IRL I knew someone who was charged with child sexual abuse. He went to prison awaiting trial, but the prosecution dropped the charges before it got there. He was released and went about his life.
Meanwhile his mug shot photo in the local paper was the number one google search result for his name. And then it reached syndication for other news sites as well.
Ideally those news paper articles should be updated to say the prosecution dropped the charges, but the reality is that at where I live, the arrest makes news but the prosecution dropping charges does not.
I think libel laws should be updated, so entities are compelled to correct the record when requested. News media have gotten away with publishing "well we thought it was true at the time" (or "we didn't say it, we said someone else said it") for too long.
Publishing the name of a suspect should generally not be tolerated. Particularly in the case of mass shootings or general terrorism.
Unless the person is a politician or an active danger, no good comes from publishing their name. In the case they are guilty, you are giving notoriety which encourages copycats. In the case they are innocent, you've seriously harmed the reputation of an innocent person.
The only reason I'd make a carve out for politicians is because well connected politicians have a way of wiggling out of responsibility and electing someone that may spend the next two years behind bars is generally worse for the public they'd represent.
> Unless the person is a politician or an active danger, no good comes from publishing their name
What do you think of the case in my comment, tldr: suspected CSAM offences by a scout group leader. I think it was right that the scout group were notified so he could be suspended... but that is only a very small step from publishing the name, unless you put recipients under NDA and/or criminalise further publicity.
I'm honestly fairly conflicted overall. Obviously the malicious publication we see in general is bad, but I'm not sure where the line is.
He was already being held in prison so I see no reason to further publish until a trial or settlement hit.
But let's assume he's charged and released on bail or otherwise. In that case, I think it's reasonable for the cops to notify the organizations he's involved with of the pending trial and for a judge to put a restraining order on him. I didn't think anything further needs to happen until he's found guilty or settles with a guilty plea.
My kid's school recently had a related event happen. A guy with a CSAM conviction was released from prison so the cops went around to all the schools to let them know about the dude. (We are friendly with the school secretary and noticed an unusual amount of cops around the school).
Edit: oops, looks like I mixed up your case with the OPs.
But I think what I said still applies and is ultimately what happened in your case.
My main issue is with a public permanent record in the form of a newspaper or news broadcast and not with responsible disclosure by cops.
Yeah in this case the guy wasn't being held.
I'd like to be able to differentiate between "permanent record in a newspaper" and "responsible disclosure", but I'm not sure where the line is.
In your case for example, what if a parent went to the media? Or what if one of the hundreds of affected parents started publicly campaigning for the person to be locked up? I think there should be limits, perhaps such as criminalising the sharing of that information unless it's from the police/courts. I don't think it even matters if the secretary at your school kept the person's name a secret, as people will jump to conclusions and start accusing others, and the whole problem here is that unfounded accusations can still cause real harm to people.
> what if a parent went to the media?
I think so long as the media outlet isn't publishing the name of the accused then I don't know how much I care about what they are publishing. Stuff blows over and is especially hard to put together if there's not a name/face with a story. I'd suspect that without a name/photo that a media outlet would simply not publish anything. If it's linked to an org I could see a "Boy scout leader accused of CSAM" and I'm not entirely against that. I think conversations about what orgs in charge of kids are doing to prevent abuse are valuable ones.
> Or what if one of the hundreds of affected parents started publicly campaigning for the person to be locked up?
I think that campaign is probably fine and publishing "100 parents calling for the arrest of a boy scout leader" is also probably fine so long as the name isn't published. There is a bit of a fuzzy line, though. For example, if a TV news station decided to cover the issue it might be easy for a parent to slip in the name which wouldn't be great.
To me, the biggest problem is how long such a name ends up staying in the public consciousness. Particularly if the individual ends up with a not guilty ruling.
> I think there should be limits, perhaps such as criminalising the sharing of that information unless it's from the police/courts.
I disagree about the police/courts as that's too early in the criminal justice process. In my book, the name getting published should happen after a conviction/guilty plea and not before.
> I don't think it even matters if the secretary at your school kept the person's name a secret, as people will jump to conclusions and start accusing others, and the whole problem here is that unfounded accusations can still cause real harm to people.
I agree. But I also don't think it's a huge problem because I've, frankly, already forgotten this individual's name. I'm sure with a bunch of extra effort I could find them and a photo (since they were convicted). If someone is accused and not convicted, then the absence of their name in a newspaper/news report would mean that it'd be quite hard to actually link their past accusation to themselves. That, IMO, is the ideal balance. That the public knows the name isn't as important as it is that if I google "cogman10" it doesn't come up with an old arrest record with my photo and "cogman10 accused of murdering a health insurance CEO" even though I wasn't found guilty.
Where this gets tricky is what do we do with a parent that decides to setup a "cogman10 accused of murdering a CEO!" webpage. Part of what's tricky here is such a webpage would be factual. Further, for very powerful people/orgs I don't like the idea that they could sue into the ground anyone that publishes something negative against them. For example, imagine an organization with rampant problems of sexual abuse but whenever it comes up they immediately settle with an NDA to silence the victims and then sues anyone that publishes information about it.
I don't have a perfect solution here. I think this is probably something better handled not by the legal system but rather journalistic ethics... but I get that that is already the system we have and it currently sucks.
He was a Scout leader, so he obviously sought ways to be close to children. Another group that does that is Catholic priests.
We know how that turned out – no one hears about abuse by priests, and they are silently moved by the Church to another parish, to continue their abusive ways for decades.
In other words, enforced secrecy does not protect potential victims. There's a balance to be found, but it is hard to know what that is.
> He was a Scout leader, so he obviously sought ways to be close to children.
Not necessarily. Mormon scout leaders didn't get the assignment by their own volition, a church leader would pick them instead. Depending on the scout sponsor group how the leader is chosen could vary.
> We know how that turned out – no one hears about abuse by priests, and they are silently moved by the Church to another parish, to continue their abusive ways for decades.
The issue with the Catholic priests was twofold. First, instead of involving cops and prosecutors early on, church goers would instead reach out to church leaders about the problem. If it did make it's way to the cops, the church would go through extra efforts to make the priest go away to a different perish. (of course without informing the parishioners about the past).
Then of course there is an issue with cops and prosecutors treating religious abuse with kid gloves. Slap on "this is a religion" and all the sudden laws matter a lot less.
> In other words, enforced secrecy does not protect potential victims. There's a balance to be found, but it is hard to know what that is.
And, to be clear, I'm not trying to say we should have total secrecy about these sorts of abuses. I think a news report about a priest or a scout leader being charged is appropriate and that cops disclosing to anyone related to the incident that they are in the process of charging the individual is also appropriate and indeed necessary (after all, the individual could have injured their kids as well which would be a part of collecting evidence). A news organization naming the priest or scout leader would likely not be appropriate.
What I'm against is things like mugshot sites publishing every arrest and name associated with the arrest as an arrest is not a conviction. It's something that can hurt innocent individuals.
I don't even have a problem with sites like this publishing the mugshots of convicts.
One could argue that a newspaper is continuously publishing something on its website. And therefore it has a duty to keep any archives it keeps available to the public updated.
Obviously that might just lead to most publications deleting all their archives...
There was an arrest. The alleged crime was published -- but since it was alleged, the news outlet doesn't have to prove it was true, they were reporting on what was alleged by the police. So libel laws had little to do with it.
It's possible the police "juiced" the story in the media, only then to try to sweep it under the rug when it didn't play out the way they were hoping. Or maybe the police thought it was all true, but the victim recanted when questioned about inconsistencies.
Whatever happened afterwards, it didn't make the papers. There's no conviction, just the arrest and allegations.
That's why they said updated. It means to change the laws.
But again, that's not libel. Libel is publishing something untrue on purpose. Everything published was true and is still true today. He was arrested and alleged of a crime.
Requiring media to update every news story they publish is untenable.
Then maybe we should change the law that defines what is and isnt libel.
I know that there is the saying that goes something like “a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich,” but at least there is an acknowledgment there that being publically accused of a crime can come with a pretty high cost to the accused, and that is worth some process.
I served in a grand jury in NY and it was overall a pretty positive experience. Yes, the standard is lower and at times it can feel like a rubber stamp, but we did refuse to indict in two cases where we decided the DA failed to get us to “more likely than not.”
In the Netherlands media never names suspects.
But it's more of a cultural thing people just mind their own business.
To clarify, we name them partially. The first name and then the first letter of the lastname. So John Doe would be John D.
"Minding their own business" means that thousands of children are abused by Catholic priests and no one does anything to stop it.
Of course, this is not limited to the Netherlands, but it's the point of the discussion: how to prevent more abuse, more of whatever crime.
I knew someone charged with having large amounts of CSAM. He was also named in local media before conviction, although you really had to go looking for it to find it.
More importantly perhaps, he was a scout leader and his scout group were informed, I believe by the police, as early as the investigation began - i.e. before being charged, let alone convicted.
Given the topic of the investigation, as much as I think people not yet convicted should be treated as innocent, I also think the public has a right to protections in cases where there is a plausible threat. In this case regardless of his guilt, there was a plausible threat to children under his care.
The problem is that if you tell a scout group you're telling the parents, and it only takes one to make a stink about it for it to spread. Sadly, although perhaps expectedly, the nuance of plausible threat vs conviction is often lost in times like this.
Were they convicted? It seems irresponsible to let someone strongly suspected of harming children to continue to have close contact with children. “Innocent until proven guilty” is a criminal justice concept. It actually doesn’t apply to civil matters.
I don't think the conviction matters to the point. They were convicted, but my point is that a suspicion that causes an investigation should probably warrant telling those who could be at risk, even if the investigation ends up going nowhere.
Not sure what you mean about the civil matter, CSAM offences are criminal, so I'd expect "innocent until proven guilty" to apply in this case. If you mean that for other civil matters there's no need to notify those at risk, I would agree, I doubt anything civil meets the bar of risk.
I think I misunderstood your point. It sounded like you were arguing against telling the scout group prior to the conviction, because they were innocent until proven guilty. But from your follow up, it sounds like you agree with telling the scout group prior to his conviction. In that case, I agree with you.
In the UK, at least, I think if you were charged with this they limit your access to vulnerable groups until the charges have run their course and there is a verdict either way.
Just because charges were dropped doesn't mean they were innocent. It could mean there wasn't enough reliable witness testimony, physical evidence, or the evidence was tainted in a way that the prosecution did not believe they would get a conviction in a court of law.
Here's a scenario.
You get into an argument. The other guy is a cop it turns out. He arrests you for a trumped up charge and makes sure to tell the media. Child sexual abuse is the charge.
Now what?
Sue the police department for false arrest odds are good it would make the media.
This is true, for sure, but there is also the flip side where evidence is wrong, mistaken, planted, framed etc, which comes out during the trial. Where do you balance it?
You're innocent until proven guilty by a court of law
In the eyes of the law, yes. But that does not mean that a child wasn't damaged due to the abuse by a person the law could not convict.
Or are you of the opinion that that 100% of sexual abusers have been caught, tried, convicted, and have or are currently serving time?
Edit: typo
> Ideally those news paper articles should be updated
They cannot do this, their reputation is at stake. I've seen very few newspapers who recognised they made a failure.
Your right, their reputation is at stake. So, they should recognize their failures.
I understand this is the general policy in a few places, like Germany. The general idea seems to be that it is more beneficial to a society if criminals are given a viable avenue to lead non-criminal lives again, with the alternative being people going "ah fuck it, I guess I'm a criminal now".
I'm surprised at this concept spreading in the US, since the system would generally benefit from having perpetual perpetrators percolating through the prison slavery system.
There are enormous problems with this kind of thing though, especially when for example, a murderer is part of the establishment or is cuddled by the big established entities.
There was a guy who was a motor journalist for a major Swedish newspaper (Dagens Nyheter) who stabbed a man to death while his friends prevented the man's escape, and you basically don't get to hear about. It's even been removed from the journalist's Wikipedia page.'
I think truth is much more important and I think what a court does must be inherently public and I see a court, is as a proxy for going before the people itself to deal with a matter that can't be decided privately (and obviously, when somebody is dead, there's private way to make up), and therefore I believe their decisions have to stand forever and should be as public as possible.
What is this journalist's name? I couldn't find any information on this, but I don't have much to go on - Dagens Nyheter being a newspaper means "Dagens Nyheter murder" surfaces a lot of results of the newspaper reporting on murders.
Jacques Wallner.
I've found this claim online in only four places. Three are the "Alternative for Sweden" website, Samnytt, and Fria Tider. None are reliable sources (one's a political party of bigots, one's a tabloid that's been "sued multiple times for libel", and the third "anses ha ett uppenbart rasistiskt, främlingsfientligt och islamofobiskt innehåll" (quotations from Wikipedia)). I wrote this, before I looked up the names of the websites:
> I don't know enough Swedish to say for sure, but the language feels tabloidy, and there are passages with quite similar sentence constructions in articles purportedly written four-or-more years apart – so this might be one story that was adapted / plagiarised.
The fourth is https://svenskamordfall.se/stockholm-1980-1989/, which I can't identify the provenance of, but doesn't cite any source for its claim. The Swedish Wikipedia article has some kind of edit war, but the edits are all redacted, so I can't see what the edit war is about. (The revert comments look like "Tar bort icke källbelagt påstående.", so maybe it's about this.)
I'm not wholly sure that this story is true: it could be a smear put out by this journalist's enemies. I see little reason to believe there was even such a trial, unless someone can find court records.
Well, it is true, and the conviction in Tingsrätten was for 'vållande till annans död' 'causing the another's death', but in the manner described. Maybe it ended up as manslaughter in a higher court, maybe not-- I don't remember. Previously scans of the court documents were from the Flashback discussion page, but the links are dead now.
While Flashback is a 'random forum' to some degree, it is extremely reliable, since anyone who disagrees can simply post. I don't think its crime forum users would be interested in fake stuff because they want to be in the know.
It would also be an obvious libel matter if Samnytt etc. had libeled Wallner. Wallner would almost certainly have sued them, which has not happened.
What my comment is really about is how courts should be and what they should be-- the idea that their judgements should be as public as possible, because I believe that going before a court should be going before the public, only with the public having set professional experts as representatives, with those still being only representatives of the public, so what they do must be inherently public, i.e. it should be on the internet and completely accessible, forever.
Is this the Flashback thread? https://www.flashback.org/t1803341 Also, I (belatedly) noticed that the contemporary Wikipedia discussion was archived: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diskussion:Jacques_Wallner/Ark... This is enough for me to believe that, at the very least, people in 2012 believed that this happened.
To continue the discussion about court judgements being public: sometimes that is not in the best interests of the victims. (I don't know how it works in Sweden, but I've heard of court records being sealed for that purpose.)
Yes, that is the flashback thread.
Yes, it would obviously be against victim interest in some cases. However, since I see courts as I do-- i.e. as people going before the public and laying out something which is intolerable, I feel that incomplete alignment with victim interests is something one must accept.
Instead my view is that the public must become accustomed to that is is a court, and to behave reasonably with regard to those who have brought cases to them.
If it's not true, it serves as a good example of why journalists should report on all alleged crimes without hiding information from the public: when you have a system where people know that certain allegations will not be reported for privacy, or preserving the peace, or any other reason, it creates a situation where a random baseless accusation appears to have as much public evidence behind it as a true accusation might.
Bro has friends in high places bro that's why there's no evidence
Does the victim have a name, or was that memory holed too?
"Magnus Nordenmark" is the name used by the tabloids. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/250492078/sven-magnus-no... has the right date of death, and gives a grave site of plot SO 33 5756 in Solna Cemetery, Stockholm. (I don't know how to verify this without actually visiting the cemetery.)
You could have looked this up yourself.
My google fu aint what it used to be, and when I google 'Sven Magnus Nordenmark' my own comment right above this one is the top hit.
With the death date I was able to find https://sv.metapedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Wallner and its references including http://web.archive.org/web/20140428113854/http://www.natione... which is a detailed review of the whole affair. These are far right / nationalist sources but I don't see that as a reason to disbelieve them, the whole thing sounds a lot more plausible if you are one to believe that a court would let a guy off on self defense if the eyewitnesses painted the victim as a nazi who picked a fight.
If it's misinformation I guess I'm participating in resurfacing these sources on a highly indexed website, but I don't mind being able to add context to somebody's accusation of murder. Nothing catches my interest more than a good wiki edit war.
The account in the Nationell Idag article does (eventually) provide a few cross-referenceable claims.
> Vad som däremot är märkligt är hur händelsen beskrevs i en av våra största kvällstidningar, nämligen Aftonbladet. Rubriken dagen efter löd 'Jag är fascist' – då höggs han ner.
Allowing for some hyperbole, we're looking for Aftonbladet headlines on (or shortly after) 1982-03-19. I'm again suspicious that the author made a more concrete reference to an article that doesn't support the claims, but superficially appears to:
> En av många artiklar om våldsamma skinheads som publicerades under denna tid (Aftonbladet, 20 juni 1982).
But they recover some of my respect by finally providing concrete court dates:
> Den 11 juni, efter knappt tre månaders utredning, föll domen i tingsrätten.
> Hovrätten dömde Jacques Wallner till 18 månaders fängelse den 17 december 1982.
These dates might help relocate the court documents (which were online, but have since linkrotted). Lots of things claimed at the beginning of this article that seem as though they would be "facts of the case" (e.g. statements about what testimony was given) are later described as the claims of an unnamed family member of Magnus.
> I think truth is much more important
The truth is the most important thing there is. The problem is newspapers are so far removed from the truth it's not even funny. Journalism and truth do not even belong in the same sentence.
Especially today where they engage in shameless rage baiting for engagement and therefore have every incentive in the world to defame someone who might very well turn out to be innocent.
Even the most tyrannical court in the world cannot repair a destroyed reputation. It takes a lifetime to build and seconds to destroy.
Journalists should not be condemning anyone before proper judgement is rendered. Courts staffed by fallible and corruptible human beings are enough of a necessary evil. We really don't need journalists profiting handsomely off of the court of public opinion.
Before things like the FBI and the telegraph it was quite common for Americans to find a new life in another state. You could be married in New York but nobody in Montana would know unless they actively started an investigation. The world has become a village.
True story:
In the late 70's my Uncle had a run of bad luck and a dubious business partner basically sink him financially. After some discussion, he made a plan. It was simple:
Uncle goes back to Virginia to lay low in one of the back hollers.
My mom gets his mail, due to him living with us for a while[1], and writes "Deceased" on it, and "Return to Sender"
5 years pass. Maybe 4, I can't remember.
Uncle shows up, everything is fine, and he and my aunt live out the rest of their days in a small comfy trailer no worries.
[1] Living and other time with this Uncle was a great time in my life.
Edit due to device change: My uncle had one eye, the other lost when he was young and unlucky in the woods. He read everything and acquired a great many skills which he proceeded to pass along to me: lock picking, electronics, engine rebuilding and a ton about autos, working with wood, metals, tools... He is probably still doing that in his afterlife. Good soul who I treasure having known.
Why did he feel he had to run? Did he owe people money?
Yes. It was to shake off debt. Records were far from unified back then.
So, he took advantage of that by essentially living out of range. Once all the companies charged him off and basically moved on, he was free to come back and pick up where he left off with few worries.
The US used to believe in second chances. Now it believes in maximum retribution. Unless you are big business. Then not only will you get a second chance, but the government will fund it.
Did it ever believe in second chances or was it just a reality of distances and poor communications technology?
I don't believe that's true
You need to be more specific about which parts are wrong and in what way. They made a claim about the past, a claim about the present, and a couple claims about businesses. I have no idea which ones you're reacting to.
You need to be more specific
it was the main selling point of the US for quite a while.
It's one of those feudal villages you can't leave.
It's not because we're indentured, but because we're on an island, and now most of the island is as transparent as a village.
The advantage of the world being a village is that you no longer have to have extreme paranoia over everyone who isn't from your village.
It turns out that in a world of "people forced to leave the village to live a new life free from the consequences of their prior deeds", the main reason people would try to start living in a new village was because they had done something that made them no longer welcome with all the people they knew before.
One oft-understated advantage of an explicit noble class is that it provides a medium for verifying "this person really is traveling for legitimate reasons".
There are private prisons in the US that benefit from more prisoners.
But there are many more people and organizations there that benefit from fewer prisoners.
For most purposes, a country is not a singular thing.
I suspect that is true but here is the difference: organizations that benefit from fewer prisons have a multitude of other things they benefit from (and can lobby for). Private prison operators on the other hand really only have one thing that can improve their bottom line at the end of the day - more prisons.
Outside of a few non-profit orgs I suspect there aren't a lot of dollars lobbying for fewer prisons, it's not a great look and it's easily to spin as "company X doesn't want to lock up violent criminals!
On the other hand that's really the only agenda item private prison operators put their lobbying dollars toward.
“Dispersed cost, concentrated gain”
We need a way to concentrate the gains of things going in the other direction as well.
> There are private prisons in the US that benefit from more prisoners.
So do public prisons! Their employees — and those employee’s unions — want to make money just as much as anyone.
I don’t think that public vs. private is material here.
and a lot overestimate the percentage private prison systems greatly. However, I think systems like Alabama that abuse prisoners to output widgets for corporations should be dealt with by the Feds as well. It's clearly cruel and unusual punishment. It's a complicated issue but calling prisoners "slaves" is a far left talking point that they continuously use with no nuance allowed.
that labor is not compelled and is in fact a privilege; they are given absurdly low wages, but the jobs are still desirable vs sitting in a cell. misbehavior results in privilege revocation.
The labor is compelled; the statute law, regulations, and executive orders prohibit the incarcerated from refusing the work and authorize punishment for them doing so (including for refusing assignments to unpaid labor), despite Alabama finally abolishing involuntary servitude in its Constitution in 2022.
This is correct.
The main difference I've seen, though, is that private prisons will sell you a lot more stuff for your cell. They generally take a more measured approach to security risks and allow you to buy steel-stringed guitars and PlayStations because there is enormous profit in those. The public jails and prisons won't allow as much stuff like that as it makes their employees' lives a lot harder from a security perspective.
As I've gotten farther in my career as a product manager, I have to do more and more slicing and dicing of markets to understand who I'm building something for, identify opportunity.
It's been really eye-opening to start realizing just how many people refer to a collective as a unit. And how many beliefs are dependent on not inspecting that fallacious thinking.
> It's been really eye-opening to start realizing just how many people refer to a collective as a unit. And how many beliefs are dependent on not inspecting that fallacious thinking.
This is the top comment in a chain of siblings that are dogpiling on the parent for no good reason. I'm replying because I think it's a case of pointing out a distinction without difference, which is a low value response up there with "But correlation isn't causation!"
In this case there are many different groups that benefit from a higher prison population. Private prisons are perhaps the most commonly cited, but they hold a tiny percent of the total prison population.
But there are many, many private businesses that sell to prisons. Sudexo-Marriott makes millions selling services to private and public prisons. I once toured a "super max" prison in Ohio and saw that they had tens of thousands of dollars in commercial Hobart restaurant equipment.
The knee jerk response here is, "Of course a prison pays for commercial dining services and equipment! That's not surprising, it's inevitable!" But that's my point. It's inevitable that there's billions of dollars being made off the US's prison population. And that's not including industries based specifically on exploiting prisoners, like prison phone and teleconferencing services that overcharged the incarcerated and their families by billions of dollars.
There are many utterly conventional businesses that use slave labor from prisons. This is not hyperbole -- prisoners are often forced to work for $1 a day or less. They are punished with solitary confinement or even additional prison time if they refuse.
The final rebuttal would be, "Well not everyone in America benefits from a large prison population!" But if you read carefully, that's exactly what the parent comment is saying. But enough different and powerful stakeholders do benefit from a large and growing prison population that it's difficult to enact reforms to make that number smaller.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sudexo-Marriott+prison+sales&t=ffa...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=prison+video+conferencing+business...
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=who+uses+prison+labor&atb=v...
It’s completely fair to say that private prisons have too much pull and that there are bad incentives like you point out.
It’s completely unfair to express surprise that Americans would come up with a way to reduce their prison population because of the notion that they’ve all been captured by the private prison industry.
> they’ve all been captured by the private prison industry
This is a straw man argument, which is also discouraged on HN. Literally no one -- besides you and the sibling comments below -- has suggested that everyone has been captured by private prisons.
Instead there are businesses all along the spectrum of those that incidentally do businesses with prisons to those that exclusively do business with prisons to those that are (private) prisons. And that doesn't even include police and sheriffs departments or politicians who benefit from prisons.
I sincerely suggest that you engage with the discourse at hand rather than dismissing it with straw manning and other logical fallacies.
Now you’re strawmanning. Read the thread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42596079 says:
> “I'm surprised at this concept spreading in the US, since the system would generally benefit from having perpetual perpetrators percolating through the prison slavery system.”
A sweeping statement about the entire conceptual space of a huge country based on ideas about the private prison system manipulating an entire country.
“the system” here is specifically referencing the web of government and corporate interests that benefit from a large and growing prison population. There is no reasonable reading of this which implies the author naively believes EVERYONE supports prisons.
Please do a better job of close reading and critical thinking. Especially with “now you’re strawmanning,” the rhetorical equivalent of “I know you are but what am I?”
There's a much broader problem here: unnecessary background checks. If you're applying for a job or to rent an apartment it absolutely shouldn't matter that you vandalized something 15 years earlier.
It's likely automated systems building up these profiles too so what if you happen to just have the same name as someone who was convicted of something in a news article?
[dead]
The article isn’t strictly talking about prisoners.
In the example in the article, a kid vandalized a tombstone in a graveyard, and can’t find a job years later.
The negative knee jerk reaction to things has become comical. It's to the point where schools will not allow the parents of a student that has a record to come on school campus. They don't even care what the offense was for; they only look that there's not a clean slate.
> schools will not allow the parents of a student that has a record to come on school campus
It is even wider than that. I have noticed in my wider circle of friends. Deciding somebody is "bad" and ostracising them.
Often when people are at their most vulnerable and need to wrapped in love by their friends they get the opposite.
People kicking someone out of their immediate circle is not a new development. It always existed - both for good reasons and bad reasons.
It has become much more common in the last, say, 10 years, than it ever was. It used to be an extreme last resort, now people talk about it like it’s the obvious first step. Discussed previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32223003>
Hacker news thread is not exactly a sociological proof. In that thread, people talk in abstract and no one reading it has any way to figure out a.) what happened in anecdotes they talk about b.) whether such situations are more frequent then in the past. Besides, hacker news is a place where imaginary past gets written about all the time.
I was not trying to prove my assertion; I was just making an observation based on my personal experience.
I've noticed that the exact opposite is true - I've seen endless "one more chance" and "let's just bury the hatchet" for very bad behavior, behavior that should get someone ostracised.
People are extremely forgiving, to a fault, for those in their in-group.
I'll be honest, I want to know more about the monument vandal. The article mentions that after graduating high school, a man "became rowdy with some friends and broke a small stone monument".[1]
If the reason he couldn't get a job was that every employer googled his name, discovered what he did, and decided not to hire him, then clearly his actions were something that most people would want to know. If it was as inconsequential as the journalist claims, then why did his actions disqualify him from employment? Without details of the case (which would likely reveal the man's name), we can't decide whether memory-holing his past was beneficial to society or not.
And that's exactly my point: People want to decide for themselves whether a person's past disqualifies them from becoming an employee, a friend, or even a lover. There are some crimes that most people are willing to overlook, especially if they happened long ago and the perpetrator has turned their life around. Nelson Mandela is an excellent example of that. But there are some crimes that most people are willing to shun someone for. The actual harm inflicted doesn't matter as much as how the actions reflect upon the person's character. For example: If you knew someone had been caught keying cars on three separate occasions, wouldn't you be a little hesitant to associate with them? The harm they did was minimal, but such actions say something about that person's psyche. Should their actions be googleable for all time? I don't know, but I know that I want to judge for myself whether those actions can be overlooked or if they're beyond the pale. I don't trust others to make that decision for me.
Most importantly, if people realize that they can't trust public information, then they will be less trusting of strangers who can't prove their bona fides. They'll revert to how people solved this problem before the internet: preferring to hire relatives, former classmates, people who go to the same church, friends of friends, relying on stereotypes, and so on. It will become harder for someone to without the right connections to get their foot in the door, and it will hurt social mobility.
1. https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2015/09/help_us_imagine_ho...
I have lived in an area of the US where a high portion of the population regularly attends church. I do not attend church. I noticed that when people found out about my lack of religion early in our acquaintance I was judged harshly for not being a believer. If they got to know me first, then they were okay with me by the time the subject of religion came up. Was I a bad person for hiding my lack of faith?
The US has such a patchwork of reporting systems around crimes and convictions, and there are several workarounds to avoid having bad things surfacing. So there are likely already people around you who have secrets but are living decent lives now. We all have those things about ourselves we don’t discuss and this is the social lubricant that keeps our relationships going.
Hiding it is the wrong way. Nobody cares about kids having stupid ideas. Erasing the entry closes the opportunity of providing a reasonable explanation and showing repent, that in fact could help highlight the candidate among other.
If employers still care... is a red flag. The case tells about a person that 1) has anger problems, 2) never mastered any skills valued by employers, and 3) never cultured friends wanting to vouch for him.
In sum, not the type that employers enjoy as coworker. Newspapers aren't necessarily the problem here.
> Erasing the entry closes the opportunity of providing a reasonable explanation and showing repent, that in fact could help highlight the candidate among other.
If someone does a crime, goes to jail or does whatever punishment is mandated by a court, have they not already “repented”?
> The general idea seems to be that it is more beneficial to a society if criminals are given a viable avenue to lead non-criminal lives again, with the alternative being people going "ah fuck it, I guess I'm a criminal now".
It really boggles my mind that so many people have difficulties understanding this concept, and prefer it when the general public wants blood. Peed in public? Capital punishment it is.
It’s almost like there are multiple competing interests at play in a country of 340 million people…
There is need for a middle ground between privacy and the safety of the community. In my country, a lot of horrible crimes could have been avoided if the repeated criminal's past crimes were something people could at the least be aware of, one way or another. I'm talking about murders and sex crimes.
take your tinfoil hat off. the US isn't one system conspiratorially doing one thing or another. it is a myriad of competing individuals and groups.
journalists have different incentives than private prison operators and tend to be more progressive for whatever reason. they often are activists.
it should not be surprising that journalists might take a softer view and than prison industrialists in a country with free thought and expression
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> the prison slavery system.
extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is the enslavement?
To add to sibling comments about the 13th amendment's exception clause (which is what legally allows forced prison labor[1]): forced prison labor has been a state-level ballot issue in recent years.
Colorado voted to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime in 2018 (though enforcement is reportedly poor). [2][3]
In other states voters have upheld forced labor[4] but sometimes it's because of issues with how it's worded[5].
You can argue it's involuntary servitude instead of slavery but to most people that's a meaningless distinction. Especially while they are being beaten for not working.[6]
[1] https://action.aclu.org/send-message/congress-end-forced-lab...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2018/11/07/665295736/colorado-votes-to-a...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2023/11/13/1210564359/slavery-prison-for...
[4] https://calmatters.org/politics/elections/2024/11/california...
[5] https://lailluminator.com/2022/11/17/the-story-behind-why-lo...
[6] https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-inve...
> You can argue it's involuntary servitude instead of slavery but to most people that's a meaningless distinction.
The purchase and sale of humans, or the lack of such transactions is a meaningless distinction?
The purchase and sale of humans, or the lack of such transactions is a meaningless distinction?
by which definition of slavery do we have “purchase and sale of humans” as part of that definition?!
Article 1(1) of the 1926 Slavery Convention: “Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.”
just because you are not purchased/sold does not mean your condition cannot be defined as slavery
> by which definition of slavery
"Chattel slavery".
Yes, it's my opinion that it's meaningless pedantry to argue involuntary servitude is not included in the definition of slavery when used in casual speech on a forum.
I don't believe there's a need to soften language to attempt to weaken the narrative of a "prison slavery system". If one is a proponent of forced labor for convicts then just say so: plenty of people will agree (and plenty will disagree).
Reminds me of the progressives trying to say words are violent just like fists, knives, and bullets are. But we're all vibes these days, and no science or empiricism.
Given the for-profit prisons, it comes very close to being the purchase and sale of humans.
It's not full chattel slavery such as was legal before the 13th Amendment, but the word "slavery" has always encompassed definitions short of that, e.g. in ancient Rome.
Prisons routinely lease out prison labor.
Read the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
The US penal system is explicitly a continuation of the former slave system. Slavery wasn't outlawed in the US, just made a monopoly franchise of the US government. It isn't coincidental that so many prisons were built on former plantation property, or that the incarceration rate of black men is so high.
> The US penal system is explicitly a continuation of the former slave system.
Penal labor is not exclusive to the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour
> It isn't coincidental that so many prisons were built on former plantation property, or that the incarceration rate of black men is so high.
32% of prisoners are Black: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
56% of homicide perpetrators are Black: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...
Using homicide as indicator of general criminality because it's hard to fudge the numbers or inflate them with over-policing. Granted the correspondence is surely not perfect, but given such a parsimonious explanation, we'd need strong justification to reach for conspiratorial alternatives.
Not sure who's downvoting this because the comment is objectively correct [1][2][3].
The practice of "convict leasing" is modern day slavery. This system should be abolished or, at a minimum, the prisoners should be paid at least minimum wage so we don't have the state to pay to lock people up and then some private corporation to profit off slave labor.
[1]: https://harvardpolitics.com/involuntary-servitude-how-prison...
[2]: https://innocenceproject.org/how-the-13th-amendment-kept-sla...
[3]: https://www.newsweek.com/book-american-slavery-continued-unt...
> the prisoners should be paid at least minimum wage so we don't have the state to pay to lock people up and then some private corporation to profit off slave labor.
Minimum wage is supposed to cover sustainable food, shelter, clothing and other basic physical needs (leaving aside the question whether it really does, it is the intent). The prisoner has these basic physical needs already taken care of. Therefore, it makes no sense to pay both prisoner and a free low-wage worker the same. Moreover, if it were the situation, the very next day every paper would have a headline "Workers are being paid prisoner wages - outrage!"
However, if the prisoners are allowed to work for commercial for-profit companies, the company that benefits from this work should be asked to cover a substantial part of the prisoner's sustenance bill - which also would be to the taxpayer's benefit. Of course, participation in such programs should be strictly voluntary - I imagine prison life is not too fun, so there should be a number of people who would agree to do it even for a relatively very low wage. That said, it could be incentivized e.g. by taking successful work experience into account for parole decisions, etc.
"Voluntary" is a very blurry line, which is why I think the prisoners should be meaningfully paid.
The US prison system uses "commissary" to further extract wealth from prisoners and their families. We give prisoners substandard food and (usually) insufficient calories. How do they make that up? By paying out of pocket at commissary. And of course everything is overpriced.
Prison phone companies have historically gouged prisoners to keep in touch with family.
We even give female inmates insufficient sanitary products and, to get more, they need to see a doctor. But don't worry, we've financialized that too, as many states require a "co-pay" that might be $6 to see a doctor.
Now that doesn't sound like a lot. But remember if you have a prison job, which you pretty much have to in many prisons, you might be makihng 30 cents an hour.
So on top of forced incarceration, paid for by the state, we just have all these private profit opportunities that prisoners are coerced into.
> Minimum wage is supposed to cover sustainable food, shelter, clothing and other basic physical needs (leaving aside the question whether it really does, it is the intent).
You've simply made this up. This is what you think minimum wage should be, so this is what you've decided it was meant to be.
> Minimum wage is supposed to cover sustainable food, shelter, clothing and other basic physical needs
* Many people locked up (in my country) are their families breadwinners * Many would if they could pay compensation, and victims would, if they could, receive it and improve their lives * Many leave prison with nothing. The ones not in the first clause often do not have families, nor friends left on the outside * Prisoners have, or can learn, valuable skills
Put it all together, please.
People (our fellow citizens, our comrades) should be sent to prison as punishment. Not for punishment. If they do not come out better than they went in (often a low bar) then we have failed.
We can do so much better
Good points. And as you note, the punishment is (or should be) being deprived of one's freedom, not being mistreated in prison.
It occurs to me that prisoners are usually exempt from child support payments (for example), but it might be better if they could actually contribute.
If we had surefire ways to make people better than they went it, why deploy them in prisons? People pay thousands upon thousands for things like that voluntarily. The problem is, there's no such way. There's no way to "make" a person better. A person can become better because they strived to it and worked on it, and it can even happen in prison - it's as good place as any to hit the rock bottom and realize it's time to change - but if you think you can force it to happen, you are deeply deluded.
> People (our fellow citizens, our comrades)
Our fellow citizens, our comrades did the crime to earn prison. Retaliatory and precautionary aspect is as important as confinement itself. Of course, it should be moderated both by the size of the crime and by the culture, but it still exists.
> "Workers are being paid prisoner wages - outrage!"
As I understand it, in a number of US states workers are being paid prisoner wages.
However regular workers aren't locked up in a prison and don't have to eat prison food. On the down side, they might have to pay for their own health insurance.
I would guess it is being downvoted because while what it says about the 13th Amendment is correct it isn't really relevant to the question it was answering.
The question was whether or not US prisons use slavery. He answered the question of whether or not it would be legal for US prisons to use slavery. While is it legal, it is not mandated.
A proper answer would examine the labor requirements actually in use in US prisons, compare them to labor requirements in other first world country prisons (and yes, several other first world countries make prisoners work), define just what they mean by slavery, and then try to make the case that the differences between what the US does and what other first world countries with required prison labor do is enough to make it slavery in the US.
people that don’t have a fucking clue about slavery in their own country are the ones downvoting
Slave is sometimes also referred to as captured person or captive. An imprisoned person is a captive.
There's usually a work component, though.
An imprisoned person may or may not be enslaved as part of that imprisonment. If they get paid a reasonable wage, they're a prisoner with a job. If they're not forced to work, they're a prisoner but not a slave.
Slavery was a condition, usually a legal status, where someone's autonomy was stripped from them.
The work component only existed because why else would one want a slave?
If someone born into slavery died before they could walk, they still were a slave. If an old slave was allowed to retire without working again, that didn't stop them from being a slave.
But there's no purchase or sale of a human. So where's the slavery?
Prison labor is not limited to inside prisons:
https://apnews.com/article/prison-to-plate-inmate-labor-inve...
Your labor should not have financial considerations to the prison. You taking a sick day should not risk punishment up to and included increased security points and should not impact any prison employees pay/bonus (COs/AWs/Ws often get bonus' based on inmate labor metrics). Security points are the 'nice sanitized' way penal systems threaten violence on inmates. If you get points you go to a more dangerous yard where your safety will be threatened and you will get hurt. Anything that can incur security points is a implicit threat of violence against inmates. Inmates should not be threatened with violence for taking sick days/losing a non-prison job. Inmates jobs should not include the possibility of overtime because inmates CAN NOT REFUSE it. Inmates should not be threatened with violence (security points) if they do not want to work overtime of need a sick day.
Inmate jobs should not include zero hour jobs (jobs where the schedule constantly changes and you are not guaranteed any hours) because inmates CAN NOT control their schedules and it works out to be a nightmare for them logistics wise. For example leading to inabilities to file legal mail (inability to schedule around mail room hours), missed meals (chow hall hours are fixed with almost no accommodation other than SHU/medical meals), excessive isolation during transfers, missed 'move times' resulting in no personal recreation time, etc.
Only chattel slavery involves purchase or sale of a human. Any forced labor is slavery, it just might not be chattel slavery.
You see no difference between being a legal prisoner and being a captive?
In the US police and prisons are directly derived from slave patrols. This is history and factual.
In prison and jail inmates work for rates like $.25 an hour. Many places in the south prison inmates are contracted out to work minimum wage jobs and denied parole.
Recidivism rates for people incarcerated more than 6 months is something like 66% for one year post release.
There are private prisons that benefit from more prisoners. In many places the jail or prison is the largest and best employer.
... .. . You can go on forever. It's maybe getting better in some places, but not where they used to have slavery.
> In the US police and prisons are directly derived from slave patrols. This is history and factual.
and human rights are derived from feudal rights. okay, and? is this just supposed to make you feel bad with scary words?
> Recidivism rates for people incarcerated more than 6 months is something like 66% for one year post release.
this sounds very much like you are mixing up cause and effect. is it surprising that someone who commits more serious crimes is more likely to commit further crimes?
"Crims are going to crim again" is likely the shallowest take possible in such discussions.
What's relevant here is comparing different prison systems wrt Recidivism.
eg: Nine out of 10 South African criminals reoffend, while in Finland it’s 1 in 3. This is why
https://theconversation.com/nine-out-of-10-south-african-cri...
Did you click through to glance through the paper linked? I was hoping the author would posit a causal model, adjust for a few different factors, and have something robust. Nope, nothing - just a wall of text even quoting Derrida. Empiricism is slowly dying, in large part due to truth seeking becoming subservient to confirmation bias.
> Did you click through to glance through the paper linked?
Yes.
> I was hoping the author would posit a causal model, adjust for a few different factors, and have something robust.
They did to a degree.
> Nope, nothing
Perhaps you might click through and read again.
> just a wall of text
A "wall of text" is something, this one was broken up with paragraphs and had a number of observations regarding systems in two countries and quotes from people in several countries.
> even quoting Derrida.
Would you be kind enough to quote the "quote", Ctrl-F Derrida returns zilch, and expand on why that particular quote offends you?
> Empiricism is slowly dying, in large part due to truth seeking becoming subservient to confirmation bias.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana
> They did to a degree
Where? I’m fairly facile with causal inference; this is the crudest observational “study” without even qualitative heuristics to make the comparisons apples-to-apples.
> and expand on why that particular quote offends you?
Generic low tolerance for high V, low M academics: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1
This is the paper he links to, where you can find references to Derrida: https://unisapressjournals.co.za/index.php/Phronimon/article...
Anyway, if this is the kind of nonsense that convinces you, I don’t intent to continue this discussion. We have very different notions of what qualifies as evidence.
I'm sorry if words scare you. The prison system is a direct continuation of slavery in the US. I'm not sure what you're analogy attempts to prove.
My point on recidivism is that US jails focus on punitive rather than rehabilitative justice.
there is no such thing as rehabilitative justice, which is just secularized christian theology of redemption; there is only keeping dangerous or destructive people away from the rest of us. if they manage to reform themselves all the better, but the stats don't indicate any persistent institutional success despite decades of effort and rotating fashions. the thing that actually brought crime down after its tremendous mid-century spike is mass incarceration, ie taking the pareto tail out of circulation
I don't think you're familiar with the topic. Nearly every single person who goes to jail will be released and may become your neighbor. I suggest you research the subject instead of pulling anecdotes from your ass.
" the stats don't indicate any persistent institutional success despite decades of effort and rotating fashions"
This is the exact problem that fuels mass incarceration and costs us tax payers and society infinite sums. In some places, even in Texas this model has been rejected because it's more expensive for tax payers to jail everyone.
Let's spell it out for the obstinate:
Jails have incentive to fill beds.
Jails have incentive to not rehabilitate.
Inmates go to jail and become worse because they're in a bad place.
Inmates are released with hostile support (probation).
Jail bed gets filled.
....
"schools have incentive to fill desks. schools have incentive to not educate. students go to school and become worse because they're in a bad place"
It's an interesting suggestion, but not a good analogy. In many areas schools actually begin the prison pipeline. Children don't stay in school longer or continually cycle in and out. In poor areas they go to jail.
It's clear you hate people. Most people in jail haven't even been convicted of a crime. Nearly all plea, and rarely any go to trial.
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you seriously asking this or joking?????!
Historically criminals from Germany would find a new life in Argentina. And they mostly lived out plain unremarkable lives, so this does work. Not sure everyone appreciated the benefits to society though.
Reminds me of a laugh-out-loud closing paragraph in a 2009 NYT article about the clash between Wikipedia & German lawyers over some infamous murderers' right-to-be-forgotten.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13wiki.html
Read the whole thing for maximum effect, but for me it beautifully demonstrates the contrast between the USA/Wikipedia/NYT ethos of "the truth is always printable and your speech is by default 'on the record'" and alternate expectations elsewhere.
Worth noting that both Germany’s highest criminal court and the European Court of Human Rights in the end decided that the people in question don’t have a right to get their names expunged from archives (or Wikipedia).
still, very limited speech rights compared to the US
Here's the archive link: https://archive.ph/5978
It was well worth the read!
I know Library of Congress has a newspaper database. But does anyone know if newspapers are covered by mandatory deposit in the US? Many European countries archive all national newspapers, printed or digital, so they won't be lost for posterity if deleted by their publisher.
To me it seems unreasonable to require publishers to keep an immutable record. Shouldn't be forced by law to keep up your blog posts. National Libraries and legal deposit were literally made to solve this issue.
The local newspaper here recently shut down. They had close to 100 years of archives, went to the dump. They tried to give them to the library, to the local university, to anyone. No takers.
Again I don't know the scope of US mandatory deposit. But in the countries such as the UK, the Scandinavian countries, or Germany tall issues of such a newspaper would already be in the archive of the national library, in two copies.
Basically, as I understand it, there is none. If you want to collect copyright infringement damages, you have to register for copyright, pay, and deposit a copy. Otherwise you have a copyright on creation and don't need to deposit anything. The vast majority of created works are not deposited anywhere.
What newspaper was this?
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The US has a very weak legal deposit scheme compared to e.g. the UK. IIRC, legal deposit is only required where the author applies for copyright registration, so it’s extremely unlikely that a newspaper would be subject to the legal deposit scheme.
They don't get public procurement announcement ads either? If so, an agency would get a deposit as a proof-of-advertisement.
I wish newspapers were more concerned about being an objective system of record rather than trying to push social goals by helping rewrite history. They should post follow-ups for those wrongly convicted or after the fact caveats but completely memory holeing news stories strikes me as deeply disturbing
I would like them to refrain from naming people until/unless they are actually convicted.
Heck, I would probably go a step further and update defamation laws to make publishing allegations (legal or otherwise) considered equivalent to making allegations. Far too many lives have been ruined by media “just reporting on allegations”
Or they should just report newsworthy public items in an unbiased way and let people decide
Deciding on the accuracy of claims is difficult. We have complicated and lengthy judicial processes that attempt this, and they still make frequent mistakes.
Saying it’s okay to defame people with an “allegedly” disclaimer and relying on the public to somehow do what even our courts cannot, is willfully ignorant.
Publishing an allegation should be legally equivalent to making an allegation.
Is it accurate that this person is being tried for a crime? Did the prosecutor state which crime they were convicted of? Then report on that.
That's not defamation. Stop trying to have newspapers make editorial judgements. Just report the facts.
I work in a local TV newsroom for my job and the idea that the public has about journalism has been deliberately warped. A great example of criticism of bias is that it's widely reported that Luigi Mangione's motive was unknown until they uncovered and verified the manifesto. "Clearly the corporate media is in the pockets of the insurance industry. You can't think of one reason someone would hate the CEO of United?" Of course reporters can relate to your experience with health insurance, they're workers too. However, if you think about it, it's more biased to try to relate to that group (even though almost all the viewers are in it) than it is to ignore your opinion and only say what's in the black and white.
99% of accusations of media bias in my experience are just someone whose experiences don't match those of that particular story.
Lol the conviction rate would drop, as they count on everyone knowing about it to pre mess with the jury.
number of views/shares when someone is accused on something: 876.5 billion
number or views/shares on the follow-up for wrong conviction: 17
Ideally we would live in a society that simply didn't give weight to arrests or accusations, only convictions. (Exceptions may be made for outstanding cases, such as a preponderance of evidence or accusers that appears only after the statute of limitations is up.)
I used to work with someone who was arrested for having a beer in his possession when he was 20 years old. The circumstances were pretty colorful, and so it made the local news. He had since worked his way into management at the company we worked for. One day he mentioned that the article about his arrest finally fell off the Google index after more than a decade, and he was relieved about that. One of his reports in the room immediately jumped on Google and used their tool for re-indexing sites to get the article back in the results for his boss, and then he proudly announced how he "solved that problem!"
Of all the career-limiting moves I've witnessed in my lifetime, that one was pretty near the top.
I'm honestly surprised that after 20 years of the Internet "never forgetting" things like this, we haven't gotten a lot better about forgiving them instead.
Much has been written about Gen Z having a tiny appetite for risky behavior, and the causes are attributed to all sorts of stuff. But my entirely unscientific bet is that there is a real chilling effect to growing up as the first generation that had entirely digital “permanent records” and zero tolerance policies for their entire lives. Very little room for error when, regardless of whether you learned anything from it or not, your mistake is recorded forever and searchable by anybody. And because the rest of society didn’t grow up with that level of retention, they’ll still judge you for it being documented.
I have to admit I kind of inflicted this on my own child. She has her paper diaries, which are sacred, not to be touched, and a box for putting any artifacts she doesn't want me to see. But for any interaction with electronic devices, the rule is "don't do anything you don't want your parents to see. Just assume we can."
But the thing is, her permanent record exists, and I do not control it, so inhibiting her from entering things into it is somewhat called for.
young people today are definitely policed way more heavily than in the past
What!?! Why did they do that? Absolutely bonkers.
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Kind of an ironic comment coming from an anonymous burner account.
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Based on what?
based means 'agreement on the action' in this instance.
I also think search engines sometimes remove results based on subject requests - at least I've seen such notices in Google search results, that some hits were removed due to 'right to be forgotten' policies.
Unpopular opinion (it seems): I think it is OK to some extent. Not for serious crimes (violence, murder etc.) but there's an awful lot of 'lesser crimes' reported with full names where I think subjects might deserve a clean slate or where people have some right to privacy. In the extreme case, everything court-related and all infractions could be public and subject to auto-generated news, and forever searchable: traffic fines, civil cases, neighbor complaints (either way) etc. All parts of an immutable record for everyone to look up by name. I personally think that is a violation of privacy, so it has to be balanced. Maybe the best balance is not to write the names to begin with.
In Denmark where I'm from, court cases are almost always public and the subject names are read aloud as well; however the names are not listed on the court lists or in the publicly accessible version of the verdicts. In order for the media to learn the name, a journalist has to physically go and see the trial. This already prevents automation and ensures prioritization by the media. Furthermore, most news media have a policy of only writing the subject's name after a guilty verdict has been found and even then only if the verdict was of some severity (unless it is a public person). I just checked on media outlet and their policy was to only write the name in case of a custodial sentence of at least 24 months. If it weren't for such policies, even relatively small cases would be reported with full name and be searchable forever.
I'd feel better about a "right to comment":
So instead of deleting the record of my arrest, I could add some kind of comment explaining that I was not convicted in the end.
rebuttals are never read by anyone. there are numerous examples of this like in our modern age a completely bogus story will “go viral” and will be shared / read by millions and millions while a retraction will go completely unnoticed.
even more serious, bogus scientific studies like the one that started the whole “vaccines cause autism” while fully disputed cannot be undone with a retraction/rebuttal
In my imagined system, the rebuttal/comment is displayed right next to the original story.
Unfortunately so much information is spread through half-remembered tweets of quotes from screenshots of tumblr posts, a lot of people will never see the original story to begin with. Sometimes I feel like I have to pull people's teeth to get straight talk and links out of people making serious accusations instead of indirect references.
it won’t be read as it came after the original story and is no longer “interesting.”
imagine if say Diddy got exonerated of all charges against him and leaves jail tonight. subsequently imagine every story written since his arrests gets a disclaimer “the accused was cleared of all charges” - that gon help Diddy in any way? perhaps Diddy is a bad example but it don’t matter where you put the rebuttal - it will be completely ignored
The right of rebuttal!
I'm sympathetic to amending articles related to people who were accused of crimes they didn't commit, and were later acquitted or had those charges dropped—that's a matter of correcting the record. I disagree with destroying the historical record itself, if the expunged stories were factual accounts of real events. Those things ought to be immutable. Journalists engaged in real journalism have special protections because they have special responsibilities in society, one of which is to truthfully document history as it unfolds. If they just give up those responsibilities, people may eventually start questioning what makes them different than everybody else with a hot take on the internet.
I know someone who was (in my opinion, clearly) taken in to the witness protection program. That’s the only time I’ve seen every trace of a person disappear. Yes, there are a few stray dangling references to that person in a few documents I found. But if their life is legitimately threatened by an adversary, I can be sympathetic to having the records expunged.
Isn’t that Wilson’s job in 1984 if I recall correctly, been a while since reading it.
Winston, but yes he is a records editor at minitrue.
This whole criminal record piece of shit is a crime on its own. I believe that records of people who served their time or just have been arrested/carded and then let free must be sealed and not accessible to general employers.
Some obvious exceptions can apply but generally people should not be penalized for what they've been penalized already.
Employers would need then to not be liable for the actions of their employees.
Are they now? I see no reason why they should as long as it does not fall under special exception list. Like pedos working in kindergarten. But attempt to hire those would raise that special exception flag anyways.
They are externalizing that liability on to the rest of society then. It's obviously in everybody's interests that convicted criminals can get jobs outside of crime.
Employers just Google candidates now, not even worth paying for a real background check. It's all out there.
IMO it would be much better to redact names instead of deleting the entire stories. Newspapers in other countries like Germany never write the full names, anyway.
You often find them on X though.
thank god for the wayback machine
If the newspaper uses robots.txt to exclude the deleted article's URL then archive.org will also remove it from their archives.
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Presumably this will increase business sand value for the various private companies that sit on silos of such data that you access for a price.
That actually could help.
A big reason that say 50 years ago if you had made a newsworthy mistake when young and then had been clean for decades after that mistake being in newspaper didn't cause you to have trouble getting jobs or housing was that it took effort for people to find that archived newspaper item.
Move to a new town far enough away that your youthful mistake didn't make the papers there and build your new life there. If someone in the new town wanted to see if you had been in the news in the old town they had to actually get someone to go to the newspaper archives in the old town and search them.
There might not be any indexing of the archives good enough to allow going right to stories that mention you. They might end up having to just manually scan old newspapers (actual physical newspaper or microfiche copies).
That's too expensive for people to routinely do it for everyone they hire or rent to.
Now the records are digitized and on the internet. They have been indexed by search engines and used to train LLMs.
THey dont have to go searching. They have most of it, if not all, already in their systems. A lot of it from far more reliable sources than newspapers.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2024/11/data-broker-e...
But there are far far worse (in term of all manner of personal details) you can buy
This article fails to include any context and background that "right to be forgotten" was first legally established in Europe in 2014.
https://www.judyrecords.com/ probably has it.
And this is a potential issue, because you might be able to persuade a newspaper to remove an article, you can get your criminal record expunged, but it's very unlikely you can persuade a court to totally seal a record of the case, especially if it has appellate issues.
This is a huge disservice to the public. Lots of offenders are repeat offenders, and the public needs to know who they are. Or maybe someone just wants to look up an old news story they remember. More fundamentally, this type of action is just a manipulation of the public and not journalism, which should be a neutral way of sharing information.
No just lots but almost all.
63% of violent offenders reoffend but that actually undercounts the amount of crimes that are caused by repeat offenders because there are some people offending 10+ times.
A three strikes rule would eliminate nearly half of all violent crime because nearly half of violent crime is committed by people who have already been convicted of 3+ other violent crimes.
In the Seattle area there’s a huge trend of reoffending criminals performing larger crimes as time goes, because they face no real consequences. This is happening because activist judges, who typically run unopposed and don’t face consequences themselves, are releasing dangerous criminals back into the public. As a recent example, an activist judge released a teen who committed felony robbery back into the public, against prosecutors’ pleas, and he ended up stabbing and disemboweling another teen.
https://komonews.com/news/local/everett-lions-park-stabbing-...
> there’s a huge trend of reoffending criminals performing larger crimes as time goes
Is there evidence of it? In my experience, people take a few incidents as ammunition for their reactionary attacks on 'activists'. But that doesn't mean it is or isn't happening.
Statistically, across the USA, a large majority of the judges are ex-prosecutors and definitely not "activists." I've personally known dozens of criminal court judges and I can't think of a single one that routinely sentences on the low side or would be considered an "activist." Even the defense lawyers I know that become judges usually sentence punitively, as if to show they aren't biased.
Which suggests rehab might be better than prison for getting these people to give up violence.
> A three strikes rule would eliminate nearly half of all violent crime because nearly half of violent crime is committed by people who have already been convicted of 3+ other violent crimes.
LMAO. Twenty-nine states have a three strikes rule, and their violent crime hasn't decreased by half.
Source: https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/three-strikes...
Maybe it has dropped relative to what it would have been otherwise.
Then presumably the states with these rules will be the least violent in the country, right?
Spoiler: they’re not. In fact several of the states without those rules have less violent crime.
If you want to say each state is different, sure. But there is zero way of proving your hypothesis.
I was locked up. I've worked with offenders coming straight out of prison. A majority will return to prison.
Why? Several reasons.
1) When you get out, everything is stacked against you. Despite what you hear, there is almost zero support for those released. You've almost certainly lost all your support networks (family, friends). You have no money, no ID, no bank account, no debit card, no cellphone, no email address, no home, no clothing, no food. You have a criminal record, the newspapers say you're a criminal, the Internet says you're a criminal. It's very, very tough.
2) Your only friends when you get out are other ex-cons. Most people in the system have suffered from drug addictions. Everyone you know will be trying to get you to use again. And if they can get you to use then they can get you to steal to get money to pay them for drugs, so they can pay for their own drugs.
3) Only the first stint in jail really sucks. When you walk back into jail you walk back in as a boss. You know the system, you know the routines, you're probably going back to the same jail, so you know the guards. All your friends are there. When you walk in the door your buddies will give you a starter kit to get you going. You're not scared of anyone or anything. After the first time, not only are you not scared to return, you might be thankful for the rest from the hardships of being released.
Various by system - South Africa has a 9 out of 10 recidivism rate, the US 7 out of 10, Finland 3 out of 10. China, reportedly, has just over 1 out of 10 .. although the reason there is they apparently execute serial recidivists.
Finland puts some effort into looking what circumstances land citizens in jail and addressing those and post time served support.
Yes, sorry, my comment is specific to the USA. A lot of countries have better and/or different (China) ways of dealing with recidivism.
It's horrible that if you go to prison once, then that's basically your whole life from now on. Most people will never escape the revolving door.
Every single person I know who has been to prison is counting down the days until they end up locked up again.
No need to apologise, the contrast is worthy of some reflection.
Australia does somewhat better than the US, but it's sharply broken on various demographics leading to rate quotes ranging from 32%, to 50%, to 60% (close to the US) depending on which populations are focused on.
FWiW the US inspires much health, education, prison, etc. policy here .. albeit more often as a counter point or warning.
There's a lot of research on ban-the-box policies[1]. I assume this applies here as well.
>I assume this applies here as well.
That it won't have much effect, and might actually be counterproductive?
Hiring discrimination is hard to control, and background checks are still legal.
This doesn't work well. It results in additional discrimination. The state of the art is, as I understand it, "Fair Chance employment", where the employer explicitly agrees to hire people with criminal records. We're well on our way to the majority of employers opting in, it's snowballed nicely. And it gives jobseekers a big red flag if the company doesn't have that policy.
that's not how fair chance works -- it just means the company will consider whether or not the offense(s) are relevant to the job. the employer isn't committing to hire more people with criminal records
> the company will consider whether or not the offense(s) are relevant to the job
I doubt many employers would consider armed robbery to be a relevant job skill.
We are saying the same thing. :)
A flip side to this is that you can go here to see archives of newspapers:
https://news.google.com/newspapers
After reviewing lots of southern papers during the 1960s, shockingly (!) entire months are gone. I was really hoping to read their editorials saying what they thought MLK really was at that time, and then see what they wrote today. I figured this would be more fun than paying attention to Trump on inauguration day, which weirdly falls on the same day as MLK day.
Let's be frank, there probably isn't ad revenue for old crime stories that aren't sensationalized. So, the newspapers owners are not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, or their thoughts on the criminal justice system.
How about instead, they agree moving forward to not publish crime stories about poor people at all? That I could get excited about.
What would happen to people’s perception of crime if only the crime perpetuated by the rich and powerful was reported on?
It's probably just me, but it feels like reporting on crime is very lopsided and slanted against the powerless.
The powerless are usually the victims, not the criminals. Criminals are by definition exerting their power (usually through physical violence) over people who have even less "power."
Not everything is about power dynamics, and crime rarely is. Far more often it is about selfishness.
Again, would love to be proved wrong, but I think physical violence is far and away the majority of crime reported, but the minority (in my own definition) of crimes committed.
As an example, I think RealPage and the rent collusion they were doing clearly is illegal. And, has impacted hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.. But, you'll see a lot more reporting on a shooting in every newspaper, even though in most cases that would directly impact only a few people.
I suspect the majority of crime committed to be civil infractions and petty crime (speeding, parking violations, minor theft, vandalism, then on to things like drug use and DUI). Then you get to violent crime. By sheer quantity, I'd guess there are more violent crimes than fraud.
Fraud may impact far more people at once, but there are a lot fewer instances of it than of violence, if we're talking quantity of commission and not quantity of victims.
i’ve seen tons of reporting on realpage relative to pretty much any shooting other than the Luigi Mangione thing. if you mean you see shootings reported on more overall, well yeah - the magnitude of impact of all shootings in the US is greater than realpage
Hackers are down voting your comment, but anybody who has been "on the inside" in dealing with criminal cases knows you are speaking the truth. Criminals usually seek out their victims among the people with the least power: Children, youths, addicts, isolated people, mentally weak.
This is just CRT nonsense.
Where in my comment did I bring up race?
The comment I was replying to claimed criminals were criminals because they were powerless. I think most criminals are criminals because they're bad people (the opposite of CRT's Marxist analysis).
for national news i strongly feel like it is the opposite, it’s mostly high profile white collar crime
I only hear about poor people committing crimes usually on the local news.
Everything else is billionaire did this, politician did that, corporation did both of those and more.
Sure, you don't read other places' local news. But those places' residents do.
It’s just you.
This could create an imbalance of power:
It could prevent the public from knowing of the past misdeeds of the powerful. It's much different to give someone with no power an opportunity to move forward, compared to removing an essential check on people who have power.
Also, it seems likely that powerful people will still have access to this data, in news databases, in the data accumulated in the profiles of marketing and surveillance companies, etc.
>It could prevent the public from knowing of the past misdeeds of the powerful.
In a world where books, radio, movies, television and the internet didn't exist, and where people had memories like goldfish, maybe.
What's the name of the most powerful drug trafficker in your region?
I don't know, I don't use drugs and I'm not involved in organized crime.
Yet, these are some of the most powerful people in your region, and you don't even know their names.
But you know the name of the mayor, even though you're not a member of the city council or involved in setting policy.
I seriously doubt a drug dealer is the most powerful person in my region. I live in a small suburb of Austin, Texas, not the setting of a crime drama where the mobs and cartels run everything. I also don't know the name of the mayor, why the hell would I? The mayor is nobody. And if I want to know who the mayor is, I'll check the internet. I don't need a paper for that.
Well what are you doing in a comment thread about news reporting if you don't care about any of this stuff? I'm pretty certain that the drug dealers and the network of power they represent has influence on the lives of high school kids even in your sleepy suburb. If you don't care about this, then fine. But many people do. Just like they care about local politics, local business, and everything else that a newspaper is supposed to report on.
I don't need to know the names of specific drug dealers or politicians to care about my community or even engage in activism. If I do need to know, again, I don't need the paper to tell me.
You're wildly spinning the topic off the rails. The subject of this thread is not news reporting per se, but newspapers removing old crime stories, and whether that would, to quote upthread, "prevent the public from knowing of the past misdeeds of the powerful."
I'm arguing it wouldn't because newspapers are not the sole source of knowledge for anyone and haven't been for a very long time, and because such stories are a matter of obvious public interest, and would certainly remain archived.
What the article is discussing is a consideration by some (not even all) papers to consider remove old stories of minor criminal incidents on a case by case consideration. If anything, this protects the less powerful more so than the powerful.
You're right. The hacker discussion is about all kinds of crime, including murder, but the article is about minor incidents.
"There was some initial internal resistance, but eventually Quinn and his staff came up with general parameters: they would not erase names in cases of violence, sex offenses, crimes against children or corruption."
It's a bit odd, because newspapers rarely report on minor crimes, and when they do they don't put the names of the guilty in print.
It depends on where you are, but where I am local papers report on minor crimes, with names, all the time.
And even if they no longer do, archives may still exist. Which as the article states is a problem when employers will search those archives and refuse to hire for even minor offenses, regardless of context.
Powerful people can pay professionals to erase their crimes from the internet. You can barely find any specific information about everybody involved in the 2008 mortgage fraud, because everybody involved had it scrubbed.
It is a hard job to figure out where the boundaries go on what and whom should be forgotten.
It's pretty clear which Americans the media wants to forgive and which it wants to punish.
I have a good story related to the topic of discussion :)
I am the author of one site - a dictionary of the English language, which, in addition to the definition of a word from several dictionaries, shows the use of words in different contexts. One of the contexts is news - so for example for the word "window" it shows several news headlines containing the word "window".
So, about 10 years ago, I received a very rudely written email demanding that I remove a reference to a certain person from the text of a news story. The news story was about a misdemeanor that a certain person had committed. Since the email was very rudely written and since I hadn't broken any law, I just ignored it and forgot about it. Over the course of about six months, this person bombarded me with dire threats and also wrote complaints to my hosting provider. The hosting company forwarded these letters to me and asked me to look into it, but did not demand anything because no law had been broken.
One day, after many e-mails with threats of legal action, and about 6 months, I received the first normal message, in which the person asked what he should do to make me delete the information he wanted.
Here I need to mention that for all this time this person has parroted me quite a lot with his threats and I had no desire to meet him halfway.
I wrote that I would delete the necessary information as soon as I received a request from him, written in the form of a short (!) verse.
Another month or so passed, during which this person argued and tried to change my mind (instead of sending a short verse)
…
As soon as he did, I connected to the database with a smile, deleted the entry he asked for and wrote him an email wishing him good luck. I hope he is doing well now :)
What is a short verse?
Or, keep the info but change our perceptions.
Have any monetized this feature yet?
I'm ok with this, as long as it's systemic. Otherwise it's just another way for people with means to get a leg up on people without means. If it's, "we delete all crime stories after N years", then fine, especially for low level, non violent stuff.
The punishment for crimes should come from the justice system and people should be able to pay their dues and move on.
You're describing punishment by the state. One is entitled to move on from a fine or imprisonment. One is not entitled to a clean social or occupational reputation. There's a good reason those consequences exist.
>One is not entitled to a clean social or occupational reputation
In plenty of jurisdictions people are entitled precisely to that. Here in Germany the entire basis for punishment is a right to full reintegration after you have been punished. A just community punishes once, not five hundred times over and that goes both for the people and the state (which are the same thing in a democracy, the latter punishes on behalf of the former). If you come out of prison and you've paid back your debt only to be ostracized and arbitrarily pursued by a witch hunting public that's not a just society, it's a mob. It's worth repeating, if someone goes to prison you're putting them there, it's "we the people vs X". "The state" is exercising power on your behalf.
That's the basis of a working social contract. You harm the community, you pay, but afterwards we have an actual duty to resocialize you, otherwise we just acted in arbitrary and disproportionate fashion. Criminals have rights in a civilized society, including to privacy and not be discriminated against, by say employers.
> we have an actual duty to resocialize you
You may feel that you have this duty. I do not feel that I have this duty. You are placing upon me an obligation that I will not accept.
Personally, I like living in a liberal democracy where we reintegrate criminals.
You might be misunderstanding the word "resocialize".
It has nothing to do with you.
I believe it's Scandinavia, or maybe Denmark, where there is no punishment for escaping or attempting to escape prison.
The courts, community has decided the need to be free is a fundamental human drive, and cannot be punished.
Sure, when you're caught, you'll be taken back to complete your sentence, but you won't get additional punishment for the effort.
I've heard it's the same in Germany.
It’s useful for society if there’s a way for criminals to reintegrate into society.
If potential employers can always check for a criminal record, and refuse to hire criminals, then guess what those criminals will do? The answer isn’t “starve to death”.
Previously there were practical limits to how long a sentence could follow you. If you moved across the country, you might lose whatever family you still have, but at least you could get a fresh start. Nowadays that’s effectively impossible.
There are employers who don't care about criminal records, at least up to a point. Most trade unions don't, and many other blue-collar employers don't. A criminal record isn't going to prevent you from working, but it might limit your choices.
It depends on the crime and the job. I wouldn't hire an embezzler to do the books, for example.
Why is that useful? To me it sounds like society’s law followers would be taking risk to the benefit of the criminal. I think certain crimes that are petty - like traffic violations or whatever - sure reintegration makes sense. But burglaries, robberies, assault, murder, etc - I think keeping them jailed is probably best for everyone.
People learn, change, and grow. People experience things and change their perspectives. The person I am at 45 is not the person I was at 25.
Also, some folks believe crime has root causes in systems outside the self -- poverty, violence, compulsion -- helping people out of those systems and then seeing if they can contribute in society without those pressures against them.
> especially for low level, non violent stuff
This is codeword for financial, white collar crimes. So, it is definitely a policy serving the rich.
Minor drug offences could also fit that though — possession or even someone dealing weed mightn't be directly involved in any violence at all
Or petty theft, shoplifting etc.
I think GP probably meant "stupid stuff young people do" minor drugs, drinking underage or even DUI, fighting, theft, vandalism.
If you were under ~25, and it was "stupid kid stuff" why ruin someone's life.
If you're 40 with a good job and get caught embezzeling, totally different in my view. Old enough to know better.
More or less, yeah, you got it.
Shoplifting is low level, non violent, and very very common. The only shoplifting I've heard of by the rich is a famous actress who had a shoplifting fetish.
It's generally the disadvantaged and poor who get hit for low-level, non-violent stuff.
Are they the ones also committing more of them statistically - is that why (or are you saying they are targeted)? And if so why is that the case - there are plenty of people who are disadvantaged and poor and don’t commit crimes. Look at various immigrant minority groups for example.
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> It's generally the disadvantaged and poor who get hit for low-level, non-violent stuff.
In my country (New Zealand) judges let off young people who look like them, regularly.
"This young man [not but almost always a man] has a great future and he should not be burdened...."
That is if they are an aspiring accountant, laywer, sports star, etcetera
If they are a young bricklayer, welder, etcetera it is tough luck
It is absolutely disgusting. No wonder so many people want to burn the whole thing down
I don't usually call thing "dumb" but this seems like a bad idea and overly forgiving. This is coming from someone who has hire nonviolent offenders in the past because I think it's a good thing to give people a second chance. You don't fix things by hiding the past.
Hitler was an artist.
> One in three U.S. adults has been arrested by age 23.
Does that seem crazy to anyone else? I'm in Ireland and can't think of one person in my extended family and friends that has any interaction with the police beyond routine insurance/DUI checkpoints or reporting incidents like car accidents.
It'll vary a lot by demographic. It's not that 1/3 of every group of US adults has ever been arrested, it's that there are some groups where hardly ever have and some groups where a huge fraction have, and it averages out to 1/3.
In particular, I bet that if you look at poor black men who live in US cities the figure is very very high. Maybe it's close to 100%.[1] If you look at middle-class white women living in the suburbs, not so much.
Also: the fact that the report is about the US and you're in Ireland is very relevant; the US has a lot more arrests than Ireland. (I would guess, though I haven't looked at stats and I don't know whether they exist, that the US also has more racial divergence in the figures than Ireland.)
(I shall not get into the highly contentious and political question of why these things are the case.)
I'll guess that your extended family and friends are mostly (1) not in the US, (2) white, (3) middle class, and (4) not living in city centres. All of which makes them drastically less likely to end up having difficult interactions with the police.
[1] I did some crude arithmetic on the figures at https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ... and got an estimate that 108% of black men in the US have a criminal record. That seems unlikely to be correct :-) but suggests that the real figure is probably pretty high. (I suspect it does also indicate that the "up to 1/3" is an overestimate.)
> Also: the fact that the report is about the US and you're in Ireland is very relevant; the US has a lot more arrests than Ireland.
While some of the effect may be more frequent and longer incarceration per arrest, the US (until recently being passed last year by El Salvador) has had the highest incarceration rate in the world, so its a good bet that it has a higher than typical arrest rate for the developed world, as well.
I live in Cincinnati and I'm continually surprised to meet African Americans who all seem to have an immediate family member who has been shot. And that's without the subject even coming up with a lot of them. At this point, I would be afraid to ask. (Most are not involving police)
Among whites the only person I know to have been shot dropped his shotgun and accidentally blew half his forearm off while hunting.
>[1] I did some crude arithmetic on the figures at https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ... and got an estimate that 108% of black men in the US have a criminal record. That seems unlikely to be correct :-)
How are you calculating the proportion of black men with criminal records? The pdf mentions that black men are 6x more likely to be incarcerated, but that's not the same as having a criminal record.
That link doesn't point directly to data, only an expired event. What is the link please? For state-level data, did you mean: https://www.sentencingproject.org/research/detailed-state-da...
That's very weird. My comment referred to this link: https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ... and the person replying to it quoted what I wrote but changed the link. (Presumably by mistake; I can't think of any reason why someone would do it maliciously.) Anyway, the thing earlier in this paragraph is what I was pointing at.
Yeah, that's one reason why the arithmetic is crude. The PDF says the following things:
About 1/3 of US adults have been arrested by age 23.
About 1/3 of US adults have a criminal record.
Black men in the US are about 6x more likely to be incarcerated than white men in the US.
These figures aren't all about the same thing -- different classes of (alleged) offence, and also "adults" versus "men" -- and indeed the black:white ratios may be different for arrests, and criminal records, and incarcerations.
It's not obvious to me whether we should expect the black:white ratio to be much higher for incarcerations than for arrests or criminal records. If it is, then that would indeed be one of several possible explanations for how the crude calculation ends up with more than 100% of black men in the US having a criminal record.
Anyway, my calculation just pretended that the black:white ratio is the same for arrests / criminal records (take your pick, both are alleged to be up to ~1/3 of US adults) among adults as for incarcerations among men. Probably false, but I was just looking for a ballpark figure.
>> I bet that if you look at poor black men who live in US cities the figure is very very high
Blacks are 14% of the population, so black men would be under 7%, poor black men who live in cities would be less than that.
So that doesn't explain the statistic.
I'm trying to figure out where that number comes from. The link to The Sentencing Project claims this, but the link to NCSL instead states "Approximately 77 million Americans, or 1 in every 3 adults, have a criminal record."
Like, this feels like it's got to include speeding tickets in the mix to get something that high.
> Like, this feels like it's got to include speeding tickets in the mix to get something that high.
Speeding is a civil, not criminal, infraction.
You can't have the highest prison population in the world for decades and not end up with a bunch of people with criminal records.
The U.S. prison population is around 2M people. I'm not sure how that translates to 77M people with criminal records. (I'm serious about wanting to know more about these statistics and how they're generated. My brief searches trying to find where the data claimed in the linked infographics comes from got me nowhere.
EDIT: I found the [National Longitudinal Survey of Youth](https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm) and as far as I could tell from some super quick excel formulas it's about 32% of interview subjects (people born 1980 - 1984) reported being arrested at least once by 2021.
The vast majority of those with criminal records do not serve prison time. They plea bargain for work release, probation, diversion programs, etc.
For example some types of DUI (drunk driving) is a felony in many states, but extremely common in the population as a whole. Very few do actual prison time unless especially egregious, are repeat offenders, or if they hurt someone during the commission of that crime.
Many other examples abound - ranging from felony (over $1,000 in most places) shoplifting, breaking and entering, bar fights, etc.
Felonies used to mean "high crimes" and were intended to be exceedingly rare and for exceptional crimes, but they have lost any meaning whatsoever over the interceding years.
I believe "criminal records" also includes folks with misdemeanors which is even more common and almost never has associated prison time included in sentencing.
Not sure if the statistics you're referencing re: "criminal records" even includes arrests in that. Many arrests don't result in further prosecution on top of all the above.
I used to know this guy that got two felony DUIs in a week (both with injuries) and all he ended up with was six months in county jail (plus, I'm guessing, a shitton of fines) after all was said and done.
Dude totaled at least his two cars (don't know what happened to the cars he hit), hurt some people and obviously didn't care since he did it twice. Of course it was over a woman...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4443707/
It excludes "minor traffic violations."
> Brame, Turner, Paternoster, and Bushway (2012) recently investigated the arrest experience of a national sample of American youth and found that 25–41% of those youth reported having been arrested or taken into custody for a nontraffic offense by age 23.
> Assuming the missing cases are missing at random, about 30% of black males have experienced at least one arrest by age 18 (vs. about 22% for white males); by age 23 about 49% of black males have been arrested (vs. about 38% for white males). Earlier research using the NLSY showed that the risk of arrest by age 23 was 30%
Speeding tickets are not criminal.
In the 1960s, the Air Force decided that they had too many candidates for pilots, and to winnow it down all candidates with a speeding ticket were disqualified.
I've often felt this was unwise, as you want fighter pilots to be aggressive.
So they looked at traffic infractions record, too; interesting.
Yeah, but you don't want them getting caught.
Really high, and crazy, but apparently legit -see https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4443707/#:~:text=Br....
The fact that it's self reported makes me wonder how close to the actual number it is. Also, how did they choose their sample.
Edit: Link to original paper https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/32982174/Turner_-_Appe...
It's the NLSY, about as good a sample as one could hope for.
When I went to a boxing gym in Maryland there were a lot of young black guys. For them going to prison was totally normal thing. Often they themselves had been to prison or their relatives. Some had scars from gunshots. I can’t even imagine how it is to grow up in that environment.
I had a surreal experience riding a Greyhound bus where I was the only passenger who hadn't just gotten out of prison. They were comparing conditions in various prisons the way you and I might compare coffee shops.
Having been locked up, I was regularly the only white guy in a whole building. It's completely normalized for Black youth to go to jail. I hesitate to say it, but it's practically considered a rite of passage. It's really sad. Some of these kids are absolutely smart as fuck and could do anything with their lives if their environment hadn't failed them.
When they get to jail, every one of their friends is there already, so it's way easier for them to process and deal with than it is for some random middle-class white dude.
Looking at the PDF they link to, it doesn't say "has been arrested" it says "has criminal record". Maybe those 2 things are the same, but I'm not so sure.
Criminal records would include all misdemeanors.
You can get a misdemeanor without ever being arrested. In some cases trivial things like speeding can be a misdemeanor requiring a court appearance.
25 years ago I got a misdemeanor citation for rollerblading on the sidewalk in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, which required me to make a court appearance and pay for a VERY expensive lawyer to get the charge thrown out. If instead I'd paid the $25 fine, I'd have had a permanent misdemeanor charge on my record.
Having a record of such a minor infraction doesn’t seem to me a problem, in and of itself. The problem would be if such records were public, available to potential employers, etc. If the records were private to the courts, that’d be something else. Not sure how it is in USA.
It’s a difficult balance. On one hand, privacy is important. On the other hand, visibility into the system is an important check on the power of law enforcement. It’s especially important for arrests; you really, really do not want the police to be allowed to secretly jail people. But it’s important for other things too. In this example, if the police were using rollerblading citations as a way to harass a certain group of people, it’s good to have access to that information to be able to discover this.
The solution is to make summary statistics available to the public but no names.
Just publicize that there have been 471 citations for rollerblading without listing the names of those affected.
So you're saying I should have paid the fine and had the charge recorded, creating a criminal record for myself?
Not in the least. I’m just saying there are good reasons for everything that did happen to be public record. (And some good reasons for privacy. There’s a conflict and a balance to be found.)
In the USA it is public record which in practice means anyone with money can get the record. This is potentially a large part of the high US recidivism. Once you have been convicted once, most employers will see the record and refuse to hire you forever.
No, it means anyone with — or without — money can get the record right here:
I don’t think anybody particularly cares about non-violent misdemeanors, except maybe drug or alcohol offenses.
Felony on your record? Yeah, you’re basically fucked for life.
> Not sure how it is in USA.
Assuming the record was as an adult, it will be reported publicly by the county (or other jurisdiction) court system and be on public record. This used to be a musty records keeping office somewhere you'd have to go in person and request the records of the individual in question - so without prior knowledge of where a conviction was it was difficult to "background check" people without extensive investigation.
Then these became digitized and put on-line most places.
The larger issue is data brokers who aggregate the records of literally everyone in the entire US (or close to it) into one database you can pay them to make lookups into. They send someone to every courthouse in the US (well, they sub-contract others who sub-contract, etc.) and get all new records. This builds a nationally searchable database that more or lives on indefinitely. All legal since the records are public information.
You can get records sealed and such by court order, but once it's aggregated it's basically a game of whack-a-mole. You can go further and get it expunged which typically requires a state governor signature or similar, where then you might have better luck with said data brokers as the penalties for reporting it are heavy in some states.
It's a very fractionalized system, built out of bailing wire and duct tape like most such records are in the US for historical reasons.
Some employers simply have a binary policy of "zero criminal records" and don't go any further into detail beyond that. Other employers are more lenient, but the more desirable a job is the more likely you are to run into the former policy.
Adult criminal records are public in the US (juvenile records vary by state but are usually confidential, and I think in most states also automatically expunged after a certain period or age.)
Same thing in Maryland. Speeding is a criminal charge here.
I was charged with misdemeanor reckless driving for going the speed limit in heavy rain and hydroplaning into another car. My fault for sure, but a criminal charge seems over the top.
Spent $1,500 on a lawyer who negotiated it to a trivial “failure to maintain control” ticket with a maybe $100 fine.
The system is dumb. Or maybe it’s smart, giving people with means, like us, favorable treatment without having to outright say “poor people aren’t worthy.”
> I was charged with misdemeanor reckless driving for going the speed limit in heavy rain and hydroplaning into another car. My fault for sure, but a criminal charge seems over the top.
If they charged every rain related accident in Arizona as a criminal offence the court system would be clogged up for months after the monsoon season...
Frankly, I think the original sentence was accurate. If that had been a cyclist instead of a car then they’d be dead.
The speed limit is a limit, not a requirement. Driving fast in conditions where you can hydroplane is absolutely reckless.
Restricted access highway, no cyclists allowed or present.
I don't think “reckless” is the right word. Clueless, really. I didn’t know there was a problem until I lost traction.
Whatever you want to call it, do you really think that’s worth a criminal charge? Possibly destroying my livelihood over this? Do you think the possibility of criminal charges is what stops me from doing it again, versus the potential damage to life and property, including my own? Lay it out for me.
I was taught not to drive fast on roads like that, specifically due to the risk of hydroplaning. Significantly slower than the likely speed limit, unless the speed limit on your highway was 60 kmph. You never do know how good your braking action is going to be, so preemptively slowing down is the only option.
I don’t believe your driving was safe. I also don’t believe you were taught driving correctly, assuming you’re American, and I might also believe that driving slowly would have been equally dangerous, if the other cars did not.
Furthermore, I don’t believe a reckless driving charge without injury should be a criminal matter or that a criminal conviction should destroy someone’s livelihood.
However, four wrongs don’t make a right. It just makes a mess.
From your use of “kmph” I’m going to guess that you live in a country with decent driver training.
I’m in the US, where driver training goes just slightly beyond checking if the candidate is capable of fogging a mirror. I learned in a northern state so we learned a lot about how to deal with ice and snow, but I don’t think there was anything about rain. If there was, I’d forgotten it in the 20+ years since I last had any training or check.
I agree with you that my driving was unsafe and I wasn’t taught well. I don’t think my behavior even came close to criminal.
I am confused about your assessment of my charge. You previously said it was correct. Now you think it shouldn’t have been a criminal charge?
Well, I originally missed the “criminal” bit. I was agreeing that it was reckless. A misdemeanour wouldn’t be considered a criminal charge where I live; it goes through a similar system, but has far fewer implications.
The original fine seems reasonable.
Ok. Unfortunately that bit was the entire point. If it had been a “reckless driving” traffic ticket I wouldn’t have a problem with it and wouldn’t be commenting about it here.
You hit another vehicle, at excessive speed, in poor weather. Fortune meant that the occupants of that other vehicle were not injured or worse.
Writing it off as "Oh, I was just clueless" is a little downplaying.
Yes, it's a one off instance, but the stakes in vehicles can be very high, hence our requirements for licensing and insurance.
Well I met those requirements and still didn’t know enough to avoid this.
On one hand, there’s a responsibility to seek further knowledge and self-evaluate. I accept responsibility for not doing that here.
On the other hand, having the government sign off on your training as officially adequate, then threatening to jail you and put a conviction on your record when it wasn’t, seems rather uncool. Hold me liable for damages? Sure. Ticket me? Ok. But charge me with an actual crime?
People gain more experience. Many/most also naturally become more cautious with age. I know there's a school of thought here that if we just made licensing more time consuming and expensive--whatever the cost in employment possibilities etc.--problems would go away. But I'm not sure how much classes, beyond a certain point, for a young driver really help.
It says both. The 1 in 3 refers to those under 23.
> One in three U.S. adults has been arrested by age 23.
The has a criminal record refers to the population as a whole.
> [...] between 70 million and 100 million—or as many as one in three Americans—have some type of criminal record
Linked PDF: https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ...
The prison-industrial complex in the United States encourages this. While less than 10% of prisoners are in “for-profit” prisons, there’s a large industry of private companies beyond this that profit off federal prisons; in addition to providing cheap prison labor or goods made by prison laborers (AKA modern slavery)
Many of those private prisons also have clauses with their contracts that the city/county/whatever is required to pay per bed, regardless of occupancy. "If we're paying for it, might as well use it".
That seems exceptionally high, and I'm assuming the study was mostly (all?) urban subjects, which could skew the results heavily. I can't think of more than 2 people I know that have an arrest history, and I know a LOT of (non-urban dwelling) people.
No, the sample was the NLSY: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4443707/
Well arrested doesn't mean thrown in jail. Sometimes you are arrested then just given a citation. Open intoxicant, noise violation, underage drinking, speeding, bonfire in a field, peeing behind the bar, etc. I can see it.
Yes it seems crazy but this map is crazy too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
The US is, by comparison to the rest of the developed world (and much of the rest of the world, besides) a very high police interaction regime, owing in no small part to the institutional and cultural aftereffects of the history of slavery and the use of the criminal justice system as a direct substitute for private chattel slavery when it was abolished.
It's kind of my experience too, we all live in our (socioeconomic) bubbles. You are much more likely to get involved with the police if you were raised by poor parents. Or rather, you are much less likely to get involved with the police if you were raised by (comparatively) rich parents.
Policing and imprisonment are very aggressive here. Arrests very often don't turn into convictions because the police are rewarded for wielding force any way they choose regardless of whether it's justified - their right to do this is legally protected via qualified immunity.
You may already know of Peelian Policing, but if not: Several countries practice a very different model, described as as ‘policing by consent’. Police try to work with and not against citizens, recognising that they are citizens too.
Ireland polices its population this way, USA doesn’t.
As a nerdy, middle class, white guy, I and many of my male friends have been arrested between ages 18 - 25. Usually for drinking underage, public intoxication, or small amounts of marijuana.
It’s an obviously incorrect figure. It must include things like traffic tickets. The guardian is a highly activist and biased publication by their own admission, and not truly “journalistic”.
It’s trivial to search and check. The numbers appear to be accurate.
However that is misleading, the below link talks about problems with the definition of a ‘criminal record.’
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/aug/18/andrew-cuo...
You can figure this for anything, and prepare to be shocked. The variables are the number of incidents per period, the population during that period, and the expected duration an incident could occur. For example, in San Francisco, there are about 4700 car related injuries and deaths per year; about 800000 people; and the life expectancy is high at 83. This gives you 41 years for a cumulative 25% chance to have been involved in your first car injury.
It is crazy. Everyone should be pissed off. Do this for guns, diabetes, etc. Think about the people you know, and how the further you venture into acquaintances, you know someone who has been arrested, injured by a car, injured by a gun, has diabetes, etc.
Some will be looking for math flaws. It’s an exponential model for time until first event, “constant hazard.” It’s actuarial. Nothing unorthodox. If you couldn’t calculate the durations until events insurance couldn’t work. The biggest factors are numerator, denominator and eligible period (ie rate of incidence). The biggest factors are NOT other things…
The reason you doubt this stuff, that you think it’s crazy, isn’t because the math is wrong. You believe very strongly that people involved in crimes and car crashes and guns have personal agency. The discount for panopticon approved safe driving is a pathetic 5-10%! If agency is all it was, auto insurance would be way cheaper.
This is all about the myth about what kinds of agency matter. You cannot be much of a “better” driver. You can’t be a “safer” criminal. Even if you never drove, due to the rate of injuries, it takes 41 years. I didn’t give the figure for causing injuries, just being involved in one, on purpose: we’re primed to assume it’s all about agency. Consider if there were only ONE criminal who commits the same rate of crimes: they’re still going to arrest a ton of people! Or ONE driver who hits everybody: you’re still going to be involved.
The math is easy to understand but people absolutely refuse to question their beliefs about agency.
> For example, in San Francisco, there are about 4700 car related injuries and deaths per year; about 800000 people;
800k permanent residents.
> In 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic more than 26 million visitors travelled to San Francisco.
That changes your statistics quite a bit.
If you include all 26m visitors, the duration that an event could occur correspondingly gets much smaller, from 83 years to whatever the average stay is, which might be days. So it turns out to be about the same.
Anyway, you can Google “how does insurance modeling work” and see for yourself. There are whole teams of people who do this modeling. I am just sharing a simple and representative model, better than to an order of magnitude.
I don't think it does unless you assume that San Francisco roadways are on aggregate dramatically safer or more dangerous than other places.
Indeed. If we assume two days per visitor, that would be 140k additional people.
> For example, in San Francisco, there are about 4700 car related injuries and deaths per year; about 800000 people; and the life expectancy is high at 83. This gives you 41 years for a cumulative 25% chance to have been involved in your first car injury.
It doesn't account for the fact that people can be injured more than once. Taking that into account, the number would be closer to 50 years. It also makes agency more relevant if most of the injuries are concentrated in a smaller group of people (ex: bikers).
> The discount for panopticon approved safe driving is a pathetic 5-10%!
Well, in France, the maximum discount for safe driving is officially -50%, and the maximum penalty for unsafe driving is +250%, calculated based on your history of at-fault accidents. That's a 7x difference! Not only that but if you get into too many accidents, the insurance company may cancel your contract, usually forcing you to go for insurance companies that specialize in high risk customers, which are even more expensive. I don't know about the insurance system where you live, but a 5-10% difference seems crazy.
> 5-10% difference seems crazy.
Well. That’s what it is. It’s crazy only because of how deeply you believe in agency.
If you instead think deeply about the numbers, and then the fact that you are comparing two completely different driving environments, one thing becomes clear: the way the driving environment is designed and driving culture is administered in France might be much better and safer! Then, agency plays a relatively larger role, by definition, even if it is absolutely small everywhere. Whereas in America, such as in San Francisco and many other communities, a lot of injuries are probably attributable to the environment and culture. This is at least the expert consensus is, not just the consensus of insurance companies.
Meh, we’re a rebellious group. Honestly though I would be more interested in what percentage of this ratio are repeat offenders.
> Meh, we’re a rebellious group.
Definitely not the explanation.
20% of the world's prisoners are housed in America. Interactions with police and arrests are very common here.
4.25% of the world's population live in the US.
Right, so the US incarceration rate is almost five times the global average.
Yes but the US is a safer place to live and conduct business than most of the world. And it has a population that’s far more diverse than any other country. Looking at this metric requires context. And it could be that these are great numbers for what you get in return.
The US is not particularly safe. Various indices put it well below other countries -- in the top half, for sure, but it's hardly a safe place.
You'll have to supply evidence that the US is safe, as that's not self evident.
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The US isn't one country.
When you read things like this, compare the EU to the US, not Ireland to the US.
The Southern US is an archipelago of police states that regularly throw black and poor white citizens into jail on flimsy pretexts. New England, meanwhile is another country altogether.
Thankfully we have the Internet Archive. </s>
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That's doubtful. This "panopticon" version of the future is in direct competition with the increasing sophistication of deep fakes and other means of generating content. Instead of everything you've ever done being easily searchable, verified to be you, and there to shame you forever, another view of where we're headed is to where all content from the past is subject to doubts and questions of authenticity. To me, the latter scenario seems likelier to occur.
Whenever I'm openly performing nefarious illegal acts in public, I always wear my Sixfinger, so if anyone takes a photo of me, I can plausibly deny it by pointing out (while not wearing it) that the photo shows six fingers, and obviously must have been AI generated.
In support of said nefarious illegal acts, the Sixfinger includes a cap-loaded grenade launcher, gun, fragmentation bomb, ballpoint pen, code signaler, and message missile launcher. It's like a Swiss Army Finger! You can 3d print a cool roach clip attachment too.
"How did I ever get along with five???"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElVzs0lEULs
https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/sixfinger-sixfinger-man-al...
https://www.museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2010/11/Sixfinger-p...
You don’t avoid 1984 (mass surveillance) by being 1984 (erasing history).
Edit: to expand my thought, what you just said would be erased if we got in the habit of erasing stuff because it might be unpleasant. So while maybe this kind of opposition to Internet Archive would get rid of it, good luck preserving your well intentioned reason for it far into the future. A world in which books are burned/rewritten is a world in which it’s impossible to give a shit about anything on a societal level, including privacy.
Have you ever tried to find the things you said on a forum when you were a teenager?
Every time I do this, most of the stuff I did 20 years ago is outright gone, and it always ends in disappointment-- and I have material info on where and what it should be.
For awhile I could find some of my old bullshit on bash.org, but even that’s gone now.
> That stupid shit you said in some obscure forum when you were a teenager
What's the first presidential election going to be like when the first candidate who was old enough to have a Facebook or myspace runs for election? Each opponent will do anything they can do disparage the 35+ year olds character with the words he uttered as a teenager.
I think one of the unintentional consequences of this newspaper move will be that a great deal of our history will be lost. When I was a kid, the libraries touted how cool it was to peruse old stories in the local paper on microfiche. Now that info is online for $8 per article.
If you take a McLuhanistic perspective on the internet, then the internet is the nervous system of the human world. It's a medium through which information flows at unprecedented speeds (with major consequences worldwide). The nervous system is still new, and with new nervous system growth come weird sensations (pain, tingles, false alarms, weird flashes of joy).
It needs to adapt for a few more centuries.
Most of the things said on the internet are shared to be forgotten seconds later; Information has a half-life. And in a fast medium? That half life can be seconds or minutes.
It doesn't matter too much.
That's not how llms work.
Is this being proposed to get Trump off the hook?
How could it possibly get Trump off the hook?
Ah yes, rewrite history to not offend, what got us here in the first place
As AI tools become more powerful and are used by the public to analyse the news, I suspect we'll see a lot more deletions of news articles to prevent "harmful" narratives from forming.
Would it better to punish the publishers and users of such AI tools instead? A better solution.
What are you referring to and how did that 'get us here'?
This isn't about not offending people.
This is Orwellian gaslighting. These papers should no longer be viewed as authoritive keepers of the public record. Any institution that engages in this kind of memory-holing forfeits all credibility. They can no longer be trusted whatsoever.
Imagine someone who got pardoned by the state for a minor crime (so a clean criminal record) but who still had a newspaper article about them. That would be a raw deal.
If it was reported in a newspaper, then it was deemed to be newsworthy, and that record should be preserved for posterity, for myriad reasons.
Not a raw deal, just the truth. Why should information be deleted? That IS Orwellian.
Because people are prejudiced, and the newspaper article doesn't include an addendum that it should be taken with little to no value, so the impact it could have on someone's life due to people's stupidity is unwarranted.
If we lived in a perfect universe where people were thoughtful and wise I wouldn't care.
This sort of paternalism by “elites” who are “enlightened” and “know better than the proles” is why there is a global pushback against elitism. If people feel like they need this information to protect themselves or their businesses, however misguided, who are you to tell them otherwise?
> If people feel like they need this information to protect themselves or their businesses
The "people" you are referring to here are the "elites." Conservatives adopting left-wing rhetoric has confused everybody for some reason. The people who own everything and can keep you from working, attending school, or having a place to live are the elites.
> who are you to tell them otherwise?
The person who the information is about. It's worth making an argument as to why that person shouldn't have a say, instead of railing against the "elites."
I'm so glad people are finally starting to think of the criminals.
