be a deterrent and it does not deter if you are super rich. It is also supposed to be a fairly mild punishment so if it is always so high that you can’t pay but have to go to prison then you are suddenly handing out very severe punishment for minor infractions.
There is also a right to a "fair and speedy trial". Judges just have to start ruling that sitting in county jail for six months waiting for trial is unconstitutional.
I admit there's a Catch 22 logic here though. Once a punishment starts being handed so often that it becomes a problem for society, it becomes "usual".
[0] https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/right-to-a-sp...
A basic principle of common law and the American justice system is that it's better to free the guilty than imprison the innocent. So just on American principles, letting poor people go on the assumption that they'll return for trial is better than keeping them in jail for lack of bail.
Bail tends to be set in relation to the criminal record of an individual, the seriousness of an offense, how much of a flight risk they are, and whether or not they're likely to be a danger to themselves or others if released. It's not the 'norm'. So for instance of all individuals (arrested for any offense) 77% of those with no priors end up being released without financial condition. For those with misdemeanor priors it's 63% and 46% for those with felony priors.
And there are excellent test cases that can experimentally show whether these release conditions are reasonable. For instance there are occasional emergency releases caused by things such as prison overcrowding. And this is where people that would not normally be released without condition, are. Of these individuals 52% end up being charged with pretrial misconduct! For the general population of people intentionally released that figure ranges from 27%-36% depending on the release type.
And when somebody is forced to pay bail, they have numerous options. Generally they only have to pay 10% of the cost of the bail. In some cases that can be paid directly to the court who will then refund that 10% once they return for and complete their trial. If that's not an option the way bail bondsmen work is that an individual pays the bail bondsmen 10%. The bail bondsmen then go to the court and pay 100% of the bail on behalf of the individual. They get that 100% back once the individual returns and completes their trial, so the 10% is their profit margin. This is also where modern day 'bounting hunting' tends to come into play -- the bail bondsmen have a very strong incentive to ensure that their clients do not flee.
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So the point of this all is that in the vast majority of cases we do simply let people go on the assumption they'll return to trial. For those that we don't let go, there tends to be a pretty good reason. That article from the BJS I linked has a great table at the bottom that offers some regression figures for release/return rates of various groups helping to determine how justified various decisions are. In most cases they are, in some cases they are not. It's pretty reasonable to conclude that it's a system that does well, but could be made to do better. But it's quite different from what you would portray it as.
I'm trying to find a more comprehensive article containing data across both misdemeanors/felonies and state/federal courts, but running up short. Their data seems to be heavily segmented in not so useful ways. If you find something along these lines I'd very much appreciate if you'd ping it regardless of its direct relevance.
One other thing you have to look at as well is the time frame. As time goes on you get closer to the real 'risk' rates. That's also detailed at the top of page 7. For instance only 8% of those those that would be rearrested were rearrested within a week, which goes to 29% in a month, 62% in 3 months, and 85% in 6 months.
Again it's very disappointing that the data aren't more clearly quantified and classified across documents.
Once criminals start going free because of easily fixed procedural problems, those problems will be fixed quickly.
Bear with me, I am not from the US.
The main way things get before SCOTUS is through the parties appealing the lower court decisions and then SCOTUS deciding to hear it.
For example, in 1980 they ruled that it could only be applied only if it involves a precise and aggravating factor[0].
Louisiana had a law that made the rape of a child punishable by death and SCOTUS overturned that law in 2008[1].
SCOTUS has consistent narrowed the crimes punishable by death in the past 50 years using the Eighth Amendment as a justification.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unit...
That does not change the fact that SCOTUS has upheld the death penalty generally as being a Constitutional punishment.
Yes, although there are many things that SCOTUS ruled constitutional that are just unpopular in this day and age that nobody treads in that territory.
So we and all the states have the choice to just not practice that, for example. Yes, in this case that is unlikely. Still an option.
As far as popularity goes though, the death penalty has been more popular than not for all but a brief time in the 60's[0], and I think it's dangerous to conflate popularity with Constitutionality, or to suggest even implicitly that they should have any bearing on each other.
Fictional example: speeding 20km/h above the limit gets 30 day-fines. So they'll calculate how much you'd earn in 30 days, subtract essentials and that's your fine.
Edit:
I would be less not ok with fines that scaled by income if they were reasonable for the infraction. Fines in the US are not reasonable (with a few state by state exceptions) unless you're upper middle class. If we scaled fines in the US so everyone got screwed as hard as poor people get screwed that would be very, very bad. If we were to scale fines by income then the middle or upper middle should be the point where there's not much difference (i.e. those people pay the same under the current system and some hypothetical income based system) because that's the point you need to be at for fines to be roughly proportional to the offense. I have zero faith that that could be implemented. What would likely happen is that the poor would still get screwed and everyone else would get just as screwed which is worse than the current situation.
If not, I don't see how this would be a problem. If your income is X times higher than mine, you will be fined X times more. Given your income, you can afford it, but it is still a deterrent (I, on the other hand, would go back to square "minus one" if I had to pay the same amount as you).
The way this is likely to work in reality if that you go to square minus one if you get fined and I go to square minus one if I get fined. So we've gained nothing except screwing more people and making the state more dependent on revenue from fines. Fines never go down, only up. An income based system would mean we all get screwed.
I have no problem with income based fines on paper. I have zero faith in their ability to be used properly in the US. Better to just lower fines across the board. It's not like the threat of a fine is what's keeping the vast majority of people from driving at triple digit speeds or littering.
You forget that the people who have "made it" hold disproportionate political influence. If you think a 0.1% fine on your annual income is too high because it is $100+, then you would fight to reverse this policy.
Meanwhile the people who are living paycheck to paycheck and have very little influence don't have to worry. 1% is very little for them, maybe $20 or so.
https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi... shows that sweden, finland, norway also have good mobility (behind denmark though).
edit: see also https://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/medios/44582910.pdf - it's in the 1st page abstract.
https://gavinkellyblog.com/where-has-income-mobility-been-ri...
(Also, the OECD's own press release on the article's source publication doesn't raise the same points and points at the Nordic countries as good models: https://www.oecd.org/newsroom/action-needed-to-tackle-stalle... - maybe economists, or OECD economists in particular, think that inter-generational mobility is a better measure?)
Why not, assuming that laws against speeding exist for public safety? (That's a dubious assumption, but if it's untrue then the speed limits need to be changed until it is.)
The cost of an accident can end up being lives, not just money, so it's hard to talk about "the cost of an accident." Even if you take a hard-nosed economically rational position and assign a monetary value to each life, the typical value is something like $10 million.
The point of these fines is to deter the behavior. If you put a cap on the amount of the fine, then sufficiently wealthy people are no longer deterred. You're essentially making it so that they can break this law with impunity because they're rich.
As for giving the police the wrong incentives, if they have any incentives related to the amount of money they bring in through fines, they already have the wrong incentives. Money from traffic tickets should never end up anywhere near the police budget.
That is why that system doesn't work. For most things the required amount of deterrent doesn't depend on your income. For example, if it costs $100 to dispose of motor oil properly but $0 to dump it in the sewer then the fine has to be at least $100. But that means it needs to be at least $100 for everybody, or there will be people who find it profitable -- even to the point of setting up a "motor oil disposal" company where they dump everyone's motor oil in the sewer and then just pay the fines. But if you set the amount high enough that it deters the lowest income person and then scale it with income, you end up with unnecessarily draconian penalties on ordinary people.
It also becomes an obvious arbitrage opportunity. For example, if a rich person wants to travel fast by car then they get a low-income chauffeur so that the speeding fine is less. Income-based systems are always susceptible to this, where the super rich pay the cost of doing the arbitrage and what the system really ends up doing is hammering the middle class because they can't justify the arbitrage so they end up paying higher rates than the rich. See also corporate income tax, paid by local businesses but not huge international ones.
Finland only gets away with it because they have much less income inequality, and in particular much less poverty, so the ratio typically doesn't scale to the point that it starts causing huge problems like this.
In the case of breaking the law for hire, you can make the employer jointly liable, as is already the case for most crimes.
The problem is the opposite of that -- it isn't that the fine on low income people is too high, it's that it's too low to be a deterrent unless you make it high enough that scaling it makes is unnecessarily harsh for middle class people.
> In the case of breaking the law for hire, you can make the employer jointly liable, as is already the case for most crimes.
At which point you might as well just disband all large enterprises immediately because you've set up a system where you multiply the base rate of misbehavior by both the number of employees and the company's total revenue, which are both just proxies for size and so the penalty isn't just proportional, it's N-squared.
You also can't avoid the problem unless you go all the way to the root of ownership or people will just outsource the activity to a shell company, but then you end up imposing a billion dollar fine for littering because the offender works for a company which is owned by a mutual fund.
Easy fix: Set the fine as "N times daily wage, but at least X".
At which point low and middle income people all pay the same fine or as close to it as makes no difference, rich people avoid it through arbitrage and you have a system with no significant effect (except maybe that the super rich still pay less than the upper middle class).
Rich people deciding not to drive and hiring professional drivers and/or using Uber, Lyft, or a taxi doesn't seem like a problem. The incentive worked. I doubt people driving as a business are all that eager to lose their license.
The downside is that you're failing to do the thing you set out to do. In theory the rich person (say $1,000,000 in income) places a high value on their time, so you impose a higher fine on them (say $20,000) to try to deter them. But the Uber driver only makes $20,000 total, so the fine for them is only $400. Meanwhile a middle class person making $50,000 pays $1000 -- 2.5X what the rich person incurs (assuming the fine the Uber driver pays is amortized over the fares).
> Do you have a better example?
Name basically anything that incurs a fine. A rich person who wants to do it and is "deterred" by the high fine just hires a poor person to do it for them. This is often what they do anyway because it saves them the labor independent of lowering the fine.
> I doubt people driving as a business are all that eager to lose their license.
But that has nothing to do with the fine, it's a separate penalty which doesn't exist in most other categories, apparently isn't sufficient (everybody speeds anyway), and the incentives of the driver and passenger are already aligned. They both want to get there faster, the passenger to save time, the driver so they can get another fare sooner.
A progressive fine isn't going to solve inequality.
Poverty-level jobs, by definition, because the prerequisite to being a good fine-sink is having a low income.
> A progressive fine isn't going to solve inequality.
The problem is that it makes it worse by effectively imposing higher fines on middle income people than the super rich.
More to the point brought up about Finland's lower wealth inequality: yeah, that should be what we're shooting for. Say we return to a robust progressive income tax system where if you make over say, 10 million dollars a year, you get taxed 90%. The arbitrage loophole doesnt work because, what, are you going to split up your 10M/Year income between 20 different less wealthy people and have them spend your money for you in order to avoid the tax?
What am I saying, of course the rich would find a way to skirt taxes. It's like, their whole shtick. I loathe the whole "Of course I'll do every shady, up to and including illegal things, to pay less taxes because if theres a loophole I want to exploit it". No, in fact you are acting being an anti-social cretin who neglects to give back to the society that produced the material conditions that allows for your wealth.
How? You would have to prove collusion between them rather than just a normal contractor-type relationship where the contractor does something unsavory entirely of their own volition.
> Say we return to a robust progressive income tax system where if you make over say, 10 million dollars a year, you get taxed 90%. The arbitrage loophole doesnt work because, what, are you going to split up your 10M/Year income between 20 different less wealthy people and have them spend your money for you in order to avoid the tax?
Of course. That's exactly what happens in those types of situations. As soon as you hit the 90% rate, the next thing you know the spouse is on the payroll, or the kids, the parents, brothers and sisters, in-laws, cousins, friends of the family etc.
> What am I saying, of course the rich would find a way to skirt taxes. It's like, their whole shtick. I loathe the whole "Of course I'll do every shady, up to and including illegal things, to pay less taxes because if theres a loophole I want to exploit it". No, in fact you are acting being an anti-social cretin who neglects to give back to the society that produced the material conditions that allows for your wealth.
Right, which is why you need policies they can't avoid instead of ones like this which they can.
The best way to do this is a UBI funded by a flat tax. The rich can't arbitrage a flat rate and the UBI makes it progressive (meaning net transfer from rich to poor).
As to UBI, I am all for it but I have concerns as well. Like a super basic one being what is to stop commodity prices inflating proportionately to the new lowest possible income set by UBI. Say UBI is 20k for every human on Earth. Great, but what's to stop the rise in prices of commodities to essentially UBI adjusted income + original price of commodity? Im genuinely curious what you think.
So this is always the argument people make against a UBI because it sounds plausible and the answer is complicated.
The first thing to notice is that the same concern is present for any method of reducing poverty/inequality whatsoever. If the poor have more money then they'll want to buy more stuff and by supply and demand the higher demand raises the price of certain products. It's a thing that happens.
But the only way it eats 100% of the money is if everything has zero price elasticity of supply. Which it doesn't. For example, if people want more land, well, sorry, the supply is pretty much fixed. But if people want more housing, that we know how to construct, so if more people could afford it then we could just build more. (If we have asinine laws against building more housing, well, that is an independent problem with an independent solution.)
And most of the things people want are not practically limited in supply. If more people could afford a sailboat then businesses would make more sailboats. If more people could afford new clothes then businesses would make more clothes. It's not as if there is an insufficient supply of wood or cotton -- for many products the dominant cost is the R&D or some other fixed cost and having more buyers could make the unit price come down.
On the flip side, the government is powerless to address chronic mental health issues without a paper trail. We all know that poverty and mental health issues are deeply entwined. The government can't just compel mental health care on a whim. They need evidence. Evidence like trespassing citations, public intoxication arrests, and citations for defacating in public. Evidence like 911 calls when a senile resident continues to forget to turn off the oven.
Only in the absence of a civilized public welfare system.
Do poor communities deserve this?
i-5 in Seattle is absolutely trashed from Northgate to Downtown because Jenny Durkan and previous mayors have raided homeless encampments out of view, away from other homes, spending millions of dollars to displace them instead of just giving them garbage cans and a few porta potties. They end up on i5 and in tent camps downtown and it looks like a dump.
Humans have been living camping-like near rivers for millennia. It's not as homeless people shit is toxic...
Just a few days ago an institution for mentally ill women got convicted for recording (and then discussing with the "patients" on their "evalution") what was said when they met with a lawyer.
Ok. So an investigation that was done earlier on the year was made public that already complained about this. When the press read that they published another few details:
* one patient was isolated and "fixated" (tied spread eagle to a bed) for 13 days because she bit her nails
* another patient had that done to her for over 2 months. The reason ? Nobody bothered to write anything down.
* several patients died without a clear reason
And ... no worries, the government agency responsible for it will "do a thorough review" of the system. Comments by the management on the issue are expected by the end of the year ...
Also, I seem to have no problem finding desperate pleas of patients on fora and on youtube about how they get incarcerated in such institutions for idiotically small reasons.
Mental health, when it does exist, seems like it's more a way for government employees to torture people who make a dumb legal mistake (like asking for help from a government psychiatrist) than it was ever meant to help anyone.
The people working there were on TV. Maybe it's just me but the impression I got was that these were incredibly dumb and definitely not the sort of people that can be trusted with the care over others. And, in case you're wondering, the psychiatrist on staff ? There is no psychiatrist on staff, one comes for 2 days per month. I'm sure it saved the government some money.
Is this really what you want to do to the homeless ? It does not seem like an improvement to me.
1) Mental health treatment represents a legitimately difficult set of problems with no known recipe for success in the general case.
2) Mentally ill people are routinely dehumanized and otherwise marginalized.
And let's not pretend this facility is a huge negative exception. It's not. It just got caught recording client-lawyer confidential conversations because they boasted about it in court. Yes, they actually boasted in court that they did this and used it in the case. That's how they got caught. Then the inspection report fell into the hands of the press and this patient treatment stuff leaked. In other words, this is a random sample.
And what does the government do about this ? They ask the management to come up with ideas by year-end. Clearly nobody cares or wants to see improvements.
So the problem that this is exactly what is being proposed here as the solution to mental health problems ... I feel like it would be more humane to just round up all mentally ill patients and shoot them.
Let's please not pretend that torturing them for a decade or two before they accidentally die in such a "fixation" is more humane, because it's not, it's far, far worse. Solitary confinement for weeks is torture, constantly living under that thread is also torture.
Needless to say, when you check your find the same ("internment") is done to their kids, even if the only thing against them is that one of their parents has some mental health problems. Doesn't matter if the parent recovers. Doesn't matter if they are 16 or even 18 years old (mental health "care" lasts until 25). There was a story of a 21 year old student ripped out of independent living (well, a student dorm she paid for herself) and studying at university because her mother got interned.
Leaving them to rot on the streets, again, is a far more humane approach than mental health care.
We cannot seriously suggest this as a solution until massive improvements are made to the system, starting with a minimum complement of actual mental health professionals. The system doesn't have that, nor are there any plans to change it, so ... it is not humane or reasonable to suggest mental health services as a replacement to letting them live on the streets.
These are not signs of mental illness, and should not be considered reasons to imprison someone in a mental health facility and/or forcibly drug them.
There is zero chance this survives 4th Amendment scrutiny at the Supreme Court
A thought-provoking read. Thanks for sharing
But yes, having read the article it just reinforces the impression I have of USA - that it's the "land of the free but only if you have money"
In principle if you can show that these beliefs were unreasonable (not just wrong, but not even reasonable beliefs for the court officials to hold) you might be able to get somewhere, but I suspect a decent lawyer would tell you that this bar is too high.
Conviction rate for people who go to trial in the UK is very high, because the "Full Code Test" for prosecutors tells them to never prosecute people unless they're convinced the evidence they have will support a conviction for each charge they specify.
Would be interesting to read some real life info and stats on this.
If we draw a line at "felony", well... how many people wind up in jail for inability to make bail for misdemeanors? And for how long? I'm pretty sure you can google that kind of thing.
Also, "beyond a reasonable doubt" is the legal grounds for conviction, not arrest. "Probable cause" is the grounds for arrest, a far lower standard.
Probable cause isn't a UK test -- we use [reasonable] suspicion -- but one needs far more evidence than that to retain someone in prison. CPS don't take cases to trial without an expectation of success; non serious crimes (and some serious ones) don't result in prison so aren't pertinent.
Suspicion is an even lower bar, but the charge officer won't even admit someone into custody without evidence (though that evidence has a far lower bar than is required for conviction).
So you get out 24 hrs later, the police caught the perp who just happened to match your description and locality. Surely the downside is just part of society functioning, do you really need compensating? Legal protection for your job, seems like it should be in place though.
I'd say the answer to that is a resounding "yes", but I get it that there's no consensus here on that one.
You might lose a job by police stopping traffic after a RTA and so being delayed by several hours. Should you get compensation for that, or should you just accept it as part of a functioning road network/emergency service?
In the UK IIUC there's a 85% arrest-to-conviction rate across all crimes.
[I realise I'm pushing my luck somewhat.]
So you are OK with people's lives being fucked up just because they've been accused of something? You do realize that anyone can accuse anyone of anything anytime, right? There's a reason we go through investigations and trials.
To your question: obviously not. That statement discredits you as a genuine enquirer. Strawmen and incredulity don't really help us make progress here.
Or, you have statistics to show that's true?
> You don't get locked up on remand just because someone made an accusation against you.
Yes, you can. Once accused, you then go to trial to see if the accusation is correct.
What statistics do you want to see? How many people make false accusations? How many people are arrested on false accusations? How many people use "guilty by association" logic because they can't be arsed to figure out the real story? How many lives are ruined because you would rather we just bypass the judicial system?
https://www.gov.uk/arrested-your-rights/how-long-you-can-be-...
Also its worth noting our anti-terror laws seem to allow indefinite detention without charge. And ant-immigration laws allow for long (months even years) detention of migrants, without even suspicion of a crime.
The longest ever proposed was 90 days (proposed in 2006), and the longest implemented was 28 days (between 2006 - 2011).
https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/human-rights/counterin...
as for imigration 'Just over one fifth of immigration detainees are held for at least two months' :
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/im...
more specifically section 29, 1, (d):
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/schedule/8/part/...
Though F1 seems to have been edited since i last looked.. still its in theory, unlimited detention without trial.
There is also the Terrorism Act 2006, which i think extended the standard limit to 26 days.. Not sure if this was ever repealed.
One may not agree with long term detention, nor even with the law in this area but this assertion (that immigrants are being held without due process) appears to be unfounded?
What would you change?
I would like the presumption of innocence before due process and i would like the due process to involve a British jury. I would like an absolute time limit on detention of innocent people. And if these things made policing or managing immigration more difficult then i can live with that.
If they're innocent then they'll be able to prove it easily ... if they have a valid reason for immigration than despite their crime they'll be released in good time. It seems a small price to pay for freedom if you're fleeing certain harm?
this is just childish, you can only establish the existence of 'absolute proof' in a court of law. If you really want some jobsworth to sit in their office and dispense justice, then you don't want justice.
I'm not sure about the altogether part, but if I don't want people to know how much money I have, going to the government and saying "I need money from other people because I'm not capable of providing for myself and my kids" is kind of the start of a process of telling people about your life in exchange for getting money from other people.
The article makes some good points on bail and fines, but the idea that getting other people to pay for your living expenses should somehow be possible without giving up up any information about yourself is pretty silly.
But the other side is that they money they are asking for has to be taken from people who were responsible and can afford their families. Shouldn't we at a minimum require that if you seek help for family members you can't afford, that you take the same steps others take to not get any more kids you can't afford?
Because unless you have a good counter argument to that, you won't get anywhere politically.
But ultimately my counterargument would be that we should focus on helping people who need it, rather than on not helping people who we think don't deserve it. This country has a puritanical mindset about public help, where we're outraged at any person who receives it who we see as being in any way unworthy. For a pervasive recent example, look at drug testing for welfare recipients. It's more expensive than not doing it, but people love it because we see drug addicts as being evil and therefore unworthy of help.
We need to teach compassion, or at the very least rationality, rather than a punishment mentality.
We also murder people who have expired tags, as long as they don't pay the fine, don't show up in court, resist the police officers enough to get them to shoot them.
In reality essentially everybody stops before it gets to that point, and in your example the women buys (or ideally gets) a bunch of condoms, use them and no more children nobody can afford is brought into the world, and maybe she also avoids some STDs.
Look I don't want to compel her to do it, but at the very least make sure that she understands that the people who pay for her children have certain justifiable expectations.
>people love it because we see drug addicts as being evil and therefore unworthy of help.
If you work hard at a crap job that pays say 22 usd/hr, you don't want to pay for somebodies meth bill.
If you want a system that can help people then you need it so that it is politically palatable enough -- or you won't be able to focus on it at all.
I don't know if they can find out about my bank account or not, but I'm guessing they can, so I am effectively discouraged from saving any money from side jobs (yard work, that sort of thing). I know for a fact they have access to any employment, so that is a big disincentive to pick up a job unless I really think it's going to work out.
As you have pointed out, there is a feeling that this kind of intrusion is justified since I am apparently getting something I don't deserve anyway ("other people's money").
> there is a feeling that this kind of intrusion is justified since I am apparently getting something I don't deserve anyway
The idea that you deserve food stamps implies that you some how earned it. Keep in mind that what you get in food stamps effectively comes from someone else who would earned that money and might rather use it to pay off their college debt or put their kid through school.
If you are not listing your bank account because you don't want them to know that you DO have enough money to provide for yourself, then you are highlighting why they ask for that information. I'm glad if you are getting temporary help if you need it. If you think you somehow deserve and are trying to hide the fact that you actually do have resources you could use for food, you are making a good case for the fact that the government needs to do a better job of requiring that type of information.
People make things so complicated, they'll do anything to avoid doing the right thing. It's not that complicated.
The law isn't right by virtue of being the law, it's right in virtue of being in accordance with what's truly right. Ignoring this for generations doesn't change it.
You would think a nation that has the sins of taking the land and labor of others would have the respectability to make sure everybody has a place to be with no work requirement. Alas, this nation knows no shame.
A recent story on Reason (yes I know their leanings) pointed to a suburb of Atlanta with excessive fines for issues that harmed no one except of course those who could not afford it [1]
the poor are not just hit by the justice system but they are hit by all sorts of government fees and regulatory policies that can force them into expensive schools just to do simple jobs like braid hair. Occupational licensing costs can keep many from productive jobs to get themselves out of the poor house.
so if you want to fix it it has to be done at the legislative level. restrictions of how fines and fees are assessed. people joke that HOAs are bad have seen nothing when faced with over zealous county and city code enforcers.
https://reason.com/blog/2018/05/24/georgia-town-brags-about-...
There was a time where getting a scratch from an unsanitized blade meant an infection that could kill you.
One of the things I came to appreciate was the harm done in the name of "justice". I blogged about some of my experiences (most were originally posted at kuro5hin.org [RIP]). America's Make-Work Sheriff: The Anachronism of Joseph Arpaio [1] examines the United States' criminal justice system as a "make-harm program", which is a jobs program where the government puts people to work making work for themselves.
[1] http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/09/americas-make-work-sheriff-a...
This submission mentions Gideon v. Wainwright, which is a rather important Supreme Court case that found the accused have a right to counsel for all criminal prosecutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_v._Wainwright After Gideon got the Supreme Court to find that he had the right to an attorney, he was re-prosecuted and acquitted.
IMHO, the next phase in the evolution of the United States' criminal justice system is moving away from "punishments" (revenge) towards helping the convicted with their actual problems. Something like how Germany treats the people they've convicted: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/this-is-prison-60-minutes-goes-...
(edit: shifted order of paragraphs)
Why doesn't Department of Economic Security fix this?
The system has been rigged in favor of the rich for decades. Someone said it above, but it's the Land of the Free only if you are wealthy.
I think your source says that 28% of individuals had non-financial release. Also that the number of non-financial releases is going down (from 40% to 28% during the years in the data), but I could be misreading it.
Where are you getting 77%?
>Except for a decline to 57% in 2004, the percentage of defendants released each year varied only slightly, from 62% to 64%. A more pronounced trend was observed in the type of release used (figure 1). From 1990 to 1998, the percentage of released defendants under financial conditions rose from 24% to 36%, while non-financial releases dropped from 40% to 28%.
The only mention of 77% I see just says total release - not release without financial condition.
>Defendants with a prior conviction (51%, not shown in table) had a lower probability of being released than those without a conviction (77%). This was true even if the prior convictions were for misdemeanors only (63%). The effect of a conviction record on release was more pronounced if the defendant had at least one prior felony conviction (46%).
>A bail of let's say $250 for a minor offense is, in effect, a bail of $25. Though again, in the vast majority of cases a minor offense generally means you're released for free.
Why say $250 when the median of released defendants was $5,000?
>The median bail amount for detained defendants ($15,000) was 3 times that of released defendants ($5,000); the mean amount was about 5 times higher ($58,400 versus $11,600) (not shown in table). For all defendants with a bail amount set, the median bail amount was $9,000 and the mean was $35,800.
Even minimum wage is a barrier for some. Marginalized groups (e.g. chronic drug users) can find it difficult to find an employer who values their labor at the minimum wage. The stepping stone of working below minimum wage is made illegal for them, which leaves them with bottle/can collection, squeegee-ing, panhandling and petty crime as the few other alternatives.
Overall, it's good to be aware of problems afflicting the poor, because the adverse effects of repressive government policies seem to fall disproportionately on this subset of the population.
I think where the article discredits itself is when it presumes that people are entitled to welfare:
>>If they want to get public health insurance while they are pregnant, they have to answer questions and give up information about their sex lives, their romantic histories, their medical past, their incomes, their ideas about the future of their families. In some states, if they want to receive public assistance, they must agree not to have more than a certain number of children. Their family lives are subjected to a routine scrutiny that is entirely different from the experience of middle-class families.
No one is entitled to public health insurance. It is provided at the expense of others, through the taxes they are compelled to pay. Where is the privacy for those who are required to file an income tax return? Where is the privacy for those who are audited, and forced to produce an untold number of documents to prove their reported income and deductions are accurate? Where is the individual liberty in the entire process?
The mandates imposed on the taxpayer fully justify conditioning use of public welfare on information disclosure. That the article overlooks this completely indicates an ideological narrow-mindedness, and callousness toward the other, who is forced to pay for these public benefits.
The ideological angle is seen again here:
>>It is true that the decimation of the American welfare state has helped to create a tremendous pool of people living on remarkably low incomes, who may be only tangentially connected to the labor market.
The idea of the American welfare state has been decimated is a common, and inaccurate trope, often peddled by leftists. Since the War on Poverty began, per capita social spending has rapidly grown.
It was vastly greater in the 1980s than the 1970s and it was vastly greater in 1990s than the 1980s:
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/01/16/us/politics/16fiv...
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/01/16/us/politics/16fiv...
By all indications, the War on Poverty has failed, given the poverty rate was declining far faster before its institution than during the 50 years since it began. Social welfare spending's negative unintended consequences, like having a measurable effect on the proclivity of women to have children out of wedlock, appear to outweigh its positive effects.
I find this line of reasoning flawed, if you relaxed the constraints around minimum wage, the "stepping stone" would become the new minimum
You can require employers prove they need a credit check or drug test, for example. Most these places already have systems in place to catch theft and should be simply making sure the person does the job safely. Make sure folks can go to doctor's appointments, and have policies that mean folks can ride their bike to work without being stuck due to a stolen bicycle. This might also include making sure to have a changing room in case of incliment weather if you expect your employee to look a certain way when work starts.
> You can't work in many occupations without meeting minimum skill standards
Both of these are objectively good things that increase consumer confidence, public safety, etc.
> Marginalized groups (e.g. chronic drug users)
Claiming that drug addicts are "marginalized" and placing them in the same group as truly marginalized people (racial/ethnic minorities, LGBT, etc) is disingenuous. Drug use is a choice and in most jurisdictions, and federally in the US, is a crime. It's not surprising that many business owners do not want to employ someone who regularly violates the law.
I think drug testing for employees is an outdated concept and isn't going to increase your workers' productivity or the quality of your employee pool, but that doesn't mean it isn't the business owner's right to do so if they disagree.
> The stepping stone of working below minimum wage is made illegal for them
Which is probably another good thing considering you can barely feed yourself if you work for minimum wage.
I haven't seen any indication that these are "objectively good things" that increase any of these public goods.
>>Drug use is a choice and in most jurisdictions, and federally in the US, is a crime.
That doesn't make drug users not marginalized.
>>but that doesn't mean it isn't the business owner's right to do so if they disagree.
Of course, I didn't suggest otherwise.
>>Which is probably another good thing considering you can barely feed yourself if you work for minimum wage.
Their alternative is working informally (e.g. bottle collection) and making below minimum wage without the benefit of gaining marketable skills, or not working, and making nothing, so I can't see how it could possibly be a good thing.
You might want to actually check your statistics before making proclamations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#/...
The poverty rate dropped 50% from 1959 to the early 1970s, from almost 25% to around 12-13%, coinciding with the introduction of the modern welfare programs. It's held steady there ever since.
Poverty rates have failed to decline during almost the entire era of rapidly increasing social spending. There is less than a decade of poverty rate reduction during the War on Poverty era, and it is all at the beginning, when the economy and populace had still not become accustomed to large social welfare programs, and when the size of these programs was much smaller than it is now. If social programs reduced poverty these aren't the stats you'd see.