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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36178 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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So it looks like WNBA’s Brittney Griner’s 9-Year Prison Sentence Upheld In Russian Appeal Court.

One thing I find interesting about the whole ordeal is the similarities between her case and the Jan6 detainees, in both an hostile government dishes disproportionate punishment to a member of an opposing tribe.

While I feel for Ms. Griner I can't help, but chuckle at the parallels and remind myself that in the real world there aren't good guys, just your guys and theirs.

Jan. 6 detainees say a D.C. jail is so awful that they'd like a transfer to Guantanamo

Jan. 6 detainees say a D.C. jail is so awful that they'd like a transfer to Guantanamo

Glossing over the performative nature of this gesture, you'd think the travails of the Jan. 6 rioters would engender a degree of sympathy for criminal justice reformers. Instead, the reaction seems to be outrage that Upstanding Citizens like themselves should be subject to the same conditions as common criminals.

If they were subject to the same conditions as common criminals, they'd have been released without bail and then had the charges quietly dropped.

Do you think this accurately reflects the state of criminal prosecution in the United States, and if so, how do you account for the hundreds of thousands of people in pre-trial detention?

There's an awful lot of multiple felons in on murder charges who even "abolitionists" can't get released without bail. It's not complicated.

You think there are 400,000 people in pre-trial detention for homicide?

For one thing, because the median time to release from state prison is only 1.3 years and trials take far too long, you would always expect a significant proportion of people to be in pretrial detention even with very high bail rates. And those who have their charges dropped don't even enter the statistics (until they're rearrested enough times to finally be held without bail).

Here's an interesting case study from NYC, where pretrial detention rates halved after the new law let most suspects free without bail. By 2021 their detention rates had reached the old level due to increased crime rates and rollbacks to the bail law requiring detainment of people who committed felonies while still out on probation. The comptroller stresses that bad people are trying to draw a connection between leniency and all the new crime, but that he will acknowledge No Evidence for this. He finishes his report with a demand to defund the police and prosecutors, which will definitely solve the problem this time.

So yes, my take would be that both criminal suspects and convicts were suddenly treated very leniently. Then the crime rate exploded and COVID happened, and now we're back to having a high number of people in pretrial detention--and even higher proportional to the number of convicts due to how many of them were released.

Here's the Prison Policy Initiative chart of what they're in for. I dunno, "only" 16k are for murder charges, but the rest seems like pretty bad stuff on the whole.

I'm trying to find a source for how many held in pretrial detention were already in the legal system for something else before the current offense. It's only 10k for simple parole violations, but that doesn't account for "we brought this guy in for burglary and he was already on probation/out on bail for a burglary offense"

Also gotta see if I can find the same chart from 2019, see if COVID backlog changed anything.

Guys like prisonpolicy are such a research rabbit hole because you know there's useful stats they're very carefully not putting in the infographic, buried somewhere in appendix C of some BJS report.

The Prison Policy Initiative, the group pushing the 400,000 number you're quoting, attributes it to the median bail cost for felony charges at 10,000USD which is apparently out of reach for the demographics typically charged with a felony.

Was this intended as a refutation of the 400,000 number? It seems like you're suspicious the number is real but all you've offered is pointing out that the organization has a leftist agenda.

I offered their reasoning as well which was far more than the original uncited argument. Activist organization provided numbers are generally suspect and InfluenceWatch is somewhat reasonable in terms of mapping various activist networks so it seemed a worthwhile inclusion. Infer why someone bothered to check the source of a specific numerical claim all you want.

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