Not all people who are arrested are guilty, though. If someone is arrested and later proven innocent, what “right” do I have to an unflattering photograph taken on one of the worst days of their lives?
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There may be a bigger reason having to do with their defense attorneys saying they could never get a fair trial with mugshots being made public. Then prosecutors face a wall of delays, mistrials, etc.
I agree it’s weird, but it might be for the best until they’re actually behind bars.
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DOJ only releases them in accordance with department policy (which, basically, is that there needs to be a public safety reason for releasing a booking photo).
Every podunk local jail, on the other hand, is another matter.
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If you’re wealthy or a celebrity, when you get in trouble and hire an attorney and/or crisis management consultant, one of the first things they will do is actually release a good photo to the media just so they won’t rely on the mugshot. It’s extremely common in certain rarefied circles.
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In the indictment, you see several of the parents saying outright to the ringleader that their kids are stupid. One of them submits a handwriting sample that looks like an 8 year old’s and says something to the effect of “this is what we’re dealing with. You’ll have to work a miracle”.
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I consider Yale and Harvard yearbooks as compendiums of pre-arrest photos.
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I can tell from the placard (Rochester NY) that Bowie did nothing wrong.
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I want my MTV.
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What’s MTV?
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Yes. It’s demeaning and runs counter to the principle that people are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
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Selectivity isn’t just about what scores/grades are necessary to get in, it’s also about space. There are some schools that are both physically smaller and not staffed to accept 50% of the applicants. Yale has about 5500 undergraduates and a 7% acceptance rate. That means that they get 20k applications per class. If they accepted 50%, that’s 40,000 students. I’ve been to the campus. There’s no way that many students could physically attend class, much less be housed. The whole population of new Haven is under 130k people. Adding another 34,500 people would strain the city, much less the university.
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[[ insert the no duh gif here ]]
What? No.
Should the media (as a proxy for the public) have access to the minutiae of nuclear weapons operation?
Should the media have access to my medical records (I’m in the UK, so that’s publicly funded)?
I’m with the majority on this: mugshots may be useful within the law enforcement system, but they shouldn’t be made public without a good purpose, related to law enforcement.
And shouldn’t get it.
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What I find amusing is that by and large the education one receives at a “prestigious” school is no different than offered at a state university. I’ve spent a combined 20 years studying and working in universities. I’ve hung out with people with advanced degrees from Stanford, MIT and the like. There’s nothing supernatural about these folks. At least when it comes to my field, physics, the smartest financial move would be to do the first two years of your undergraduate at a small college, and then.transfer up to a degree granting university. You’ll probably get smaller class sizes (and commensurately better education) at the college. It’s only when you get to grad school that you might see some difference in the education by virtue of the caliber of research. Undergrads at big schools are high-throughput squeezable money sponges.
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I’ve heard back from former students at my community college who were surprised to find out how far ahead of their new peers they were after transferring to fancier 4-year programs.
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https://twitter.com/johnnys_eye/status/1105531290500120576?s=21
https://twitter.com/disco_socialist/status/1105954996112089090?s=21
https://twitter.com/disco_socialist/status/1105955310219358208?s=21
https://twitter.com/disco_socialist/status/1105955552159363072?s=21
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That’s an indictment of the parents. Kids aren’t born stupid. They are inquisitive by nature. Stupid takes years and years of parental self-absorption and apathy about the little people in their care. These vacuous teens don’t suddenly emerge from the homes of even moderately diligent parents. And then trying to buy Suzy or Chad undeserved access to a perceived elite university? Well that, I’m afraid, is a little late to suddenly get interested.
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I could make you a Trading Places style dollar bet, but I’ll just say that there are plenty of kids out there who were born stupid (as opposed to having a cognitive impairment). I’ll leave it as a thought exercise as to why inquisitive stupid kids in particular are relatively thin on the ground. Obviously, that doesn’t automatically make them morally or ethically deficient.
That said, nurture (or lack thereof) plays exactly the role you describe, especially when it comes to parents like these who care more about money and fame and superficial appearance than they do about making their kids happy and empathetic humans. It enhances existing stupidity and degrades existing intelligence. Buying access to universities, through an illegal side door or a legal back door, is right in line with that kind of “parenting”, whether or not the kid is stupid.
ETA: the kid I referred to above is this one:
His mother’s opinion aside, I don’t know if he’s stupid or not, but either he learned about ethics and morality despite her crappy example or is being convincing in his dishonesty thanks to her crappy example. I’m really hoping it’s the former.
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