His pet, actually.
Maybe also his peer, who knows…
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Yeah, it’s hard. What should be a crime? And what should the punishments be for those crimes? Our current systems have been cobbled together from various bills that could make it through legislative sausage factories (and get signed by an executive) over the decades, along with federal sentencing guidelines created an independent judicial agency (with public comment—you yourself can comment, ha), and 50 individual states with their own flavors of crimes and sentencing guidelines.
Occasionally, we get efforts at reform and there have been some actual reforms, particularly at the federal level. States vary widely.
I will say that, for state crimes, people are generally sentenced not directly to prison but rather to probation, with various conditions of probation that might include payment of fines and restitution (which you mention, but that raises the issue of the enormously different impact on rich defendants and poor defendants); various meetings, evaluations, and counseling and/or treatment plans; and most importantly not committing more crimes while on probation. Unfortunately, a lot of people violate their conditions of probation (which are sometimes fair and sometimes not). Even those people generally don’t have to serve out the whole sentence on the first violation, but they may after repeated probationary violations.
There are some success stories. Many states have instituted “drug court” programs, which are sort of a judicially-supervised specialty probation that’s been hugely successful in getting people treatment and keeping them out of prison. (For anyone who thinks drugs shouldn’t be outlawed anyway, see the beginning of this comment. If you can get your fellow citizens to agree, as many are agreeing or starting to agree with marijuana, then let’s try it. But in the meantime, we’ll keep working on sentencing reform.)
It’s a hard issue. What do we do with bad people? Fine them? Rich people don’t care about even large fines. Jim Justice, the fucking governor of West Virginia, owes millions of dollars in taxes and fines. And he got elected. And he still doesn’t pay. Poor people, on the other hand, get comparatively walloped by fines and court costs. Fining successful “white collar” criminals, in particular—rather than imprisoning them—risks turning the fines into the “cost of doing business,” which is exactly how big businesses already view fines.
I saw an interesting story the other day: Conservative pundit gets sent to jail for not paying the hundreds of thousands of dollars that a court found he owed in child support. He made no attempt to make any payments over a period of years. It’s not exactly a crime; it’s “civil contempt” of court, but he’s still in jail. And some commentators think that’s wrong! Like, what’s the alternative? Sometimes I’ll see internet comments, including here, against putting people “in a cage” (“cage” sounds worse than “cell” and is meant, I think, to emphasize the dehumanizing nature of imprisonment). Whats the alternative? We talked about some real-world alternatives above, but yes—sometimes you’ve got to throw a dude in jail. At least until we evolve into a utopian society complete with slap drones.
Not many easy answers.
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Typical racketeering type charges don’t involve 180 million dollars and 67 tons of drugs. Those are the numbers that dictated the length of the sentence.
I’d find it a lot easier to feel sympathy for him if it weren’t for the whole commission of five murders thing.
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I wonder what the recidivism rates are for people who get probation vs. imprisonment. The percentage of people who get multiple lesser sentences and then wind up in prison for parole violations might also be useful information. Criminal organizations recruit people without records and throw them into the system as a cost of doing business, too.
Going after assets instead of fines seemed like one possible solution. TPTB abused it, though. Expansion of civil asset forfeiture in a way that affected privileged people led to efforts to completely dismantle that option.
https://www.cnn.com/2014/09/03/us/philadelphia-drug-bust-house-seizure/index.html
The overburdened system for monitoring people on probation/parole and the public penchant for nosy behavior could explain current efforts to merge surveillance cameras, neighborhood-based social media, and law enforcement. Not sure if the next step would be ankle bracelets visible on GPS systems or an expansion of offender registries searchable by the public. That might evolve into a different form of tech-enabled shunning as punishment:
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He was never charged with murders (they didn’t actually happen), so the life-with-no-parole sentence was exclusively for non-violent crimes.
On the last day of trial, Serrin Turner, the lead prosecutor, addressed the jury and stated that none of the six contracted murders-for-hire allegations occurred. One charge of procuring murder was originally filed in October 2013 in a separate pending indictment in (which was later dismissed with prejudice in its entirety in July 2018)] the other five allegations were never filed.
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Murder for hire (even if unsuccessful) isn’t a violent crime? This was definitely factored into his sentence even if it wasn’t part of the indictment.
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Sadly, non-rehabilitative punitive US penal system only gets noticed by the 99.3% not behind bars when it makes splashy lucrative headlines. Mind you, those 2.3 million prisoners don’t include the millions who will either “serve” a short sentence in jail at some point in their life because they were talked/frightened into pleading guilty for outrageous and occasionally unconstitutional charges such as drug possession or their face resisting a cop’s fist during a “routine” traffic stop for DWB or publishing a state’s legal code, nor the millions more who will experience the Kafkaesque probation system designed to rent-seek from the poor.
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It didn’t make a difference to the sentence because he’d already exceeded the maximum level in the guidelines, but there was a two-level upward adjustment for the directed use of violence, and the judge didn’t mince words when dismissing the defense’s claim that he was just role playing when he sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to someone with instructions for who to kill.
The only reason the murders didn’t take place is that the guy he approached was on the government’s payroll. He believed they did take place though, and he continued paying for more. When told that one wasn’t possible due to a target spending literally all their time with three other people, he simply paid to have all of them killed. He didn’t even ask who they were.
Mandatory minimums and rigid sentencing guidelines are messed up, I agree, but there are plenty of people far more deserving of sympathy than Ulbricht.
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ETA: Of course many people will assume that if one expresses support for justice reform, they sympathize with every convict; and many others will assume that if one expresses a dearth of sympathy for a specific convict, that they support the system. Obviously it’s important to choose your battles carefully, but the fact that certain sensationalist crimes tend to grab the headlines because they sell creates a bit of a Catch-22 in that if the media ignores the people deserving of sympathy, the injustice of the system is often overlooked.
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Wow. That episode sounds good. Reminds me of the 1967 The Prisoner episode about being declared “unmutual” (another great show, btw).
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sigh Yes, it’s not photorealistic for a professional artist.
For an amateur, it’s a really good attempt. The level of shading and detail work put in suggests a great amount of time spent trying to get it to look right, without the experience/practice necessary to completely succeed. The level of detail also suggests a reference since amateurs generally don’t know what little touches to put in (or how to put them in) to make something look realistic (I’m looking at the cracks in the wall and the shading on the cloth, the latter being notoriously hard for newbies to reproduce).
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No, I’m sorry; but it’s not photorealism for anyone, of any skill level.
By definition, that term specifically means a drawing or painting which is so detailed and realistic looking, that it can be readily mistaken for a photograph at a glance, and it can maintain that illusion until much closer inspection.
I don’t mean to be one of those know-it-all asshats who have to always “be right” and who nitpick over every minor detail of every comment to the point of derailment, (because we have an endless supply already) but the image linked to the article does not fit the actual definition of photo-realism.
That said, it’s not a bad rendering; there’s lots of potential there.
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Photorealistic, not photorealistic. Whatever.
My beef is with the word incredible. How is this drawing incredible?
Above, a detail from his incredible drawing of his cell and cellmate at the MCC (Metropolitan Correctional Center).
It’s better than I could do. But it’s definitely, 100% believable that someone could produce that good-but-decidedly-amateurish drawing.
I’ve got to watch The Prisoner again. It was one of those shows that fascinated me as a child, but I was too young to really understand it.
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Not “whatever”; specifics matter to art nerds with overpriced art degrees, like myself.
I didn’t take issue with that particular phrasing because, unlike an incorrectly named genre, that seems like a matter of personal opinion.
What’s ‘incredible’ to one person could be fairly underwhelming to another.
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While I understand that the conditions in jail are terrible and that a life sentence for the crimes he committed is excessive, I’m personally more concerned about people who are in jail for minor drug offences, or women who are in jail because they defended themselves against abusive partners, or people locked up for crimes they didn’t commit, rather than someone like Ross Ulbricht.
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I don’t want to diss amateurs, as I can only draw stick figures, , bus this is saying that 2 + 2 + 4.5 is almost a perfect result for someone who’s not a professional mathematician.
