This is not a new problem. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in "Democracy in America" in 1835:
"It is evident that such a legislation is hostile to the poor and favorable only to the rich. The poor man has not always security to produce, even in a civil case; and if he is obliged to wait for justice in prison, he is speedily reduced to distress. A wealthy person, on the contrary, always escapes imprisonment in civil cases; nay, more, if he has committed a crime, he may readily elude punishment by breaking his bail. Thus all the penalties of the law are, for him, reduced to fines. Nothing can be more aristocratic than this system of legislation. Yet in America it is the poor who make the law, and they usually reserve the greatest advantages of society to themselves. The explanation of the phenomenon is to be found in England; the laws of which I speak are English, and the Americans have retained them, although repugnant to the general tenor of their legislation and the mass of their ideas."
I don't know if it was true in 1835 that "The laws of which I speak are English" but today the situation is utterly different in the two countries.
The UK has no concept of "cash bail", either you may go free, or you are a danger or flight risk and so you're held in jail by the state on its dime to avoid that.
The court can set fairly broad rules for bail, it just doesn't [this used to say "can't" but see the example below which proves that they actually can] ask for cash, e.g. "You must give us your passports and other travel documents so that you can't fly" or "You mustn't go near Jimmy who says you assaulted him" or even "You must go see the police once per week between now and your court date". If you break any of the rules, then you may stop qualifying for bail and get sent to prison until trial.
Actually, that's not true. The courts (in E&W, at any case) can ask for a security (so cash or other assets) or a person to stand as a surety.
They rarely do so, but the highest profile one in recent times was when Julian Assange slipped off to that ground floor flat in Knightsbridge and cost his supporters the thick end of £100k
Democracy in America is a fantastic book. It's amazing the number of things that might as well have been written about America in 2018. Reading it with the benefit of nearly 200 years of additional history, it basically becomes a tremendous commentary on the staying power of national culture and mythology...
It's something that's really interesting about reading US history as a hobby. It's fascinating have all of this ability to reflect and see how things developed.
History class in grade school was nowhere near as interesting as history books as an adult.
I had no idea when I was younger how much of school history is just introducing shared mythology and indoctrination. History is so much more interesting to just read about instead of the mythology selected by state education boards.
The one that comes to mind is the discussions of the two World Wars. When I left high school, I basically believe that both of them were basically good vs evil stories, where Europe was sucking at stuff and then America showed up and defeated the bad guys. My history classes basically ignore WWI only to say that a bunch of people died in trenches and then America showed up. WWII, the British and French were losing, and then America showed up. What's an Eastern front? Normandy. America is awesome. The end.
The first time I started actually learning about World War I and started realizing that the Germans were pretty much as innocent as anybody else in that conflict (and probably more innocent than, say, the Russians or the Austro-Hungarians, or the Ottomans), I was like "wait, what?"
Also, that the US didn't really do much from a combat perspective (though financing the whole thing for the Allied Powers certainly helped).
Some Myths I Learned in School that Reading History and Anthropology Corrected
1) The founders cast off autocratic tyranny and invented power checks, individual rights and the rule of law.
While monarchs in Russia, France and Spain frequently cited tradition, religion and even pagan mysticism to certify their absolute rule, things were a bit different in England. Republican government and rights of the ruled were part of the English system for a long time before 1776. They were mostly hard won by nobels (mostly for nobels) but none the less, proto constitutional law like Magna Carta, Parliament and the Civil Service preceded the founding by many years. American government may have been born of revolution but it was just an evolution of ideas and practices that had been developing for centuries.
2) America, and particularly Lincoln fought the Civil War in a nobel effort to end slavery.
While obviously the Civil War was triggered by the inability to resolve the issue of slavery the motivations of the primary participants aren't clear. From Robert E. Lee's initial opposition to secession to Lincoln's writing, "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that." it's clear that the war wasn't about "what was right" but what the individual actors wanted. What's really stunning about the narrative told in schools is just how close the government came to not abolishing slavery. The 13th amendment actually failed to pass the house once and that was with no Southern states holding seats at the time.
3) The Americas were largely empty when Europeans discovered them.
They weren't.
4) Neolithic people and hunter gatherers largely lived in peace with the planet and each other. For lack of a better term, they lived as "nobel savages".
To the contrary, the lives of these people are characterized by frequent skirmishes between bands, blood feuds and ritual killings. "Nobel savages" living all over the globe managed to drive extinct more than 50% of large mammal species well before recorded history. They also shaped the earth and warped plant life far from anything you could rightfully consider "natural".
I could go on about Martin Luther, the "Fall" of Rome and the Russian Revolution but I gotta get back to work.
> It is evident that such a legislation is hostile to the poor and favorable only to the rich
I feel hopeless that this will ever change. In a extremely liberal city like San Francisco, where nearly every citizen follows progressive politics, NIMBYs have passed laws the enrich wealthy renters and make it hard for the poor to afford to live in the city.
If San Francisco cannot get this right, no one can.
I agree somewhat with your conclusion but I question your premise.
From an outsider perspective San Francisco strikes me as a culture that is, and has been for decades, a creation of the affluent class.
Hippies and tech founders alike have all talked a good game about an equal society, but both groups are primarily seeded from the children of the rich and well educated and have worked to preserve the status quo.
New York City, for all its superficial associations with finance and Wall Street culture, has always seemed to be a much more genuinely diverse and empathetic place in actual day to day policy and practice.
San Francisco is perhaps the most materialistic community on earth, full of people who don't care how bad things are for others if they themselves made it (and you can too!), full of people who want rights for gay people but don't care if gay people who aren't obscenely rich can live in their city. I would expect San Francisco to be the last place to deliberately help poor people.
speaking from experience (I have been incarcerated in the past) the bail system is a complete joke.
If you get the public defender, you'll likely see about a 6 minute pretrial to set your bail if you get one. its factory-like in its efficiency, and you're lined up with 20 other inmates that were just loaded off a bus from the local jail. The judge is half-asleep, likely overworked, or just too jaded to care anymore. assuming you havent killed anyone, you'll get around a 50k bail. mine was just shy of $34,000 USD.
If you dont have the cash for bail, you can attempt to secure a bail bond at 10% of the face amount. youll do this through family members sometimes, but youll use the jail phone. Using the jail phone is about nine dollars per phone call as its managed by a private phone company. your access to this phone is often once per week, because jails are massively overcrowded and youre scheduled a 5 minute phone call.
After sleeping on a yoga mat in a group cell for about 2 weeks, you'll finally make bail. This often comes with a processing fee from the county or city. depending on your city, you'll also be issued a bill or invoice for your stay in jail. If you were assaulted or sent to medical, your bill will include any treatment. some jails can use this to refuse your bail paperwork...so no matter what you got for a bail bond, its now useless.
and behavior? Anything at all can be used to refuse bail processing.
Once I'd made restitution and been released from prison, the bond fee had been paid, and I was a free man. Or so you'd think. Most bail bond agencies have their own team of bounty hunters and they dont maintain accurate paperwork for many orders. Due to a misfiling, I was labeled as a skip-jump. Before even checking with the state for a warrant, their 'team' had tackled me in a taco bell parking lot at 8 am on my way to work. I spent nearly an hour in the back of a police cruiser until I was released. I was not given the option to press charges.
Aggravated assault during an attempted carjacking. The aggravated charge stemming from my use of a paslode gas actuated nail gun to defend myself against an armed attacker. I worked a construction job at the time to pay for my automotive trade tech schooling.
acquitted of all charges but this took six months of my life. Bail only works for rich people. In my opinion its easier to just do the time and work with the judge. Bail bonds also wrecked my credit.
Bail can change, too. The judge could just "decide" they dont want you in jail and release you under monitored conditions. this type of amnesty is very popular for rich people...especially if you have a winning complexion.
It's also a common tactic for police to do mass arrests on a Friday if some large event is happening on the weekend too. That's how they clean the streets of anything that will embarass the mayor in front of foreign press such as homeless with unpaid fines, activists they know will disrupt, ect. You have to wait all weekend in jail to see a judge on Monday or Tuesday that will almost always just release you. Anybody whos been through the system the first thing you notice is how at least half the people you meet shouldn't be there.
Fair enough - if who I replied called it, "prison", I'll remit my nit-picking ;)
But usually you cannot bail out of prison, right? You get arrested, and go to a city jail, where you can get bailed out. If you are found guilty, you go to county or prison to serve a sentence.
The terms are fairly interchangeable. There's no hard and fast rule or law that states "jail" is one type of incarceration and "prison" is another. In the U.S., we lean to referring to long-term incarceration as prison and short-term as jail, but that's a fairly "local" thing.
But to what you're thinking of, I believe that is correct; bail is for short-term incarceration pending a trial. If you've been tried and sentenced, you can't bail.
I think most people with more than a passing acquittance with the bail systems in most states could agree with the title, but what I have not seen are any proposed solutions that address the underlying problems certain characteristics of our bail systems are meant to address.
For example, without the threat of forfeiture how do you ensure people actually show up to court?
Without bail bondsmen how do you fund the extra police/marshals/sheriffs to find and arrest those who do not show up for court?
Without the ability to set bond amounts based upon offense characteristics and individual financial circumstances and criminal history, how do you prevent especially violent offenders with a likelihood of committing more violent acts while on pretrial release from committing new violent offenses? Keep in mind there are some jurisdictions where you are constitutionally entitled to bail of some amount.
There is much (justified) lamenting on the evils of the use of the bail bond industry, but after bail reform in the Federal system which effective ended the use of the industry for the Federal criminal system -- do people really think the Federal system is better? If so why?
If you want to go the other direction and eliminate money bail, do you really want to police/prosecution to able to indefinitely incarcerate people until trial?
Do you want to seriously jack up the criminal penalties for failure to appear in lieu of money forfeiture? That is going to screw over a lot of people.
Again, there are serious problems, but I haven't heard significantly better solutions.
For example, without the threat of forfeiture how do you ensure people actually show up to court?
Because my life is fucked worse than it already is if I don't show up. If that's not the case, then that's almost the working definition of "flight risk", and you don't release them for any amount of money.
> Because my life is fucked worse than it already is if I don't show up.
This is already the case, but surprisingly people (including those accused of crimes) do not always make choices which are in their long-term self interest.
> If that's not the case, then that's almost the working definition of "flight risk", and you don't release them for any amount of money.
So how do you determine who is a "flight risk"? Past FTA? Past convictions? Don't own property? No family ties to community? From the wrong part of town? Wrong skin color? These are the types of things that will end up going into detention decisions when you take the posting of security off the table and start trying to decide who is a "flight risk". The reason we have our bail system, including in many places a constitutional right to bail for non-capital offenses, is before that Courts would simply deny bail willy-nilly for certain crimes or people they didn't like.
It's not always the case that it's worse if you don't show up. As an extreme example, if you're already facing life, running isn't going to make that worse (they're not going to execute you for skipping bail). On the other extreme, notice we don't have to post bail for a traffic ticket. However, if I don't show, there's now a warrant for my arrest. I was in no danger of going to jail if I showed up for my traffic hearing, but I'm most definitely going to jail (even if only briefly) if I'm pulled over with an outstanding warrant.
But let's go with your thinking. Let's use money, instead of those factors in your second paragraph. But you know what having money for bail might mean? You own property, have family ties to the community, are from the right part of town, and statistically probably have the right skin color. I mean, I see where you're going with this, but in the end I think it's a wash. You've either got money, or you are found pleasing to the judge's eye, and either way it means you're likely white and wealthy.
So I don't know what the solution is. But as others have commented, the UK seems to get away without having to post money for bail (though some have pointed out the exact problems you worry about).
> I was in no danger of going to jail if I showed up for my traffic hearing, but I'm most definitely going to jail (even if only briefly) if I'm pulled over with an outstanding warrant.
And yet, people skipping court dates for traffic violations is extremely prevalent. In many areas, there are varying degrees of enforcement of failure to appear arrest warrants because of how common they are. (They'll have like amnesty days and stuff like that to encourage people to appear.)
The basic problem is that poor people have very little to lose by not showing up to court.
> On the other extreme, notice we don't have to post bail for a traffic ticket.
At least in CA, the money you pay before or instead of trial on a traffic ticket is a default bail, and you have the option of pleading no contest and forfeiting the bail as your fine, or you can contest the ticket. If you contest the ticket, at your arraignment you will be assessed for the need for and amount, if any, bail much as for any other offense.
Since that's expressly a factor in deciding on whether to grant money bail and in what amount, that's not a new problem that eliminating money bail would raise, and money bail is (on top of all it's other problems)) imposingntial costs on different defendants people arbitrarily if we don't already have a reasonable solution.
So you can't really use that to question the elimination of money bail.
It is fairly common practice for someone accused of a crime for the first time to be Released on their Own Recognizance (ROR) without bail. I could easily see a system where you are outfitted with an ankle monitor with GPS and a radio beacon similar to house arrest but only activated after either 1) Failure to appear or 2) Detection of tampering with the ankle monitor.
Currently yes. They actually require a land line to be connected to the base, but the technology exists and can be adapted to use mobile networks instead.
> For example, without the threat of forfeiture how do you ensure people actually show up to court?
You do it the way Washington D.C. does, and has for a couple decades.
> Without bail bondsmen how do you fund the extra police/marshals/sheriffs to find and arrest those who do not show up for court?
With general taxes, rather than taxes on the criminally accused.
> Without the ability to set bond amounts based upon offense characteristics and individual financial circumstances and criminal history, how do you prevent especially violent offenders with a likelihood of committing more violent acts while on pretrial release from committing new violent offenses?
Money bail doesn't prevent that; pretrial supervision or outright bail denial can, and so that's how you do it, choosing the least invasive level of supervision that provides adequate security in the circumstances.
> If you want to go the other direction and eliminate money bail, do you really want to police/prosecution to able to indefinitely incarcerate people until trial?
Before trial isn't indefinitely except at the choice of the accused, because of the right to a speedy and public trial.
> Do you want to seriously jack up the criminal penalties for failure to appear in lieu of money forfeiture?
Yes, I want to punish the actually guilty in preference to punishing the merely accused. Do you seriously prefer the other way around?
It's not broken if your overarching goals are to decrease the political power of the poor and middle classes through increased financial instability and/or incarceration.
In addition to reform, there are non-profits assisting people within the current system. The Bronx Freedom Fund [0] and their Dollar Bail Brigade [1] are particularly interesting to me.
There is a huge incentive to plead guilty when you cannot make bail. After several weeks in jail they most likely let you walk after a guilty plea because you get time served.
Mainprise is a startup building a peer-to-peer bail payment platform on NEM Blockchain. The BAIL Token platform will enable family and friends to request low fee bail payments. Instead of throwing money away on bail bondsmen. Families apply for bail on the platform. After verifying their identity, they provide details on the accused such as name, bail amount, arrest charge, jail location, and booking number. The details along with details sourced from public data are fed into an AI-based risk scoring tool to generate a risk score. The tool will use data from millions of cases to help determine if the accused is likely to skip trial or commit another crime if released. Based on the score a fee of 0-3% is paid by the applicant.
Once the accused is released, we monitor the court calendars and notify them of court dates and changes. After attending court and regardless of the verdict, guilty or innocent. The bail payment is refunded by the court and returned to the token holders along with a share of the fee collected.
No thanks. Bail + blockchain + AI is still just bail. The point is this is still based on proving you or your family's ability to pay a bail with added "AI" which is notoriously bad for this kind of thing due to historical training data being full of bias.
The book weapons of math destruction goes into the issues with machine learning and the prison system.
Not just family. But anyone can apply for bail. Even the offender can dial a tollfree number to apply. The risk assessment is used to predict the likelihood of FTA (same risk assessment being using in court systems today). This factor is provided to "peers" to help them determine if they want to contribute to bail payments.
I'm looking for it now, but there was an article recently that talked about a system that had been gamed in that it deemed almost 99% of people a flight risk.
This is just treating the symptoms, not curing the disease.
Bail, it it's current form and enforcement, is a problem. Providing bail services is a way to use this problem to make money. It's better than putting your hands in your pocket, but unless you're using some amount of your fees generated to lobby for bail reform (thus harming your platform in the long term) you're just another bail bondsman.
The concept of bail has been around since 399 BC with Plato tried to get a bond for his friend Socrates. It's been a problem a long time. If you read the whitepaper, part of the platform is to do exactly what the big insurance companies backing bail bonding agencies, lobbyists and PACs are doing by making investing in similar efforts to derail the system. Calling out the big insurers profiting off bail.
What this platform does is match bail requests with people willing to make small contributions to helping to pay someone's bail. Knowing that if the bail is paid in full it's returned by the courts when the accused attends trial.
It would be the same as someone putting up a gofund me page. Except it happens much faster and it's already funded.
My thesis: Bail shouldn't exist, it creates a 2 tied system, and creating a platform, business, whatever, that exploits that system to make money isn't "being a super nice person who just wants to help" it's profiting off the prison industrial complex unless you spend all they money you made solely to reform the system.
It sounds like they're trying to help. This doesn't mean they're not also making money by attaching themselves to the problem. The world is shades of gray. I'm sure the bail bondsmen sleep at night saying they're helping people get back to their families faster.
> The details along with details sourced from public data are fed into an AI-based risk scoring tool to generate a risk score. The tool will use data from millions of cases to help determine if the accused is likely to skip trial or commit another crime if released.
Yes, I'm sure your AI will be magically free from bias when fed data from a biased system. >_>
Again, the risk assessment is simply used to provide a risk factor to token holders who are contributing to bail payments. So "Bob" is willing to help contribute to bail payments for any low-risk offender. While someone else may be willing to make contributions towards a high-risk offender. It's not used in the court system to make any decision. Only on the platform.
You're imagining that courts will sign up directly with your startup? Have you ever actually gone in and paid bail for someone? Do you have any idea how archaic the process is?
Also, the blockchain side of this is completely and utterly pointless. Use a database.
I don't understand this bit: if it's a fee, why return any of it? Is the returned part of the fee to cover extra cost in cases where they don't go to court? Otherwise that extra part is not a fee, just extra bail.
When bail is paid in full it's returned by the courts when the person attends trial (regardless of the trial outcome). What this platform does is get many people "token holders to make small contributions to paying someone's bail. When they attend court the payment is returned back to the token holders.
That I understood; I am talking specifically about the fee described previously. That is clearly to cover costs for the service and I don't see why that would be returned even partially to the holders.
Isn't this really a problem of over-criminalization? If our court systems weren't clogged with suspects, wouldn't judges have more time to properly set bail by evaluating each suspected offender on their merits?
We don't want dangerous criminals set loose without proper guarantees, and we don't want the less wealthy pleading guilty because they can't make bail.
So the real solution seems to be to roll back as many non-violent criminal offenses as possible and perhaps simply live with people serving plastic straws that 99.9% won't wind up in the oceans instead of throwing them in jail for 6 months, or at least make them into civil offenses.
If you're charged with a serious crime, you just go to jail.
If they think you'll probably flee, you just go to jail.
If they think you'll hurt somebody before the trial, you just go to jail.
Otherwise they figure out some rules (like "Don't go to Bill's house" or "Don't hang out with Frank and Simon") and then tell you that you need to come back for your trial and meanwhile you must obey the rules.
If you break the rules, they might arrest you, and decide you now need to go to jail until the trial.
If you forget to come back for the trial (obviously a few people deliberately flee, but remember these aren't like bank robbers or murderers, they're shoplifters or people who got into a fist fight, so most cases genuinely forgot, overslept, etcetera) the court tells the police you didn't show up, the police find and arrest you for breach of bail. Then you spend a night or two in a cell, awaiting your new court date. Since you were in a cell, ensuring you appear this time is much easier.
For the type of people who forget, the humiliation and inconvenience of spending a night in a cell waiting for the new trial date is adequate "punishment" for their foolishness and wasting the court's time, they mostly look a bit forlorn when I've seen them, they're Spud from Trainspotting, not Begbie, or even Renton.
Police can only hold you for up to 96 hours without charging you with a crime. Once you are charged with something and awaiting trial, you have to be tried within 56 days. If you are not tried within those 56 days you have to be released on unconditional bail - so courts tend to stick to those limits. Police can set up bail before the trail, but it cannot involve money - frequently it involves staying at a particular address, reporting to the police station daily, not contacting certain people etc - it depends on the severity of the crime, you cannot be released on bail for acts of violence or armed robbery for example.
If this was attempted in the United States, and we wanted to maintain the due process protections afforded by our Constitution, we would have to fund our indigent defense programs at levels far, far beyond what anyone has been willing to do.
If it isn't worth properly funding the /defense/ for then maybe the matter should just be dropped entirely. Should save quit a bit on paperwork, jail stays, and the prosecution as well.
Since the government tightened up the bail rules the police have mostly stopped using it. Instead, you are "released under investigation". This has no legal meaning. It was invented by the police to deprive suspects of their bail rights.
In the UK, almost everyone released on bail is released on "their own recognisance" which is a fancy way of saying no money involved. Conditions can be attached, like living at a particular address and reporting to a police station weekly. Bail can be denied for serious/repeat offenders or if you're likely to run.
There are also no bail bondsmen/bounty hunters; that role is taken on by the police. Failing to surrender can be punished with an increased sentence and being denied bail in the future - if you're caught.
You don't have to go to other countries to see a different system -- the new DA in Philly (a reformist aligned with Black Lives Matter and other progressive causes) ended cash bail for low level offenses! https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/The-End-of-Cash-B...
The article also notes that "In 1991, Washington, D.C., ended its bail bond system and now releases nearly 90 percent of pretrial defendants."
The three most critically important systems that we need to thrive as a society: politics, healthcare and law are all in need of critical overhauls.
Sadly, in the West we are hell bent on pursuing unbridled capitalism while more disciplined countries (e.g. Sweden) just shake their heads in disbelief.
Same as the plea bargain system - it's completely obvious that US has loads of completely innocent people pleading guilty just to get out of jail, if the alternative is waiting a year or longer for the trial. It's insane.
Which is insane. We acknowledge that someone making a statement when they are kidnapped is under extreme duress. Yet when the state does it, somehow the "confessions" aren't under duress and are legally binding?
Hardly.
Edit: Currently at -1. For those who -1'ed me, I'd like to hear your arguments why state imprisonment prior to a guilty verdict isn't extreme duress, or a violation of "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"
When you've been kidnapped, you have good reasons to think that the kidnapper might just kill you if you don't go along with what they want. I've heard a lot of abusive police interrogation practices in the US, and none of them go so far to make you worry you'll be taken out back and shot.
You're drawing an equivalence that just isn't there, and I think you know that.
I do remember reading articles saying that prosecutors frequently say to detainees who have already spent 3-6 months in jail "look, you can plead guilty to this minor crime, and with the time served you can go home to your family tomorrow. Or you can wait for trial, which can happen maybe in next 12 months, if the judge isn't sick on that day and doesn't reschedule for another 3 months later. So what will it be? Do you want to go home tomorrow, or stay locked up for a year before even going to trial?"
Like, I don't think I'd care how innocent I was - I'd want to get out asap. If your options are presented as "get out now" or "stay locked up for an indefinite amount of time, with no hope for compensation for the time lost even if you win" then it's an easy choice.
For starters, many people do die in police custody without being convicted
But "kidnapping" does not require a threat of death to have a real impact on your life. If your choice is to "confess" to a minor crime with time served, or lose your job/home/etc due to being locked up without trial, it's a no brainer for many people to falsely "confess", and it's absolutely under duress
> Yeah, I'm sorry, but as a citizen of the UK, the US system of bail and bail bounty hunters is just nuts.
Which is somewhat ironic since the foundation of our bail system originates from UK common law and the limitations on it (e.g. the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) originate from limitations put into place after abuses of bail in the UK legal system. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excessive_Bail_Clause#Origins
meanwhile, in massachusetts where bail can't be used as an economic means to keep people locked up, criminals are being freed and continue to do what they do best. just this month:
officer chesna and vera adams in weymouth, ma -- gunned down with his own service weapon by a savage whose bail was reduced ($5k to $500). this asshole then murdered an elderly woman on her own porch who witnessed the murder.
marine combat veteran kevin quinn -- killed in a head on crash by another low-life who was freed because his bail was reduced (from $35k to $1k).
it's comical that this topic is positioned as "rich vs poor" issue. in reality, criminals who are a serious threat to society, are being let loose and innocent civilians become the collateral damage.
But that is the entire point of this discussion. If someone is a rich "low-life" then even a $5k or $35k bail from your example wouldn't have stopped him from being out. If you really care about not freeing "criminals" (that have not been convicted yet right?) then wouldn't you appreciate a system only reliant on danger to society and flight risk, why even bring economics into it?
Are there many rich low-lifes? Are many well-off people detained for personally committing violent crimes?
I'd suppose most serious crimes by well-off people are either economical, or done by hired hitmen. OTOH a previously lucky criminal may possess quite enough loot from crimes yet uncovered to pay a large bail.
But it is not even "a lot". $5000 can be acquired by scrapping together $500 from family/friends and giving that to a bail bond company. Not all poor people can accomplish that, but many can.
If $5000 is a better bail for this person than $500, that is a lucky accident. It is not as if $50,000 would automatically be a better number either.
Risky individuals either need to be kept in jail (or perhaps closely tracked). Keeping bail bond profitable is not a successful strategy here.
Dehumanization aside those two aren't mutually exclusive at all - a rich psychopath would be just as releasable. The crossover that makes it appear to work for the wrong reason isn't a good system.
The system "works" by law of averages like my simple test for cancer - you don't have it. That answer is right far more often than not and lacks false positives by definition.
Really there are two problems made into one - fiscal inequity and reoffense. The theory of monetary bail was deterrence but it doesn't seem to work that well with irrational defendants and sufficiently rich, screwed, or underworld connected defendants which make the calculation rational to transgress.
All that the "extreme" demand is that wealth not be a consideration for bail. Either they are a sufficient flight or repeat crime before trial risk or they are not. Judging that is in itself a hard problem of great importance to liberty and security.
A no release before ever philosophy would be equitable but extremely problematic to liberty and expensive. It could be mitigated with very expedient trials but a proper investigation takes time. Downright luxury jail conditions could mitigate this some but the fundamental loss of freedom remains no matter how gilded the cage.
A release literally everyone before sentencing approach would also not work well barring fantastic and powerful technologies like being able to teleport them or unremovable and unblockable trackers.
I think bail also serves as a mechanism to make sure they show up for the trail. Or if they don't show up, their family and friends who helped post the bail will tell the police where they are.
Just to point out that there are literally hundreds of thousands more instances proving bail is a broken system as opposed to the two that you selected.
The legal system in the US is in large part a horrific dumpster fire.
Here's the question at the heart of this- Which do you feel to be a greater problem in our society; Imprisoning people unjustly, or allowing criminals back into the street to commit more crimes?
My answer is "both". Bail reform advocates typically say they want people to be kept out of jail before their trial, for free, if they pose no flight risk or danger to the community (ie, violent criminal past) and want people kept in jail if they pose a flight risk or a danger to the community. There is not a perfect solution, but we can do much better.
TL;dr- not all crimes are the same, not all criminals are the same, and we both agree the system is broken. The difference seems to be that you're not actually advocating for any specific solution, just pointing out that bad people have done bad things.
The goal is not to just let everyone go free while they await sentencing, it is to have a jail system that houses people on the basis of their danger to the public and/or their risk to flee instead of their ability to pay. I don't see how anyone can actually be against that.
Besides bail just allows cases just like you mention to happen, just that it's rich guys. Take a look at Robert Durst, posting $300,000 bail then stalking his brother with a gun. And Durst isn't the only guy to do this, what about Roman Polanski? What about Robert Vesco? Criminals who are a serious threat to society, are being let loose and innocent civilians become the collateral damage in money bail systems.
In the linked video Prof. Aiello of Valdosta State explains that in
some ways the convict labor system was worse than slavery. In the strict economic sense a slaveowner had an incentive to treat the enslaved person in such a way that he would survive and produce many years of labor. People leasing convicts have no such concern. The people they have been leased may only be sentenced to 6 months, a year, 3 years, etc. So they may be more willing to work those people to death.
Angola, the Louisiana state prison, was originally privately owned by a guy with a convict leasing contract.
This is only one part of a system that the rich have their rules, and the rest have "their rules".
It also goes along with the idea: pay for a bigshot attorney, get out of murder charge. Be poor accused, get public defender and a guilty charge.
In Indiana, you can even expunge felonies up to a certain criminal threshold. Do you know what the primary criteria is? You have to PAY for them to expunge.
The USA has always been pay-for-play. Now, its being called out for what it is. This country, the legal system, elections; you name it. The more money you have, the more influence you have, and the "better" the system is for you.
How do we fix this? The simple answer is to elect people who have more liberal mindsets that try to get rid of these poor=disenfranchised laws. That's a long term, and not even guaranteed to work. What do we have short term? I have no clue.
The ideology underpinning such unequal treatment ferments in places like HN. How often do we see the argument around here that unlimited inequality is fine so long as everyone improves in absolute terms?
That argument is bogus because political power closely tracks wealth -- and thus unlimited inequality facilitates a society where we are not equal under the law.
You bring up an important point with that question, what exactly is an immutable quality of the individual. Is the upbringing, cultural influences etc also immutable qualities or are you only talking about actual physical properties such as age, gender, skincolour etc.
I would say the latter. People have escaped their upbringing, culture, and socioeconomic position. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s not immutable either.
But I’ve never seen a woman become a man or a white person become a POC. So that’s pretty immutable.
Since race is a social construct and has no provable scientific reality, lots of people "pass" as other races depending on where/when they are being observed. Mixed-race people have always done this, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose.
Having a sex change doesn’t turn a man into a woman. There is no basis in science for that. If that were true, I could paint a tennis ball orange and eat it like a fruit.
Race is not a “social construct”. If that were true, I wouldn’t be able to blindly tell your race via a dna test.
Where does all this anti-science rhetoric come from? I guess global warming and evolution is a myth too?
It is not anti-science to allow people the freedom to determine their own gender. There is a difference between being a man or a woman and being biologically male or female. All it requires is a degree of enlightenment and perhaps empathy.
> There is a difference between being a man or a woman and being biologically male or female.
It's true that there is a difference between gender (and gender identity) and biological sex, but biological sex is more complicated than simple binary distinction, too, and done biological sex features correlate with gender identity better than those we have historically mostly relief on to set socially ascribed gender.
Perhaps in the future, we can do a better job at first-impression gender assignment as well as avoiding blaming the victim when we get it wrong.
"race is a social construct" refers to the fact that the racial categories we place people in as a society do not have a strong relationship to the type of racial information available through biological testing.
>Race is not a “social construct”. If that were true, I wouldn’t be able to blindly tell your race via a dna test.
This statement is not true. The racial information which can be determined via a DNA test does not necessarily match up with what that person, or others, would consider their race to be.
Saying "words are a social construct so you could mean anything" is not a good faith contribution to discussion.
It is good faith. Words are a social construct. We as a society have constructed them to categorize the world around us, to describe things and actions.
When you say race is a social construct because we may visually ascribe a person wrongly to a race seems pointless in an era of dna tests. The possibility of being factually wrong doesn’t suddenly make something a social construct.
If I see bear cub from a distance and then find out it was actually a dog, it doesn’t mean I should shrug and say that a bear and a dog are social constructs, so I wasn’t wrong because these distinctions are fluid based on the social norms of our day.
Why you seem to deny that science can blindly determine your ancestral origins (and thus race) with astonishing accuracy is beyond me.
Please don't break the HN guidelines by taking threads off on generic ideological rabbit trails. Once you get this far, the resulting flamewars are all the same.
Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the guidelines by using HN primarily for political arguments. That's something we ban accounts for, because it's destructive of what this site exists for (i.e. intellectual curiosity). Can you please stop doing that?
For what it's worth, I've received constructive criticism from Dan in the past as well (and I thought about it when replying to you when I tried to bring us back to the main subject of bail). Dan's bias is not so easy to discern.
> Having a sex change doesn’t turn a man into a woman.
Correct. The surgery aligns genitalia with gender identity; social norms have evolved to align ascribed gender with gender identity irrespective of genitalia, so even viewing "man" and "woman" as labels of ascribed gender rather than identity the surgery is largely beside the point.
I don’t think these social norms are as settled as you might think. The fallout of these new norms has yet to come, but it is coming.
By fallout, I mean women are starting to realize that men identifying as women isn’t in their best interest. Feminist are already split on this issue.
In the US, the state of Connecticut has biological boys who identify as girls competing in female sports and blowing them away, displacing biological girls on teams and soon in athletic scholarships.
This throws well-intentioned gender based laws into chaos. Title 9 will be challenged as biological men displace biological women in sports at larger scales. The Olympics will be dominated and world records will be shattered by biological men in female gender events.
Then there’s the guy in Canada that spent $50 to change his gender to female and saved $1,400 on his auto insurance.
This era of self identification will end since sincerity is not an objective truth and can’t be measured.
Or, another possibility, all laws attempting to promote equality between sexes and races will be made useless.
All laws based on age, ability/disability, the place someone (or their parent) was born, gender, prior criminal status, and sexuality. I'm only talking about the US, though.
I can give examples of each if you don't believe me.
This, from a explaination of the UK system in a comment below.
> Police can only hold you for up to 96 hours without charging you with a crime. Once you are charged with something and awaiting trial, you have to be tried within 56 days. If you are not tried within those 56 days you have to be released on unconditional bail. Police can set up bail before the trail, but it cannot involve money - frequently it involves staying at a particular address, reporting to the police station daily, not contacting certain people etc - it depends on the severity of the crime, you cannot be released on bail for acts of violence or armed robbery for example.
There seems to be an assault on freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and the right to self defense (life).
Freedom of the press:
The Tommy Robinson episode which is the first time I had heard of the broad government ability to ban news stories from being reported. You don’t have to agree with Robinson’s politics, you just need to realize the precedent it sets.
I’m not defending these people, but think about the chilling effect this has on speech.
Right to self defense:
U.K. took away the right to legally own hand guns in 1996. Since then knife violence has been on the rise. London is now considering “common sense knife control”. There is no longer any legal weapon you can carry that will give you a force multiplier over an attacker. This is especially dangerous for women.
No. Is all you have an appeal to authority argument?
What about what I said is nonsense?
Are you saying that you have freedom of speech while a 19yr old posting lyrics from a rap song on her private Instagram page is censured and fined for doing so?
Are you saying your government can’t censor media outlets from certain topics?
Are you saying you have the right to defend yourself with some sort of force multiplier?
If you’re willing to explain why I’m wrong factually or philosophical, I’m willing to listen.
Tommy Robinson was arrested for breaching his parole. This parole caused by his prior arrest in 2017 for contempt of court outside Canterbury Crown Court.
So the reason he got this seemingly harsh sentence, was because it was a reoffence, contrary to the terms of his suspended sentence.
The judges correctly found a real risk of prejudicing the jury and like it or not, the UK judiciary take potential infringements on the fairness of a trial very seriously.
A right to a fair trial for others is at least as important as his free speech.
With the gun point I disagree strongly. London has a rate of 1.45 homicides per 100,000 people. Potentially 180 murders this year. This is fewer than most large cities in the US. Most people in the UK don't carry weapons and the rates of murder are significantly lower than in the US. Access to guns increases the ease of homicide. New York has decreased it's rate (although it's still above London's rate) by limiting access to guns.
> It also goes along with the idea: pay for a bigshot attorney, get out of murder charge. Be poor accused, get public defender and a guilty charge.
Fun fact: the government wins almost all of its cases against the "bigshot attorneys" too. The DOJ secures a conviction in 90%+ of white collar, official corruption, and organized crime cases, comparable to the conviction rate for narcotics convictions: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao/legacy/2011....
Isn't this a selection problem though? I've heard criticism of the 'chickenshit club' variety - basically that the government only pursues the most slam-dunk easy win cases at all. If that's true, certainly bigshot attorneys still work, just in that they induce the government to never go to court in the first place as opposed to going to court and then losing.
Another possible factor here...what percentage of US politicians are attorneys?
Whether it's lobbies, tort-reform, whatever we always sortof seem to be expecting reforms to come from people with incentive for these systems to stay the way are.
"California, an extremely liberal state, voted in a 72% majority referendum for the three strikes policy."
Incorrect. In 1994, when the three strikes legislation passed, CA was a purple state with a moderate Republican governor.
It is the anti-immigrant rhetoric around Prop 208 in 1996 that undermined the GOP in the state, by driving the majority of the young and non-white into the arms of the Democrats.
I'm not sure the Dems are focused on the poor anymore. One of Trumps main pushes was that he would represent the working class Americans who are working but still struggling. I think the GOP has been targeting the working poor away from the Dems in recent years
They are focused on the poor - the decline of unions and lack of traction of economic issues has lead to the drift - or more specifically general refusal to adopt views or stances held which they find unacceptable for other reasons. Typically this is referred to as "voting against their interests" but that depends upon personal priorities be they wise or foolish. Tech workers refusing to work on abuseable projects are technically acting against their interests fiscally. I will try to abstain from judgement here.
Also they do have a large portion of the working class - just not definitively over the white part who traditionally bear the name. Perhaps related to their strong hold on minorities that made them not stand out as a distinct bloc. Parts of their other coalition having views at odds with theirs and friction related is not new (see the Hard Hat Riots for one and environmentalists vs industrial workers). Similarly Republicans have long been reaching them on social issues as well - pre civil rights act related inversion even arguably.
Regardless of one's moral opinions facing their overtures largely rejected and power diminished why should the democrats try to serve them at the cost of others strategically? They aren't special or numerous enough which makes the political capital better spent elsewhere.
Blue-dogs exist and are run where locally favorable but they aren't nationally prominent for a reason.
"It is evident that such a legislation is hostile to the poor and favorable only to the rich. The poor man has not always security to produce, even in a civil case; and if he is obliged to wait for justice in prison, he is speedily reduced to distress. A wealthy person, on the contrary, always escapes imprisonment in civil cases; nay, more, if he has committed a crime, he may readily elude punishment by breaking his bail. Thus all the penalties of the law are, for him, reduced to fines. Nothing can be more aristocratic than this system of legislation. Yet in America it is the poor who make the law, and they usually reserve the greatest advantages of society to themselves. The explanation of the phenomenon is to be found in England; the laws of which I speak are English, and the Americans have retained them, although repugnant to the general tenor of their legislation and the mass of their ideas."