Disgusting abuse of power manages to catch a criminal. Is that our only metric for success now? Putting people in prison? Might as well shred the constitution, apparently we're ready to burn everything it stood for to prevent people from getting high.
I know I sound dramatic but it is honestly impossible to overstate how damaging to privacy rights and how much horrific police militarization can be directly and indirectly laid at the feet of the war on drugs.
Worse is the whole guilty until proven innocent scenario the media (and our society) has created. All it takes is being a suspect once to have your life turned inside out. For years people will suspect you of whatever horrors were committed by someone else.
The founding fathers are rolling over as they say if they heard where this country has gone.
You can't say that media and public shame are worse than the abuses of the criminal justice system. Your life may get turned upside down if you are simply accused of some crimes (especially sexual crimes), but you may very well bounce back.
Getting rightly accused of possession of light drugs and ending up in prison is a much worse outcome, and it happens to many, many times more people. And unlike the celebrities that usually fall on the wrong side of public opinion, most people who are absurdly put in prison for petty crimes will never bounce back, since they don't have the resources (money, social circle) to do so.
Well, first of all it's a matter of numbers. Maybe hundreds of people's lives has been affected by being accused of a crime and being judged by the public eye with a presumption of guilt (some of these people may be guilty, some may not).
However, hundreds of thousands of people are suffering from vastly over-exaggerated punishment for minor crimes. Even more, the current political climate suggests that some of what these people did should not have been illegal in the first place (e.g. Marijuana use and distribution). Worse still, there is discretionary, racist enforcement of many of these laws, disproportionately affecting some communities and not others.
Individually, suffering from being falsely accused of a crime is much worse than being punished excessively for a crime you did commit.
But overall, people losing jobs and status is a much smaller problem to society todyay than excessive enforcement of minor crimes.
The crime is irrelevant. The discussion is whether you are guilty or not as an individual. If you willing commit a crime (regardless of how you feel about the law) then you are rightfully punished.
The problem is when you're innocent and still get punished anyway.
Well, if you stole a pack of gum and are executed for it, that's still a problem, even though you're technically guilty.
And again, in the real world, there are maybe hundreds of people suffering public outrage even though they are innocent, and there are tens of thousands of people who are serving extremely harsh sentences for minor crimes. The first is regrettable, the second is a major societal issue.
If you're guilty then you can disagree with the sentencing but it doesn't change the fact that you did the crime. Being considered guilty (by the courts or public) when you're actually innocent is far worse.
The US justice system is built on this foundation of letting the guilty go if it means avoiding a single innocent from being wrongfully convicted. Now you might say that social outrage isn't a big deal but considering the permanent nature of the internet and pervasiveness of social media, it's the same branding as a ex-con, if not worse since govt records at least have some controls on who can see them.
I agree that criminal sentencing and prison reform is needed, but that's a different discussion compared to how we treat the innocent.
Impacts on life from prison that are independent of guilt or innocence? Now it may make them more /deserving/ but it would be worse for the guilty party.
Granted it may be better for society (may because nothing stops the law from being messed up) so the question is worse for who?
We have no way of knowing that the police didn't plant the evidence to save face and justify the warrant. Shit like that's happened before. There are plenty of cases of people going to jail and being much, much later exonerated and there are cases of being framed by police. We don't know how many more people are rotting in jail who are completely innocent.
I mean, sure, it might not be likely, but the point is, these police were willing to do unscrupulous things to catch the guy, so how do we know?
That's beside the point. The parent comment was saying that being rightfully guilty is worse than being innocent and assumed guilty because they disagree with the severity of the crime.
To me, being innocent yet treated as guilty is far worse, and in fact the US justice system holds that as a core principle.
Agreed. People who willfully commit crimes know what they are doing is wrong and can get them in jail or worse. Those around them and before them have likely been caught before.
>Getting rightly accused of possession of light drugs and ending up in prison is a much worse outcome, and it happens to many, many times more people.
Can we just agree that both are a perversion of our justice system?
Blackstone's formula, "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" was very influential do the people who designed our initial legal system. The reason it is important is that if innocent people believe they will be prosecuted unjustly, they have no incentive to stay innocent. This of course will turn us into a lawless society.
But public opprobrium for a presumption of guilt is not a part of the justice system.
Also, the prevalence of this problem you are raising is extremely small in reality. The opposite is still much more likely - people who are guilty of various crimes who escape unpunished both by the justice system but also from public scrutiny.
"University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross led a team of experts in the law and in statistics that estimated the likely number of unjust convictions. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences determined that at least 4% of people on death row were and are likely innocent. Gross has no doubt that some innocent people have been executed.[18][19]"
It seems small unless you are one of the 4%, that's just direct affect to the individual and their family. The indirect effect to you and me is lawlessness.
"It is of more importance to the community that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world, that all of them cannot be punished....when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, 'it is immaterial to me whether I behave well or ill, for virtue itself is no security.' And if such a sentiment as this were to take hold in the mind of the subject that would be the end of all security whatsoever"
- John Adams, Defending British soldiers charged with murder for their role in the Boston Massacre
For the record, I think it's a travesty that people get thrown in jail for petty crimes, or that petty crimes in general have become felonies, sold by politicians who want to appear "tough on crime." I don't think it serves either purpose to try to rank them.
I'd like to hear more about this if you don't mind expounding on it some. I realize that in a certain light that's how it looks (I'm no stranger to a lot of what used to be called conspiracy theories, including the long history of illegal surveillance) but honestly it's always looked to me like the powers that be, in America, genuinely try to operate in a benign fashion. I realize that's not the same as operating in a legal or legally spirited fashion, but I also don't see it as flagrantly hypocritical enough to warrant the cynicism you've presented.
While there is no catching a criminal in this situation. Asset forfeiture is abused. This is where police take items, usually cash, and keep it. There is no trial, just a seizure of property.
It's a good example of what I mean. There are others, I'm just not going to post them all. The police seem to optimize for stats and profit. And the cities/counties/state are on board. That's why we see red light cameras too. There are also documented cases of tweaking yellow light times in order to increase the number of tickets sent for running red lights.
The police don't seem to be here to protect and serve anymore. Like most things in America it's all about appearances and money.
I just recently saw the video of the guy picking up trash with a claw/grabber and being told to drop his 'weapon'. Several police showed up to stop this threat from cleaning his property. Luckily though, no one was shot, and the officer that started it all resigned.
This is a fair criticism, and in line with the comment I replied to, but I still don't know if I agree with the overall sentiment of cynacism. While I'll give you the leaks about Prism/Five Eyes/Mail Espionage (the original government surveillance!), etc. the same documents are in line with what a pattern of being motivated by a fear of being unprepared to defend the greater society from upheaval would look like. Obviously metric gaming is the self serving side of that desire, and I'm being a bit of a devil's advocate here, but a department that doesn't receive adequate resources can't perform its function adequately. At the same time, American justice (I don't know much of other systems) has a long tradition of not just being a government product. Our system is designed to be corrected, lawsuits are easy (if funded) because the (ideally) other side of productive authoritarianism is civil resistance (physical sure but also legal punativism). I realize that these aren't reasons to not be cynical of our LEO organizations, but I guess that's why the cynicism seems strange to me, it's also not a reason to doubt the overall outcomes of the justice system. Whistleblowers (and their checkered history sure), civil disobedients (looking at you MLK and Malcom X), plain old litigants (gay marriage) are the counter balances to the sometimes hostile nature of the bureaucratically empowered entities in the American government. Is the system perfect? Obviously not, maybe not even optimistically close, but it's certainly not something indicative of a populace motivated purely by metric performance from my perspective.
>> in line with what a pattern of being motivated by a fear of being unprepared to defend the greater society from upheaval would look like.
There were, and still are, plenty of horrible people, probably worst ones in the whole of history, that were doing such things with good intentions.
Also American, or commonwealth justice system, from outside perspective looks like a farce - mostly due to jury system. Based on emotions, not facts - although i do have very high respect for some of your judges.
The combination of private prisons, lobbying, police getting slap on the wrist for the abuse of powers and corrupt government makes USA looks absolutely horrible abroad.
I’m not sure anyone is really engaging you here, so let me give it a go.
Three years ago, I was you. I thought I wasn’t blind to the problems in the US, but that we fundamentally had a solid system that did its best. Insofar as racial injustice permeated the system, that was a product of racist cops/prosecutors, but a problem that would solve itself as better, younger people, with fewer prejudices, slowly rotated in. I realized I was wrong after Trump became president.
Not the way you might think, though. It wasn’t the series of stories of the things Trump did (and does) that showed me how wrong I was. It was the stories about the things people conveniently started blaming on Trump. Now that we had a legit villain in the White House, the press started dredging up horror stories—but as often as not, from before the administration took power!
So I started reading. And I read about how qualified immunity means cops can do anything to you as long as a court hasn’t previously ruled is unconstitutional. I read about how courts will not decide on constitutionality if they don’t have to—meaning that finding qualified immunity means that the constitutionality wouldn’t be ruled on, leaving the act legal!
I found out that prosecutors will charge defendants with absurd numbers of crimes that they know they can’t prove in order to force a plea deal, because they know the vast majority of defendants can’t afford the legal representation to avoid conviction.
I found out that if you do have means of hiring competent counsel, it is not unheard of for the government to freeze your assets, alleging they proceeded from your crime, so you can’t pay for your defense.
In other words, I found out the US criminal justice system is a giant machinery that takes in people and spits out shattered lives, and that your best hope in life is that its Eye of Sauron won’t turn to look at you.
So how did it get that way? I’ll propose three theories and hopefully explain why the last one is the one I subscribe to.
First, the American people may just be evil. But I don’t buy that, because nations aren’t evil, and everyday people just want to get by. Also, they live under this system; it’s a particularly stupid sort of evil that harms itself.
Second, the American people are oblivious. This one is true, but insufficient. By a “hilarious” cultural “accident”, the vast majority of the system’s horrors fall on the powerless and the poor (by "coincidence", minorities, particularly African American); the rest of society tends to live in a reasonable world. However, that doesn’t explain why things are bad for the victims; cops and prosecutors should be no more likely to be evil than the rest of the population, and yet they are the ones turning the gears of the meat grinder.
Third: the system structurally encourages the behavior. That’s the one everyone is arguing for. Measuring conviction rates (how insane is that?), needing to be seen as tough on crime, those provide the push. Then, removing the guardrails of prosecutorial accountability (prosecutors are almost never sanctioned, even in egregious cases of misconduct) and police restraint leads to the rest.
We are putting good people in a position where the only rational thing to do is to destroy lives to make a number go up, and we remove or don’t enforce the rules that would give any semblance of fairness. Inevitably, the most successful ones will be the ones operating outside the expected rules. As for the ones who refuse, their motivations don’t matter; the system will grind them down as surely as it will grind down its other victims.
I would add a factor to that - America, in a mythic sense, does not have a good relationship with authority. Perhaps for historic reasons, it is not a country where authority is really respected... and so I think, there is a bit more expectation of authority being abused by those who have it than in countries where people in positions of authority are expected to hold themselves to a higher standard.
> honestly it's always looked to me like the powers that be, in America, genuinely try to operate in a benign fashion
Chomsky has a good point about this, that often the most heinous crimes in history have been done with a genuine belief that they are done for good. So, intentions should play a limited role in your judgment of someone's moral outcome.
On the other hand, there have been clear cases where the powers that be in America have gone to violent extremes to protect their interests. Some major examples would be the southern slave holders going to war with the rest of the country to protect their 'right' to hold slaves. Or large industrialists getting help from the army or national guard to stop large scale protests and strikes. Or COINTELPRO, where the FBI used infiltration, blackmail and even assassination against the civil rights movement.
This was covered in popular culture most famously by The Wire, written by retired police beat reporter David Simon, it's called "juking the stats", each police district is judged by different crime stats, and promotions are based on those stats, so naturally everything evolves to optimized for better stats. Not only that, on the judicial side in America over the past 50 years, funding has not kept up with the increase in population so there is an extreme pressure on prosecutors to not go to trial, add to this the political nature of the office and American prosecutors are under pressure to keep up their 95% conviction rate, this is done by going hard after those least able to afford an adequate defense and "laddering", adding on every single conceivable charge so that defendants will plead guilty to a smaller number of charges in exchange for some charges being dropped and not inconvenience the state with an expensive trial by jury. This is covered pretty well by season 3 of the Serial podcast.
> each police district is judged by different crime stats, and promotions are based on those stats, so naturally everything evolves to optimized for better stats
I thought Russia was pretty far on the scale of messed up for having that system, but apparently it's up there with the freedomland.
Judges here like the wording of ‘there's no reason to doubt the testimony of the officer’, but how can you not doubt it when the police has an interest in the outcome—by design, at that.
A great, empirically based, comprehensive look at the devolution of criminal justice in the U.S. can be found in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" by the late criminal law scholar William Stuntz.
TL;DR: The trend started nearly 200 years ago, though for various reasons it accelerated in the mid 20th century.
Some reviews:
"The book is eminently readable and merits careful attention because it accurately describes the twin problems that pervade American criminal justice today―its overall severity and its disparate treatment of African-Americans. The book contains a wealth of overlooked or forgotten historical data, perceptive commentary on the changes in our administration of criminal justice over the years, and suggestions for improvement… Virtually everything that Professor Stuntz has written is thought-provoking and constructive... Well worth reading." -- Justice John Paul Stevens, New York Review of Books
"This volume is exceptionally rich, insightful, provocative, and well-written. It is bound to have great influence on academic thinking, and perhaps in time on the criminal justice system itself... Stuntz's book will repay much closer scrutiny than I can give it in a review… [An] important book." -- Richard A. Posner, New Republic
Yes, let’s take an outlier and extrapolate that to a universal. There are bad people everywhere and in America there are a lot of tools to discourage and identify that behavior.
Outlier? Well that depends on a lot of things - social class, colour, gender, religion, position on the environment etc. What looks like an outlier to you may not be an outlier to lots of other people.
>Is that our only metric for success now? Putting people in prison? Might as well shred the constitution
You just threw that straw man straight down a slippery slope.
>apparently we're ready to burn everything it stood for to prevent people from getting high
This falls under "punching Nazis". Do you want some guy going around punching people? No, of course not. But if he's punching Nazis, then hey, let him do his thing, man. Same logic here, except it's "tracking meth dealers".
>I know I sound dramatic
I was thinking "moral grandstanding"
I'm okay with the police catching a meth dealer and putting him away. Good job. Keep up the good work.
What straw man? What slippery slope? That's literally what's happening here, and it's the argument you're making: "this man is a meth dealer, so the ends justify the means".
I know I sound dramatic but it is honestly impossible to overstate how damaging to privacy rights and how much horrific police militarization can be directly and indirectly laid at the feet of the war on drugs.