Florida charges their inmates $50/day as a "bed fee" that they must pay when they are released. If you were found guilty and sentenced to 5 years in prison, but were released after 1 month because your charge was overturned, you still have to pay the fee for the full 5 years you would have been there.
Florida is a special version of horrible when it comes to treatment of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. The citizens of Florida overwhelmingly voted to restore voting rights to people who had completed their sentence. Ron DeSantis and the Republicans modified the law to prevent people from voting if they hadn't paid all of their fees, which there is no central tracking or source of. They then went on to arrest Black citizens who tried to register to vote after their PO had told them they owed no money and were clear to vote.
Alabama should be included on any list of states terrible to inmates. We still have jails and prisons without HVAC. I really don't care what you did, having to live in a metal and concrete box in the middle of an Alabama summer without basic air conditioning is absolutely torture in my book.
I love this ^^^ However, you forgot one particularly disgusting tidbit: the Supreme Court blessed Florida's poll tax, basically concluding that, even though it looks like a poll tax, it's really not, so it's all good.
Do you believe someone who had been released from prison with no housing, no income, no phone, no computer, and no job, trying to get on their feet, would have the time or money to hire a lawyer and submit a petition within their first two months?
Yeah let me look that up that lawyer's number on my phone that I have to pay $120 in unpaid device payment fees plus $50 in reactivation fees before t-mobile reactivates my data plan.
No worries, let me just use the McDonalds wifi, I'll drive there in my car that was repossessed while I was incarcerated since no one was paying my car payment.
Actually, I'll use my laptop at home. Oh nevermind, it was thrown out on the side of the street a month after I was incarcerated because I got evicted for nonpayment of rent and someone driving by grabbed it.
Things that are simple for you and I are 1,000% more difficult for someone who was just out of prison or is currently homeless.
It's a wonder mini Jan 6 events don't happen more often. Either people are more cowed than I'd hope, the Murphy's Law outcomes like that almost never happen, or the surveillance state is so complete it would make Eric Blair turn stone cold and piss his britches.
> It's a wonder mini Jan 6 events don't happen more often.
An event involving a bunch of people with the financial wherewithal to all take vacation from work and travel across the nation, in order to support an auto-coup with the tacit blessing of a President in power who keeps not-really-joking about being president for life?
I wouldn't use that label since I don't see a lot of overlap with the downtrodden people we're talking about here.
What percentage of ex convicts are so completely isolated from society that they have no friends, family, or even a public defender, social worker, or parole officer?
This does not include those who were not wrongfully convicted, but who did not serve out the entirety of their sentences, or who had been released without the state admitting wrongdoing. This appears to be more limited in scope than the parent comment’s underlying point.
So if you went to prison for 7 years, and your conviction wasn’t overturned but you served your time, it’s somehow ok for the government to send you a bill for $50 * 365 * 7 = $127750? When convicted felons usually struggle to find better than minimum wage jobs due to their records? What a perversion of “justice”. And if you get out early for good behavior or due to prison overcrowding (again, your sentence was valid) you still get charged for the full 7 years? How is that morally reasonable?
No it is theft, also I think it's like this because the state needs criminals to justify its standing army and policing powers. If it's this hard to do well, kneecapping someone only makes it more likely they will betray society instead of rejoining it. No criminals means no need for police or SWAT or overreaching crime fighting powers or overbearing surveillance. The State is a higher order organism which needs criminals to justify itself.
How is that morally reasonable? I think it depends on whether the court was aware of this and considered it during sentencing. If someone served 7 years for a major corruption charge, paid $1.5 Million in restitution, and $250k in fines, then I think $127k in fees might be perfectly reasonable.
If someone served 7 years on a drug charge, the part that I would find morally reprehensible would probably be the incarceration. In my mind 7 years of prison is a lot worse than the $127k.
I am not a bankruptcy (or criminal) lawyer, but it may also be dischargeable in bankruptcy. What I see online says "punitive" charges are not dischargeable, but "reimbursement" based charges are and this seems related to reimbursing the state for the cost of the bed.
nativeit says that it doesn't apply to those who were not wrongfully convicted, then an authoritative source is presented that clearly states that it does apply to those who were not wrongfully convicted, and your counterclaim is that "wrongfully convicted" is a term of art with a specific legal meaning?
Tell that to the person who said that it doesn't apply to those who were not wrongfully convicted, using those exact words, not the person who is providing authoritative references stating that it does.
GP was talking about correctly convicted prisoners who had completed their sentences, you are talking about wrongful convictions. You seem to think you replied to someone upthread who told a different story about wrongful convictions in Florida, but have inadvertently replied to the wrong person.
> And well, this was done for a very simple reason: almost all criminals vote Democratic.
Criminals deserve human rights as anyone else does, but, all the same, I think it's important not to buy into the framing imprisoned → criminal. (To be clear, these charges would still be wrong even if we lived in a world where only the guilty were imprisoned, but that's not our world.)
I also doubt your statistic. Do you have a reference?
I have no objection to calling "almost all criminals vote Democratic" a "claim" rather than a "statistic," although I'm not sure what it changes. I still doubt the claim, and, even if there is no pre-defined numeric threshold at which one can say precisely that one more criminal voting Democratic would mean "almost all" do, and one less would mean the contrary, then there are certainly quantitative data that could be judged to refute it—for example, if fewer than half do—or that could be judged to be evidence for it—or example, if 90% do. I think it is reasonable to ask for a reference to some confirmatory evidence for such a statement.
It's not just Florida. You pay the bed fees even if found not guilty. Seems like a very cruel and efficient way to ruin someone financially considering that the average wait time before their first court date is one month. So, you're looking at at least $1500 for a crime you didn't even commit.
Can you provide a citation for this? Currently when I go looking for information on this your comment is the only result I can find that claims that this is possible for pre-trial jail terms.
I see lots of references to it for people who are cleared years later, which is awful, but I want to make sure we're not mixing horrible facts and horrible fictions.
....how can this possibly be legal? It's not like you wanted to be there. I have a hard time seeing how it can be justified for someone who is guilty, but I absolutely can't comprehend how you could charge fees from someone who is found innocent.
I think its important to understand that you're never found innocent; only not guilty. The difference here is that you're not guilty given the evidence and arguments presented to the court vs you've been proven innocent.
Secondly, the prison system in the US is meant to be one of vengeance and a continuation of slavery as clearly stated in the 13th amendment[1] rather than one of rehabilitation:
"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."
It is more nuanced. Illinois at least you can petition the court after acquittal for a "certificate of innocence" which you can use to gain some small statutory compensation. I assume other states have this.
Also, many county jails charge bed fees even if the case is dismissed and you never go to trial. These bed fees have been ruled legal many times by courts.
And, as a final kicker, the 13th Amendment isn't as clear as the text makes out. The US Supreme Court has carved exceptions out for small amounts of slavery. For instance, the government is allowed to force pre-trial detainees who are unconvicted to do cleaning jobs and it does not violate the 13th Amend.
> I think its important to understand that you're never found innocent; only not guilty.
This is not true. Many wrongfully convicted people are found to be "factually innocent" when their convictions are overturned. This is because after you are convicted the burden of proof to overturn the conviction switches, you are now presumed guilty, since you've been convicted beyond a reasonable doubt, and must prove your innocence. Some Supreme Court Justices even hold that being innocent isn't enough to get out of even the death penalty.
In American criminal law, the term "innocent" is not a verdict that a jury can return. Instead, the only possible verdicts are "guilty" or "not guilty". No one can declare you innocent because new evidence may come up later finding you guilty.
> In American criminal law, the term "innocent" is not a verdict that a jury can return. Instead, the only possible verdicts are "guilty" or "not guilty". No one can declare you innocent because new evidence may come up later finding you guilty.
As the person to whom you responded said, there is such a thing as a determination of factual innocence. See, for example, the relevant section of Utah's legal code: https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title78B/Chapter9/78B-9-P4.html . I can't see at a glance whether a jury or only a judge can grant such a petition, but, even if a jury can't return such a verdict, that's different from saying "no one can declare you innocent."
Because like someone else said - innocent is the default state. Being found not guilty automatically means you're innocent. Any other read of this is invalid.
No, that is about a court re-trying someone, which they cannot do. The evidence itself may well prove their guilt.
The point being that a lack of evidence of guilt is not evidence of a lack of guilt. But we require evidence of guilt for convictions, not a lack of evidence of innocence (in criminal cases, and if it's not an affirmative defense).
> I think its important to understand that you're never found innocent; only not guilty.
Just no, one doesn't need to understand that - because it doesn't change anything.
I thought that in any functional society you were innocent until proven otherwise. And even if you play with words it doesn't somehow excuse it. And a poor vengeance-based prison system isn't relevant either because that only applies if you are found guilty.
In American criminal law, the term "innocent" is not a verdict that a jury can return. Instead, the only possible verdicts are "guilty" or "not guilty". No one can declare you innocent because new evidence may come up later finding you guilty.
The presumption of innocence is something else. It's not a verdict.
Well, no, you're not actually stating how the legal system works, you're just stating which of two words it uses to mean the exact same thing -- it works the same way regardless.
The difference between these two is there’s an implied probability of guilt, which is a dangerous view because it allows you to treat people who haven’t been directly proven guilty worse on the basis that you’re mistreating a population more likely to contain guilty people. The presumption of innocence isn’t objective, it’s an important psychological tactic to help avoid such behavior. That’s why we should use that language.
Edit: in practice the legal system doesn’t behave this way, but I’m still wary of using different terminology because it seems like it concedes ground.
Prisons serve many purposes and rehabilitation should be lowest priority of them, after incapacitation, deterrence, and retribution. Prisons are for society’s benefit, not for prisoners. If inmates can be rehabilitated, great, but all those other things are more important.
When people come out of prison, they need a bed to sleep on and food in their stomachs, and they will find those things one way or another. Absent the means to achieve those goals legally, the only alternative is returning to a life of crime. So, really, the choice is either rehabilitation or recidivism. Recidivism comes with a bunch of costs to society, so rehabilitation is ultimately for society's benefit.
(I would argue that retribution has no place in the justice system, but that's a discussion for another day)
That, as a person from a nordic country, sounds like a very American take. At least over here, the point is to make the people be in a state where criminal behavior isn't desirable. Coming out of a sentence with debt (unrelated to the reason you were there) seems counterproductive.
Voting patters. Americans, like any human, loooove righteous violence, both witnessing and enacting it. The System in America is Americans' collective expression of this impulse.
Prisons should act in societies benefit not the fulfillment of your personal revenge-fantasies.
Because that is what you propose. The goal of prison is to take people put of the environments they are in, as a punishment, to stop them from doing things they shouldn't, but also to not have them do it again.
I'd argue, not having them do it again is The most important goal of prisons. And it turns out, that rehabilitation is very good at that given scientific consesus.
It is just not good at fulfilling personal revenge-fantasies like yours.
A countries prison system is a reflection of the attitudes and priorities of people in that country.
For people who are violent at heart, prisons are violent. For people who love money, prisons are about money, for those who care about individuals and seek the improving of others, you get rehabilitation and so on.
Show me your prisons and I'll tell you about your society.
> Prisons are for society’s benefit, not for prisoners
It would greatly benefit society to have prisoners be rehabilitated. It's currently just a vicious cycle that produces hardened, repeat offenders that prison companies can make money off, money that comes from tax payers.
> It would greatly benefit society to have prisoners be rehabilitated.
It would. If only we knew how to do that.
There are places in this country where attitudes develop for many years, decades even, before that person is ever incarcerated. By the time that happens, these attitudes are quite immutable, and they see any gentleness as vulnerability. They're adept at lying, exploitation, and have no qualms about hurting others. What sort of rehabilitation do you even think is possible? Where do you expect this million person army of rehabilitators to come from exactly, to be hired in these prisons? When they start getting raped and killed, will you just double down? Under what principles, exactly, do you expect the rehabilitations to operate? Do you ever remember seeing some study or research that concluded "If steps A, B, and C are performed on convicts who meet the empirical criteria of X, Y, and Z" then they will become upstanding members of society"?
We know, however, that treating people like animals in harsh prison conditions and lengthy sentences does not reduce reoffending rates.
We can tell, from comparing with systems. So the current US prison system imposes vast amounts of violence and abuse on prisoners without achieving anything beneficial.
I've said before and I say it again: If I were to - by some stroke of magic, seeing as I'm neither a US resident or citizen - be put on a US jury, I don't think I could find a moral justification for convicting someone even if I knew with 100% certainty they were guilty. The US prison system stands out as such a barbaric and immoral system that I'd consider inflicting it on anyone hardly any more moral than most violent crime.
>If I were to - by some stroke of magic, seeing as I'm neither a US resident or citizen - be put on a US jury, I don't think I could find a moral justification for convicting someone even if I knew with 100% certainty they were guilty.
That's called Jury Nullification, and if you ever hope to successfully reserve your right to invoke it you best not tip your hat in any way that you have been made aware of it.
Don't search it on your normie-browser search engines, do it on Whonix or TBB. Remain data vigilant!
Given there is zero chance that I will ever serve on a US jury given I don't live in the US, it's not a concern for me. But good tip for anyone in the US who might want to do it.
> We'll never figure out how to do it until we actually start trying to rehabilitate people.
We'll never figure out how to do it because it's unethical to experiment on humans. But even more damning than that, we don't have a good theory of mind that explains criminality. It's all half-assed woowoo nonsense meant to bolster this or that political ideology.
My only agenda is that it's irritating to listen to non-scientific and pseudo-scientific nonsense bandied about by people who plainly should know better.
What do you propose? That if we can't rehabilitate, we don't bother to deter criminals, or to sequester them from society so they can do less harm, or even that we refuse to punish them thereby encouraging private vengeance? Is that why you irrationally hold onto the clearly mythical rehabilitation, because if we can't have that then we must also abandon the others but subconsciously you know what that shitshow would look like?
The world needs more thinking, not less, and it needs less feeling/empathy, not more.
A researcher would have a hard time getting an IRB to let them build a study at a jail where the jail treats a random half of the inmates in a different way. And judicial oversight might not allow that, either. Further, it's hard to control adequately.
We're going to be stuck with time series and case control studies of changes made haphazardly. It doesn't mean we can't get better, but it's a tougher hill to climb.
We do. Quite a few other developed countries than ours are able to successfully rehabilitate prisoners, and have a very low rate of recidivism. We're never going to rehabilitate 100% of all convicted criminals, but we can certainly do orders of magnitude better than we do here in the US today.
But the US doesn't want to work like that. Most people here seem to think that prison is a place to be punished, not to be "fixed". And the entire prison-industrial complex that sits atop it all has a vested interest in keeping it that way.
In the US we are very good at cutting off our own noses to spite our faces. The kind of prison that actually rehabilitates people looks "unfair" to most Americans. It looks like coddling, a vacation, when compared to our current prison system. Americans want criminals to be punished, first and foremost. They should live in poor conditions and have the most difficult time. Because that's what they "deserve". And it doesn't matter if that produces the worst outcomes for American society as a whole, including for the people who believe this stuff. As long as the convicts get their harsh punishment, the tough-on-crime crowd is happy to endure any poor societal side-effects.
It reminds me of how we deal with homeless people, or even housed people who are on the edge financially. God forbid we give anyone anything without them having earned it. That would be colossally unfair to all those hard-working folks! Even if welfare and homeless assistance ends up making everyone's lives better than the alternative.
It's completely disgusting, but I don't know how to change people's attitudes on this, not at a country-wide scale.
> Quite a few other developed countries than ours are able to successfully rehabilitate prisoners, and have a very low rate of recidivism.
I think we can learn quite a bit from those places, and do better. I don't think the cruelty of the system helps at all.
But I don't think that the problems that the US faces with criminality and criminal behavior are exactly the same as what other developed nations face. Just looking at different outcomes isn't super compelling evidence.
Remember people: Jury Nullification. Do not admit to knowing about it. Do not explain why you are not voting guilty, just that you have doubts. If 1 in 10 jurors on average were conscientious about the terrible treatment of the convicted, it would grind the apparatus to a halt in weeks!
Why do you think they keep felons from voting and serving on juries? I think it's to keep the state's poor customer service reviews under wraps.
There's no societal benefit in retribution, and the evidence is entirely against the use of inhumane prison conditions as an effective means of deterrence.
Personally I'd find it more moral to subject people supporting these kinds of conditions to them than to subject anyone else to them, because I find the notion of supporting this level of harm to others to be no more moral if you vote for it than if you commit a violent crime.
Some cultures are more prone to vigilantism than others. Absence of vigilantism in one country is only very weak evidence that it wouldn't occur in another if their government stopped punishing criminals.
Particularly, America has a culture that puts relatively high value in individualism, and I think that would make vigilantism, individuals meting out their own brand of justice, common if not for the perspective that the government will dole out harsh punishments without the victims needing to do it themselves. We aren't Norway, and the delta between the present status quo in both countries is itself evidence of this cultural difference.
I find this notion that America values individualism bizarre, given how authoritarian American society is - the extent of state control and violence that is tolerated seems entirely foreign to me, and yet the same US government is supposedly scared of shutting down attempts at vigilantist violence? It doesn't pass the smell test for me.
I also find this American exceptionalism unconvincing. No, you are not uniquely barbaric brutes unable to reason about the morality of your actions.
Nor is this about the US vs. Norway. There are plenty of places with more lenient prison systems without any such huge waves of vigilantism. There's no evidence to suggest more lenient sentencing would cause vigilantism of a level that can't be stopped just like other violent crime.
> yet the same US government is supposedly scared of shutting down attempts at vigilantist violence?
Who said that? What is that even meant to mean?
Here is what I said: Americans demand that criminals be harshly punished and if the government isn't willing to saite that desire then Americans, having individualist mentalities, will take justice into their own hands more often than the people in countries like Norway. The government does try to prevent this vigilantism, because vigilantism is harmful to society as a whole, but there's not a whole lot the government can actually do to stop me from murdering my neighbor with a baseball bat because he did something to my son. What the government can do to stop me from doing that is give me a credible promise of punishing the man for me.
The American public demands harsh treatment of criminals, which is why the American government provides this. If the American public were a bunch of Norwegians then American laws would reflect Norwegian values. Both systems are a product of their respective culture. The difference between the two systems of justice reflect cultural differences in attitudes towards justice.
> I also find this American exceptionalism unconvincing. No, you are not uniquely
If anything, its the Scandinavians who are unique. Go to Africa, Asia or South America and you'll find that criminals are given harsh punishments and people generally like this. In fact this is more or less true in most of Europe as well, which is why people always talk about Norway/Sweden/etc as the go-to counter examples. They are the ones who stand out as exceptions to the norm of inflicting punishment on criminals. What I'm saying is that system is designed for that culture and would not satisfy most Americans. Most Americans are satisfied with seeing criminals get what they deserve.
You used the risk of vigilantism as a reason for the brutal treatment of prisoners.
> What the government can do to stop me from doing that is give me a credible promise of punishing the man for me.
They can also give a credible promise of punishing would-be murderers like you for that kind of vigilantism. There is no evidence to suggest that shorter sentences leads to more vigilantism. Zero. It's something you've made up to justify a barbaric, immoral treatment of prisoners.
> If anything, its the Scandinavians who are unique.
Strawman. The argument was not about everyone going as far as Scandinavia, but about not going to the other far extreme like the US.
> Go to Africa, Asia or South America and you'll find that criminals are given harsh punishments
And yet no single other country worldwide imprisons a large proportion of its population than the US. The US is worse at this than the most brutal authoritarian dictatorships.
> In fact this is more or less true in most of Europe as well
So does executing a random scapegoat. This is a made up problem and an attempt to make a right out of two wrongs.
Retribution needs to have value in an of itself, and it doesn't have any. you can't pay rent with it, you can't eat it. No-one's life was ever saved by it, no-one's lot in life was improved, there is no societal benefit. You just favour a brutish set of values
But if you take steps to conspire with people to cause violence to be caused to others, such as by voting for the perpetuation of a violent, brutal prison system, then I would see you as morally no better than someone actually engaged in a violent attack. You're in that case seeking to cause an untold amount of harm to others.
To me, seeking to cause that to happen to others is at least as wildly immoral as a rape and murder.
I don't see anything there about punishment. It's simply a moral judgement of people who want others they don't like (for one reason or another), killed.
Personally, I find it ridiculous to differentiate between murdering a person for e.g. money, and murdering a person for vengeance, and absent an imminent threat for which deadly force is generally authorized, I don't support the use of it.
I happen to think that extended stays in solitary confinement are worse than simple murder. So yeah, if you're into retribution to the point of preferring or not caring if prisoners receive such treatment, then I think your morality is highly questionable.
Voting to put in place a system that arranged organised violence and oppression is to me equivalent to conspiracy to engage in what is effective violence against a huge number of people, and morally vastly worse than one, or a few, individual murders.
>Prisons serve many purposes and rehabilitation should be lowest priority of them, after incapacitation, deterrence, and retribution.
I dont think any sane person would argue against the first two as priorities. I think the balance retribution vs Rehabilitation is far more debatable, as both DO have conflicting impacts on society's benefit, and not just prisoners.
Incapacitation is the easiest to make the case for societal benefit. If a robber is locked up, he can't rob you. That's incapacitation. Nearly everybody agrees that incapacitation is necessary, even people obsessed with rehabilitation are generally willing to concede that until a dangerous criminal is successfully rehabilitated, he probably needs to be locked up.
Hardly any prisoners are sentenced to rehabilitation, and most justice systems have few means of doing so, so it appears hardly any justice system is based on the notion of locking people up until they are rehabilitated.
(there are some rare exceptions - in Norway the maximum sentence is 21 years except in some particularly serious cases you can be convicted to incarceration for the purpose of protecting society - this punishment is in theory shorter in that you can get out after 10 years, I think, but you won't get out until a parole committee deems that you are no longer a risk).
Furthermore, if justice systems were based on reoffending risks, then sentencing would look very different. Most murderers who commit murders that aren't gang-related, for example, are very low-risk prisoners. Yet no justice system I am aware of takes that into account.
Incapacitation is only one of the reasons we imprison people, albeit the most important reason and the most easily defensible. Murderers who are unlikely to reoffend are still put into prison because our prisons are also for punishing people who do things we think are worthy of punishment. There's no contradiction here, prisons simultaneously serve several purposes.
Point remains that the concern of reoffending is rarely if ever given much actual consideration - reoffending rates shows that the sentencing very clearly does very little to ensure people are locked up until rehabilitated.
you are mixing two separate topics. Concern of reoffending =/= optimizing rehabilitation.
reoffending is rarely if ever given much actual consideration - False, It is usually the #1 consideration, and why courts look at criminal history, risk factors, ect. This doesnt have to be based on rehabilitation, but can be justified simply with a incapacitation rationale.
E.G. You think someone is likely to reoffend so you lock them up longer. not because you think it will offer more rehabilitation, but because it incapacitates them for longer.
3 strikes laws are a classic example of this. You dont give someone a 25 sentence because thats how long it takes to rehabilitate them. you do it because you think they are a serial offender you want to keep off the streets and they are unlikely to be rehabilitated
No, it is not, or the prison system would be structured entirely differently. Courts do not have the power to affect that.
> E.G. You think someone is likely to reoffend so you lock them up longer. not because you think it will offer more rehabilitation, but because it incapacitates them for longer.
The reality is that this is unproductive when it comes to reducing crime.
> 3 strikes laws are a classic example of this. You dont give someone a 25 sentence because thats how long it takes to rehabilitate them. you do it because you think they are a serial offender you want to keep off the streets and they are unlikely to be rehabilitated
The reality is that this too is ineffective at reducing crime.
> "concern of reoffending is rarely if ever given much actual consideration"
Complete bullshit. Concern for somebody reoffending is a major factor in sentencing and in the public's support for the continued existence of the prison system. Examples of sentencing that follow from other principles do not contradict this.
Indeed, and many of these factors are taken into consideration for the construction of sentences, although often times with different weighting that some people would like.
Retribution provides almost no societal benefit. Most of society doesn’t know or care about any individual crime. Rehabilitation of a single member however will benefit all of society, as you can’t predict all possible social interactions of a single person.
Social order, the people wronged want to know that the culprit suffered for it, otherwise said people will start to feel the judicial system is disconnected from justice itself.
I mean, why do you think Lex Talionis is that historically universal?
The caste system and human sacrifice also provide social order. Medieval system of peasants and lords and kings provided social order. Spanish inquisition and torture provide social order.
For my part, I consider inflicting suffering to be fundamentally immoral, because the "moral" justification for retribution relies on the notion of free will, and there is no rational case for free will.
Rehabilitation is also for the benefit of society, a rehabilitated prisoner is less likely to commit more crime after they get out.
I would say that deterrence (preventing non-prisoners from committing crimes) and rehabilitation (preventing prisoners from committing crimes when they get out) should be the primary objectives of the system.
Which is precisely why they should be geared primarily towards rehabilitation. We'd all be better off if we can reform people and have them be productive members of society. This is far better than losing productive hands to satisfy our bloodlust and base desire for vengeance.
Incapacitation lasts just for a short time. If you don't rehabilitate prisoners, you're just going to have the same problem again a few years from now. And we don't have the capacity to lock up everyone forever.
> Prisons are for society’s benefit, not for prisoners.
I wonder if creating a system that helps people build a better life after they have served their time might actually result in better outcomes for everyone...
I had to pay hundreds of dollars in court fees after all shoplifting charges against me were dropped by the prosecutor when they noticed the person on camera was not, in fact, me, or anyone looking even remotely like me. The mall cop just grabbed the wrong person.
This was in Northampton Massachusetts about 25 years ago. I did go to UMass’s legal help clinic who told me basically “Yes, that’s how it works, it’s awful, but unless you want to spend the next few years of your life and every penny you have fighting this, just accept it and move on.”
Sometimes just paying it and moving on is in fact the simplest solution. Fighting it in the courts would have taken time and effort, and unless you could find a good pro bono lawyer, money. Fighting it in the court of public opinion is another option. Visiting you elected representatives offices for a chat about it takes a limited amount of time, but can have a big impact. Please don't misunderstand me, I am blaming you for anything or judging your decisions, I am merely offering suggestions to you and anyone else about ways to make things better :)
It is legal because running on a platform of making life better for prisoners is a losing strategy. Voting to make the lives of prisoners better in any real way is writing an attack ad for your political opponent. Merica.
Yes, many, many times. It has always been ruled legal by the higher courts. Even for pre-trial detainees who never even go to trial and who have been falsely accused.
"A defendant in a criminal prosecution who is acquitted or discharged is not liable for any costs or fees of the court or any ministerial office, or for any charge of subsistence while detained in custody."
Edit: You can search scholar.google.com for "939.06" and find cases such as:
Starkes v. State, 292 So.3d 826 (2020) wherein the 1st DCA issued a writ of mandamus commanding the trial court to certify the defendant's costs (so that they may be reimbursed).
And in the rare cases when someone wins they court will do an 'as applied' ruling, meaning only for this specific case and unable to be used as precedent in any other cases.
The incentives are perverse. Opening a prison in a small district can result in 75% of the population being prisoners, which counts towards census->congressional seats and for gerrymandered power. Some states somehow even keep you in the prison's district even after release, but I'm having trouble finding specific instances.
Yes I replied to the $1500 one but the thread specifies being found guilty and "sentenced to 5 years".
I find it completely acceptable to charge an inmate money for his stay, people are against prison labor cause it makes it profitable for a state to have prisoners, which is true, but somehow the state has to recoup money it poured into an individual eating free and using public services without paying taxes for multiple years. You decided to commit the crime.
Now, I am against you being charged pre-sentencing, unless you are found guilty, in which case you should be charged for that pre-time as well.
> which is true, but somehow the state has to recoup money it poured into an individual eating free and using public services without paying taxes for multiple years
Please turn your business brain off. Society costs money to run - this is why we pay taxes. Your taxes routinely provide unpaid services to people because the benefits to society outweigh the costs.
I have not heard about that one before, and it's gross. It sounds like Illinois and New Hampshire had similar things with their prison system, but outlawed it into 2019.
The medical fees are the worst. Nobody seeks medical treatment because they can either spend the $15 on seeing a nurse to be told their cancer is simply a stomach ache (happened to a friend), or spend it to call their kids on the phone for maybe 20 mins that week.
People hide all sorts of diseases and complaints until they are so sick they have to be forcibly removed -- this way you can avoid the fee.
Having to pay if you're released sounds like just an accident of bad law drafting, but I'm stunned that I have watched so many prisoner TikToks, read so many undercover guard articles, and never heard of pay-to-stay laws before. It's like every prison sentence comes with a crippling fine.
Highly doubt it's an accident. The cruelty is the point: These voters/government deliberately make their laws as terrible as they legally can. They see the world as a hierarchy with in-groups and out-groups and see the law as a way to inflict cruelty on the out-groups.
I had a recent colleague and we’d argue this exact law (and others).
The takeaway I got is he generally believed the people impacted by the laws were bad. And even if they served their time there was basically no limit to what we should try to impose on them. Furthermore, even if they didn’t do the crime they probably did others so no remorse on other things that might seem unjust. He thought they deserved those things too.
People who are wrongly convicted are in the in-group. Also, pay-to-stay exists in 49 states; why are only 2 of 49 as cruel as you expect? I don't recognize the monsters you imagine; people just collectively aren't too careful about who gets hurt balancing the budget on the backs of groups who can't vote.
> Highly doubt it's an accident. The cruelty is the point:
Someone murders another, pleads down to manslaughter. Will spend 4 years in prison... but the cruelty is that after he gets out if somehow he manages to come up with money that the court system can even become aware of, we might make him pay for some of the $250,000 cost of keeping him in the cell?
Or do you just mean the people who were wrongly held before evidence exonerated them? It's not cruelty there either, just revenue collection. Someone's gotta pay for it, and when the people who should be paying get to duck out because their only income is cash from street drug sales or fenced shoplifted goods and impossible to recover, I guess those people who can hold a job that direct deposits into a bank account are on the hook.
God, I'm glad you don't review my code. Full of bugs because I'm in a hurry, don't understand the problem clearly enough, or the specifications were bad... "that's no accident, you're being cruel to the shareholders".
So, somebody who is locked up because they rejected a cop's advances, and then had evidence planted on them in retribution, should absolutely, 100% foot the bill for their time in jail, even if its eventually found that the only reason they are there is because of the laws the cop broke?
Even if I concede that literal criminals should have to pay for their accommodations (which I don't), there should be a straightforward path to appeal those costs if found not guilty. If the fees are meant to be further deterrence, then it is absolutely vital that we only deter those found guilty. Otherwise, we are depriving people of life, liberty, or property for "driving while black" or "being poor in front of your betters".
>... and when the people who should be paying get to duck out because ...
See here you're confused. You built the cage, you hired the staff to watch the cage, you are by proxy forcibly caging people in it who ought not be there, YOU pay for the damned cage! When selling coke gets you a box simply because a plurality of nitwit voters think someone selling coke should get the box, it's not about morality anymore and it's just a war... err a case of "you pay me to go beat him up because you think he stinky, but hey I found that burglar last week and stopped Russia last month so it's tots cool! *peace sign*"
Well said. Society has decided that imprisoning people is how we deal out justice, so society should have to foot the bill for that mode of justice. If society thinks that a particular crime's sentence should have a monetary component, it should make that explicitly part of the sentence, not "LOL, you go to prison AND by the way, you pay for it!"
If my house catches on fire, I don't have to pay the fire department to come out and fight the fire. Society decided that a functioning fire department is a good thing to have, and pays for it with public money.
>When selling coke gets you a box simply because a plurality of nitwit voters think
I would legalize cocaine tomorrow were I in charge. I'd regulate the pharmaceutical companies such that profits were capped at about 2% over cost, they couldn't market it, and it would be sold in a plain retail box out of liquor stores in marked, known dosages and potency. I'd do the same for heroin and meth. But every time I mention something like this, the leftist I'm arguing with backpedals instantly "oh noes, we can't do that, drugs are bad mmmkay!".
To me, this means you're clearly talking about or to someone else. Your criticisms fall from me like raindrops off a freshly waxed car.
You would do better to use rationality more than empathy, but I'm content to let you learn that lesson painfully.
> It's not cruelty there either, just revenue collection. Someone's gotta pay for it
Okay, let's extend this principle to the rest of society - if the government investigates a business for labour violations, then the business should pay for the cost of investigating them. if the government investigates you for not paying taxes, you should have to pay for that, even if you are 100% innocent.
Oh look, the more baseless accusations the governments creates, the money money they collect, how convenient!
the only issue is prisons in the US are frequently for-profit enterprises, so there's an even more perverse incentive - govco imprisons people, private prison makes money from the government, then bills the incarcerated, private prison has money to lobby for law changes that make more people "criminals" that need to be incarcerated - it's basically the same thing except now there's a bunch of fat middlemen.
My understanding is that in Florida, even if you are found not guilty or charges are dropped etc., you are still liable for the fees. Their argument is that you were still using a bed.
And if you are released early, somebody else will probably get that bed and they too will be paying the fee. I bet they are double and triple collecting on a significant number of beds.
One problem with tying the fee to net worth is that wealthier individuals may be more likely to have their wealth in trusts so they may actually have "fewer assets" than a poorer person.
None of those articles state that they can charge the fee on an overturned sentence. The one states they can charge the fees on the full sentence even if you are paroled, which is dumb. But not on an overturned sentence.
There is, courts just ignore it because administering justice is time-consuming and inconvenient. There are many examples of the judicial system choosing expediency over integrity.
I mean they essentially allowed slavery to exist for prisoners with the 13th amendment [1] -- Americans seem to view the prison system as anything goes punishment instead of rehabilitation:
[1] "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."
Also allowed without conviction. Those in county jails who are unconvicted are allowed to be subject to small amounts of slavery the US Supreme Court has previously ruled.
Oh boy. We technically got rid of slavery after the Civil War but in actual practice the line is quite blurry. Joseph Stiglitz made a really good point about freedom when analyzed through an economic lens. You can't just talk about political freedom but also the opportunity set as afforded to you by your economic status. Even if you have political freedom but only one choice, that freedom isn't much use.
I never really understood why the US are used as a baseline for anything social-related.
Concerning Stieglitz, it’s unclear to me whether we owe non-contributing members their freedom. The federal USA costs a trillion per semester, so it’s 6400$ per year. Those who don’t contribute so much per year, are a weight upon the others. If anything, the actual-workers are slaves of the poor people.
Granted, social friction makes that it is not possible to make everyone contribute efficiently. But we owe them money only because the society is not perfectly organized, not because they’re poor.
As for the slavery induced by the prison IO system, it is obviously inhumane and we should repay the victims probably a few hundred dollars per day in jail.
The level of surveillance makes it impossible to form coherent organizational structures domestically which can effectively oppose this system, because your organizations' and family's financial, communication, and social lives can be mapped out for strategic legal attack by the very same players they wish to protest. This is the price of KYC & AML.
This presumes an organized resistance. That's not what I was talking about. I'm surprised there aren't more regular reactions out of sheer anger, like the BLM riots.
>"If you were found guilty and sentenced to 5 years in prison, but were released after 1 month because your charge was overturned, you still have to pay the fee for the full 5 years you would have been there."
This is totally disgusting. But I guess they need underclass of slaves. Fucking piece of trash.
I am, and believe I am (mostly) sane, empathetic, and relatively intelligent.
Its fine if things aren't perfect. We're a country with a lot of very different people with very different beliefs. Things are going to go wrong, but they tend toward getting better with time.
I can be proud of my country and the good things it has done while also recognizing its failures - both past and present. Pride can be a good thing, so long as it is not from ignorance. Pride can create expectations which drive improvement.
IMO one of the US's greatest issues right now is how much its own citizens either hate it or have given up on it. It's so much easier to white about The Other Side and how they're supposedly ruining the country than it is to enact meaningful change that we can be proud of.
Paying for the cost you caused society by being a criminal seems just as just as putting someone in prison to begin with. Obviously that means it should only apply to those guilty, not to anyone who has the charges overturned, and it also means the crimes need to be deserving of being crimes. I find it weird that people seem okay with the idea of imprisoning someone for X years, but fining them as well is going too far.
Keeping the fined even after the conviction is overturned is an extra horrible case, comparable to keeping someone in prison even after the conviction is overturned, but that shouldn't be mixed with fines in general just like imprisoning someone after their conviction is overturned shouldn't be mixed with imprisoning someone who has a valid conviction.
> Lose job and get charged with shoplifting for stealing baby formula.
> Lose child to the system due to being found guilty.
> Rack up $18,250 in bed fees for 1 year incarceration.
> Lose ability to vote until $18,250 can be paid.
> Can't get job because of previous conviction.
> Become homeless.
> Re-arrested for sleeping under a bridge on public property.
> Rack up another $5,000 in bed fees for 100 day incarceration.
> Rinse and repeat.
Don't try to pull wool over my eyes that this is a just system. It's sole purpose is to disenfranchise voters even if they weren't charged with a federal crime.
Well your very first step doesn't really make sense, given that the USDA, a federal organization funded with 150+ billion dollars a year, has 15 different nutrition assistance programs to provide food specifically "to ensure that children, low-income individuals, and families have opportunities for a better future through equitable access to safe, healthy, and nutritious food".
Why commit crimes and steal food when the taxpayer will literally just give you free food or free money for food.
USDA programs generally (always?) operate by giving money to states, which each have their own eligibility and application requirements. This is the (physical) application form for Alabama:
(There is an online form, but it requires an account.)
Note the last page, particularly "You have the right to have your application acted on within thirty days without regard to race, sex, religion, national origin, age, disability or political belief. You have the right to know why your application is denied, or your benefits reduced or terminated. You have the right to request a conference or fair hearing either orally or in writing if you are not satisfied with any decision of the county department. You have the right to be represented by any person you choose. You have the right to examine your food assistance case file in relation to any hearing you may have."
Expedited services are available: "You may get food assistance benefits within 7 calendar days if your food assistance household has less than $150 in monthly gross income and liquid resources (cash, checking or savings accounts) of $100 or less; or your rent/mortgage and utilities are more than your household’s combined monthly income and liquid resources; or a member of your household is a migrant or seasonal farm worker."
It is a little known fact that few infants, for example, can survive 30 or even 7 calendar days without food.
It may not make sense, but it happens. People may not know about those nutrition assistance programs. Their local programs may be backed up, can't see them soon enough, or provide them what their children need fast enough.
Your criticism is not as damning as you think. The original comment could have used an innumerable amount of other unfortunate circumstances to reach the same end. It is fortunate for you that you have never been in dire straits, been fired and had to feed a baby, or tried to enroll in a program like that in an emergency, and can instead sit back at a computer and google the USDA and their enrollment websites at your leisure. Many other people do not have your fortunate circumstances, which makes your comment seem tone deaf, out of touch, and in denial of the injustices in our justice system.
Please note my comment already had this line specified.
>it also means the crimes need to be deserving of being crimes.
I don't want to get into the details of what crimes should or should not be crimes, that won't be productive for this community. But if you are going to use an example to try to make a point, please note that picking an example that includes something you think shouldn't be a crime, or at least a crime deserving of imprisonment, means that my critique was not applied to that example to begin with.
Also, my criticism was specifically about considering the fines as being a point of complaint while not doing so of the incarceration. You example of losing a child is a result of the incarceration, not the fine. Your example of not being hired has to do with the conviction and people's general perception of those convicted, as well as with insurance and similar, and not with the fine. So neither of those are specific to my previous post.
You also end with a critique of the legal system in general. Which is not what I was talking about. Once again, I was specifically talking about the instances of criticism being levied against fines that should be, but aren't being, applied to incarceration as well, creating at least the appearance that incarceration is tolerable but fines are going too far.
Please understand that critiquing a critique of X does not mean that the person doing so agrees with X.
Making up your own hypothetical bad guy and then turning around and saying "people such as you describe" shouldn't get to vote has to be the most brazen act of strawmanning I've seen in recent memory. But you know, fuck everyone in prison just to stick it to this guy, right?
Is not morally any worse than making you your own hypothetical saint.
But I didn't make it up. I read voraciously, and when this started happening 6 or 7 years ago and it was making the news, the real story came out. None of those shoplifting baby formula or laundry detergent were doing it to feed their babies, or put the babies through the gentle cycle in their ghetto laundrymat's washing machine. It was merely a decent commodity for fencing, and it was sold mostly on ebay though sometimes it'd end up sold out of storage units and trunks of cars or landed at a flea market. Go google it, I'll wait.
This is lifted wholesale from one of the folk tales of the honorable thief stealing only enough to feed his family, by the way. How many of these shoplifters steal actual loaves of bread?
These prisons are privately operated for-profit ventures and society does not benefit from the enrichment of the prison-industrial complex, and in fact it can be argued that it is a net loss to society because these businesses depend on a steady stream of offenders to incarcerate in order to survive, as well as repeat business from a high rate of recidivism. In order for the people running these businesses to maintain their wealth, they need a steady supply of criminals to shake down, and when they can't do that, they'll just lobby using sympathetic points like yours to say that they deserve to be landed with crippling debt.
Of course, a society that dehumanises criminals, favours retribution over rehabilitation, and believes heavily in the 'free market', has simply opened the space for such a pipeline to exist.
In the case of the wrongful conviction, it sounds like indentured servitude. You're not actually free until you've paid off your contract with Private Prison Inc.
>they'll just lobby using sympathetic points like yours
I suggest you read my post again because your response doesn't seem to be related to my post. Your response is taking issue with private prisons and with businesses making money off prisons. My post was specific to people being okay with imprisoning someone, making no statement if it was in a private or public prison, but not being okay with fining someone.
If you want to discuss how to make sure prisons aren't ran in such a way to ensure you don't have a pressure to increase prison usage, that is a fair discussion to have, but unrelated to the specific critique I was criticizing.
These fines cause people to reoffend to get the money to pay them, as often these fines and fees cause you to be reincarcerated if no payment is made.
Even without reoffending, it stops people reintegrating successfully as it is very hard to get a job after incarceration and people end up having to take cash jobs for way below minimum wage and live in slums just to try to pay off these debts.
>These fines cause people to reoffend to get the money to pay them,
Sending them to prison causes them to reoffend as shown by the recidivism rate of people based on how long they are in prison, as they learn to be better criminals while not learning skills to fit back into society, and as imprisonment creates a life changing stigma which negative impacts their lives. Perhaps instead of criticizing fines, you should criticize imprisonment and even the act of convicting them that creates the stigma that makes gainful legal employment so hard to find.
The primary skills you use locked up are how to be sneaky, how to hide shit, how to detect camera zones.
You couldn't get cheese at one institution unless you had a court date; they would give you a cheese sandwich at court. I would smuggle coffee out of the jail (through a full naked visual body cavity search) to trade for cheese sandwiches in the court holding pens, and then smuggle the cheese slices back in (through another full naked visual body cavity search).
Florida charges their inmates $50/day as a "bed fee" that they must pay when they are released. If you were found guilty and sentenced to 5 years in prison, but were released after 1 month because your charge was overturned, you still have to pay the fee for the full 5 years you would have been there.
It makes me ashamed to be an American.