I realized that the USA was a hyper-brainwashed totalitarian non-democratic, well, Babylon when I was a kid. But it doesn’t get any easier to take over the years – this literally turned my stomach a bit.
5 Likes
Of course we do. It’s a growth business and offers an excellent ROI…or some shit like that.
2 Likes
Dang, Double Dang! I’m free as bird, ain’t never going back to the gray bar hotel.
9 Likes
Ending the racist war on drugs would do far more, but yeah, for profit prisons don’t help.
Also, we need to focus on restorative justice rather than punitive retribution.
9 Likes
One quibble with the argument. The author says that plea bargaining, “conviction without trial,” is coercive and wrong. I have around 25 years experience as a public defender and deputy prosecutor (not simultaneously, thank God). As a prosecutor my plea bargaining philosophy was to charge the crime that I was sure that a jury would convict on, but threaten that if we went to trial I would charge everything that had better than a 50/50 chance of conviction. Offer ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ likelihood, but threaten ‘more likely than not’ likelihood. Of course if there were mitigating circumstances I’d lower the charge, or exceptional circumstances I’d increase the charge. The defendant would then have a choice. To trial lawyers, it’s a lot like a card game. You see the cards. You’ve played multiple hands. There are random incidents.
You’ve got to know when to hold 'em
Know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run
The system does not have the resources for jury trials for every single offense. I have no problem with plea bargaining. I have a lot of problems with the severity of sentences. I have a lot of problems with the police focusing on the ‘low hanging fruit’ of drug dealing on the street and ignoring drug dealing in the suburbs. But, there you go. . .
This is just awful.
Look at plea bargains from the perspective of a defendant for a moment. If you’re guilty, then plea bargains allow you to escape some larger charges that you’re actually guilty of, but if you’re innocent, they are a nightmare. you face the prospect of even harsher punishment, being locked up until a delayed trial date and suffering loss of job, income and so on because you’re suspected of a crime, and the probability of being unjustly convicted anyway, if you don’t have an expensive lawyer; or admitting to something you haven’t actually done just to get the inevitable unjust punishment over quicker.
Systematically, plea bargains are toxic to justice- they can only result in worse outcomes for society as a whole, and often intimidate innocent people into pleading guilty. They do nothing to reduce crime, they just juice up the conviction stats and fuel the incarceration machine.
And your throwaway remark that “The system does not have the resources for jury trials for every single offense” shows up the larger problem. There should be the resources for a jury trial for everyone- no question, it’s a basic right.
16 Likes
14 Likes
Per capita, Canada has less than a sixth, at 104/100k, and it’s nothing to brag about with a huge percentage of indigenous people.
When the numbers are that far out from the rest of the world, something else is going on, and somebody wants it that way.
14 Likes
Spoken like someone with a fair bit of CCA in their stock portfolio.
I, like many here, do have a problem with plea deals. Plea deals keep privately owned prisons a growth industry, resulting in the US’s ridiculously high incarceration rates of non-whites, which serves the ends of systemic racism.
11 Likes
I have looked at this from the perspective of the accused. 98 percent of my criminal law experienc was in superior court, felony level.
First, you assume that the accused is being held pending trial. I agree with the essay that far too many people are held pending trial that shouldn’t be. The basic rules are that the accused shall be released pending trial unless: 1) the accused is a flight risk; 2) the accused is likely to subvert justice by intimidating a witness; or 3) the accused is likely to commit a violent crime if released. Far too many judges won’t release if the accused is likely to commit any crime, for instance, go back to their addiction or continue thieving. Far too many defense attorneys don’t fight that difference because for them it’s easier to manage their clients if they are in custody. They know where their clients are, and far too many clients are willing to chew their leg off to get out of the trap. It is far easier to make a plea deal with an incarcerated person than it is a person who is out of custody.
However, it isn’t just the conservatives who mistake pretrial custody with post-conviction punishment. Did you see the liberal outrage when Kyle Rittenhouse made bail? Or the Capitol insurrectionists were released pending trial.
The reality is that if there were no plea deals and every case went to trial, the prosecutor would have no incentive to do anything than charge at the ‘more likely than not’ standard (probably cause) and let the jury decide. Is that a better result?
There should be enough resources for every jury trial. The response rate for jury summons is around 20 percent - about 80 percent of citizens don’t even bother to show up. It’s even worse among the poor who cannot afford to give their time as jurors. Current jury pay is around $20 a day. It would be wonderful to pay for jurors at a professional rate. It would be wonderful to pay enough money into the system to afford jury trials in every situation. It would be wonderful to have medical care for all. It would be wonderful to fully fund public education - preschool to post-graduate.
So where are you going to start? I started by defending the poor as best I could, with a felony case-load three times the ABA standards, grossing $36,000 a year with a $600 monthly student loan payment, in 1991. That’s where I began looking at this from the accused’s point of view.
the outrage from this former liberal is the inequity.
if most people were released pre trial, it would be no problem.
the reality is, it depends on your resources and your skin color. as i linked above, there are plenty of times you’ve got kids and adults in jail for months or years awaiting trial because they can’t afford bail. and that has severe consequences for them and for society at large
the standard of justice i personally want is that it’s the same for everyone as it is for a white person with means
[edit]
end the drug war, divert drug charges to treatment, close private prisons, defund the police, stop locking people up when they can’t afford jail.
if we need more money for trials - and i agree we do - there’s plenty money right there with those few changes.
14 Likes
Yes, it’s as immoral as for-profit health care
4 Likes
Jail churn. (?!!!)
While this pie chart provides a comprehensive snapshot of our correctional system, the graphic does not capture the enormous churn in and out of our correctional facilities, nor the far larger universe of people whose lives are affected by the criminal justice system. Every year, over 600,000 people enter prison gates, but people go to jail 10.6 million times each year. Jail churn is particularly high because most people in jails have not been convicted. Some have just been arrested and will make bail within hours or days, while many others are too poor to make bail and remain behind bars until their trial. Only a small number (about 160,000 on any given day) have been convicted, and are generally serving misdemeanors sentences under a year. At least 1 in 4 people who go to jail will be arrested again within the same year — often those dealing with poverty, mental illness, and substance use disorders, whose problems only worsen with incarceration.
source: Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020 | Prison Policy Initiative
10 Likes
This is either disingenuous or just mistaken.
Imagine tomorrow every person charged with a crime suddenly decided, en masse, to stop taking plea deals. There would be so many trials that soon most would have to be scheduled long after the defendant died of old age. This, of course, would be a massive sixth amendment violation, which hopefully the courts would address. Attempting to hold more than a tiny fraction of those people for pretrial detention would similarly be a massive fifth amendment violation, which hopefully the courts would address, and even if they were detained, by the time the guilty were convicted, they would on average have already been held much longer than whatever their sentence ended up being. And of course, we don’t actually have the means to detain that many people that long, so this would de facto end most pretrial detention (not immediately, but it would necessarily lead there).
In other words, it would call prosecutors’ bluff, and force them to actually prioritize cases (if we’re lucky, based on the value to the public of taking a given case to trial) instead of forcing huge numbers of people to ruin their lives and the lives of their loved ones and/or communities by either admitting to crimes they didn’t commit, or risking everything on a roll of the (loaded) dice.
5 Likes
This doesn’t even mention the fact that prisoners in the US are forced to work for little or no pay, effectively slave labor, and the goods they produce are competing with goods made by paid workers.
7 Likes
Yes and to add to this conversation: for every person who does this, it means a criminal is out and about who has now gotten away with it. This, to me, is the often unspoken part in any discussion about plea bargains and false convictions.
Yep.
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g40922-d2334399-Reviews-Maine_State_Prison_Store-Thomaston_Maine.html
And they typically feel lucky for the opportunity to get one of the “good” jobs. 
9 Likes
If the system can’t grant people a fair trial, you let them go. You don’t hold them in inhumane conditions until they are willing to take a deal to make the duration shorter. That’s the reality of our plea system.
7 Likes
not just goods of course. sanitation is a big prison job, cleaning up city trash, parks, making downtowns look pretty for commerce and making highways look slightly less ugly than the ecological disaster that they are.
( i do sincerely wonder what the mark-up on their labor is. presumably prision ceos are making more per hour contracting out that work, for a job they themselves will never have to do. )
3 Likes
At the ballot box.
You state all those things as if they are inevitable, unfixable problems. With the additional subtext that fixing them would cost too much. Except, here’s the thing- every other developed nation has all those things fixed (at least by the US standard of broken- not to say they are perfect). The US is the wealthiest country in the world, yet is the only wealthy country that can’t seem to solve these problems. Why? Because the people Americans elect want those things to be broken.
Your sentiment here is extremely defeatist and that’s not going to get anything fixed.
12 Likes
