US Senate Passes Sweeping Criminal Justice Reform Bill
bbc.com
bbc.com
Reducing 3 strikes from minimum life to 25 is fine, but it does nothing to address the fact that expanding judicial discretion just gets you screwed in an election year. Theres nothing to keep people from getting multiple consecutive terms until its just the same as life.
The bill also doesnt address perpetual parole. When I was released after having served time, I was sentenced immediately to additional "parole" for a year and a half. This cuts into your ability to go to work in some cases (construction hours start early.) my job as an automotive mechanic started at 4 AM and school ended at 10. parole says i need to check in and be home by 6 pm, so i have to apply for extensions and variances every week. miss one and I go back to a jail term I technically already served.
$300 million dollars is nice for training, but training generally sucks in private prison and you have no recourse. For example, in a state run correctional facility you can learn shop math (trigonometry) and a trade. At the private prison I spent a year at (before it went bankrupt and transferred us all to state anyhow) my "education" consisted of painting the floor and laundry detail. you learn nothing, and surprise, are paid nothing because its education not work (work details like this in prison are supposed to be paid.)
as for the tampons and sanitary napkins, fine, its not like those were actually much of an issue from what i gather. Did you know inmates have to purchase things like soap and shit tickets? (toilet paper) There are freebies from commissary like those stab-proof pens for visitation, but use too many or upset a guard and youll get a strike for 'commissary abuse' and be restricted from buying things for a month or two. Ever wiped with a piece of receipt paper? not fun.
https://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=...
But in general, many still believe that all felons are 100% restricted from ever voting again, which isn't accurate.
I'm nitpicking one detail of your overall point here, but you didn't serve the time; that's why you're on parole. If you had served the full sentence there would be no parole.
So you pay an inconvenience tax in exchange for being released. If you violate those terms you go back to serve the remainder of your sentence.
No one is saying it's easy, or that there aren't aspects that couldn't be improved, but I don't see the overarching problem here.
I don't know how good behavior credits factor into this. Typically a prisoner can get a significant reduction in time served for good behavior, but I don't know if that really means early parole or actually full release from the sentence.
edit: after more research it seems my understanding of parole's place in the criminal justice system may have been incomplete. Also there is a distinction between parole and probation that I had never noticed.
Most people don’t know about this.
Colorado has mandatory parole period that applies on top of the base sentence of imprisonment for felonies. They may not be unique in doing something like that; the US has more than 50 different criminal justice systems, and most generalizations about them that aren't federal Constitutional mandates have exceptions.
Could you expand on this? It sounds like you served your full sentence, then got additional parole on top of that. And, 'sentenced' - without a new trial/charges?
This bill is addressed to federal prisons. There is no parole in the federal system.
And his gripes about parole can certainly apply to US Probation Officers, US Marshalls, and other BOP designates, depending on the one you get assigned.
When I was released after having served time, I was sentenced immediately to additional "parole" for a year and a half.
The post-release supervision is there for a reason. People in prison talk about how they're going to have a blast when they get out. Live it up. Do exactly the kind of things that led to them breaking the law in the first place.
I got a saying for those people who cry about prison and cry about the "bs" they gotta put up with on release: "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time."
In Suriname people wash their ass after they took a dump. They also wash their hands afterwards.
Holy shit. How is this not a thing already?
The other 90% of prisoners do not necessarily have them. It really isn't a thing already, even with this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_Litigation_Reform_Act
Nobody likes lawsuits or lawyers, but judicial remedies are often the only option for relief that inmates have. When you take that away from them, they are at the absolute mercy of the prison bureaucracy.
Your constitutional rights have been violated? Tough, go fill out a grievance form.
It's women, who wrote guidelines about how to treat women, and came up with guidelines worse than guidelines that a bunch of old stodgy men in congress came up with yesterday.
That's a real problem. And it's a problem that we need to try to solve in "Second Step".
I mean, why even have female administrators and wardens putting this stuff together, if they are just going to get their cushy jobs and sit there and try to out "man" the men? The entire reason you're there is to supposedly bring a different sensibility.
What's unstated in placing those requirements in this bill, is how much of a dismal failure our hiring programs have been in bringing in people, (men OR women), with different sensibilities. Whether they are male or female, black, white, asian, or hispanic, these positions seem to attract the same sort of people. People who look at the way things are done, and don't see any problem with it.
We need to start looking past identity politics and start seeing that issue.
Basically, prisoners are responsible for purchasing their own sanitary supplies (among other things), men and women.
Another good bill that benefits an even more marginalized population (with no executive branch patrons) is being actively killed because of a single representative: https://www.kfyrtv.com/content/news/ND-Indian-Affairs-commis...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/native-women-abused-bil...
killed because of a single representative
Personally I would be a fan of 3 strikes and you are committed to mandatory drug rehabilitation, and aren't let out until you are clean for x number of whatever amount of time seems fair and reasonable.
We have an existence proof that the “War on Drugs” has been a failure, has not made drugs any harder to get, and penalties are unequally applied on the poor and minorities.
Moral beliefs tend to eventually end up externalized in some form or fashion. What then? What if I told you that everything we do affects someone else? This post-modernist idea that you can do whatever you want as long as it doesn't affect someone else is a fallacy. Unless you live in an isolated, self sustaining biodome in Antartica, chances are you are impacting at least one other life in extreme cases, if not more.
The "Desert Fathers" of the ancient Church, of whom left the holy cities with the extent purpose of leaving the world to not impact others (or be bothered by the cares of the world) ironically, impacted millions.
Let’s not forget if those preaching “morality” had their way they would also ban birth control.
You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t pay too much credence to the “moral majority”.
And finally, your argument is very flawed because systems of morality are what have lead to the greatest human progress for thousands of years, and you are invalidating all of that on some unfortunate decade-long (strong emphasis on decade long, not millennium long) effects of fundamentalists and charlatans who, as history has already judged, were on the wrong side of things? You must have a very bleak outlook on humanity.
Should I start with the mass slaughter of native Americans, slavery, Japanese internment camps, etc?
All the while the “good Christians” either actively took part or looked the other way?
Even the name and implementation of the law -- "3 strikes" -- feels absurd. IIRC from the Congressional debate, the choice of 3 strikes is rooted in the familiarity of the term from America's pastime, not based out of an analysis of penalties and recidivism outcomes.
The 3-strikes laws serve a different purpose. The trouble is that some people simply won't get the message that crime is unacceptable. It doesn't matter how long we keep them in prison. Letting them out is like being an accomplice, because they are going to commit that crime. The only solution is to separate these criminals from society.
It's true that some criminals may be irredeemable. The ideal is that only these criminals face the punishment intended by 3-strikes, the reality is that otherwise rehabilitatable criminals might be unduly punished. For example, prosecutors can use the statute to pressure a defendant to plead guilty or testify as state's witness, with no ability for judges to act as a check on sentencing if the defendant goes to trial and loses. And of course, there are the criminals who get life in prison for minor, usually drug-related crimes [0].
[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/cruel-an...
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/opinion/sunday/california...
1. It can reform. This is often officially implied by names that contain the word "corrections".
2. It can satisfy victims who would otherwise enact their own idea of justice.
3. It can be a deterrent for others.
4. It can be a deterrent for that same person, if later released.
5. It can protect society by making the attackers be dead or physically contained in cages, and thus away from society. It's hard to rape kids when you are all alone in a concrete box.
6. It can fulfill a religious duty.
You seem to think that numbers 2 and 6 are all we get out of the deal. This is not the case. We get all of the above. With the possible exception of number 6, all of them are beneficial.
I'm pretty sure that number 5 is what the American system is mainly about. If you can't behave, you can't be with the rest of us.
The law of noncontradiction: to believe X is necessarily to believe they the belief in not-X is incorrect. One may believe it is right to tolerate or accommodate the incorrect belief, but that's not the same as viewing it as correct.
If someone feels that drug abuse is “unethical” shouldn’t matter as long as the drug addict is not breaking into your home or otherwise causing you harm.
The law of noncontradiction is valid everywhere. One can have a meta-ethical view (which would apply to politics insofar as that depends on ethics) that ethical propositions are neither true nor false but simply subjectively preferred behavior or subjectively opposed behavior, but then one wouldn't actually believe any subordinate ethical proposition to be true; noncontradiction would still hold just fine.
But lots of people believe that ethical propositions can be true or false even if they accept some area of preference, and anyone who believes a particular ethical proposition is true must also believe that any contradictory position (the simplest case of which is simple negation) is false.
If you accept areas of preference, then your beliefs in those areas are not of the form ‘X is right’ or ‘X is wrong’ but ‘X is my preference’ or ‘X is not my preference’. A statement about someone else's preference in that area does not conflict with yours even if the preferences differs (‘A prefers X’ does not contradict ‘B prefers not-X’.) Any statement of universal truth by a third party in the area of preference conflicts with the belief that it is validly an area of preference, OTOH, and cannot simultaneously be viewed as anything but incorrect while believing the area to be validly one of preference.
Non-violent offenders should not be in prison. Punishing people with prison doesn't fix the problem, better mental health services and education (real education, not lies about drugs == devil) does much better. If you want to punish drug users, you're right (and in morally questionable standing imo) and you'll have to pay for that, but if you want to reduce the drug problem you're not in the right.
Whatever happened to purpose of prison being rehabilitation? I mean... they are called correctional facilities. Are we so far gone now that we think criminals are beyond redemption and change?
You can't change someone's behavioral tendencies against their will. The criminal has to choose for himself to change and to be rehabilitated. The most you can do is to provide the resources and support he needs to carry out that decision once he's made it.
What you can do is (a) provide a disincentive for committing crimes and (b) separate people with a known tendency for committing crimes from the rest of society. Prison and the death penalty both accomplish these goals, but prison is cheaper and more reversible.
To the best of my knowledge, one of the problems with US prisons today is that the resources and support you describe are not widely available.
I think you're arguing against a strawman here. I don't think most people who support moving from the current system towards a more Norwegian-style approach are arguing that it is the panacea that will reform all criminals, only that it will do a lot better that the current system.
Maybe this comes across to you as a straw man argument because you don’t live somewhere completely insane where there is political opposition to building jails and police stations in the first place because of wacky leftist ideology. Sometimes I envy people who assume I’m arguing with a straw man.
I have no problem with the notion that violent criminals, thieves, and con men should be punished, and that those who persist in their crimes should be permanently removed from civil society. I do have a problem with the notion that someone only guilty of carrying two ounces of cannabis or transporting a particular species of fish across state lines should be punished in a similar fashion. That's because I think one category of felonies should continue to be felonious, and the other category should cease to be felonious.
I get that one argument is that many have "nothing to lose". And yeah, maybe they are very poor, unemployed, without a proper education or skills so their situation doesn't look great. But to then say "well, doesn't matter if I end up in prison for the rest of my life is truly mind-boggling.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunedin_Multidisciplinary_He...
Yeah, that's actually incredibly possible in our legal system, and it's incentivized by the plea bargaining system, because the more charges the prosecutor can pile on, the stronger her negotiating position.
Suppose you rob a bank with a gun, the old-fashioned way. Clearly, that's at least one crime: armed robbery. Now, usually brandishing a weapon is a crime in itself, and if you're brandishing it at people, that's also assault with a deadly weapon, and if you're threatening people, that might qualify as terroristic threat. Arguably, the single act of "waving a gun around and demanding money from the bank teller" has double jeopardy protection and it should only count as one of these three crimes. But what if you point the gun at more than one bank teller? What if you point it at the customers and demand that they get on the floor? I don't know. I'm not a lawyer.
Suppose things escalate and you, for example, don't even shoot the gun, you just pistol-whip someone. That's definitely an additional crime. It's an additional crime for each person you pistol-whip, let alone shoot. Probably some sort of aggravated assault or assault and battery type thing, depending on the laws in your particular state.
Let's imagine that during this bank robbery, someone dies. They don't even die of being pistol whipped. There's a little old lady at the bank who just wants to deposit her Social Security check, and here you come, screaming and yelling and pointing a gun in people's faces, and she dies of a heart attack. Was the heart attack caused by the stress of being in the middle of a bank robbery? Yes, and the medical examiner would rule the cause of death as "homicide". Which means, merely by virtue of robbing the bank in the first place, you are now guilty of felony murder.
Now, let's suppose you didn't just walk in the front door, like an idiot, and you instead did something more creative like crashing through a window. Breaking the window is probably a type of vandalism or malicious mischief, so let's add that on too. Likewise, if you fire a warning shot into the ceiling, like in the movies: lots of property damage there (and, of course, strict liability for anything or anyone else that stray bullet happens to run into.)
Let's talk about the gun. Is it an unregistered gun in a state that requires gun registration? Did you carry it concealed and loaded on your way into the bank without having a concealed carry permit? Did you buy a stolen gun from a fence instead of having an obvious paper trail at a legitimate gun dealer that has your name and ID on file? Probably a crime or two in there as well.
The getaway is its own unending font of possible crimes. Let's suppose you get your bag of cash, jump in your car, and drive away. If at any point in this process you're being pursued by the police, this constitutes resisting arrest. You're likely committing reckless driving, too. Obviously if you run over a person that's vehicular assault and felony murder again, but depending on what else you run into, you could also be guilty of animal cruelty, mailbox vandalism (actually a federal offense), damaging government property, just plain normal vandalism, and so forth, not to mention all the trespassing and moving violations you're undeniably committing as well.
Also, if you ever discussed this plan with anyone, there might be a case for conspiracy. It might not hold up in court or anything, but a clever prosecutor will pile this on anyway just to turn a witness against you or for cheap bargaining leverage.
What if they had a 3 strikes clause for white collar crime?
Also once you’ve been convicted, it’s harder to find a job with a criminal record.
That's ok. The important thing is to recognize it exists. Too often, be it taxes on cigarettes or theft or laws like this, people apply their personal lifestyles instead of others.
People also forget that tons of petty crimes that are misdemeanors have felony equivalents and which one you're charged with is often up to the discretion of the prosecutor.
For the most part, the same as in most people’s minds for most decisions—if it plays out at all, it does so only as a post hoc rationalization for decisions not made based on risk/reward calculus in the first place, which conveniently juggles facts to support the action already undertaken.
Rational choice theory is a nice model that has some use in modelling behavior in some domains in broad aggregates, but has little to do with how individual decisions are actually made.
big scary retaliation can only really gain purchase against those who really perceive other options for themselves. if you don't perceive options, you're likely to just be resigned to what you see as your fate. it's not crazy to see prison as shelter and food, and far better than starving in a ditch.
we also cannot assume that people are in an emotionally and psychologically healthy position when deciding what risks are worth taking, or even that people are considering risks at all, or when they do that the risks are even perceived as optional.
The whole point of the 3-strikes laws is to acknowledge that rehabilitation is simply not possible with some people. Such people will forever be a hazard to society, and thus need to be separated from society.
Most violent crimes are committed by young men, say from teenagers to early twenties. I don’t know anything about Brazil’s juvenile justice system, but a twenty year old who gets a 35 year sentence is very unlikely to be a violent person at 55. And if not, another 35 year sentence puts him away until he’s 90. It doesn’t take very many prison sentences like that to completely get rid of the risk of recidivism.
However I think a lot of the problems with the prison system in the US seems to be in the state/country level.
> https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/5682...
That the Kochs and the Deasons were so committed to criminal reform, aligning themselves with the likes of ACLU and left-leaning groups, I remember reading op-eds/screeds from activists accusing the Kochs of having an ulterior agenda. But not much evidence has surfaced of this. FWIW, the TAL episode refers to a 2015 NYT op-ed that Doug Deason wrote about how close his life came to being ruined by a felony burglary charge, which is a great read [1].
[0] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/591/transcript
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/opinion/ruining-lives-wit...
That is provably false. They care of criminal justice reform because they don't want corporations--or the people who own them--to be held criminally liable when those corporations violate the law. This is particularly important for a family whose fortune comes from the extraction of oil.[0] They purchased ads around the country criticizing judges and politicians as "soft on crime," and actively supporting a Republican gubernatorial candidate who opposes criminal justice reform and criticized Obama for releasing "dangerous thugs."[1]
From the Intercept: "Koch’s interest in criminal justice reform was sparked not by the plight of overcrowded prisons or racial disparities in law enforcement, but by the company’s own environmental crimes. In 2000, Koch was indicted over claims that it had polluted huge amounts of benzene, a known carcinogen, from a Texas refinery and then attempted to cover up the crime. The indictment came on the heels of a series of state and federal probes that had forced the company to pay what was then the largest civil penalty for violations of environmental law for allowing hundreds of oil spills across six states."
[0] Koch Industries has pattern of violating ethics, environmental laws: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/koch-industries-has-pa...
[1] KOCH BROTHERS TALK CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM, BUT PAY FOR “TOUGH ON CRIME” POLITICAL ADS: https://theintercept.com/2015/11/03/soft-on-crime-ads/
1) The Kochs' money goes toward Republican candidates who oppose criminal reform.
2) The Kochs' interest was "sparked by the company's own environmental crimes"
Point 1 is as convincing as arguing that the ACLU and other liberals are also anti-criminal-reform, given that the majority of them likely voted for Bill and Hillary Clinton, despite the former being the president who advocated and signed America's most punitive federal sentencing reforms. The Koch brothers support conservatives, and some/many conservatives don't support or prioritize criminal reform. Also, you mischaracterize their political ad efforts. Their money goes to Republicans who have the discretion to spend it on whatever they like, including tough-on-crime candidates and platforms. The Kochs are indeed an accomplice to whatever their supported candidates decide to do with the money. But if the Kochs just want conservatives to win and don't actually care about criminal reform, why would they be quitely spending millions directly to support the kind of criminal reform advocacy that undercuts the GOP's status quo?
Point 2 is supported by a link to this TIME article: http://time.com/3686797/charles-koch-criminal-justice/
And the TIME article does indeed assert the Kochs' interest in criminal justice reform dates back to when their company was charged with environmental crimes and fined. And the Kochs' general counsel is quoted as supporting that timeline and that non-altruistic origin story:
> The owners believed they had been victimized by overzealous prosecutors and unclear statutes. “Our view was if we, a large company with many resources, were treated this way, what’s happening to the average American?” Holden says.
And...so? I didn't say the Kochs' got into criminal reform out of altruism. The op-ed I linked to from Doug Deason clearly has Deason talking about his personal run-in with the law. What I'm claiming is that, however they were first interested, what they are advocating now is reform that affects millions of convicts who are nowhere near Kochs' strata of self-interest, which the TIME article details (and the Intercept ignores). What does lobbying for better legal counsel for low-income/indigent defendants, restoring rights to youthful non-violent offenders, and reducing mandatory prison sentences, have to do with protecting the Kochs from prosecution for white-collar crimes. If the Kochs wanted to mitigate their exposure to future prosecution, they could just focus on lobbying for corporate and environmental deregulation.
The New Yorker has a more thorough article about the Kochs' possible motives and potential Trojan horse [1]. It notes that a previous iteration of the criminal reform bill, passed by the Senate committee, the House Judiciary Committee added provisions that would "weaken the government's ability to prosecute an array of corporate crimes". The Kochs spokesperson told the New Yorker at the time that the Kochs supported stripping the white-collar-crime provisions if that meant the bill could be passed.
Or maybe they're just fighting a shadowy proxy-war with George Soros. Who knows. Just always seems funny that when a billionaire is working towards political reforms you like, they're the good guy, and when they're working towards political reforms you don't like, it's a shadowy conspiracy to rig the system and get richer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There's more explanation here if you or anyone wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
[1] My very limited understanding of this bill, is that it will reduce spending overall (i.e. smaller government), and the only increase in spending is going to private institutions.