I think society struggles with knowing who is a threat and who isn't. The consequences of being wrong is rape, death, and arson.
> released without bail and was arrested 10 hours later for arson
https://westseattleblog.com/2022/10/crime-watch-followup-ars...
> A judge released him [..] one week before this Monday’s murder.
https://westseattleblog.com/2022/06/crime-watch-followup-arr...
> Fulk is a convicted felon and was arrested just eight days earlier in neighboring Pierce County for threatening to kill a Pierce Transit public safety officer.
https://komonews.com/news/local/witness-describes-vicious-vi...
I’m pretty sure the rest of us think it should be 0… but maybe that is just me. 3 notable examples in the last 6 months in one area… not zero… not anywhere close.
edit: I think your edit made things a little clearer. I doubt we agree, but we've talked past each other here. The relevant statistic is [number of people who commit crimes on bail]/[number of people released on bail]. If we had Minority-Report-style precogs, we could have had 0 such cases in the last 6 months while denying only 3 more people bail. But we don't have that option- there's not much to be done about the sensitivity, so all we can do is crank the cutoff of doubt higher or lower.
With tens of thousands of people released on bail, and assuming that identifying the nth potential murderer roughly follows a power law distribution (a fairly reasonable assumption in a sensitivity/specificity situation like this) we're talking about jailing thousands of innocents to prevent one guilty man from going free. If look at violent crime in general the numbers are less skewed (around 2%), but I'd hope that most people balk at the idea of preemptively jailing ten people without trial to prevent just one from committing a crime. I mean, recidivism rates after prison are way higher than that- perhaps "the rest of us" would favor life sentences for every crime, but I doubt it.
People that are not functioning on any level (just because they're low-income doesn't mean they don't have friends or family to help) should be treated with caution, because they have nothing to lose.
They already are facing jail, so why should they try to function?
What level of rape/murder is acceptable from criminals who have not yet been charged with a crime?
The answer is the same as for your question, so unless we are going to preemptively detain everyone not yet charged with a crime, I don't see how the answer to your question can imply we should lock up people who are charged but not convicted.
Huh? What are you talking about? You don’t even get a bail hearing unless you've already been charged with a crime.
1. https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/clea...
More simply put: much more than 50% of people that have stolen 1 car will get caught before they have stolen their tenth car, and if someone has stolen a hundred cars then their chances of getting caught before stealing 110 are much less than 50%. Edit: note that my figures don’t match your numbers - they are only examples.
This is not likely true, and it is definitely not necessarily true.
There are quite likely people out on bail who have (1) committed at least one crime, (2) never been identified and arrested or charged for any crime that they have committed.
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109558870665603162
It notes that a Judge can still say that an offender should be remanded to pre-trial custody because they're a threat to the community.
Yes, and that happens with people released on cash bail as well as no-cash-bail; there's no evidence, despite the fact that large no-cash-bail jurisdictions have existed in the US for quite some time (D.C. has been essentially no-cash-bail for three decades, for instance) that having money in the mix for pretrial release protects against that.
Generally for first time offenders that are not a threat to society and unlikely to skip court, bail is waived altogether.
He hasn't been convicted of a crime. What's wrong is for people who haven't been convicted of a crime to spend time in jail, especially in situations like this where he isn't posing a physical danger to the community (and indeed won't even be leaving the house anyway).
Bail is usually proportional to your crime and there are businesses that will pay your bail if you give them 10%. They take the risk and will send a bounty hunter after you if you skip bail.
Some states like California are testing out non-cash bails which is probably similar to what Germany does. If you do something evil like murder, you stay in jail until your trial. If you're harmless and not looking to escape the country, they let you go.
I think it is supposed to be tied to how likely you might be to flee. So a rich person accused of a crime that could lead to the death penalty would have huge bail. (Or likely not be given bail at all.). A poor person accused of a minor crime would likely have a very low bail.
Which is not to say if you commit murder, you go to jail without bail.
It's if you're accused of murder and made to stand trial, then you go to jail without bail, regardless of if you're guilty or not.
Really messes with poor people because if they don't have bail money, they either:
1. Sit in jail for a few months, unable to work, while their bills pile up, kids go uncared for, and rent is due.
2. Pay 10% of bail to a bail bondsman, who keeps the money regardless of if the accused is innocent or guilty, just so they have the privilege of walking free while awaiting trial for a crime they may or may not have committed.
It seems like in online discussions, and especially in the recent US midterm cycle where crime was said to be an issue, and hell, I've even seen this when I've been called for jury duty ... Many people seemingly do not understand that police or a district attorney accusing someone of a crime is not the same as guilt.
I would say even that many times a conviction doesn't really mean that. We as a country accuse and convict a lot of innocent people, have an unfair punishment mentality, often charge in excess of a person's actual misdeed, etc.
And all of these problems and more are amplified when the accused doesn't have resources to fight it.
It’s a tough situation because optimally no one who’s not a flight risk or dangerous should be in jail. They’re all innocent, after all, until they have trial. A financial hostage is just the easiest to implement.
Whether or not someone is held in jail before trial is determined by whether there is a risk that they might flee, destroy evidence or influence witnesses and that judgement has to be taken in a proportional manner (so e.g. if jailing someone before trial would likely put them in jail longer than their potential punishment then you can’t do it).
It actually doesn’t happen that often.
As is often the case with criminal justice one of the biggest issues is actually that it just takes too long until there is a trial and this often also leads to problems with the duration someone sits in jail before trial. Six months are supposed to be the usual upper limit, in practice, however, that line is frequently crossed. So the thing I would want to improve in Germany is time until trial. (And: this is also not to say that this system is perfect. For example, people without a home are empirically much more likely to be jailed, even though the Constitutional Court determined that just the mere fact that someone doesn’t have a home isn’t a valid reason to consider someone a flight risk. Every individual case is supposed to be considered on its own terms. In practice that obviously doesn’t work perfectly.)
As for the US, you need judges to decide whether and how to set bail anyway, just get them to decide on flight risk and risk of tampering with evidence or witnesses instead.
Currently there are around 12,000 people in jail awaiting trial in Germany. In the US there are around half a million people in jail awaiting trial. Normalizing for population that’s around 150 per million in Germany and 1,500 per million in the US. There also seems to be about a five time difference in the crime rate (if we are focussing on violent crime) with, for example, five times more murders per capita in the US. So, even taking that difference into account the US still seems to be jailing about double the people Germany does pre-trial. Doesn’t seem like a great system …
(Obviously all back of the napkin calculations. Please check my numbers if you think there’s anything wrong with those.)
When I was briefly in jail I met several people without a home who had commited petty crimes with the explicit intent of being able to spend a couple days in jail. One fellow I saw return three times with less than 24 hours between each visit.
There are certainly motivated, intelligent poor people. But if you don't think lazy & dumb isn't over-represented amongst poor people, then you've been leading an insular life.
Maybe Harari doesn’t realize that the true arbiters of right and wrong—no matter what people might think—are people with power. And often is people who are rich, although they might have no formal power.
In that light it is not strange.