Does that seem crazy to anyone else? I'm in Ireland and can't think of one person in my extended family and friends that has any interaction with the police beyond routine insurance/DUI checkpoints or reporting incidents like car accidents.
Definitely not the explanation.
Edit: Link to original paper https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/32982174/Turner_-_Appe...
You can get a misdemeanor without ever being arrested. In some cases trivial things like speeding can be a misdemeanor requiring a court appearance.
Felony on your record? Yeah, you’re basically fucked for life.
Just publicize that there have been 471 citations for rollerblading without listing the names of those affected.
Assuming the record was as an adult, it will be reported publicly by the county (or other jurisdiction) court system and be on public record. This used to be a musty records keeping office somewhere you'd have to go in person and request the records of the individual in question - so without prior knowledge of where a conviction was it was difficult to "background check" people without extensive investigation.
Then these became digitized and put on-line most places.
The larger issue is data brokers who aggregate the records of literally everyone in the entire US (or close to it) into one database you can pay them to make lookups into. They send someone to every courthouse in the US (well, they sub-contract others who sub-contract, etc.) and get all new records. This builds a nationally searchable database that more or lives on indefinitely. All legal since the records are public information.
You can get records sealed and such by court order, but once it's aggregated it's basically a game of whack-a-mole. You can go further and get it expunged which typically requires a state governor signature or similar, where then you might have better luck with said data brokers as the penalties for reporting it are heavy in some states.
It's a very fractionalized system, built out of bailing wire and duct tape like most such records are in the US for historical reasons.
Some employers simply have a binary policy of "zero criminal records" and don't go any further into detail beyond that. Other employers are more lenient, but the more desirable a job is the more likely you are to run into the former policy.
Spent $1,500 on a lawyer who negotiated it to a trivial “failure to maintain control” ticket with a maybe $100 fine.
The system is dumb. Or maybe it’s smart, giving people with means, like us, favorable treatment without having to outright say “poor people aren’t worthy.”
The speed limit is a limit, not a requirement. Driving fast in conditions where you can hydroplane is absolutely reckless.
I don't think “reckless” is the right word. Clueless, really. I didn’t know there was a problem until I lost traction.
Whatever you want to call it, do you really think that’s worth a criminal charge? Possibly destroying my livelihood over this? Do you think the possibility of criminal charges is what stops me from doing it again, versus the potential damage to life and property, including my own? Lay it out for me.
I don’t believe your driving was safe. I also don’t believe you were taught driving correctly, assuming you’re American, and I might also believe that driving slowly would have been equally dangerous, if the other cars did not.
Furthermore, I don’t believe a reckless driving charge without injury should be a criminal matter or that a criminal conviction should destroy someone’s livelihood.
However, four wrongs don’t make a right. It just makes a mess.
I’m in the US, where driver training goes just slightly beyond checking if the candidate is capable of fogging a mirror. I learned in a northern state so we learned a lot about how to deal with ice and snow, but I don’t think there was anything about rain. If there was, I’d forgotten it in the 20+ years since I last had any training or check.
I agree with you that my driving was unsafe and I wasn’t taught well. I don’t think my behavior even came close to criminal.
I am confused about your assessment of my charge. You previously said it was correct. Now you think it shouldn’t have been a criminal charge?
The original fine seems reasonable.
Writing it off as "Oh, I was just clueless" is a little downplaying.
Yes, it's a one off instance, but the stakes in vehicles can be very high, hence our requirements for licensing and insurance.
On one hand, there’s a responsibility to seek further knowledge and self-evaluate. I accept responsibility for not doing that here.
On the other hand, having the government sign off on your training as officially adequate, then threatening to jail you and put a conviction on your record when it wasn’t, seems rather uncool. Hold me liable for damages? Sure. Ticket me? Ok. But charge me with an actual crime?
If they charged every rain related accident in Arizona as a criminal offence the court system would be clogged up for months after the monsoon season...
> One in three U.S. adults has been arrested by age 23.
The has a criminal record refers to the population as a whole.
> [...] between 70 million and 100 million—or as many as one in three Americans—have some type of criminal record
Linked PDF: https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ...
It is crazy. Everyone should be pissed off. Do this for guns, diabetes, etc. Think about the people you know, and how the further you venture into acquaintances, you know someone who has been arrested, injured by a car, injured by a gun, has diabetes, etc.
Some will be looking for math flaws. It’s an exponential model for time until first event, “constant hazard.” It’s actuarial. Nothing unorthodox. If you couldn’t calculate the durations until events insurance couldn’t work. The biggest factors are numerator, denominator and eligible period (ie rate of incidence). The biggest factors are NOT other things…
The reason you doubt this stuff, that you think it’s crazy, isn’t because the math is wrong. You believe very strongly that people involved in crimes and car crashes and guns have personal agency. The discount for panopticon approved safe driving is a pathetic 5-10%! If agency is all it was, auto insurance would be way cheaper.
This is all about the myth about what kinds of agency matter. You cannot be much of a “better” driver. You can’t be a “safer” criminal. Even if you never drove, due to the rate of injuries, it takes 41 years. I didn’t give the figure for causing injuries, just being involved in one, on purpose: we’re primed to assume it’s all about agency. Consider if there were only ONE criminal who commits the same rate of crimes: they’re still going to arrest a ton of people! Or ONE driver who hits everybody: you’re still going to be involved.
The math is easy to understand but people absolutely refuse to question their beliefs about agency.
800k permanent residents.
> In 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic more than 26 million visitors travelled to San Francisco.
That changes your statistics quite a bit.
Anyway, you can Google “how does insurance modeling work” and see for yourself. There are whole teams of people who do this modeling. I am just sharing a simple and representative model, better than to an order of magnitude.
It doesn't account for the fact that people can be injured more than once. Taking that into account, the number would be closer to 50 years. It also makes agency more relevant if most of the injuries are concentrated in a smaller group of people (ex: bikers).
> The discount for panopticon approved safe driving is a pathetic 5-10%!
Well, in France, the maximum discount for safe driving is officially -50%, and the maximum penalty for unsafe driving is +250%, calculated based on your history of at-fault accidents. That's a 7x difference! Not only that but if you get into too many accidents, the insurance company may cancel your contract, usually forcing you to go for insurance companies that specialize in high risk customers, which are even more expensive. I don't know about the insurance system where you live, but a 5-10% difference seems crazy.
Well. That’s what it is. It’s crazy only because of how deeply you believe in agency.
If you instead think deeply about the numbers, and then the fact that you are comparing two completely different driving environments, one thing becomes clear: the way the driving environment is designed and driving culture is administered in France might be much better and safer! Then, agency plays a relatively larger role, by definition, even if it is absolutely small everywhere. Whereas in America, such as in San Francisco and many other communities, a lot of injuries are probably attributable to the environment and culture. This is at least the expert consensus is, not just the consensus of insurance companies.
When they get to jail, every one of their friends is there already, so it's way easier for them to process and deal with than it is for some random middle-class white dude.
In particular, I bet that if you look at poor black men who live in US cities the figure is very very high. Maybe it's close to 100%.[1] If you look at middle-class white women living in the suburbs, not so much.
Also: the fact that the report is about the US and you're in Ireland is very relevant; the US has a lot more arrests than Ireland. (I would guess, though I haven't looked at stats and I don't know whether they exist, that the US also has more racial divergence in the figures than Ireland.)
(I shall not get into the highly contentious and political question of why these things are the case.)
I'll guess that your extended family and friends are mostly (1) not in the US, (2) white, (3) middle class, and (4) not living in city centres. All of which makes them drastically less likely to end up having difficult interactions with the police.
[1] I did some crude arithmetic on the figures at https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ... and got an estimate that 108% of black men in the US have a criminal record. That seems unlikely to be correct :-) but suggests that the real figure is probably pretty high. (I suspect it does also indicate that the "up to 1/3" is an overestimate.)
How are you calculating the proportion of black men with criminal records? The pdf mentions that black men are 6x more likely to be incarcerated, but that's not the same as having a criminal record.
About 1/3 of US adults have been arrested by age 23.
About 1/3 of US adults have a criminal record.
Black men in the US are about 6x more likely to be incarcerated than white men in the US.
These figures aren't all about the same thing -- different classes of (alleged) offence, and also "adults" versus "men" -- and indeed the black:white ratios may be different for arrests, and criminal records, and incarcerations.
It's not obvious to me whether we should expect the black:white ratio to be much higher for incarcerations than for arrests or criminal records. If it is, then that would indeed be one of several possible explanations for how the crude calculation ends up with more than 100% of black men in the US having a criminal record.
Anyway, my calculation just pretended that the black:white ratio is the same for arrests / criminal records (take your pick, both are alleged to be up to ~1/3 of US adults) among adults as for incarcerations among men. Probably false, but I was just looking for a ballpark figure.
While some of the effect may be more frequent and longer incarceration per arrest, the US (until recently being passed last year by El Salvador) has had the highest incarceration rate in the world, so its a good bet that it has a higher than typical arrest rate for the developed world, as well.
Among whites the only person I know to have been shot dropped his shotgun and accidentally blew half his forearm off while hunting.
Blacks are 14% of the population, so black men would be under 7%, poor black men who live in cities would be less than that.
So that doesn't explain the statistic.
You'll have to supply evidence that the US is safe, as that's not self evident.
Ireland polices its population this way, USA doesn’t.
Like, this feels like it's got to include speeding tickets in the mix to get something that high.
I've often felt this was unwise, as you want fighter pilots to be aggressive.
Speeding is a civil, not criminal, infraction.
You can't have the highest prison population in the world for decades and not end up with a bunch of people with criminal records.
EDIT: I found the [National Longitudinal Survey of Youth](https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm) and as far as I could tell from some super quick excel formulas it's about 32% of interview subjects (people born 1980 - 1984) reported being arrested at least once by 2021.
For example some types of DUI (drunk driving) is a felony in many states, but extremely common in the population as a whole. Very few do actual prison time unless especially egregious, are repeat offenders, or if they hurt someone during the commission of that crime.
Many other examples abound - ranging from felony (over $1,000 in most places) shoplifting, breaking and entering, bar fights, etc.
Felonies used to mean "high crimes" and were intended to be exceedingly rare and for exceptional crimes, but they have lost any meaning whatsoever over the interceding years.
I believe "criminal records" also includes folks with misdemeanors which is even more common and almost never has associated prison time included in sentencing.
Not sure if the statistics you're referencing re: "criminal records" even includes arrests in that. Many arrests don't result in further prosecution on top of all the above.
Dude totaled at least his two cars (don't know what happened to the cars he hit), hurt some people and obviously didn't care since he did it twice. Of course it was over a woman...
It excludes "minor traffic violations."
> Brame, Turner, Paternoster, and Bushway (2012) recently investigated the arrest experience of a national sample of American youth and found that 25–41% of those youth reported having been arrested or taken into custody for a nontraffic offense by age 23.
> Assuming the missing cases are missing at random, about 30% of black males have experienced at least one arrest by age 18 (vs. about 22% for white males); by age 23 about 49% of black males have been arrested (vs. about 38% for white males). Earlier research using the NLSY showed that the risk of arrest by age 23 was 30%
However that is misleading, the below link talks about problems with the definition of a ‘criminal record.’
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-cuo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
When you read things like this, compare the EU to the US, not Ireland to the US.
The Southern US is an archipelago of police states that regularly throw black and poor white citizens into jail on flimsy pretexts. New England, meanwhile is another country altogether.
The punishment for crimes should come from the justice system and people should be able to pay their dues and move on.
This is codeword for financial, white collar crimes. So, it is definitely a policy serving the rich.
In my country (New Zealand) judges let off young people who look like them, regularly.
"This young man [not but almost always a man] has a great future and he should not be burdened...."
That is if they are an aspiring accountant, laywer, sports star, etcetera
If they are a young bricklayer, welder, etcetera it is tough luck
It is absolutely disgusting. No wonder so many people want to burn the whole thing down
If you were under ~25, and it was "stupid kid stuff" why ruin someone's life.
If you're 40 with a good job and get caught embezzeling, totally different in my view. Old enough to know better.
If potential employers can always check for a criminal record, and refuse to hire criminals, then guess what those criminals will do? The answer isn’t “starve to death”.
Previously there were practical limits to how long a sentence could follow you. If you moved across the country, you might lose whatever family you still have, but at least you could get a fresh start. Nowadays that’s effectively impossible.
Also, some folks believe crime has root causes in systems outside the self -- poverty, violence, compulsion -- helping people out of those systems and then seeing if they can contribute in society without those pressures against them.
In plenty of jurisdictions people are entitled precisely to that. Here in Germany the entire basis for punishment is a right to full reintegration after you have been punished. A just community punishes once, not five hundred times over and that goes both for the people and the state (which are the same thing in a democracy, the latter punishes on behalf of the former). If you come out of prison and you've paid back your debt only to be ostracized and arbitrarily pursued by a witch hunting public that's not a just society, it's a mob. It's worth repeating, if someone goes to prison you're putting them there, it's "we the people vs X". "The state" is exercising power on your behalf.
That's the basis of a working social contract. You harm the community, you pay, but afterwards we have an actual duty to resocialize you, otherwise we just acted in arbitrary and disproportionate fashion. Criminals have rights in a civilized society, including to privacy and not be discriminated against, by say employers.
The courts, community has decided the need to be free is a fundamental human drive, and cannot be punished.
Sure, when you're caught, you'll be taken back to complete your sentence, but you won't get additional punishment for the effort.
You may feel that you have this duty. I do not feel that I have this duty. You are placing upon me an obligation that I will not accept.
It has nothing to do with you.
To me it seems unreasonable to require publishers to keep an immutable record. Shouldn't be forced by law to keep up your blog posts. National Libraries and legal deposit were literally made to solve this issue.
If we lived in a perfect universe where people were thoughtful and wise I wouldn't care.
I'm surprised at this concept spreading in the US, since the system would generally benefit from having perpetual perpetrators percolating through the prison slavery system.
journalists have different incentives than private prison operators and tend to be more progressive for whatever reason. they often are activists.
it should not be surprising that journalists might take a softer view and than prison industrialists in a country with free thought and expression
In the example in the article, a kid vandalized a tombstone in a graveyard, and can’t find a job years later.
It is even wider than that. I have noticed in my wider circle of friends. Deciding somebody is "bad" and ostracising them.
Often when people are at their most vulnerable and need to wrapped in love by their friends they get the opposite.
People are extremely forgiving, to a fault, for those in their in-group.
If the reason he couldn't get a job was that every employer googled his name, discovered what he did, and decided not to hire him, then clearly his actions were something that most people would want to know. If it was as inconsequential as the journalist claims, then why did his actions disqualify him from employment? Without details of the case (which would likely reveal the man's name), we can't decide whether memory-holing his past was beneficial to society or not.
And that's exactly my point: People want to decide for themselves whether a person's past disqualifies them from becoming an employee, a friend, or even a lover. There are some crimes that most people are willing to overlook, especially if they happened long ago and the perpetrator has turned their life around. Nelson Mandela is an excellent example of that. But there are some crimes that most people are willing to shun someone for. The actual harm inflicted doesn't matter as much as how the actions reflect upon the person's character. For example: If you knew someone had been caught keying cars on three separate occasions, wouldn't you be a little hesitant to associate with them? The harm they did was minimal, but such actions say something about that person's psyche. Should their actions be googleable for all time? I don't know, but I know that I want to judge for myself whether those actions can be overlooked or if they're beyond the pale. I don't trust others to make that decision for me.
Most importantly, if people realize that they can't trust public information, then they will be less trusting of strangers who can't prove their bona fides. They'll revert to how people solved this problem before the internet: preferring to hire relatives, former classmates, people who go to the same church, friends of friends, relying on stereotypes, and so on. It will become harder for someone to without the right connections to get their foot in the door, and it will hurt social mobility.
1. https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2015/09/help_us_imagine_ho...
The US has such a patchwork of reporting systems around crimes and convictions, and there are several workarounds to avoid having bad things surfacing. So there are likely already people around you who have secrets but are living decent lives now. We all have those things about ourselves we don’t discuss and this is the social lubricant that keeps our relationships going.
If employers still care... is a red flag. The case tells about a person that 1) has anger problems, 2) never mastered any skills valued by employers, and 3) never cultured friends wanting to vouch for him.
In sum, not the type that employers enjoy as coworker. Newspapers aren't necessarily the problem here.
If someone does a crime, goes to jail or does whatever punishment is mandated by a court, have they not already “repented”?
In the late 70's my Uncle had a run of bad luck and a dubious business partner basically sink him financially. After some discussion, he made a plan. It was simple:
Uncle goes back to Virginia to lay low in one of the back hollers.
My mom gets his mail, due to him living with us for a while[1], and writes "Deceased" on it, and "Return to Sender"
5 years pass. Maybe 4, I can't remember.
Uncle shows up, everything is fine, and he and my aunt live out the rest of their days in a small comfy trailer no worries.
[1] Living and other time with this Uncle was a great time in my life.
Edit due to device change: My uncle had one eye, the other lost when he was young and unlucky in the woods. He read everything and acquired a great many skills which he proceeded to pass along to me: lock picking, electronics, engine rebuilding and a ton about autos, working with wood, metals, tools... He is probably still doing that in his afterlife. Good soul who I treasure having known.
So, he took advantage of that by essentially living out of range. Once all the companies charged him off and basically moved on, he was free to come back and pick up where he left off with few worries.
It turns out that in a world of "people forced to leave the village to live a new life free from the consequences of their prior deeds", the main reason people would try to start living in a new village was because they had done something that made them no longer welcome with all the people they knew before.
One oft-understated advantage of an explicit noble class is that it provides a medium for verifying "this person really is traveling for legitimate reasons".
But there are many more people and organizations there that benefit from fewer prisoners.
For most purposes, a country is not a singular thing.
It's been really eye-opening to start realizing just how many people refer to a collective as a unit. And how many beliefs are dependent on not inspecting that fallacious thinking.
This is the top comment in a chain of siblings that are dogpiling on the parent for no good reason. I'm replying because I think it's a case of pointing out a distinction without difference, which is a low value response up there with "But correlation isn't causation!"
In this case there are many different groups that benefit from a higher prison population. Private prisons are perhaps the most commonly cited, but they hold a tiny percent of the total prison population.
But there are many, many private businesses that sell to prisons. Sudexo-Marriott makes millions selling services to private and public prisons. I once toured a "super max" prison in Ohio and saw that they had tens of thousands of dollars in commercial Hobart restaurant equipment.
The knee jerk response here is, "Of course a prison pays for commercial dining services and equipment! That's not surprising, it's inevitable!" But that's my point. It's inevitable that there's billions of dollars being made off the US's prison population. And that's not including industries based specifically on exploiting prisoners, like prison phone and teleconferencing services that overcharged the incarcerated and their families by billions of dollars.
There are many utterly conventional businesses that use slave labor from prisons. This is not hyperbole -- prisoners are often forced to work for $1 a day or less. They are punished with solitary confinement or even additional prison time if they refuse.
The final rebuttal would be, "Well not everyone in America benefits from a large prison population!" But if you read carefully, that's exactly what the parent comment is saying. But enough different and powerful stakeholders do benefit from a large and growing prison population that it's difficult to enact reforms to make that number smaller.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sudexo-Marriott+prison+sales&t=ffa...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=prison+video+conferencing+business...
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=who+uses+prison+labor&atb=v...
It’s completely unfair to express surprise that Americans would come up with a way to reduce their prison population because of the notion that they’ve all been captured by the private prison industry.
This is a straw man argument, which is also discouraged on HN. Literally no one -- besides you and the sibling comments below -- has suggested that everyone has been captured by private prisons.
Instead there are businesses all along the spectrum of those that incidentally do businesses with prisons to those that exclusively do business with prisons to those that are (private) prisons. And that doesn't even include police and sheriffs departments or politicians who benefit from prisons.
I sincerely suggest that you engage with the discourse at hand rather than dismissing it with straw manning and other logical fallacies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42596079 says:
> “I'm surprised at this concept spreading in the US, since the system would generally benefit from having perpetual perpetrators percolating through the prison slavery system.”
A sweeping statement about the entire conceptual space of a huge country based on ideas about the private prison system manipulating an entire country.
Please do a better job of close reading and critical thinking. Especially with “now you’re strawmanning,” the rhetorical equivalent of “I know you are but what am I?”
Outside of a few non-profit orgs I suspect there aren't a lot of dollars lobbying for fewer prisons, it's not a great look and it's easily to spin as "company X doesn't want to lock up violent criminals!
On the other hand that's really the only agenda item private prison operators put their lobbying dollars toward.
So do public prisons! Their employees — and those employee’s unions — want to make money just as much as anyone.
I don’t think that public vs. private is material here.
The main difference I've seen, though, is that private prisons will sell you a lot more stuff for your cell. They generally take a more measured approach to security risks and allow you to buy steel-stringed guitars and PlayStations because there is enormous profit in those. The public jails and prisons won't allow as much stuff like that as it makes their employees' lives a lot harder from a security perspective.
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is the enslavement?
An imprisoned person may or may not be enslaved as part of that imprisonment. If they get paid a reasonable wage, they're a prisoner with a job. If they're not forced to work, they're a prisoner but not a slave.
The work component only existed because why else would one want a slave?
If someone born into slavery died before they could walk, they still were a slave. If an old slave was allowed to retire without working again, that didn't stop them from being a slave.
https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-inve...
Your labor should not have financial considerations to the prison. You taking a sick day should not risk punishment up to and included increased security points and should not impact any prison employees pay/bonus (COs/AWs/Ws often get bonus' based on inmate labor metrics). Security points are the 'nice sanitized' way penal systems threaten violence on inmates. If you get points you go to a more dangerous yard where your safety will be threatened and you will get hurt. Anything that can incur security points is a implicit threat of violence against inmates. Inmates should not be threatened with violence for taking sick days/losing a non-prison job. Inmates jobs should not include the possibility of overtime because inmates CAN NOT REFUSE it. Inmates should not be threatened with violence (security points) if they do not want to work overtime of need a sick day.
Inmate jobs should not include zero hour jobs (jobs where the schedule constantly changes and you are not guaranteed any hours) because inmates CAN NOT control their schedules and it works out to be a nightmare for them logistics wise. For example leading to inabilities to file legal mail (inability to schedule around mail room hours), missed meals (chow hall hours are fixed with almost no accommodation other than SHU/medical meals), excessive isolation during transfers, missed 'move times' resulting in no personal recreation time, etc.
The US penal system is explicitly a continuation of the former slave system. Slavery wasn't outlawed in the US, just made a monopoly franchise of the US government. It isn't coincidental that so many prisons were built on former plantation property, or that the incarceration rate of black men is so high.
The practice of "convict leasing" is modern day slavery. This system should be abolished or, at a minimum, the prisoners should be paid at least minimum wage so we don't have the state to pay to lock people up and then some private corporation to profit off slave labor.
[1]: https://harvardpolitics.com/involuntary-servitude-how-prison...
[2]: https://innocenceproject.org/how-the-13th-amendment-kept-sla...
[3]: https://www.newsweek.com/book-american-slavery-continued-unt...
Minimum wage is supposed to cover sustainable food, shelter, clothing and other basic physical needs (leaving aside the question whether it really does, it is the intent). The prisoner has these basic physical needs already taken care of. Therefore, it makes no sense to pay both prisoner and a free low-wage worker the same. Moreover, if it were the situation, the very next day every paper would have a headline "Workers are being paid prisoner wages - outrage!"
However, if the prisoners are allowed to work for commercial for-profit companies, the company that benefits from this work should be asked to cover a substantial part of the prisoner's sustenance bill - which also would be to the taxpayer's benefit. Of course, participation in such programs should be strictly voluntary - I imagine prison life is not too fun, so there should be a number of people who would agree to do it even for a relatively very low wage. That said, it could be incentivized e.g. by taking successful work experience into account for parole decisions, etc.
* Many people locked up (in my country) are their families breadwinners * Many would if they could pay compensation, and victims would, if they could, receive it and improve their lives * Many leave prison with nothing. The ones not in the first clause often do not have families, nor friends left on the outside * Prisoners have, or can learn, valuable skills
Put it all together, please.
People (our fellow citizens, our comrades) should be sent to prison as punishment. Not for punishment. If they do not come out better than they went in (often a low bar) then we have failed.
We can do so much better
It occurs to me that prisoners are usually exempt from child support payments (for example), but it might be better if they could actually contribute.
> People (our fellow citizens, our comrades)
Our fellow citizens, our comrades did the crime to earn prison. Retaliatory and precautionary aspect is as important as confinement itself. Of course, it should be moderated both by the size of the crime and by the culture, but it still exists.
The US prison system uses "commissary" to further extract wealth from prisoners and their families. We give prisoners substandard food and (usually) insufficient calories. How do they make that up? By paying out of pocket at commissary. And of course everything is overpriced.
Prison phone companies have historically gouged prisoners to keep in touch with family.
We even give female inmates insufficient sanitary products and, to get more, they need to see a doctor. But don't worry, we've financialized that too, as many states require a "co-pay" that might be $6 to see a doctor.
Now that doesn't sound like a lot. But remember if you have a prison job, which you pretty much have to in many prisons, you might be makihng 30 cents an hour.
So on top of forced incarceration, paid for by the state, we just have all these private profit opportunities that prisoners are coerced into.
You've simply made this up. This is what you think minimum wage should be, so this is what you've decided it was meant to be.
As I understand it, in a number of US states workers are being paid prisoner wages.
However regular workers aren't locked up in a prison and don't have to eat prison food. On the down side, they might have to pay for their own health insurance.
The question was whether or not US prisons use slavery. He answered the question of whether or not it would be legal for US prisons to use slavery. While is it legal, it is not mandated.
A proper answer would examine the labor requirements actually in use in US prisons, compare them to labor requirements in other first world country prisons (and yes, several other first world countries make prisoners work), define just what they mean by slavery, and then try to make the case that the differences between what the US does and what other first world countries with required prison labor do is enough to make it slavery in the US.
Penal labor is not exclusive to the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour
> It isn't coincidental that so many prisons were built on former plantation property, or that the incarceration rate of black men is so high.
32% of prisoners are Black: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
56% of homicide perpetrators are Black: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...
Using homicide as indicator of general criminality because it's hard to fudge the numbers or inflate them with over-policing. Granted the correspondence is surely not perfect, but given such a parsimonious explanation, we'd need strong justification to reach for conspiratorial alternatives.
Colorado voted to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime in 2018 (though enforcement is reportedly poor). [2][3]
In other states voters have upheld forced labor[4] but sometimes it's because of issues with how it's worded[5].
You can argue it's involuntary servitude instead of slavery but to most people that's a meaningless distinction. Especially while they are being beaten for not working.[6]
[1] https://action.aclu.org/send-message/congress-end-forced-lab...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2018/11/07/665295736/colorado-votes-to-a...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2023/11/13/1210564359/slavery-prison-for...
[4] https://calmatters.org/politics/elections/2024/11/california...
[5] https://lailluminator.com/2022/11/17/the-story-behind-why-lo...
[6] https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-inve...
The purchase and sale of humans, or the lack of such transactions is a meaningless distinction?
by which definition of slavery do we have “purchase and sale of humans” as part of that definition?!
Article 1(1) of the 1926 Slavery Convention: “Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.”
just because you are not purchased/sold does not mean your condition cannot be defined as slavery
"Chattel slavery".
It's not full chattel slavery such as was legal before the 13th Amendment, but the word "slavery" has always encompassed definitions short of that, e.g. in ancient Rome.
I don't believe there's a need to soften language to attempt to weaken the narrative of a "prison slavery system". If one is a proponent of forced labor for convicts then just say so: plenty of people will agree (and plenty will disagree).
In prison and jail inmates work for rates like $.25 an hour. Many places in the south prison inmates are contracted out to work minimum wage jobs and denied parole.
Recidivism rates for people incarcerated more than 6 months is something like 66% for one year post release.
There are private prisons that benefit from more prisoners. In many places the jail or prison is the largest and best employer.
... .. . You can go on forever. It's maybe getting better in some places, but not where they used to have slavery.
and human rights are derived from feudal rights. okay, and? is this just supposed to make you feel bad with scary words?
> Recidivism rates for people incarcerated more than 6 months is something like 66% for one year post release.
this sounds very much like you are mixing up cause and effect. is it surprising that someone who commits more serious crimes is more likely to commit further crimes?
What's relevant here is comparing different prison systems wrt Recidivism.
eg: Nine out of 10 South African criminals reoffend, while in Finland it’s 1 in 3. This is why
https://theconversation.com/nine-out-of-10-south-african-cri...
Yes.
> I was hoping the author would posit a causal model, adjust for a few different factors, and have something robust.
They did to a degree.
> Nope, nothing
Perhaps you might click through and read again.
> just a wall of text
A "wall of text" is something, this one was broken up with paragraphs and had a number of observations regarding systems in two countries and quotes from people in several countries.
> even quoting Derrida.
Would you be kind enough to quote the "quote", Ctrl-F Derrida returns zilch, and expand on why that particular quote offends you?
> Empiricism is slowly dying, in large part due to truth seeking becoming subservient to confirmation bias.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana
Where? I’m fairly facile with causal inference; this is the crudest observational “study” without even qualitative heuristics to make the comparisons apples-to-apples.
> and expand on why that particular quote offends you?
Generic low tolerance for high V, low M academics: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1
This is the paper he links to, where you can find references to Derrida: https://unisapressjournals.co.za/index.php/Phronimon/article...
Anyway, if this is the kind of nonsense that convinces you, I don’t intent to continue this discussion. We have very different notions of what qualifies as evidence.
My point on recidivism is that US jails focus on punitive rather than rehabilitative justice.
" the stats don't indicate any persistent institutional success despite decades of effort and rotating fashions"
This is the exact problem that fuels mass incarceration and costs us tax payers and society infinite sums. In some places, even in Texas this model has been rejected because it's more expensive for tax payers to jail everyone.
Let's spell it out for the obstinate:
Jails have incentive to fill beds.
Jails have incentive to not rehabilitate.
Inmates go to jail and become worse because they're in a bad place.
Inmates are released with hostile support (probation).
Jail bed gets filled.
....
It's clear you hate people. Most people in jail haven't even been convicted of a crime. Nearly all plea, and rarely any go to trial.
It's likely automated systems building up these profiles too so what if you happen to just have the same name as someone who was convicted of something in a news article?
There was a guy who was a motor journalist for a major Swedish newspaper (Dagens Nyheter) who stabbed a man to death while his friends prevented the man's escape, and you basically don't get to hear about. It's even been removed from the journalist's Wikipedia page.'
I think truth is much more important and I think what a court does must be inherently public and I see a court, is as a proxy for going before the people itself to deal with a matter that can't be decided privately (and obviously, when somebody is dead, there's private way to make up), and therefore I believe their decisions have to stand forever and should be as public as possible.
> I don't know enough Swedish to say for sure, but the language feels tabloidy, and there are passages with quite similar sentence constructions in articles purportedly written four-or-more years apart – so this might be one story that was adapted / plagiarised.
The fourth is https://svenskamordfall.se/stockholm-1980-1989/, which I can't identify the provenance of, but doesn't cite any source for its claim. The Swedish Wikipedia article has some kind of edit war, but the edits are all redacted, so I can't see what the edit war is about. (The revert comments look like "Tar bort icke källbelagt påstående.", so maybe it's about this.)
I'm not wholly sure that this story is true: it could be a smear put out by this journalist's enemies. I see little reason to believe there was even such a trial, unless someone can find court records.
Does the victim have a name, or was that memory holed too?
You could have looked this up yourself.
With the death date I was able to find https://sv.metapedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Wallner and its references including http://web.archive.org/web/20140428113854/http://www.natione... which is a detailed review of the whole affair. These are far right / nationalist sources but I don't see that as a reason to disbelieve them, the whole thing sounds a lot more plausible if you are one to believe that a court would let a guy off on self defense if the eyewitnesses painted the victim as a nazi who picked a fight.
If it's misinformation I guess I'm participating in resurfacing these sources on a highly indexed website, but I don't mind being able to add context to somebody's accusation of murder. Nothing catches my interest more than a good wiki edit war.
> Vad som däremot är märkligt är hur händelsen beskrevs i en av våra största kvällstidningar, nämligen Aftonbladet. Rubriken dagen efter löd 'Jag är fascist' – då höggs han ner.
Allowing for some hyperbole, we're looking for Aftonbladet headlines on (or shortly after) 1982-03-19. I'm again suspicious that the author made a more concrete reference to an article that doesn't support the claims, but superficially appears to:
> En av många artiklar om våldsamma skinheads som publicerades under denna tid (Aftonbladet, 20 juni 1982).
But they recover some of my respect by finally providing concrete court dates:
> Den 11 juni, efter knappt tre månaders utredning, föll domen i tingsrätten.
> Hovrätten dömde Jacques Wallner till 18 månaders fängelse den 17 december 1982.
These dates might help relocate the court documents (which were online, but have since linkrotted). Lots of things claimed at the beginning of this article that seem as though they would be "facts of the case" (e.g. statements about what testimony was given) are later described as the claims of an unnamed family member of Magnus.
While Flashback is a 'random forum' to some degree, it is extremely reliable, since anyone who disagrees can simply post. I don't think its crime forum users would be interested in fake stuff because they want to be in the know.
It would also be an obvious libel matter if Samnytt etc. had libeled Wallner. Wallner would almost certainly have sued them, which has not happened.
What my comment is really about is how courts should be and what they should be-- the idea that their judgements should be as public as possible, because I believe that going before a court should be going before the public, only with the public having set professional experts as representatives, with those still being only representatives of the public, so what they do must be inherently public, i.e. it should be on the internet and completely accessible, forever.
To continue the discussion about court judgements being public: sometimes that is not in the best interests of the victims. (I don't know how it works in Sweden, but I've heard of court records being sealed for that purpose.)
Yes, it would obviously be against victim interest in some cases. However, since I see courts as I do-- i.e. as people going before the public and laying out something which is intolerable, I feel that incomplete alignment with victim interests is something one must accept.
Instead my view is that the public must become accustomed to that is is a court, and to behave reasonably with regard to those who have brought cases to them.
The truth is the most important thing there is. The problem is newspapers are so far removed from the truth it's not even funny. Journalism and truth do not even belong in the same sentence.
Especially today where they engage in shameless rage baiting for engagement and therefore have every incentive in the world to defame someone who might very well turn out to be innocent.
Even the most tyrannical court in the world cannot repair a destroyed reputation. It takes a lifetime to build and seconds to destroy.
Journalists should not be condemning anyone before proper judgement is rendered. Courts staffed by fallible and corruptible human beings are enough of a necessary evil. We really don't need journalists profiting handsomely off of the court of public opinion.
It really boggles my mind that so many people have difficulties understanding this concept, and prefer it when the general public wants blood. Peed in public? Capital punishment it is.
https://news.google.com/newspapers
After reviewing lots of southern papers during the 1960s, shockingly (!) entire months are gone. I was really hoping to read their editorials saying what they thought MLK really was at that time, and then see what they wrote today. I figured this would be more fun than paying attention to Trump on inauguration day, which weirdly falls on the same day as MLK day.
Let's be frank, there probably isn't ad revenue for old crime stories that aren't sensationalized. So, the newspapers owners are not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, or their thoughts on the criminal justice system.
How about instead, they agree moving forward to not publish crime stories about poor people at all? That I could get excited about.
Not everything is about power dynamics, and crime rarely is. Far more often it is about selfishness.
As an example, I think RealPage and the rent collusion they were doing clearly is illegal. And, has impacted hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.. But, you'll see a lot more reporting on a shooting in every newspaper, even though in most cases that would directly impact only a few people.
Fraud may impact far more people at once, but there are a lot fewer instances of it than of violence, if we're talking quantity of commission and not quantity of victims.
The comment I was replying to claimed criminals were criminals because they were powerless. I think most criminals are criminals because they're bad people (the opposite of CRT's Marxist analysis).
Everything else is billionaire did this, politician did that, corporation did both of those and more.
63% of violent offenders reoffend but that actually undercounts the amount of crimes that are caused by repeat offenders because there are some people offending 10+ times.
A three strikes rule would eliminate nearly half of all violent crime because nearly half of violent crime is committed by people who have already been convicted of 3+ other violent crimes.
https://komonews.com/news/local/everett-lions-park-stabbing-...
Is there evidence of it? In my experience, people take a few incidents as ammunition for their reactionary attacks on 'activists'. But that doesn't mean it is or isn't happening.
LMAO. Twenty-nine states have a three strikes rule, and their violent crime hasn't decreased by half.
Source: https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/three-strikes...
Spoiler: they’re not. In fact several of the states without those rules have less violent crime.
If you want to say each state is different, sure. But there is zero way of proving your hypothesis.
Why? Several reasons.
1) When you get out, everything is stacked against you. Despite what you hear, there is almost zero support for those released. You've almost certainly lost all your support networks (family, friends). You have no money, no ID, no bank account, no debit card, no cellphone, no email address, no home, no clothing, no food. You have a criminal record, the newspapers say you're a criminal, the Internet says you're a criminal. It's very, very tough.
2) Your only friends when you get out are other ex-cons. Most people in the system have suffered from drug addictions. Everyone you know will be trying to get you to use again. And if they can get you to use then they can get you to steal to get money to pay them for drugs, so they can pay for their own drugs.
3) Only the first stint in jail really sucks. When you walk back into jail you walk back in as a boss. You know the system, you know the routines, you're probably going back to the same jail, so you know the guards. All your friends are there. When you walk in the door your buddies will give you a starter kit to get you going. You're not scared of anyone or anything. After the first time, not only are you not scared to return, you might be thankful for the rest from the hardships of being released.
Finland puts some effort into looking what circumstances land citizens in jail and addressing those and post time served support.
It's horrible that if you go to prison once, then that's basically your whole life from now on. Most people will never escape the revolving door.
Every single person I know who has been to prison is counting down the days until they end up locked up again.
Australia does somewhat better than the US, but it's sharply broken on various demographics leading to rate quotes ranging from 32%, to 50%, to 60% (close to the US) depending on which populations are focused on.
FWiW the US inspires much health, education, prison, etc. policy here .. albeit more often as a counter point or warning.
That it won't have much effect, and might actually be counterproductive?
I doubt many employers would consider armed robbery to be a relevant job skill.
Of all the career-limiting moves I've witnessed in my lifetime, that one was pretty near the top.
But the thing is, her permanent record exists, and I do not control it, so inhibiting her from entering things into it is somewhat called for.
It could prevent the public from knowing of the past misdeeds of the powerful. It's much different to give someone with no power an opportunity to move forward, compared to removing an essential check on people who have power.
Also, it seems likely that powerful people will still have access to this data, in news databases, in the data accumulated in the profiles of marketing and surveillance companies, etc.
In a world where books, radio, movies, television and the internet didn't exist, and where people had memories like goldfish, maybe.
But you know the name of the mayor, even though you're not a member of the city council or involved in setting policy.
You're wildly spinning the topic off the rails. The subject of this thread is not news reporting per se, but newspapers removing old crime stories, and whether that would, to quote upthread, "prevent the public from knowing of the past misdeeds of the powerful."
I'm arguing it wouldn't because newspapers are not the sole source of knowledge for anyone and haven't been for a very long time, and because such stories are a matter of obvious public interest, and would certainly remain archived.
What the article is discussing is a consideration by some (not even all) papers to consider remove old stories of minor criminal incidents on a case by case consideration. If anything, this protects the less powerful more so than the powerful.
"There was some initial internal resistance, but eventually Quinn and his staff came up with general parameters: they would not erase names in cases of violence, sex offenses, crimes against children or corruption."
It's a bit odd, because newspapers rarely report on minor crimes, and when they do they don't put the names of the guilty in print.
And even if they no longer do, archives may still exist. Which as the article states is a problem when employers will search those archives and refuse to hire for even minor offenses, regardless of context.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13wiki.html
Read the whole thing for maximum effect, but for me it beautifully demonstrates the contrast between the USA/Wikipedia/NYT ethos of "the truth is always printable and your speech is by default 'on the record'" and alternate expectations elsewhere.
It was well worth the read!
Some obvious exceptions can apply but generally people should not be penalized for what they've been penalized already.
The "people" you are referring to here are the "elites." Conservatives adopting left-wing rhetoric has confused everybody for some reason. The people who own everything and can keep you from working, attending school, or having a place to live are the elites.
> who are you to tell them otherwise?
The person who the information is about. It's worth making an argument as to why that person shouldn't have a say, instead of railing against the "elites."
Meanwhile his mug shot photo in the local paper was the number one google search result for his name. And then it reached syndication for other news sites as well.
Ideally those news paper articles should be updated to say the prosecution dropped the charges, but the reality is that at where I live, the arrest makes news but the prosecution dropping charges does not.
But it's more of a cultural thing people just mind their own business.
Of course, this is not limited to the Netherlands, but it's the point of the discussion: how to prevent more abuse, more of whatever crime.
I served in a grand jury in NY and it was overall a pretty positive experience. Yes, the standard is lower and at times it can feel like a rubber stamp, but we did refuse to indict in two cases where we decided the DA failed to get us to “more likely than not.”
Unless the person is a politician or an active danger, no good comes from publishing their name. In the case they are guilty, you are giving notoriety which encourages copycats. In the case they are innocent, you've seriously harmed the reputation of an innocent person.
The only reason I'd make a carve out for politicians is because well connected politicians have a way of wiggling out of responsibility and electing someone that may spend the next two years behind bars is generally worse for the public they'd represent.
What do you think of the case in my comment, tldr: suspected CSAM offences by a scout group leader. I think it was right that the scout group were notified so he could be suspended... but that is only a very small step from publishing the name, unless you put recipients under NDA and/or criminalise further publicity.
I'm honestly fairly conflicted overall. Obviously the malicious publication we see in general is bad, but I'm not sure where the line is.
But let's assume he's charged and released on bail or otherwise. In that case, I think it's reasonable for the cops to notify the organizations he's involved with of the pending trial and for a judge to put a restraining order on him. I didn't think anything further needs to happen until he's found guilty or settles with a guilty plea.
My kid's school recently had a related event happen. A guy with a CSAM conviction was released from prison so the cops went around to all the schools to let them know about the dude. (We are friendly with the school secretary and noticed an unusual amount of cops around the school).
Edit: oops, looks like I mixed up your case with the OPs.
But I think what I said still applies and is ultimately what happened in your case.
My main issue is with a public permanent record in the form of a newspaper or news broadcast and not with responsible disclosure by cops.
I'd like to be able to differentiate between "permanent record in a newspaper" and "responsible disclosure", but I'm not sure where the line is.
In your case for example, what if a parent went to the media? Or what if one of the hundreds of affected parents started publicly campaigning for the person to be locked up? I think there should be limits, perhaps such as criminalising the sharing of that information unless it's from the police/courts. I don't think it even matters if the secretary at your school kept the person's name a secret, as people will jump to conclusions and start accusing others, and the whole problem here is that unfounded accusations can still cause real harm to people.
I think so long as the media outlet isn't publishing the name of the accused then I don't know how much I care about what they are publishing. Stuff blows over and is especially hard to put together if there's not a name/face with a story. I'd suspect that without a name/photo that a media outlet would simply not publish anything. If it's linked to an org I could see a "Boy scout leader accused of CSAM" and I'm not entirely against that. I think conversations about what orgs in charge of kids are doing to prevent abuse are valuable ones.
> Or what if one of the hundreds of affected parents started publicly campaigning for the person to be locked up?
I think that campaign is probably fine and publishing "100 parents calling for the arrest of a boy scout leader" is also probably fine so long as the name isn't published. There is a bit of a fuzzy line, though. For example, if a TV news station decided to cover the issue it might be easy for a parent to slip in the name which wouldn't be great.
To me, the biggest problem is how long such a name ends up staying in the public consciousness. Particularly if the individual ends up with a not guilty ruling.
> I think there should be limits, perhaps such as criminalising the sharing of that information unless it's from the police/courts.
I disagree about the police/courts as that's too early in the criminal justice process. In my book, the name getting published should happen after a conviction/guilty plea and not before.
> I don't think it even matters if the secretary at your school kept the person's name a secret, as people will jump to conclusions and start accusing others, and the whole problem here is that unfounded accusations can still cause real harm to people.
I agree. But I also don't think it's a huge problem because I've, frankly, already forgotten this individual's name. I'm sure with a bunch of extra effort I could find them and a photo (since they were convicted). If someone is accused and not convicted, then the absence of their name in a newspaper/news report would mean that it'd be quite hard to actually link their past accusation to themselves. That, IMO, is the ideal balance. That the public knows the name isn't as important as it is that if I google "cogman10" it doesn't come up with an old arrest record with my photo and "cogman10 accused of murdering a health insurance CEO" even though I wasn't found guilty.
Where this gets tricky is what do we do with a parent that decides to setup a "cogman10 accused of murdering a CEO!" webpage. Part of what's tricky here is such a webpage would be factual. Further, for very powerful people/orgs I don't like the idea that they could sue into the ground anyone that publishes something negative against them. For example, imagine an organization with rampant problems of sexual abuse but whenever it comes up they immediately settle with an NDA to silence the victims and then sues anyone that publishes information about it.
I don't have a perfect solution here. I think this is probably something better handled not by the legal system but rather journalistic ethics... but I get that that is already the system we have and it currently sucks.
We know how that turned out – no one hears about abuse by priests, and they are silently moved by the Church to another parish, to continue their abusive ways for decades.
In other words, enforced secrecy does not protect potential victims. There's a balance to be found, but it is hard to know what that is.
Not necessarily. Mormon scout leaders didn't get the assignment by their own volition, a church leader would pick them instead. Depending on the scout sponsor group how the leader is chosen could vary.
> We know how that turned out – no one hears about abuse by priests, and they are silently moved by the Church to another parish, to continue their abusive ways for decades.
The issue with the Catholic priests was twofold. First, instead of involving cops and prosecutors early on, church goers would instead reach out to church leaders about the problem. If it did make it's way to the cops, the church would go through extra efforts to make the priest go away to a different perish. (of course without informing the parishioners about the past).
Then of course there is an issue with cops and prosecutors treating religious abuse with kid gloves. Slap on "this is a religion" and all the sudden laws matter a lot less.
> In other words, enforced secrecy does not protect potential victims. There's a balance to be found, but it is hard to know what that is.
And, to be clear, I'm not trying to say we should have total secrecy about these sorts of abuses. I think a news report about a priest or a scout leader being charged is appropriate and that cops disclosing to anyone related to the incident that they are in the process of charging the individual is also appropriate and indeed necessary (after all, the individual could have injured their kids as well which would be a part of collecting evidence). A news organization naming the priest or scout leader would likely not be appropriate.
What I'm against is things like mugshot sites publishing every arrest and name associated with the arrest as an arrest is not a conviction. It's something that can hurt innocent individuals.
I don't even have a problem with sites like this publishing the mugshots of convicts.
Obviously that might just lead to most publications deleting all their archives...
It's possible the police "juiced" the story in the media, only then to try to sweep it under the rug when it didn't play out the way they were hoping. Or maybe the police thought it was all true, but the victim recanted when questioned about inconsistencies.
Whatever happened afterwards, it didn't make the papers. There's no conviction, just the arrest and allegations.
Requiring media to update every news story they publish is untenable.
More importantly perhaps, he was a scout leader and his scout group were informed, I believe by the police, as early as the investigation began - i.e. before being charged, let alone convicted.
Given the topic of the investigation, as much as I think people not yet convicted should be treated as innocent, I also think the public has a right to protections in cases where there is a plausible threat. In this case regardless of his guilt, there was a plausible threat to children under his care.
The problem is that if you tell a scout group you're telling the parents, and it only takes one to make a stink about it for it to spread. Sadly, although perhaps expectedly, the nuance of plausible threat vs conviction is often lost in times like this.
Not sure what you mean about the civil matter, CSAM offences are criminal, so I'd expect "innocent until proven guilty" to apply in this case. If you mean that for other civil matters there's no need to notify those at risk, I would agree, I doubt anything civil meets the bar of risk.
They cannot do this, their reputation is at stake. I've seen very few newspapers who recognised they made a failure.
Or are you of the opinion that that 100% of sexual abusers have been caught, tried, convicted, and have or are currently serving time?
Edit: typo
You get into an argument. The other guy is a cop it turns out. He arrests you for a trumped up charge and makes sure to tell the media. Child sexual abuse is the charge.
Now what?
A big reason that say 50 years ago if you had made a newsworthy mistake when young and then had been clean for decades after that mistake being in newspaper didn't cause you to have trouble getting jobs or housing was that it took effort for people to find that archived newspaper item.
Move to a new town far enough away that your youthful mistake didn't make the papers there and build your new life there. If someone in the new town wanted to see if you had been in the news in the old town they had to actually get someone to go to the newspaper archives in the old town and search them.
There might not be any indexing of the archives good enough to allow going right to stories that mention you. They might end up having to just manually scan old newspapers (actual physical newspaper or microfiche copies).
That's too expensive for people to routinely do it for everyone they hire or rent to.
Now the records are digitized and on the internet. They have been indexed by search engines and used to train LLMs.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2024/11/data-broker-e...
But there are far far worse (in term of all manner of personal details) you can buy
I am the author of one site - a dictionary of the English language, which, in addition to the definition of a word from several dictionaries, shows the use of words in different contexts. One of the contexts is news - so for example for the word "window" it shows several news headlines containing the word "window".
So, about 10 years ago, I received a very rudely written email demanding that I remove a reference to a certain person from the text of a news story. The news story was about a misdemeanor that a certain person had committed. Since the email was very rudely written and since I hadn't broken any law, I just ignored it and forgot about it. Over the course of about six months, this person bombarded me with dire threats and also wrote complaints to my hosting provider. The hosting company forwarded these letters to me and asked me to look into it, but did not demand anything because no law had been broken.
One day, after many e-mails with threats of legal action, and about 6 months, I received the first normal message, in which the person asked what he should do to make me delete the information he wanted.
Here I need to mention that for all this time this person has parroted me quite a lot with his threats and I had no desire to meet him halfway.
I wrote that I would delete the necessary information as soon as I received a request from him, written in the form of a short (!) verse.
Another month or so passed, during which this person argued and tried to change my mind (instead of sending a short verse)
…
As soon as he did, I connected to the database with a smile, deleted the entry he asked for and wrote him an email wishing him good luck. I hope he is doing well now :)
So instead of deleting the record of my arrest, I could add some kind of comment explaining that I was not convicted in the end.
even more serious, bogus scientific studies like the one that started the whole “vaccines cause autism” while fully disputed cannot be undone with a retraction/rebuttal
imagine if say Diddy got exonerated of all charges against him and leaves jail tonight. subsequently imagine every story written since his arrests gets a disclaimer “the accused was cleared of all charges” - that gon help Diddy in any way? perhaps Diddy is a bad example but it don’t matter where you put the rebuttal - it will be completely ignored
Unpopular opinion (it seems): I think it is OK to some extent. Not for serious crimes (violence, murder etc.) but there's an awful lot of 'lesser crimes' reported with full names where I think subjects might deserve a clean slate or where people have some right to privacy. In the extreme case, everything court-related and all infractions could be public and subject to auto-generated news, and forever searchable: traffic fines, civil cases, neighbor complaints (either way) etc. All parts of an immutable record for everyone to look up by name. I personally think that is a violation of privacy, so it has to be balanced. Maybe the best balance is not to write the names to begin with.
In Denmark where I'm from, court cases are almost always public and the subject names are read aloud as well; however the names are not listed on the court lists or in the publicly accessible version of the verdicts. In order for the media to learn the name, a journalist has to physically go and see the trial. This already prevents automation and ensures prioritization by the media. Furthermore, most news media have a policy of only writing the subject's name after a guilty verdict has been found and even then only if the verdict was of some severity (unless it is a public person). I just checked on media outlet and their policy was to only write the name in case of a custodial sentence of at least 24 months. If it weren't for such policies, even relatively small cases would be reported with full name and be searchable forever.
Heck, I would probably go a step further and update defamation laws to make publishing allegations (legal or otherwise) considered equivalent to making allegations. Far too many lives have been ruined by media “just reporting on allegations”
Saying it’s okay to defame people with an “allegedly” disclaimer and relying on the public to somehow do what even our courts cannot, is willfully ignorant.
Publishing an allegation should be legally equivalent to making an allegation.
That's not defamation. Stop trying to have newspapers make editorial judgements. Just report the facts.
99% of accusations of media bias in my experience are just someone whose experiences don't match those of that particular story.
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