Officials put the wrong man in a mental facility for two years
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
> ... Bento, who did not respond to a request for comment, said officials in that office had instructed him not to hand over any documents related to Castleberry’s 2006 drug case, including all records filed after May 2017 that actually pertained to Spriestersbach.
> Spriestersbach was not entitled to the documents, officials said.
> The reason: He was not the defendant in that case. He was not Thomas Castleberry.
They are saying he is not allowed to get the documents for the case which he was the main suspect and subsequently hospitalized for since the documents for the case is for the other person. Even though it happened to him and not the other person. I'm dumbfounded.
Considering the fact that the US prison population is heavily skewed in one direction, that the US has the highest per capita prison population, that prison populations are used as forced labor, I'm quite convinced it's intentional. The small number of people that are accidentally targeted unintentionally are just collateral damage nobody really cares about.
I often hear "oh well {criminal justice system, healthcare, insert other bad industry} is not a failure because it's doing its intended purpose, which is profit". No, that's the current goal of the system running it. The actual, intended purpose, in a functioning society, is to {serve fair punishments and rehabilitate, enhance quality of health, etc}.
I'm not sure which history books you've been reading, but modern police were invented in the 17th and 18th centuries as brutal forms of population control. In America, the "actual, intended purpose" was to be a genocidal force that clears the land of Amerindians, to patrol the slaves, to terrorize the workers, and so on. In the South, you can trace the history of police departments directly to Confederate troops, who, immediately after losing the war, rounded up people and threw them in prison on fabricated charges. To a lot of people, it was as if the war never happened. The fact that there was no reign of terror in the south tells you everything you need to know. And the slavery continues to this day. So I have no idea what you mean when you talk about this fantastical "intended purpose".
The US instance is one.
Robbert Peele's "Peelian Principles" (UK) are another, which is how the UK ended up with a largely unarmed and civillian institution "policing by consent". (It also has its darker elements, but that's the thumbnail sketch.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
A French "gendarme" is literally a "man at arms", and is derived from military forces, representing a third tradition.
No judgements! I only mention because it was a boon when someone pointed out i had a similar habit
Thank you for putting words to this. I think it's something I've struggled with as well.
Regardless, there isn't even a need to find some shadowy special interest to explain the high incarceration rates in the US, when the laws that led to those high incarceration rates were passed very publicly for very straightforward reasons: to curb the late-20th-century crime wave of the 1970's-1990's. This was a major, high-profile political issue, and the majority of voters at the time favored "tough-on-crime" measures that led to mandatory sentences, longer sentences, three-strikes laws, and fewer judicial prerogatives. That's why they elected the people who promised to pass those laws before getting elected and kept those promises after being elected. And just like every other well-intended law that's ever been passed, there were unintended consequences that we can and should fix.
There’s a reason some one people like Bernie Sanders were against the 1992 crime bill. Which many republicans and democrats were for. To say the people for it were well intentioned when Bernie and others were telling them of the consequences and having already seen the negative consequences up to that point shows these were not unintended and not well intentioned.
It can interest me when parts of a [sub]group do something. However it doesn’t have to mean anything too concrete or logical or line up so perfectly and neatly as your last sentence states.
I was recently reminded of this due to a strange story having to do with covid and a shortage of license plates in Washington state, due to "social distancing" in the DOC. So that state contracted with another state whose prisoners were still incarcerated and still hard at work making license plates.
> The DOC has experienced issues since last summer, when compliance with social-distancing requirements slowed production, according to spokesperson Rachel Ericson. To address the issue, the agency has increased staffing and started outsourcing some production on July 31.
> License plates first began to be manufactured by individuals incarcerated at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla in 1923. It’s now one of 43 prison factories around the country that produce plates for 40 states and the federal government.
Original: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/washington-state-g...
Outline (no paywall): https://outline.com/YnDVG6
Which doesn't say much. Most complex organisms on Earth go extinct.
I believe to think otherwise is hubris.
Could we change? Sure. Will we? Who knows.
Just a few hundred years ago people were burned at the stake, impaled, cut open alive in front of a crowd.
Every war kills off the most violent and aggressive. The next big one should wipe a lot of them.
Then again, push someone hard enough and they'll turn against you. Don't even need violence and death, a miserable existence in fear and doubt can be a way better punishment. The sociopathic rich prove it works.
"Seven weeks old," he replied.
"So, you've missed watching her grow up?"
"Every bit of it."
"How old is she now?"
"She just turned 43."
But an apology, even from the prosecutor, is all he gets, Strickland is still in prison."
This is fucking terrible. It brought tears to my eyes as it's both horrific and so tragic. It's no wonder that much of the world looks on American Justice with much askance and suspicion in that its implementation of 'justice' is so hypocritically at odds with stated American values—and even the Constitution. One wonders why so many American citizens actually tolerate this situation and do so little about it.
For heaven's sake why aren't people on the streets protesting for change?
I wonder if returning soldiers from D-Day and Iwo Jima would have allowed themselves to be crushed in similar circumstances. I doubt it very much.
(Seems to me both the zeitgeist and ethics have changed greatly in the past 75 years. The question is why.)
BTW, I note this story is now here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28079154
The number of hoops VZW made me jump through was stupefying. Multiple notarized documents, utility bills, property tax records, as well as the police report.
And then they said "Our initial review says that the account stands as-is, that we are satisfied that it was in fact you that opened the accounts, based on the documentation you provided, and the documentation that was provided on account opening".
Great (not really), I say, in that case, "I want to see the documentation 'I' used to open the account."
"We can't do that, for customer privacy reasons."
"You just told me that you determined -I- am the customer. Are you telling me it's a breach of my privacy to supply documents you've stated on the record -I- supplied you, to me?!?"
"Well, you may not have opened the account..."
Apparently, Schrodinger's cell phone account. Mine when they need the bill paid or sent to collections, and "possibly not mine" when it comes to them revealing what crap they accepted in order to open the account in the first place.
It finally got sorted out, but took a lot more back and forth.
I get the sense that a lot of things that used to be easy to resolve, easy to deal with, easy in general, are actually quite painful and difficult today.
If they can find a technicality to hide their own mistakes and general incompetency, why would they not try to influence the judge to proclaim their fantasy as the prevailing “truth”?
It's beyond me how anyone has one iota of faith in the US judicial system anymore.
There isn't a large Innocence Project (though a small one has popped up and should be supported) in Australia and there are overzealous prosecutors in Australia, just as in a lot of places (though the competition in America seems to be exceptionally strong). Faith is nice and all, but it doesn't free the innocent. There's a link to support Australia's innocence project, maybe tithe.
For that matter, things won't improve in any anglophone country until they ditch the adversarial system for the inquisitorial one that has a better chance of getting to the truth of a case. But don't hold your breath, that won't happen anytime soon.
https://obriensolicitors.com.au/case-studies-unlawful-impris...
Every day on HN we have debates about the trading of privacy for data for a more secure world. This is an indication that our efforts are broken, because people. But also that those people held a lot of different roles, in a diversity of offices across our judicial system.
EDIT: Confused "anywhere" with "everywhere". I'll take my F in logic today and show myself out.
* a human that has never once made any mistake whatsoever
* a system composed of humans who are mistake capable but the system itself actually makes no mistakes.
Such a thing seems impossible - if you can point to the existence of such a thing, your doubt is worth entertaining, otherwise it's just contrarianism.
Multiple people convicted by evidence provided by a quack of a doctor used as an Expert Witness by the crown.
For one thing, if another country handles things better, that shows humans are capable of improving their system.
I wonder what the other countries are that do better, and what they do differently. Maybe there should be a mandated evidence review every x years, irrespective of sentence.
Sure, we will have failures—but we need to push the envelope and do “good” not “better than worse”.
If it was unique you can point to what makes it unique - but if it happens everywhere, then it's because humans are humans.
If you don't understand the source of the problem you have no change of fixing it.
The system is designed to target and exploit vulnerable, poor people and turn them into productive assets. Once it has them, getting them out can be incredibly difficult because they become so profitable. Our penal system is not designed for rehabilitation but for profit generation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
Hundreds jailed or fined due to a faulty computer system blaming them - no other evidence - Post Office covered it up repeatedly - victims still not fully compensated.
I think justice should be considered the entire purpose of a legal system. And if it isn't working, it should be fixed.
Accountability sounds like a good place to start. If an official causes harm to another person through negligence or otherwise they should be held accountable to the same standards as anyone else.
... but it doesn't always succeed for multiple reasons. One of the most common being that it's not always possible to grant all parties justice. Sometimes, courts have to evaluate a zero-sum situation and decide how cost will be shared, so there's no way to move forward without constraining someone's rights. And people's definitions of "justice" vary, and are far more often grounded in emotion than coherent philosophy... It's not always even logically possible to grant all parties justice.
The useful distinction to keep in mind is that the legal system will follow the law, but whether the outcome of that is "justice" is a subjective evaluation more than a measurable concept.
This is probably argument from definition (unclear) but in any case, it's a statement which needs backing up.
To cite a usual boogeyman for such discussions, the Soviet court system under Stalin wasn't at all interested in justice.
It's not clear to me that the incentives in the US court system align with justice more than accidentally. As in, sometimes the guilty go to prison, as a side effect of the prosecutor's office needing to clear their docket and present good numbers to keep their budget up. Very occasionally, the innocent are cleared of crimes, and even more occasionally than that their lives aren't ruined in the process; defense attorneys want to look good as well.
And, to play Devil's advocate, most of those in power under Stalin would likely have claimed and honestly believed that it was a justice system and that it was using its might for the greater good.
Outright sociopaths who simply don't care about harm are rare. When systems cause more harm than good, it's usually because well-intentioned participants fall prey to other human flaws:
* Dehumanizing and believing that some groups are simply less worthy of care than others.
* Biased data or beliefs about who is harmed and who is helped.
* Principle-agent problems where the ones making the decisions don't see or own the consequences of them.
* Emergent properties where no individual member of the system wants a result, but the system as a whole ends up producing it because of its structure. Sort of the beauracratic equivalent of crowd crush.
The reason I'm pointing this out is because I think when non-totalitarian systems fail to help, it's usually for the same reasons. It's not because of psychopathic monsters. It's mostly that primate brains were never designed to operate at the organizational and power scale we have created. The fact that it works at all is a miracle.
One way of at least improving the situation would be for laws that would allow for the victim to sue both the State and public officials separately. If police and other public servants could not hide behind the protection of State and could easily be sued for negligence then they'd be much more diligent. It wouldn't make things perfect but it'd only take a few instances of public servants finding themselves out of pocket to the tune of their life savings for things to improve significantly for the better.
There's no doubt that democracy is badly impacted by such events, and it's little wonder that people continue to lose faith in their governance whenever this happens. Anyway, I hope some smart lawyer will make the State pay very early for its irresponsible and horrendous error and that Spriestersbach is awarded the large compensation that he deserves.
So, I would argue, "one of many": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
I'm not sure there are that many professions where you get exiled or go to jail for failure.
They received the pass and then pretended it never happened
The innocence project is just trying to clear his name, after he went to live with his sister in Vermont.
I can't read the article because it's behind a paywall. I said he needed outside lawyers to rectify the situation. Just because he was freed doesn't mean his life is back in order. I suspect he has an arrest record, criminal conviction and a record of time served to contend with. Not to mention he hasn't worked in 2+ years. I'm sure his credit is toast. What happened to the place he used to live? I don't know if his voting rights have been restored. I would imagine a google search for his name would bring up at least one article on his conviction for employers to be deterred. Imagine what your life would look like if you just vanished from civilization for 2 years. The punishment is a lot more than just the incarceration.
This does not change the crux of your post, just some of the points.
The justice system mostly works (relative to what its designed to do and the system it evolved out of, which you might both disagree with, but let's not complicate this). By the nature of what it handles (humans) and what you are (human) it will look abhorrently cruel when it fails. And, as with any system, it will definitely continue to fail as long as it is in place.
Assessing an acceptable failure rate is kinda hard – but realistically there has to be one or you will just have to do without any system at all.
So, more interestingly, the thing to look out for is whether a) there are institutions that report on system failures and b) we learn from those failures and correct them at all. As far as I can tell that generally happens in democratic countries.
The next thing to look at is the speed in which we do those corrections. Could they be quicker? Sure. However, it seems like democracies are a tad slow about everything to people everywhere. Or, put differently, we are all wired a little bit too impatiently for how our democracies are currently designed.
I feel that's good thing, constantly scrutinising our systems, keeping them on their toes and improving as we go.
And when they realized they had wronged this man, they did whatever they could to sweep it under the rug and avoid consequences, or reparations for their actions.
The system doesn't just "look abhorrently cruel", it IS abhorrently cruel, and this incident is a clear example of that.
The key question is "what sort of system makes it harder to cover things up?" because the people element of people not wanting to get in trouble or have their mistakes visible isn't going to go anywhere.
You also need to have the non-mistake, non-cruel cases visible, to see if things are changing for the better or worse, rate-wise.
A "less cruel" system isn't a particularly specific or well-defined thing to strive for if it's not specifically trying to address those human failings, since people can still be cruel.
How hard it is for the coverup to work is largely irrelevant IMO.
Though I am interested if you have some other examples.
Though of course it's strange that these half admissions of coverups are not treated sufficiently seriously by the courts.
We have a US legal system.
The US legal system is a commercial system. By that, I don't mean to say it is corrupt. Rather, the participants in the system require representation i.e. lawyers, and lawyers charge for their time, by design. Consequently, access to outcomes of the legal system is a function of the financial and social resources of the participants.
The only loss for the officials here is embarassment
The incentive also seems backward here: if there's a shield protecting you even in case of screwup, you are incentivized to cover things up less than otherwise.
Protection from initial mistakes, like "blame free retros," is generally heralded as a way to promote fixing root causes and reduce political coverups.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his cheap internet virtue points depend on his not understanding it.
I think this is my largest hatred. People's first action after something bad happens is not to discover why it happened, but rather to express outrage that it happened. In my ideal society they would be excluded.
What's not okay is skipping the investigation step, to jump straight from outrage to action.
Next, the police officer needs to face charges for his role in this. He failed in his duty to the community.
Finally, the police department needs to be held accountable for their role and pay damages to this man.
Not a lawyer, but I thought qualified immunity gave protection from civil liability, not criminal.
If you aren't found to be on the hook by a civil court you basically can't be found guilty by a criminal one (barring very specific statutes or legal precedents that are relevant to the facts in question).
People can sue each other for things that are not crimes, and you can go to criminal court over things you can't be sued for. Qualified immunity has no bearing on criminal proceedings. For example, if George Floyd's estate sued Chauvin directly I wouldn't be surprised if they lost because of QI, even though Chauvin was charged and convicted for murder.
However civil lawsuits can be brought by the victim. Criminal lawsuits have to be brought by the state. Which usually will mean the District Attorney. Who normally has a close relationship with the police and should be assumed to be reluctant to bring cases against them.
Therefore, in practice, civil law is the only meaningful remedy. So qualified immunity has been a huge civil rights problem since it was invented in 1982.
(Not a lawyer, but I like to read. BTW it could be worse - look up judicial immunity some time. Corrupt judges truly have nothing to fear from their corruption.)
I’d be more keen here in prosecuting the people who devised the flowchart that the police are following, for not engineering it to be robust against this failure mode. We shouldn’t expect humans to do an extra non-obvious step (checking the criminal’s file against the fingerprints they took) if the flowchart doesn’t require it, especially under time-pressure to “get the job done”; instead, we should make the flowchart require it.
When you’ve devised a system such that the human “components” of your system don’t have the necessary information from their vantage-point to correct the behaviour of the system, the system itself must be designed to be self-correcting. Because, at that point, that’s the only kind of correction it can have.
This is how we do modern medicine: a given doctor or nurse or specialist has no idea who you are or what your story is, outside of the small window they are told to see you in. They’re also just cogs in their machine. But the process itself — run mostly through medical charts — drives patients toward the treatment they need nevertheless; and there are many checks and fallback cases built into both the trained human processes, and the automated processes, to get patients who fall through one crack back on track toward treatment/good health outcomes.
—————
Also, a tangent re: prosecuting those responsible for engineering the process:
Back in Ancient Greece, the Lottery system of electing a leader had one important feature not oft-mentioned in modern discourse, but which was perhaps the keystone to understanding the Lottery system as a whole: if the polity didn’t like a leader’s policies, they’d drag them out and lynch them (or whatever the Ancient Greek equivalent of lynching was.) There was no concept of “impeachment”; it was just a question of surviving your term, by doing things that don’t anger your polity too much. (And as such, probably the whole reason for electing a leader by sortition in the first place, would have been that nobody wants to go into politics if you’re only one misstep away from a lynching at all times. So you have to force people to do the job; and if you’re forcing people to do a job that’s net-negative for them, you should at least be fair in your selection process by making it random.)
In modern times, capital-E Engineers already have to sign off on the designs that pass through their hands; and they can then be held criminally liable if those things fail for reasons they should have been able to foresee. This rarely happens, though, because Engineers, out of equal parts conscientiousness and self-interest, have built up a large body of best-practices, of meta rules and guidelines to follow when defining domain rules and guidelines, that either avoid failures, or at least outright reject “impossible to make sound” designs.
What I’m saying is: legislators and (especially) regulators really need to hold the burden of ultimate responsibility — criminal liability, even — when a defined-by-regulation process fails. They should be “signing off on” processes and workflows they define, the same way a civil Engineer would sign off on a bridge design. We probably shouldn’t be lynching them, but we should at least be taking all those civil suits over wrongful imprisonment, and targeting them directly at these policy-makers. Being a policy-maker should be a duty, not a privilege: something with perhaps more down-side than up-side.
(To be clear, even without such a policy in place, a large number of criminally-insane people already do claim to be misidentified because “they’re not John Smith, they’re Jesus Christ!” And these people do tend to really believe that, to the point where their behaviour isn’t all that different from someone who’s been misidentified. It’d be very hard to define a policy that would precisely delineate which stories should be looked into, vs. which are balderdash.)
We need more simple automated cross-checks to decrease false-positive rates. We need scalable solutions.
I think you're overestimating the number of people incarcerated for criminal insanity and underestimating the number of resources available.
But maybe the GP meant a not-so-detailed investigation. A regular investigation, per se. A cursory investigation, even.
... but we have the resources to do a security-clearance-style background check on every individual that is incarcerated against their will for reason of mental illness. I'd consider that sufficient.
If the state (or other organization) doesn't have enough resources to do a detailed investigation, then it should not be taking away freedoms for whomever it is unable to perform the detailed investigation for.
I’d expect a system where people are forced into roles of political power and punished for failing to perform to degenerate into a bunch of corrupt policymakers doing what their rich patrons tell them to, in exchange for protection and wealth.
It is the police officer's job and duty to do the investigation. He was negligent at that duty to the point of costing someone dearly. He should be prosecuted. What if a truck driver was negligent in driving, causing someone to spend 2 years in the hospital, wouldn't they be worthy of prosecution?
In my post above I've suggested that police and public officials be prosecuted but I'll nuance that by saying that ought to be in cases of exceptional negligence. Moreover, if the granularity isn't right the law wouldn't be effective, either it would be ignored and the status quo remain, or public servants would become too timid to do their work effectively.
You are right, much of the problem lies with those hidden and unknown gnomes who draft the laws that politicians often blindly pass and also those who 'engineer' the way the police work (and/or the way the law is administered). As I've said in my post it's time these people were brought to account. For starters, their names ought to adorn all draft laws, briefing/organizational documents, etc. Unfortunately, there's a snowball's chance of it ever happening.
This is more than infuriating, that in the two years that Spriestersbach was wrongfully held, they never thought of matching fingerprints, or even photos? IANAL but the lack of such a basic level of background check like this is criminal.
I’m guessing this did occur at some point behind the scenes and it caused them to cover it up even more.
> The doctor concluded the amount of psychiatric medications he was on was “well beyond therapeutic levels, which is why he was acting catatonic and his expressions vacant,” Dumas-Griffith said in a sworn statement to the court.
> Spriestersbach was prescribed powerful drugs, the doctor added, in “an effort to make him ‘competent’ when in reality he had always been competent.”
This may be a bit of a tangent, but the willingness of many medical professionals to prescribe mentally altering drugs is extremely alarming to me and it only seems to be getting worse. Even outside the prison system it seems trivial to convince a doctor you have a mental disorder - especially if you're convinced of it yourself. I know several people who went through hell because they were misdiagnosed with a mental disorder or prescribed far more than what was appropriate. Pills are such a convenient solution for everyone involved; it's easy to see why they're abused. Of course I recognize that many people actually do suffer from such disorders and I want them to receive whatever treatment they need, but it's important to remember mentally altering drugs are very dangerous and their use should not be taken lightly.
But I was even a bit shocked in the first paragraph:
>He woke up to a police officer arresting him for violating the city’s ban on lying down in public places.
Is that legitimately something that can happen? If so, find it mind boggling that you could be arrested in America for falling asleep on the pavement/sidewalk!?
I visited Los Angeles a couple of years back, one of the first places we went was a McDonalds. Some guy was dozing sat at a table (with a coffee in front of him). A cop came up to him and told him he'd be reprimanded if he caught him napping like that again.
In all my life living in the UK I've honestly never witnessed something like that. It may seem minor, but seeing an armed cop come up to someone and reprimand them for dozing off? I have no idea why a waiter couldn't have dealt with that. It's not like the McDonalds was even full or anything.
On top of this, the advertising boards saying stuff like "No homeless shelter in our community, keep it safe!" was just completely lacking in compassion.
I think a lot of people out there just don't see homeless people as deserving of empathy. At least, that's the impression I get.
I also find it profoundly ironic that America is supposedly the "land of the free", but you can get arrested/in trouble for:
- Drinking in public (even in parks or at the beach) - Sleeping in public (apparently) - Jaywalking - Eating on public transport
I just don't understand all these weird and arbitrary rules they have out there.
"The Vagrancy Act was passed in the summer of 1824, which means it is now just shy of its 200th birthday. And if it held any relevance then, it certainly doesn’t now.
At its core, The Vagrancy Act is a way to punish people “in any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or waggon, not having any visible means of subsistence”. Essentially, it criminalises homelessness. For homeless people, both begging and rough sleeping are things out of their control, and the Act does little to get to the root of why people are homeless in the first place."
https://centrepoint.org.uk/about-us/blog/everything-you-need...
Also: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/nov/12/new-home-off...
Although I really really doubt anyone here would be arrested for having a doze on the pavement.
It seems to be declining, but according to the BBC, as of a few years ago there were more than a thousand people arrested for just that.
But you live in the nation that invented the ASBO.
> - Drinking in public (even in parks or at the beach) - Sleeping in public (apparently) - Jaywalking - Eating on public transport
These are local laws, not federal, so not universal across the US. And in all of the places around the US that I have lived, these sorts of laws are rarely enforced (at least not as a primary offense).
Fixed that for you.
It has nothing to do with anything, nothing to do with any legal reality, nothing to do with the constitution, the structure of the government, the declaration of independence from the UK, life in practice within the US, or any comparison to any other developed nation at the time it was written (1812) or now (2021). American exceptionalism relies on completely ignoring countries with Human Development Index or rights that are at parity or better, and relies on hyperbolic comparisons to the worst countries in the world.
Hope that helps you understand your experiences here! Without context, the cognitive dissonance (confusion from competing ideas and observations) can be very confusing!
There are certainly valid points on all sides of the debate, and "lying in public" laws can definitely be abused to harass individuals, but there are also some valid rationale for why they exist in the first place.
Moving all these people to a different city/town/location is not "solving" the issue.
I mean if someone gets drunk and falls asleep they are not necessarily homeless.
It seems that there's this discussion between false alternatives like "let people do anything" and "let's punish people harshly for minor things". How about offering better alternatives, giving people instructions first before any worse consequences etc.
That's not a welcome idea at all, and it deserves no validity.
* No permanent structures.
* You need to move every X days.
* You cannot stay in the park/forest/etc for more than Y days/month.
Cities could forbid tents and count hours rather than days. Criminalizing the act of napping in a park seems like a huge overreaction to peoples' fear of tent cities. If you've never taken an afternoon siesta along a local greenway, you should try it sometime. Bring a blanket and a book, but don't forget to check for sharps before you lie down.
1. Largest incarcerated population on earth. 2. No public health system until Medicare (60s). 3. Very difficult to discharge debt, for citizens, easy for business. 4. Impossible to discharge student loan debt. 5. Allowing of predatory loan practices to incur this debt. 6. Many public schools are absolutely horrible. 7. Mostly no recourse for violent and corrupt police. 8. Most if not all of the federal policies go to help the donor class at the expense of the citizenry. On the occasion where policies help the citizenry, it's a coincidence. 9. Systemic racism in many aspects of the government, particularly the justice system. 10. Very little social safety net for the poor. In fact, many poor are incarcerated. 11. Very strict justice system where just about anything is a felony. 12. No voting rights for felons. 13. Vicious drug war. 14. Patriot act. 15. Skyrocketing healthcare costs. 16. Skyrocketing educational costs. 17. MANY charities have a 90+% administration fee (meaning only 10% goes to the actual group in need). This is perfectly legal. 18. Many regressive taxes (gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol, groceries). 19. Many instances where regulation isn't even done, or done so poorly, companies can do whatever they want (see nutrition labels for an example). 20. Not much done in anti-trust laws. 21. An insane amount of tax dollars goes to the war machine and soldiers get a minuscule amount. They are treated pretty horribly afterwards. 22. Government fully supports offshoring of jobs to slave-like conditions in China and elsewhere. 23. Loophole system where the well off pay very little taxes while the majority of the tax burden goes to the middle class (by income). 24. Massive income inequality and therefore political power and influence. 25. The amount of state funding for prosecution dwarfs the amount of funding for defense in most states.
These are just off the top of my head. I could probably do 20 more pretty easily.
Regarding charity, that's the citizenry. By and far the citizenry are decent people, it's the state that's cruel. Also we aren't "by far the most charitable country on earth," we're slightly about Myanmar, but we are still the top. In really poor states like West Virginia, the citizens are extremely charitable to each other. I would guess because they all need it desperately. Perhaps being so charitable is actually a symptom of the widespread cruelty of the state's policies.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-char...
https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/forgiveness-cancellation
How much of this comes from "tithe 10% to your church"?
Even when it’s not a formal tithe, American charity skews heavily towards giving to churches.
Only if you count religious giving.
And why wouldn't you, you ask?
Well, even churches themselves say that six per cent or less of religious giving goes to 'charity'. The rest goes to church upkeep and events, church childcare, etc.
In fact, an ECCU study (http://web.archive.org/web/20141019033209/https://www.eccu.o...) stated that "local and national benevolence" receives 1 per cent of religious givings (2% going to church adult programs, bible study, etc, and 3% to youth programs and evangelization).
So we should probably pump the brakes on patting ourselves on the back for "highest rates of charity", considering that some of what is characterized as charity is "erecting the world's largest cross two miles down the road from the church which has the current world's largest cross".
Yes, but it's a little more complex/subtle than that may make it seem. Some things to consider:
* Arrested doesn't mean convicted. A cop may take someone in ("arrest" them) to get them off the streets and give them a night in jail to sober up. Then they get let out without pressing charges. In some cases, this may end up being a net benefit for the person, in others it obviously isn't. Your country probably does the same thing. I assume "drunk tanks" are pretty universal.
* Police officers have a lot of discretion on which laws they enforce. There is a downside to this in that it lets them use that discretion in biased ways, but—ignoring that for the moment—it does mean that many times cops are more lenient and compassionate than the law implies that they should be. You rarely hear about those stories on the news but talk to a cop or do a ride-along and you'll see that they spend most of their time not arresting people and instead giving them warnings.
* Honolulu has a famously bad homeless problem, while also being heavily dependent on tourism for its economy. There are a lot of "beach bums" that move to Hawaii without any plan to provide for themselves and if Honolulu doesn't do anything about them at all, they can end up harming the place's overall economy, which would then make it harder for the city to afford the services these people need. Doing nothing is not as innocuous as it might seem.
* In general, a society must do some enforcement of public spaces. Otherwise, they cease to be public spaces. I live in Seattle which also has a lot of homeless people. Some of them build encampments in public parks. This means that, de facto, those are no longer public parks. They're private property because the public no longer has access to them—the squatters in the encampment will run them off.
The name for a place where you can choose to be and no one can kick you out is "private property". If you don't want all of your public spaces to turn into private spaces, then you do have to prevent people from unilaterally privatizing them to some degree. Of course, it's not black and white and there are good discussions to have about where you draw the line. Obviously people need to be able to spend some time in a public space. Is napping OK? Sleeping overnight? In a tent? In a shelter made from pallets and tarps?
Many of the laws that draw the line harshly are driven by the observation that when you give a little, some people (not all) will try to take more and more. So it's not so entirely that lawmakers are heartless sadists who don't even want to have to see a homeless person, so much as a fear that if you let someone take a nap, they'll sleep overnight. Let them sleep overnight and they'll build a structure. Let them build a structure and they'll start fires. And at that point, it becomes really hard to keep that place available to the public.
It is a hard problem and anyone who thinks it is black and white is choosing to not see all of the complexity.
One who has no home has fewer options on where to plop with all their things.
Individually, one could analyze each situation, collectively and systemically speaking, you will ALWAYS have homeless people when there is no housing safety net. there are a myriad of things can can occur in individual lives.
Homeless tourism is something that should be worked out between the desirable locations and the locations of origin that likely kick the responsibility can down the road in running homeless OUT of town, and hence to SF or wherever.
Honolulu and beach bummmery is something I've no knowledge of. Actual homelessness is something that doesn't occur much anywhere else I've seen in the world to the same level as it does in USA. I suppose that many places have folks migrating to the city from countryside regions in the hopes of a job and potentially falling on their face. I'm not sure where those folks are in many nations that I've seen (about 50, mostly Europe, South America, Asia, and North America)
I think in general society and government does and should presume that people can figure out most solutions to their own problems. Our instutitions provide a framework for people to figure out how to live, and help them do with things that require scale, but I don't think it's reasonable to say that the government needs to give everyone a "designated place to go".
> Actual homelessness is something that doesn't occur much anywhere else I've seen in the world to the same level as it does in USA.
There are a few things uniquely driving homelessness in the US:
* The opioid epidemic thanks to Purdue pharma.
* The deinstitutionalization movement was stronger here than in other countries.
* Not having free healthcare.
Outsourcing, automation, and the shift to an urban service-oriented economy is probably part of it too, but I don't think that's a huge driver. Most of the homeless stories I hear start with one of:
"I got hurt at work, and was prescribed Oxycontin. I ended up addicted and when the subscription ran out, I ended up on heroin..."
"I was mentally ill and unable to hold down a job because of it..."
"I got cancer and once all the medical bills piled up, I ended up deep in debt and couldn't afford to pay rent..."
The residents of that neighborhood don't have the power to end capitalism or the money to secure homes for all who need them (bare minimum $500k each). But they do have the power to get an ordinance passed.
Actually, this would make an incredible plot for an episode of 'Law and Order' or whatever today's clone of that show is.
"But how could the murder weapon have Castleberry's fingerprints on it when we know he's been in a psychiatric hospital for the last 2 years?"
"Maybe he snuck out, and in his psychotic state killed someone. He wouldn't be criminally culpable, but the hospital might be."
"What, then he crossed the entire city undetected, killed the victim, and got back into the hospital all without being noticed? I don't buy it. And besides, he's so doped up on that Haldol stuff, he doesn't even know his own name. He was catatonic when saw him."
Provide a design for some system that is not broken and never will be. You can't stop at "at least fix it so this doesn't happen."
The most important question for you is: how will this system be staffed? Can non-college-educated people be hired? Will it be unionized? How much will the staff be paid, and can you attract the sort of staff you want with that salary? Or will you get TSA-level people?
How will disputes be adjudicated? Via civil lawsuits, arbitration boards, or what?
Will the heads of it be elected or appointed?
The point of this is that "the system" doesn't exist as pages in a textbook. It also doesn't exist in Denmark. It exists in the real US. Some systems work out better than others, but they all bear the thumbprints of actual hands.
This is a fair point. But I think many people saying "the system is broken" implicitly or explicitly advocate a fix by throwing out the entire system.
Those people often don't seem to realize that "no system" is a system too, and you need to compare that system's emergent behavior to the current system before you can make a wise choice.
It's quite something else to say "the system is broken" while having no idea whatsoever how some new system would avoid all those problems.
Your examples are also flawed. Mechanics and doctors fix one instance of a system. They are not charged with fixing all of them.
Or are you asking for something more general?
For a more malicious case, read about Adrian Schoolcraft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft) who, as retaliation for blowing the whistle on NYPD malfeasance, was raided, abducted, and forcibly committed/restrained in a psychiatric facility.
https://nypost.com/2021/05/11/man-imprisoned-43-years-for-tr...
(Of course, it may really be broken like you're saying, it's just that I don't think a few cases like these prove it.)
Its beyond Kafkaesque.
It is so blatantly corrupt and psychotic a system, it's quite honestly ignorant to even compare it to any notion of "perfect".
"Kafkaesque" is going easy on it. It's objectively the extension of chattel slavery in this country. It's a crime against humanity.
Are you suggesting that the prisoners who did nothing morally wrong are the ones convicted of drug-related offenses?
Honestly, while the fraction is large, it hardly looks like a majority (1 in 5 apparently): https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html
And it is not broken down to users vs dealers. The former may have a claim to having done nothing morally wrong, but the latter certainly do not.
> Most of them didn't even go to trial
This is arguably a problem, but not unique to the US. Other places also do a majority of convictions via plea bargain: https://www.economist.com/international/2017/11/09/the-troub...
Well, look here [0], it isn't a priority. The people in charge of the system have no interest in fixing anything.
[0] https://www.chicagotribune.com/midwest/ct-aud-nw-missouri-go...
>If Strickland is released, he will not be eligible for compensation from the state. Missouri compensates only inmates who are exonerated through DNA evidence
It's also worth noting that despite this issue not being a priority for the governor of missouri, he did find the time to pardon two individuals fined after pleading guilty over pointing firearms at protestors from their property.[0]
[0]https://www.khou.com/article/news/politics/gov-parson-pardon...
The math for a bare minimum amount should be easy: How much would a person with that skill level have made hired into a position at the prosecutor's office in the year of imprisonment? Now run that out for the duration of imprisonment, including generous allowances for overtime, raises, promotions, etc. using percentages taken directly from the salary histories of the office involved.
This doesn't mean the money has to come out of the budget of the prosecutor's office, this is just a way to address arguments over "How much is fair? That's too generous! That's too cheap!" If the situation is such that the minimum amount seems unacceptably low, judges or juries can depart upward. If everyone agrees that the minimum is too high, that's easy to address as well - go claw back some of the overly-generous salaries paid to people in the prosecutor's office, then adjust the calculation using the new numbers.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/30/shrinking-g...
Yes, exactly.
This unfortunately demonstrates a common misunderstanding of how to interpret data; if there are more left-handed people compared to the general population in prison, does it mean that the justice system is biased against people who are left-handed?
That may still be true, but you simply cannot draw a correct conclusion without additional data along a different axis.
Yes. That is literally the definition of a statistical bias.
From wikipedia:
Statistical bias is a feature of a statistical technique or of its results whereby the expected value of the results differs from the true underlying quantitative parameter being estimated.
There are a number of possibilities aside from the justice system being biased against these particular left-handed defendants. Note that the lefties still might be biased against within the justice system, but the incarceration statistic alone is not enough to prove that conclusion.
Here's a couple of possibilities:
1) the left-handed people are more likely to be caught, even though both right- and left- handed people are equally effective at committing crimes. It's even possible that right-handed are even MORE effective at committing crimes, but perhaps right-handed people can escape the scene faster than left-handed people.
2) even if enforcement was perfectly equal and without any bias in the justice system at all, left-handed people might come from a location or environment that offers an opportunity to commit crimes more often than the general population.
There are other possibilities, but the data that you have shared, even if it had perfect accuracy and precision, doesn't actually prove causality. It doesn't even come close, except to uncritical journalists who don't really understand data science or researchers who let their own agenda or biases drive their science.
And because we surely don't want to be embarrassed, everything will be done to forget about it, no change will be made to the process, no consequence or probation for the judge or any of the doctors.
Without admission of guilt there can be no remission, but that, the justice system seems to believe true only for criminals.
I'm so glad I don't work in mental health anymore. Driving people out of the industry is a goal of the regulations IMO.
My best friend's father was a guard at Folsom prison. When I was a kid he would always remind us that the worse prisoners were the truly innocent ones. All the old timer guards knew which prisoners were innocent just based on their mannerisms.
I’m also surprised this happened in Hawaii. Are they so overrun with crime and cases that they couldn’t handle doing their most basic duties to confirm identities? Not that they would have any excuse.
No, they should be put in mental institutions under the name Castleberry with strict instructions to the medical staff that they are delusional and misstating their own identity.
Nightmare stuff