....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.
