Orange County's Seal Beach jail offers posh, $100/day accommodations to rich crooks

[anon33466019]

@WarrenTerra

One of the regulatory changes the Obama administration was implementing was intended to end (or at least to curb) some particularly exploitative telephone charges for inmates (via the FCC, if I recall, rather than via Justice). The Trump administration canceled that move extremely quickly, even though limiting inmate contact with their families probably increases recidivism and the money was all or nearly all going into private pockets.

Yes, yes, yes. I work in security and want to keep people safe, noone needs to suffer because of violence or unhinged people. But they are people as well. Gouging is gouging .

[JeffreyHayner]

We’ve got family in Seal Beach. They are notorious (even more so than Ann Arbor) for the zeal with which the go after petty infractions like parking. They have crappy, poorly maintained zone-payment machines that reject your payment methods so you are sure to get a ticket, and dubious IT coordination. They ticketed our rental car once then despite the fine being paid that hour in person at the city hall window they went after the plate anyway which got me in hot water with Avis.

They also have Leisure World, the retirement community. Their jails are probably somewhere in between, thankfully I have never had the pleasure of a stay.

[clayton_coffman]

I’m not necessarily against this, it is after-all simply a voluntary tax on wealthy prisoners, but the implementation should change.

In short we should soak them, and use it to pay public defenders.

So:

1. It should be a minimum of $2,000 a day.
2. It should scale with wealth (not income!); maybe if you’re a millionaire it should be $10k a day, if you’re a billionaire it should be $100k a day.
3. All proceeds go towards public defender’s office.

[Daneyul]

Not sure how anyone can not find this disgusting. Yeah, I know the rich don’t go to prison, and that typical jail conditions are horrible, but those are separate issues. To have wealth officially sanctioned as a de facto determination of the punishment received is pretty much the definition of corruption in a justice system.

[Brainspore]

@clayton_coffman

In short we should soak them, and use it to pay public defenders.

Public Defenders are too important to make their funding contingent on how much we can wring out of fines and penalties. (For example, in Louisiana Public Defenders are primarily funded by the fines from traffic tickets and the like, so the result is a chronically underfunded system that has nothing to do with how many people require representation).

I say we just make a law requiring public defenders to be funded from exactly the same source as the District Attorneys who prosecute defendants. Split it right down the middle so each side gets the same amount of resources to argue each case.

[LurkingGrue]

Remember, If you criticize the rich it becomes class warfare.

[anon33466019]

@Brainspore

I say we just make a law requiring public defenders to be funded from exactly the same source as the District Attorneys who prosecute defendants.

Carping. Voice. Of reason.

It doesn’t irritate me that sentencing and conditions are different based on your lawyer. That is almost the very bedrock of the judicial, since da’s/pd’s/judges are the interpretors of legislation. What irritates me is the lack of high quality defense for everyone. Which is why we need to fund defenders as well as we fund da’s.

@Brainspore gets it, I wish more did.

[sluggo]

OOOHHHH FLAT SCREEN TV?

That’s what old people call TVs.

[GulliverFoyle]

@LurkingGrue

Remember, If you criticize the rich it becomes class warfare.

It’s not criticism of the rich (not directly anyway). It’s the recognition that if you let the rich, connected and powerful bypass the systems everyone else is left with, then corruption, abuse of power, graft and injustice become the burden of the poor and the shrinking middle-class while the red carpet is rolled out for the wealthy. It’s an ongoing problem in the US with schools, police, opportunity to vote, travel, courts, security theater and prisons among myriad lesser government functions.

The result is a country where the people are no longer equal in the eyes of the law and government, where there’s one rule for the common people and another for the wealthy. Europe has a word for this: aristocracy. It calcifies the class structure by placing greater barriers to increasing one’s station. It produces and ensconces a ruling elite that are fundamentally un-republican (in the original sense of the word). And it is this condition where wealth and power are obtained and maintained by injustice rather than fair play, and the demotion of citizens to subjects that follows, which leads to class warfare.

So I remain fundamentally against allowing convicts to buy humane incarceration. It merely relieves the pressure that might actually compel reform of an inhumane system.

[GulliverFoyle]

@Bernel

@iquitos46

equal justice for all…better quality equal justice if you’ve got the cash

Some countries would consider this equal punishment.They figure that since rich people lead a better life ordinarily than poor, if they were all put in the same jail the rich would suffer a larger drop in living standard. It makes some perverted kind of sense.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

[Foggen]

Guys, you fucked up. Instead of reporting on the actual real world you reported on the world from Snow Crash.

[LurkingGrue]

@GulliverFoyle

The result is a country where the people are no longer equal in the eyes of the law and government, where there’s one rule for the common people and another for the wealthy. Europe has a word for this: aristocracy. It calcifies the class structure by placing greater barriers to increasing one’s station. It produces and ensconces a ruling elite that are fundamentally un-republican (in the original sense of the word). And it is this condition where wealth and power are obtained and maintained by injustice rather than fair play, and the demotion of citizens to subjects that follows, which leads to class warfare.

So I remain fundamentally against allowing convicts to buy humane incarceration. It merely relieves the pressure that might actually compel reform of an inhumane system.

We have already knee deep in this process and when people yell about it you get pundits shouting them down claiming they are engaging in class warfare. For decades we have had a right wing that seems to be dead set on a mission to build an American aristocracy at the same time create an uneducated near slave class that could compete with places like China.

Jokes on us as robots will just eventually fill that role. (Man, the 2010’s have really made me cynical)

[Archon]

Those damned millennials and their goshnabbit Sony Trinitrons!

[adonai]

This seems to basically be an updated version of English prisons from the 18th century. From what I know of the American legal system that seems…appropriate, somehow.

@WarrenTerra - that’d be Pablo Escobar. Narcos is worth checking out.