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The situation continues to develop and the dynamics are interesting. The mainstream media line seems contrary to your predictions. In short, NBC investigations report he is no angel:
Whatever the broader issues are, rent delinquents should be shot.
Aren’t we supposed to not dox jurors?
He’s a terrible person with bad judgement, but is it surprising those people end up on juries? Lindsay Clancy will almost certainly not be convicted as would happen without this man, and for convictions the system still seems to work: The US has the 5th highest incarceration rate, under El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan. Obviously the US needs crime reform but in enforcement, changing trials won’t fix the main problem of low-level nuisances because they’re not getting arrested in the first place.
I know norms and systems are falling apart, and I don’t expect this one instance to affect much, but breaking them without any clear reason, I have a gut feeling it’s bad for everyone in the long run (except this guy, he’ll get a GoFundMe or podcast).
Then put the booking station in the middle of nowhere, ideally in the places where it's illegal for anyone but the government to build. (Employees work 2 weeks in, 2 weeks out.)
Oh, what's that, Madame Prosecutor, the interests of justice require he not be charged? Oh, what a shock, better luck next time- you're free to go then. The public transportation back to your city runs once, on the second week of the month. The bus is free. It's 3 hours, one way, due to the length of the route and budgetary restrictions.
Naturally, if you're going to take that transport, our bus stop is very well-stocked. There are rooms with cots for rest, and along with the food, they are free until the next bus leaves. It's well-maintained by transit staff and secured by transit police.
If you're going to have a revolving door the least you could do is make it actually inconvenient. Perhaps somewhere you aren't legally prohibited from leaving, but unless you have someone from your place of residence that can vouch for you (and is willing to drive 6 hours to retrieve you), you are now in a state that is legally, but not meaningfully, indistinguishable from exile. Your "bail" is now collected by physics (the money/time/effort it takes to retrieve you).
Issues with this being a political prison are avoided simply because it's not actually a prison (the prison is coincidentally right next door to house those the prosecutor will charge, and this branch of public transit has a convenient labor-sharing agreement with them). You can just straight up go and visit if you wanted to audit the place, as it's public. (No overnight parking or camping, though.)
If you have someone who will help you, you'll be back home very quickly; I figure that the more people you can call on who are willing and able to help you in this way, the less of an anti-social element you were. You'll wear them out quickly with repeated use if you're truly an asshole anyway.
It's all very reasonable, safe, and consensual... while at the same time just being the modern version of transportation-as-punishment, and maximally frustrating external efforts to defeat this purpose. (It's true that, for example, George Soros has the power to simply send every criminal an Uber or fund busses of his own, but now he'll have to fund more than just the prosecutor to do that.)
Your proposal works as well on the actually innocent as it does on the criminals released because the prosecutor likes certain sorts criminals, and for that reason among many others there is absolutely now way it would fly in the courts.
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Yes, usually individuals with extensive contact with the criminal justice system don't get picked for juries.
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They get arrested quite often. The first level of major breakdown in the system seems to be the "decision to press charges" stage.
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I don't see how any of this follows. The conviction rate is not the same thing as the incarceration rate, so just saying "look at how many people there are in prison" feels neither here nor there, and if the low-level nuisances aren't getting arrested, you don't know whether that's the cause of low convictions or it's effect.
It would be strange that the US has the fifth largest incarceration rate and isn’t incarcerating enough people. They could be convicting the wrong people (via plea bargains) but I’d need evidence of obvious criminals (including discovered later) who get off trial (and this case isn’t obvious because 11 of 12 jurors voted to acquit).
I agree. The incarceration rate is too high. Not enough executions.
I actually am pro death penalty for people who are irredeemable i.e. repeatedly commit obvious crimes. Or send them to some confined area where they can't hurt anyone else, which is prison in a way, but not to punish them and would not waste resources doing so.
Long prison sentences don't make sense to me: a short sentence is enough deterrence, and prevention needs to be something permanent (which could be a behavior change motivated by prison, but again, I doubt a long sentence is more motivational than a short one, especially when "short" means weeks or months).
I’d favor shorter prison sentences combined with whipping. Continued crimes then leads to executions.
I would genuinely support something like
with convictions only given to people who are obviously guilty of widely-accepted-to-be-severe crimes. Mild crimes may have mild corporal punishment and/or exile instead of execution. A separate system would handle ambiguous crimes, that ensures either future crimes are either prevented or not ambiguous.
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“It would be strange that the US has the fifth largest incarceration rate and isn’t incarcerating enough people“
I would expect a country with a high incarceration rate to have a lot of crime. This is essentially saying it’s weird people use a lot of Air Conditioning in the summer.
But does the US have more crime than e.g. India, Russia, and South Africa? Or are those countries also not arresting enough, or do they instead use the death penalty?
Per Wikipedia (take as many grains of salt as you think you need), the intentional homicide rate in the US is 5.763/100k, compared to 2.716 in India, 7.821 in Russia and 39.719 in South Africa. Intentional homicide rate is generally considered a reliable proxy for crime rate in general.
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No expert on those countries. I just see plenty of criminal cases where I think the person deserves more jail than less.
America has a lot of crime and it ruins the commons.
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The fifth-richest country in Africa still isn't particularly rich.
The US has the highest incarceration rate among first world countries and democracies, as separate subsets? But the USA isn't an outlier in low crime rates. There's obviously another variable.
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But it’s not Africa, it’s the entire world including non-Western nations. Although I suppose some are greatly underreporting.
No, I'm trying to illustrate the flaw in your argument by way of analogy. Just because a given country is the fifth-highest in $metric, doesn't mean it's objectively high. Just because the US has the fifth-highest rate of incarceration in the world, doesn't mean that everyone who ought to be incarcerated is. There's no contradiction between "this country has the fifth-highest incarceration rate in the world" and "lots of people in this country aren't sent to prison even though they ought to be".
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No, it wouldn't. It would be absolutely unremarkable with a high enough base crime rate in the US, and/or dysfunctional enough criminal justice systems in other countries with high crime rates. All the "the US has (one of) the highest incarceration rates in the world" are meaningless because of this.
Hard agree all the open petty crime shows the US isn't imprisoning enough people.
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It's near impossible for something to make me have a lower opinion of journalists than I already do, but doxxing a juror managed to.
He should embrace his grifter arc, get a million dollars in donations or whatever, and pay his rent.
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The Platonic idea of a jury is that it consists of one's peers.
This man was absolutely Clancy's peer, perhaps the only one there that truly was.
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