[xfitm3]

Incarceration has been a sore spot of the american justice system for a long time. Privatization should be illegal and the plea system needs reform.

“Because jails are chaotic and concealed from outside view, we only become aware of them when very bad outcomes occur, such as deaths,”

[blfr]

Rikers Island is operated by the New York City Department of Correction, not a private company, and 85% of Rikers' residents have not been convicted (at least not yet) so how are your suggestions supposed to help with any of the issues outlined in the OP? If anything, moving away from plea bargaining would mean more people in jails awaiting trial.

More generally, what is the value or repeating things like argument-less slogans about prison privatization or "if you don't pay for it, you're the product", especially to people who must have read it dozens of times?

[xfitm3]

"Guilty pleas have replaced trials for a very simple reason: individuals who choose to exercise their Sixth Amendment right to trial face exponentially higher sentences if they invoke the right to trial and lose. Faced with this choice, individuals almost uniformly surrender the right to trial rather than insist on proof beyond a reasonable doubt, defense lawyers spend most of their time negotiating guilty pleas rather than ensuring that police and the government respect the boundaries of the law including the proof beyond a reasonable doubt standard, and judges dedicate their time to administering plea allocutions rather than evaluating the constitutional and legal aspects of the government’s case and police conduct. Equally important, the public rarely exercises the oversight function envisioned by the Framers and inherent in jury service."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2018/07/31/are-inno...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/plea-ba...

[heydonovan]

Plea bargaining makes innocent people admit to things they didn't do. Given the choice to plead guilty and receive 30 days in jail vs taking a chance in court at the risk of 3 years in jail, which would you take? Not to mention the insane costs of hiring a lawyer, which only wealthy people can afford. With the current trend of "guilty until proven innocent", it's no wonder folks take this approach.

[blfr]

And how does it relate to brutality on Rikers Island? What is the relevance to the OP?

[CamTin]

If you do elect for a trial, you are going to be waiting for a long time (on Rikers), because the system is overloaded and isn't actually provisioned to provide justice for the volume of people forced through it. This is the same reason that prosecutors are pressured to plead everyone out and public defenders are pressured to take those deals.

It's easy to score public dollars to hire cops and build prisons, but it's much harder to add judges, public defenders, clerks, and courtrooms. The result is more people with a right to a trial than we have the capacity to give a trial. Justice is therefore a scarce good and must be rationed by some means: you can either queue (wait in jail), pay in cash (by hiring private representation and making cash bail), or roll the dice and go to trial with a public defender.

The solution isn't to find another way to ration justice, it's to reduce the imbalance between people with rights to a trial and the number of trials we can provide. We can do this by arresting fewer people by, for example, ending the war on drugs (among other things) or by expanding the number of judges, clerks, and public defenders in our justice system to be able to handle the whole load. Maybe both are needed in some measure.

[kwhitefoot]

Does any other country have a system like plea bargaining? I mean officially sanctioned and on something like the same scale.

> easy to score public dollars to hire cops and build prisons, but it's much harder to add judges, public defenders, clerks, and courtrooms

If other countries do not have plea bargaining then how does this economic argument work in the US but , apparently, not elsewhere.

I ask this because I get the impression that the US is the only country that has an official plea bargaining system.

[hopler]

Why do people awaiting trial for petty crimes need to go to jail? Rich people don't have to go to jail. Give them an ankle monitor and a court date.

[heydonovan]

You also can't bail yourself out. If taken in, you can't just hand them a credit card, and be done. You have to have someone else pay for your bail, assuming you can convince someone to do so. Forgot every phone number because it's 2019 and we all have our contacts in an app? Too bad. You're not allowed to use your iPhone either. It's a very well thought out system to keep you in jail as long as possible. Unless of course, you're rich.

[gerbilly]

> Forgot every phone number because it's 2019 and we all have our contacts in an app?

This is going to be off topic, but I find this dumb.

Is it so hard to learn a 7 digit number that you need to make yourself dependent on a stupid device?

[CompanionCuuube]

1-800-FREE-411

[pjc50]

If you don't want to keep hearing the slogan, find a different way to fix the underlying problem.

[Paul-ish]

Privatization isn't the issue. A lot of the abuses you see in private prisons, you see in public prisons. I recommend anyone read "Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform"[1] by John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham who focuses on these issues. It addresses a lot of misconceptions about the criminal justice system and suggests reforms. You can find a 1 hour talk by Pfaff that gives a good overview of the book[2].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Locked-Causes-Incarceration-Achieve-R...

[2] https://cdn.cato.org/archive-2017/cbf-04-26-17.mp4

[xfitm3]

Great points, thanks for the reference to that book. I follow Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner[0] and I think he's headed in the right direction. I'm not in Philadelphia but reports of his efforts are very positive.

The reason for me knocking privatization is corruption. Kickbacks/lobbying[1] and nepotism[2]. While most of these actions are legal I don't think it is ethical.

I'll do some more reading before commenting further.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Krasner

[1] https://outline.com/MzTc9f

[2] George W. Bush & Gus Puryear https://medium.com/@pavelsokolov_56935/private-prisons-in-am...

[renholder]

>Privatization should be illegal and the plea system needs reform.

IMHO, apathy about anyone who's ensnared in the legal system, "Well, if they weren't doing anything wrong...", leads to dehumanisation. Dehumanisation will - almost always - lead to many forms of abuse.

I wish it were as simple as just making privatisation illegal and reforming the plea system but I fear that it would take far more than that to see true change.

Put succinctly: The moment you no longer care about someone's life, in any shape or form, then that battle was already lost before it was even begun.

[throwaway4224]

"apathy" is an understatement. Surveys show clearly that many people in the US, compared to other cultures, firmly believe in punitive justice.

People who broke the law are seen as "deserving" to suffer in order to restore a "just" world.

Even if the suffering is not effective as a deterrent or as part of a healing process, it's expected for a philosophical (or religious) reason.

[SomeHacker44]

Everyone commits around three federal felonies a day, according to the premise of the book "Theee Felonies a Day" that I read a long time ago.

We are all criminals and all do something "wrong" legally, all the time. The only difference is that the justice system focuses on some of us and not others, and the plea system harms most of those who are focused on, because any scrutiny at all can virtually always lead to an indictment.

Just check the Skrelli incident for an example, or the whole Muller investigation. Virtually all those people would have escaped indictment had they just kept their heads down and avoided notice by justice officials.

[hopler]

That book was a huge exaggeration. It's central thesis was that most things that that are felonies are larger scale versions of minor acts (like battery is unwabtedt touching, so supposedly you could be convicted for bumping someone on a subway, and since the law accounts for mens rea, anyone could be party to a crime if the crime occurred and the judge/jury believe it was intentional. What's the alternative, to make any crime legal as long as the perpetrator has a partner and they both blame each other for being the mastermind?

Your example of people who very clearly commuted major crimes, but could have avoided punishment, is the opposite of your thesis. very few people steal over a million dollars.

[Casseres]

I just looked at the reviews on Amazon. One reader wrote, "If you're looking for everyday examples of the felonies you and I unwittingly commit each day, you won't find them here."

I guess I won't be buying it.

[blfr]

This is a real concern in politically- or publicity-motivated prosecutions. And it gives prosecutors a wide avenue to abuse their powers.

But are these a significant per cent of cases that lead people to Rikers? I'm gonna guess no, they won't add up to even a single per cent.

[SomeHacker44]

Just to be pedantic, Rikers, as I recall, is a state/city jail and not a federal prison.

My personal belief is if the gov't wants you in jail, they can basically make it happen and only people with extreme resources may be able to belay that.