“Because jails are chaotic and concealed from outside view, we only become aware of them when very bad outcomes occur, such as deaths,”
More generally, what is the value or repeating things like argument-less slogans about prison privatization or "if you don't pay for it, you're the product", especially to people who must have read it dozens of times?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2018/07/31/are-inno...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/plea-ba...
It's easy to score public dollars to hire cops and build prisons, but it's much harder to add judges, public defenders, clerks, and courtrooms. The result is more people with a right to a trial than we have the capacity to give a trial. Justice is therefore a scarce good and must be rationed by some means: you can either queue (wait in jail), pay in cash (by hiring private representation and making cash bail), or roll the dice and go to trial with a public defender.
The solution isn't to find another way to ration justice, it's to reduce the imbalance between people with rights to a trial and the number of trials we can provide. We can do this by arresting fewer people by, for example, ending the war on drugs (among other things) or by expanding the number of judges, clerks, and public defenders in our justice system to be able to handle the whole load. Maybe both are needed in some measure.
> easy to score public dollars to hire cops and build prisons, but it's much harder to add judges, public defenders, clerks, and courtrooms
If other countries do not have plea bargaining then how does this economic argument work in the US but , apparently, not elsewhere.
I ask this because I get the impression that the US is the only country that has an official plea bargaining system.
This is going to be off topic, but I find this dumb.
Is it so hard to learn a 7 digit number that you need to make yourself dependent on a stupid device?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Locked-Causes-Incarceration-Achieve-R...
The reason for me knocking privatization is corruption. Kickbacks/lobbying[1] and nepotism[2]. While most of these actions are legal I don't think it is ethical.
I'll do some more reading before commenting further.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Krasner
[1] https://outline.com/MzTc9f
[2] George W. Bush & Gus Puryear https://medium.com/@pavelsokolov_56935/private-prisons-in-am...
IMHO, apathy about anyone who's ensnared in the legal system, "Well, if they weren't doing anything wrong...", leads to dehumanisation. Dehumanisation will - almost always - lead to many forms of abuse.
I wish it were as simple as just making privatisation illegal and reforming the plea system but I fear that it would take far more than that to see true change.
Put succinctly: The moment you no longer care about someone's life, in any shape or form, then that battle was already lost before it was even begun.
People who broke the law are seen as "deserving" to suffer in order to restore a "just" world.
Even if the suffering is not effective as a deterrent or as part of a healing process, it's expected for a philosophical (or religious) reason.
We are all criminals and all do something "wrong" legally, all the time. The only difference is that the justice system focuses on some of us and not others, and the plea system harms most of those who are focused on, because any scrutiny at all can virtually always lead to an indictment.
Just check the Skrelli incident for an example, or the whole Muller investigation. Virtually all those people would have escaped indictment had they just kept their heads down and avoided notice by justice officials.
But are these a significant per cent of cases that lead people to Rikers? I'm gonna guess no, they won't add up to even a single per cent.
My personal belief is if the gov't wants you in jail, they can basically make it happen and only people with extreme resources may be able to belay that.
Your example of people who very clearly commuted major crimes, but could have avoided punishment, is the opposite of your thesis. very few people steal over a million dollars.
I guess I won't be buying it.