[vintageseltzer]

In America, justice is only available to those who can afford it. If you can't afford months or years of lawyer's fees and don't have the ability to take time away from your job, family and other daily obligations, you're simply out of luck.

[cmurf]

It is not quite this dire, there are very competent public prosecutors and defenders. The problem is we accept the wealthy can obtain better and more lawyers, and effectively buy more or better justice as they define it. It's a classist system where justice is treated as a product rather than exclusively as a right.

[sitkack]

Justice doesn't just come in form of public defenders. I lived in Chicago and had my car improperly towed to the yards. Being a rich computer dork, I could take the time off when the yards were open to go retrieve it. It was only PoC for the entire 3 hours it took me to pay the fine and get my vehicle back, during the day, when anyone with a job would be required to pick up their vehicle.

My job says OK when I tell them I am taking the afternoon off. Most people's don't. Most people's job says, "you're fired!".

One lady lost her car because they found a worn out pot pipe under the driver's seat, while her son was driving the car. For fucks sake. They wanted 1700 to get the car back out of impound. They didn't charge anyone with a crime. But the car was gone.

I on the other hand, had the time to go give my evidence the magistrate and get my 390$ returned due to a improper impound. No working class PoC could have done what I did, on either side of that equation.

The whole time I wanted to scream my lungs out about the fucking level of utter bullshit we inflict on ourselves. I love Chicagoans, but shit, Chicago cops and Chicago justice need to get tossed in the trash.

[cmurf]

Sounds like a culture that has embraced Stockholm syndrome. $1700 to get a car out of impound when there was no crime, and yet the people who are getting shot aren't the people who enabled and profit off such an obviously corrupt system.

[WillPostForFood]

It probably isn't true that most people would be fired for having to take a half day off to retrieve an impounded car.

[ryan-allen]

Maybe not most but there certainly is an underclass that would. Even if the number is 5%-10%, it's too high.

[B1FF_PSUVM]

"You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7142/7142-h/7142-h.htm#link2H... (Thucydides, book 5, Melian conference)

(tl;dr: the Athenians took Melos, killed the adult males, sold the remaining Melians as slaves, repopulated the island. Eventually they made the Venus de Milo. And so it goes.)

[ShabbosGoy]

It is pretty dire when you have a system that incentivized throwing the book at those near the poverty line, so that private prisons could continue to grow.

It is crony capitalism, plain and simple.

[dmix]

I'm against the idea of private run prisons, it seems like something that should be the purview of the state given the lack of legitimate competition, market fundamentals, and ethical considerations.

But that said, is there any real data to support this claim you're making that private prisons incentivizes harsher sentencing of poor people? Besides maybe one or two "bad eggs" stories about judges. ie, data showing a legitimate correlation between the two as a general pattern...

This gets thrown around a lot on Reddit and elsewhere online but I really don't see how private prisons could influence criminal justice system at the other end.

[Consultant32452]

I may be parsing it incorrectly, but I take "private prisons" less literally since I know that private prisons are the vast minority. Instead of thinking about the prison itself, consider the "prison industrial complex" in a way that you might consider the "military industrial complex." There are a lot of people who make a lot of money off our prison system, and it includes everyone from food suppliers to lawyers.

Also, private companies now house nearly half of immigrant detainees including a $1 Billion facility the Obama administration purchased to hold Central American women and children seeking asylum in the US.

Specific examples of lobbying are easy enough to google. I might suggest starting with the "Kids for Cash" scandal where two judges got millions of dollars in kickbacks from for-profit juvenile detention centers for sending more kids to their facilities.

[TDL]

According to Pew Research, as of 2015, ~126,000 prisoners (state & federal) were held in private prisons[1]. As best I can tell, there are/were 2.2 million prisoners in the U.S. at the time. So about 5.7% of the prison population.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/11/u-s-private-...

[pixl97]

?but I really don't see how private prisons could influence criminal justice system at the other end.

Then you aren't paying attention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

>Two judges, President Judge Mark Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael Conahan, were convicted of accepting money from Robert Mericle, builder of two private, for-profit youth centers for the detention of juveniles, in return for contracting with the facilities and imposing harsh adjudications on juveniles brought before their courts to increase the number of residents in the centers.