In response to the pandemic, one New Mexico County convened grand juries to indict, and eliminated preliminary hearings and jury trials. The result? More indictments, fewer speedy trial rights
I work as a prosecutor in NYC. Back in March 2020, Cuomo issued an executive order that suspended all sorts of criminal procedure law, including speedy trial time. There was no speedy trial time on felony or misdemeanor cases in New York until about August, at which time parts of the CPL were reinstituted, and speedy trial for misdemeanors and indicted felonies in early October. Currently though, there are no criminal trials happening in NYC. The backlog is absolutely insane. We’ve done our best to dismiss as many cases as possible, but my bureau, domestic violence, is completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of cases. It’s such a tragedy. People are incarcerated pre-trial, but others have been released for health concerns only to go on and further abuse their partners. It’s a very difficult time for trying to pursue justice
Thank you for talking about those with no voice. The American legal system is an embarrassment. For a country obsessed with lecturing on freedom, we incarcerate more of our citizens than any other developed country. We incarcerate them and the whole corrupt, filthy system is designed to keep people buried forever in jail even if they are not guilty. I cannot understand this American obsession with locking up people. It fucks my mind with no lube.
Mr. Taibbi posted this article about the incarceration of potentially innocent people at the same time he posted his article on Rush Limbaugh's death.
The Rush article currently has over 1.000 posts, this article has 58.
What are we to make of this? The American people seem to have endless energy to discuss the death of some rich blowhard who spent his entire life serving no one but himself, but just can't seem to take an rooting interest in the incarceration of innocent American citizens due to our criminal system taking advantage of the pandemic to change the rules in their favor.
A admire Matt for putting in the time to report on a story of those who have no voice no one else cares about, but I'm disheartened by the general lack of interest. I was raised to think American's were a basically decent people who made mistakes, but managed to always get it right on the big things. I worry that is no longer the case.
“Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate ... the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.”
My first thought was, what a gigantic waste of government money.
Thank you Matt for writing about something that will never make the nightly news. Mainly because there is no entertainment value in empathy and nuance.
"The taxpayers don't know about it. " There is so much about the grand jury process that the public either doesn't know about or ignores. I think some prosecutors funnel ALL weak cases through the grand jury, because the prosecutorial advantages accrue further down the road, especially getting a guilty plea the easy way. Matt, this is an incredibly important story, obviously for all the defendants, but also for the rest of us, because we are next. I especially prize your work because you'll do stories that are unlikely to be popular despite their importance in public policy. Keep it up.
Many like me have become extremely jaded about the systemic unfairness of American criminalization. No one cares until literally they are the person being arrested. Then they spend the rest of their life listening to the grating Law and Order TV version how the system works from people without a clue.
I can't tell you how much it means that someone with your platform actually cares about an issue that directly impacts the lives of millions of Americans every year.
Thank you for always having the courage to do the unpopular stories other journalists don't care about.
SE New Mexico includes Otero County, home of Otero County commissioner Couy Griffin, who, according to Alamogordo Daily News "after being jailed in connection with the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C... Griffin was back in attendance at the Feb. 11 Otero County Commission meeting." He and his "Cowboys For Trump" have showed up here in northern New Mexico warning us about busloads of masked Antifa fighters willing to raise hell for supposed BLM protests. Thanks for the heads up on the nitty gritty of the south end of New Mexico. You sure don't hear about it out of the Albuquerque press.
Respectfully, Matt, I think your advocate-source took you for a ride. There are several differences between grand jury and trial jury proceedings that make virus-related accommodations easier for the former. As you say, the grand jury is secret, which means it doesn't have to happen in open court and no press or members of the public are permitted. This makes it easier to socially distance people present in the courtroom, and it vastly simplifies the court's need to control and test who is coming in and out. Also, it takes a fraction of the time to present a case to a grand jury that it takes to have a trial. Summoning enough jurors for a limited number of grand juries, operating for limited terms and prioritizing the most important cases, is much easier than summoning enough jurors for a fully-running trial system. Huge difference in the required traffic flow at the court, which is what the virus controls aim to prevent. Finally, with the exception of cases where defendants are held in on bail (which is an increasingly small percentage of defendants in most counties), defense attorneys are mostly thrilled to have trial delayed indefinitely. Cases don't get stronger with age, and offers become more generous as the caseload rises. tl;dr, don't believe everything you read on an advocate's Twitter.
Sorry Pablo. Matt’s point is bigger. The putos gringos love to lock people up. We built a corrupt system to stick it up to blacks and poor whites. It’s a cesspool of corruption and bullshitters like you.
Agreed. The last time I got arrested, I was in jail for four days before I saw a judge, simply because I couldn’t afford the bail ($10,000). Luckily, I had three of those days off from work, so I didn’t lose my job. My only shift was the day after I got arrested and I was able to call a friend of mine after I was booked and have him call my job to tell them what was going on (for some reason, he lied and told them I’d been in a car accident and was in the hospital haha!!! No idea why he did that...). But most people aren’t that lucky. They can’t afford their bail so they sit in jail and lose their jobs, their apartments, their cars...
Do you have anything to say on the merits? If you're the Alexander Ignatiev who shows up on Google as a public defender in Mississippi, I am sure you have a perspective on this topic I haven't considered.
Matt claims "This left a lot of people who had not even been convicted of a crime but couldn’t afford bail in a purgatory-like state of open-ended detention." You say "with the exception of cases where defendants are held in on bail (which is an increasingly small percentage of defendants in most counties)"
Can you be more specific? How many defendants are we talking about?
That's a fair question. I can't be more specific, and I'll just own up to it, I can't support my statement as originally written. What I should have said was: increasing numbers of jurisdictions are adopting bail reform laws, making fewer charges eligible for cash bail.(As an aside, I think we detain far too many people pretrial, and I am generally supportive of these reforms. The Appeal has a good round-up of these efforts: https://theappeal.org/political-report/legislative-round-up/.) I don't want my unsupported parenthetical to distract from my main point, which is that the indefinite delay of a trial looks very different for a defendant at liberty than for one in custody. There are also consequences to having an open criminal case while at liberty (in employment, for one), but if you're actually guilty - and believe it or not, some accused defendants actually are guilty - being at liberty with no prospect of trial is not necessarily a bad place to be. I agree with Matt that for someone actually in jail, having no effective trial right is a kind of purgatory.
I believe the US is one of only two countries that retains the grand jury system.
As Bertrand Russell so wisely said, the state should have a national system of judicial defense as well as prosecution as it is just as much if not of more interest to society to protect the innocent from being convicted as it is to bring the guilty to justice.
I think Bertrand Russell had some archiac idea about separating the innocent from the guilty during the trial process.
If we did that in America we would need to sacrifice a large percentage of those we depend on for what then DA Kamala Harris pointed out was the free labor the state depends on.
I live in North Carolina. I was called to jury duty last month and assigned to the Grand Jury for this county for the next year. We have had one session so far. We were told explicitly not to consider guilt or innocence. We were directed to only consider whether an arresting officer showed that a crime had been committed and had enough evidence to go to trial. A few of the cases that day had some questionable charges, but we could only look at the whole, not at parts. If a majority of the 18 jurors said yes, there was a crime committed and the officer seemed to have enough evidence to proceed, then it went to trial as a felony. Otherwise, it still went to trial but as a misdemeanor or civil offense. The only ones we saw were the officers presenting the arrest reports, often not the arresting officers.
In standard trials anything the police write in their reports and charging documents (when the prosecutor is not writing these things in advance for them for media purposes) is considered hearsay and cannot be used, which means an officer can (and typically does) tell the jury a story very different than what he wrote in his report and there is nothing the defense can do to show the jury he is lying on the stand.
Charging documents and police reports are famously and wildly inaccurate for just that reason. I can't imagine trying to make an accurate decision based entirely on the officers who wrote them.
Indded. Being limited to a decision overall, when there are items in the police report or individual charges that bring serious questions, but we are not allowed to question them, only the case as a whole. When you see how often it is reported that someone has been "indicted", people should raise questions in their minds about this and not correlate that with being "guilty".
And two more (a big problem among Aboriginal people here in Australia), do not incarcerate children under 16-18 for minor offences, because really that is child abuse.
You don't incarcerate children for minor crimes in Australia? In America, child incarceration is a cottage industry with a very bright future.
Sure, you can't join the military, vote, buy cigarettes or sign a contract until you are 18 and can't drink alcohol until you are 21, but when it comes to crime 13 and 14 year olds are routinely and increasingly charged as adults. I mean, the prisons aren't going to just fill themselves.
I'm waiting for the 13 year old to get arrested for robbing a liquor store. This being America, it would be totally on brand for us to charge them as an adult for robbing the store while simultaneously charging them as a minor for obtaining alcohol under the age of 21.
That's just the way we role. Get 'em in the system young so we can get them on that fast track of more violence, more stigma and more isolation going forward. We have decided as a society that those three things almost always lead to better citizens.
This being America, every time we incarcerate a child, we like to point out that we are really just doing it to protect the children anyway. You can't save a village if you are unwilling to torch it and burn it to the ground.
I’m taken aback more often than not to learn that the location of some of the people whose comments with which I find myself most closely aligned isn’t here in the US. How’s your Summer weather been so far this year? You may have heard of the deep freeze we’re having in the Northern Hemisphere reaching all the way to Gavelston, Texas, on the Gulf Coast. I’m fortunate to be in Western Washington!
So are we not going to talk about the fact that we've let tons and tons of dangerous criminals out of jail, during the pandemic? Especially county jails. I have spoke to several people who work for the DOC that have reported back that many violent sex offenders are being released almost immediately. It may be a result of some of the above factors, but they are being released nonetheless. To say that the government is using the pandemic to force more people into jail is just misleading. They're letting thousands of dangerous criminals out of jail, not vice versa and using the pandemic as an excuse.
I appreciate your self-serving anecdotes about "the people I know tell me," despite there being absolutely no evidence to support your self serving stories, which is why all you can present are bullshit anecdotes designed to frighten the public into maintaining the grotesque status quo of the US as the worlds biggest prison state. Despite the big headlines, the prisons have mostly refused to release those in prison even when they receive a direct order from a judge to do so. Our prison system long ago because an industrial complex insulated from our democratically elected officials the way the police have.
America is in the business of conflating a tiny minority of truly dangerous criminals with an overwhelming number of those who are mentally ill, morally innocent who broke some harmless lifestyle crime they did not realize was a crime because they were not harming anyone. The numbers became so embarrassing on this that law enforcement has spent the last decade redefining harmless lifestyle crimes and dangerous crimes to create the illusion they are actually keeping us safe. Incarceration is big business and those who profit off the misery of others have an endless story about violent criminals and how America would be Mogidishu but not for "thin blue line,"
That garbage has been thoroughly debunked by ever academic peer reviewed study. Our criminal carceral system has consistently placed profit and revenge before public safety.
The truth is, the American criminal state is weaponized against some people, some of the time and not at all against others. The primary purpose of the police state is no longer to protect the public, but to suppress minorities and terrify the general public into meekly following whatever diktats their leaders hand down. In return, our leaders promise to never hold the police accountable even for the most heinous crimes against our citizens. If anyone but the police acted the way our police do, they would face RICO charges along with long prison sentences.
I'm old enough to remember when at least some police acted on behalf of at least some of the public. Now are heavily weaponized police force almost entirely focused on enforcing low level lifestyle crimes and pulling in massive asset forfeiture busts are nothing more than the hired henchman of the elite who deploy them to terrify the public into compliance.
I totally agree with you on most points. I don't have data to back up my claim, because I'm not an investigative journalist like Matt. What I do have is a friend who works for the DOC who has shared with me what he has seen. I also recently had a man that was convicted of child rape of his own son, move into my neighborhood less than 4 months after being convicted. The idea that I want a police state or would like to further the agenda of one is truly laughable. Just pointing out what I have seen in my little corner of America.
I read this recent article ranking mass surveillance by cameras, and data requests by police. The US is #2 just after China for number of public police camera's, which does not include the private Ring cameras that tie in with police departments around the country:
Position Country Region CCTV in named major cities Population of cities CCTV per 10K people
1 China 15,880,491 15,354,067 10,342.86
2 USA 112,206 501,178 2,238.85
3 Pakistan 86,599 1,095,064 790.81
4 India 1,247,058 18,600,000 670.46
5 UK 628,975 10,181,458 617.77
6 United Arab Emirates 55,000 1,452,057 378.77
7 Russia 248,064 12,476,171 198.83
We are number 4 in terms of police requests for online data:
1 China BLOCKED 1 BLOCKED BLOCKED BLOCKED 1 94,866
2 Malta 18 1 12 2 0.0 33 1,664
3 Singapore 20 2 3 1 0.1 26 14,929
4 USA 11 4 8 1 0.1 24 800,196
Also, "despite tense debates over online manipulation, the government indulged in requests for over 800,000 of its citizens personal data in 2019 alone." which is the highest in the wold.
The good news is that here in the United Panopticon of the United States the police can tell you where a criminal is, what he had for breakfast and everything single thing he does throughout the day whether he is actually in prison or not. The bad news is that the government can do the same with you and use it's massive volume of laws to charge you with something at will anytime it wants.
The take away from this data for those who worry about former criminals leaving prison is that they never really did. They simply transferred to the open air prison from the previous one.
I appreciate your response. I don't think anyone wants a police state, but I do think people want a series of lifestyle conditions that can only be achieved through a police state. The police in America currently have more surveillance and arrest power over their citizens than at any time in human history. They will tell you they currently need more power and less restraints to get the job done.
Without knowing the circumstances of the case you cite I can't address it, but I follow these things and can't currently find a single article that supports someone raping their son now being free 4 months later. I can find countless stories of judges demanding prisons release prisoners and he prisons refusing. I can find plenty of examples of people being incarcerated past their incarceration date despite we being in the middle of a pandemic. These things are wrong without a pandemic. They are criminal with one.
"During the pandemic, however, jury trials were suspended in many jurisdictions. In some of those places, it was understood that speedy trial rights simply had to be put on hold until officials could, as Donald Trump would say, figure out what the hell is going on." Why does Taibbi mention Trump in this report? Does he have a personal relationship with Trump? Is this a famous Trump paraphrase? Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump!
"Covid-19 struck hard at the elderly in rest homes..." (Fact check this statement with Cuomo). " ...but the population that took perhaps the toughest hit was behind bars. By June, the rate of infection in America’s jails and prisons was seven times that of the general population." Oh wait, I thought were were comparing prison populations to rest home populations? And infection rates are worse than death rates? Great journalism here, Matt.
"However, official concern for jury safety seemed limited in some places to trials. Police continued to arrest people and prosecutors continued to use grand juries to indict."
And surfing alone in the Pacific got you arrested, but going to Target with thousands is OK. Anti lockdown protests are bad, but blm protests without masks are mostly peaceful AND ok. Florida has been open since September, and has similar graphs to California, which has had brutal and savage lockdowns. I can go to Wal Mart but the local restaurant down the block from me here in NYC has only recently been 'allowed' to have 25 percent capacity.
Hey Matt: You need to put your head down, close your mouth and FOLLOW THE SCIENCE PUNK!
I work as a prosecutor in NYC. Back in March 2020, Cuomo issued an executive order that suspended all sorts of criminal procedure law, including speedy trial time. There was no speedy trial time on felony or misdemeanor cases in New York until about August, at which time parts of the CPL were reinstituted, and speedy trial for misdemeanors and indicted felonies in early October. Currently though, there are no criminal trials happening in NYC. The backlog is absolutely insane. We’ve done our best to dismiss as many cases as possible, but my bureau, domestic violence, is completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of cases. It’s such a tragedy. People are incarcerated pre-trial, but others have been released for health concerns only to go on and further abuse their partners. It’s a very difficult time for trying to pursue justice
Thank you for talking about those with no voice. The American legal system is an embarrassment. For a country obsessed with lecturing on freedom, we incarcerate more of our citizens than any other developed country. We incarcerate them and the whole corrupt, filthy system is designed to keep people buried forever in jail even if they are not guilty. I cannot understand this American obsession with locking up people. It fucks my mind with no lube.
Mr. Taibbi posted this article about the incarceration of potentially innocent people at the same time he posted his article on Rush Limbaugh's death.
The Rush article currently has over 1.000 posts, this article has 58.
What are we to make of this? The American people seem to have endless energy to discuss the death of some rich blowhard who spent his entire life serving no one but himself, but just can't seem to take an rooting interest in the incarceration of innocent American citizens due to our criminal system taking advantage of the pandemic to change the rules in their favor.
A admire Matt for putting in the time to report on a story of those who have no voice no one else cares about, but I'm disheartened by the general lack of interest. I was raised to think American's were a basically decent people who made mistakes, but managed to always get it right on the big things. I worry that is no longer the case.
“Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate ... the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead
And, yeah, Matt, really great article about a subject I care a lot about.
My first thought was, what a gigantic waste of government money.
Thank you Matt for writing about something that will never make the nightly news. Mainly because there is no entertainment value in empathy and nuance.
"The taxpayers don't know about it. " There is so much about the grand jury process that the public either doesn't know about or ignores. I think some prosecutors funnel ALL weak cases through the grand jury, because the prosecutorial advantages accrue further down the road, especially getting a guilty plea the easy way. Matt, this is an incredibly important story, obviously for all the defendants, but also for the rest of us, because we are next. I especially prize your work because you'll do stories that are unlikely to be popular despite their importance in public policy. Keep it up.
I want to second this.
Many like me have become extremely jaded about the systemic unfairness of American criminalization. No one cares until literally they are the person being arrested. Then they spend the rest of their life listening to the grating Law and Order TV version how the system works from people without a clue.
I can't tell you how much it means that someone with your platform actually cares about an issue that directly impacts the lives of millions of Americans every year.
Thank you for always having the courage to do the unpopular stories other journalists don't care about.
SE New Mexico includes Otero County, home of Otero County commissioner Couy Griffin, who, according to Alamogordo Daily News "after being jailed in connection with the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C... Griffin was back in attendance at the Feb. 11 Otero County Commission meeting." He and his "Cowboys For Trump" have showed up here in northern New Mexico warning us about busloads of masked Antifa fighters willing to raise hell for supposed BLM protests. Thanks for the heads up on the nitty gritty of the south end of New Mexico. You sure don't hear about it out of the Albuquerque press.
Respectfully, Matt, I think your advocate-source took you for a ride. There are several differences between grand jury and trial jury proceedings that make virus-related accommodations easier for the former. As you say, the grand jury is secret, which means it doesn't have to happen in open court and no press or members of the public are permitted. This makes it easier to socially distance people present in the courtroom, and it vastly simplifies the court's need to control and test who is coming in and out. Also, it takes a fraction of the time to present a case to a grand jury that it takes to have a trial. Summoning enough jurors for a limited number of grand juries, operating for limited terms and prioritizing the most important cases, is much easier than summoning enough jurors for a fully-running trial system. Huge difference in the required traffic flow at the court, which is what the virus controls aim to prevent. Finally, with the exception of cases where defendants are held in on bail (which is an increasingly small percentage of defendants in most counties), defense attorneys are mostly thrilled to have trial delayed indefinitely. Cases don't get stronger with age, and offers become more generous as the caseload rises. tl;dr, don't believe everything you read on an advocate's Twitter.
Sorry Pablo. Matt’s point is bigger. The putos gringos love to lock people up. We built a corrupt system to stick it up to blacks and poor whites. It’s a cesspool of corruption and bullshitters like you.
Agreed. The last time I got arrested, I was in jail for four days before I saw a judge, simply because I couldn’t afford the bail ($10,000). Luckily, I had three of those days off from work, so I didn’t lose my job. My only shift was the day after I got arrested and I was able to call a friend of mine after I was booked and have him call my job to tell them what was going on (for some reason, he lied and told them I’d been in a car accident and was in the hospital haha!!! No idea why he did that...). But most people aren’t that lucky. They can’t afford their bail so they sit in jail and lose their jobs, their apartments, their cars...
Sounds like a prosecutor to me.
Do you have anything to say on the merits? If you're the Alexander Ignatiev who shows up on Google as a public defender in Mississippi, I am sure you have a perspective on this topic I haven't considered.
Matt claims "This left a lot of people who had not even been convicted of a crime but couldn’t afford bail in a purgatory-like state of open-ended detention." You say "with the exception of cases where defendants are held in on bail (which is an increasingly small percentage of defendants in most counties)"
Can you be more specific? How many defendants are we talking about?
That's a fair question. I can't be more specific, and I'll just own up to it, I can't support my statement as originally written. What I should have said was: increasing numbers of jurisdictions are adopting bail reform laws, making fewer charges eligible for cash bail.(As an aside, I think we detain far too many people pretrial, and I am generally supportive of these reforms. The Appeal has a good round-up of these efforts: https://theappeal.org/political-report/legislative-round-up/.) I don't want my unsupported parenthetical to distract from my main point, which is that the indefinite delay of a trial looks very different for a defendant at liberty than for one in custody. There are also consequences to having an open criminal case while at liberty (in employment, for one), but if you're actually guilty - and believe it or not, some accused defendants actually are guilty - being at liberty with no prospect of trial is not necessarily a bad place to be. I agree with Matt that for someone actually in jail, having no effective trial right is a kind of purgatory.
I believe the US is one of only two countries that retains the grand jury system.
As Bertrand Russell so wisely said, the state should have a national system of judicial defense as well as prosecution as it is just as much if not of more interest to society to protect the innocent from being convicted as it is to bring the guilty to justice.
Yep. If you're a government lawyer, you should randomly be getting cases and randomly be assigned a side. Career DAs are terrible.
I think Bertrand Russell had some archiac idea about separating the innocent from the guilty during the trial process.
If we did that in America we would need to sacrifice a large percentage of those we depend on for what then DA Kamala Harris pointed out was the free labor the state depends on.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adamserwer/some-lawyers-just-want-to-see-the-world-burn
I live in North Carolina. I was called to jury duty last month and assigned to the Grand Jury for this county for the next year. We have had one session so far. We were told explicitly not to consider guilt or innocence. We were directed to only consider whether an arresting officer showed that a crime had been committed and had enough evidence to go to trial. A few of the cases that day had some questionable charges, but we could only look at the whole, not at parts. If a majority of the 18 jurors said yes, there was a crime committed and the officer seemed to have enough evidence to proceed, then it went to trial as a felony. Otherwise, it still went to trial but as a misdemeanor or civil offense. The only ones we saw were the officers presenting the arrest reports, often not the arresting officers.
That's a very valuable insight.
In standard trials anything the police write in their reports and charging documents (when the prosecutor is not writing these things in advance for them for media purposes) is considered hearsay and cannot be used, which means an officer can (and typically does) tell the jury a story very different than what he wrote in his report and there is nothing the defense can do to show the jury he is lying on the stand.
Charging documents and police reports are famously and wildly inaccurate for just that reason. I can't imagine trying to make an accurate decision based entirely on the officers who wrote them.
Indded. Being limited to a decision overall, when there are items in the police report or individual charges that bring serious questions, but we are not allowed to question them, only the case as a whole. When you see how often it is reported that someone has been "indicted", people should raise questions in their minds about this and not correlate that with being "guilty".
Speaking as a criminal, or crim, I think, like the Bertrand Russel quote above, the onus on the courts (without stating the obvious) is to:-
Have fair, speedy, open trials that cannot be derailed on the pretext of medical exigencies;
Seek to limit the time prisoners are detained on remand to the minimum;
Delineate clear rules for using Grand Juries eg. take decisions out of prosecutors’ hands;
Do not jail addicts solely for their addiction. Get them treatment. Same goes for mentally ill;
Do not stack a jury against people of colour;
Minimise solitary confinement.
There’s plenty more but I don’t know enough.
And two more (a big problem among Aboriginal people here in Australia), do not incarcerate children under 16-18 for minor offences, because really that is child abuse.
And end private prisons where abuses are rampant.
You don't incarcerate children for minor crimes in Australia? In America, child incarceration is a cottage industry with a very bright future.
Sure, you can't join the military, vote, buy cigarettes or sign a contract until you are 18 and can't drink alcohol until you are 21, but when it comes to crime 13 and 14 year olds are routinely and increasingly charged as adults. I mean, the prisons aren't going to just fill themselves.
I'm waiting for the 13 year old to get arrested for robbing a liquor store. This being America, it would be totally on brand for us to charge them as an adult for robbing the store while simultaneously charging them as a minor for obtaining alcohol under the age of 21.
That's just the way we role. Get 'em in the system young so we can get them on that fast track of more violence, more stigma and more isolation going forward. We have decided as a society that those three things almost always lead to better citizens.
This being America, every time we incarcerate a child, we like to point out that we are really just doing it to protect the children anyway. You can't save a village if you are unwilling to torch it and burn it to the ground.
I’m taken aback more often than not to learn that the location of some of the people whose comments with which I find myself most closely aligned isn’t here in the US. How’s your Summer weather been so far this year? You may have heard of the deep freeze we’re having in the Northern Hemisphere reaching all the way to Gavelston, Texas, on the Gulf Coast. I’m fortunate to be in Western Washington!
So are we not going to talk about the fact that we've let tons and tons of dangerous criminals out of jail, during the pandemic? Especially county jails. I have spoke to several people who work for the DOC that have reported back that many violent sex offenders are being released almost immediately. It may be a result of some of the above factors, but they are being released nonetheless. To say that the government is using the pandemic to force more people into jail is just misleading. They're letting thousands of dangerous criminals out of jail, not vice versa and using the pandemic as an excuse.
I appreciate your self-serving anecdotes about "the people I know tell me," despite there being absolutely no evidence to support your self serving stories, which is why all you can present are bullshit anecdotes designed to frighten the public into maintaining the grotesque status quo of the US as the worlds biggest prison state. Despite the big headlines, the prisons have mostly refused to release those in prison even when they receive a direct order from a judge to do so. Our prison system long ago because an industrial complex insulated from our democratically elected officials the way the police have.
America is in the business of conflating a tiny minority of truly dangerous criminals with an overwhelming number of those who are mentally ill, morally innocent who broke some harmless lifestyle crime they did not realize was a crime because they were not harming anyone. The numbers became so embarrassing on this that law enforcement has spent the last decade redefining harmless lifestyle crimes and dangerous crimes to create the illusion they are actually keeping us safe. Incarceration is big business and those who profit off the misery of others have an endless story about violent criminals and how America would be Mogidishu but not for "thin blue line,"
That garbage has been thoroughly debunked by ever academic peer reviewed study. Our criminal carceral system has consistently placed profit and revenge before public safety.
The truth is, the American criminal state is weaponized against some people, some of the time and not at all against others. The primary purpose of the police state is no longer to protect the public, but to suppress minorities and terrify the general public into meekly following whatever diktats their leaders hand down. In return, our leaders promise to never hold the police accountable even for the most heinous crimes against our citizens. If anyone but the police acted the way our police do, they would face RICO charges along with long prison sentences.
I'm old enough to remember when at least some police acted on behalf of at least some of the public. Now are heavily weaponized police force almost entirely focused on enforcing low level lifestyle crimes and pulling in massive asset forfeiture busts are nothing more than the hired henchman of the elite who deploy them to terrify the public into compliance.
I totally agree with you on most points. I don't have data to back up my claim, because I'm not an investigative journalist like Matt. What I do have is a friend who works for the DOC who has shared with me what he has seen. I also recently had a man that was convicted of child rape of his own son, move into my neighborhood less than 4 months after being convicted. The idea that I want a police state or would like to further the agenda of one is truly laughable. Just pointing out what I have seen in my little corner of America.
I read this recent article ranking mass surveillance by cameras, and data requests by police. The US is #2 just after China for number of public police camera's, which does not include the private Ring cameras that tie in with police departments around the country:
https://www.websitetooltester.com/en/blog/the-worlds-most-surveilled-countries/
The top ten countries for CCTV
Position Country Region CCTV in named major cities Population of cities CCTV per 10K people
1 China 15,880,491 15,354,067 10,342.86
2 USA 112,206 501,178 2,238.85
3 Pakistan 86,599 1,095,064 790.81
4 India 1,247,058 18,600,000 670.46
5 UK 628,975 10,181,458 617.77
6 United Arab Emirates 55,000 1,452,057 378.77
7 Russia 248,064 12,476,171 198.83
We are number 4 in terms of police requests for online data:
1 China BLOCKED 1 BLOCKED BLOCKED BLOCKED 1 94,866
2 Malta 18 1 12 2 0.0 33 1,664
3 Singapore 20 2 3 1 0.1 26 14,929
4 USA 11 4 8 1 0.1 24 800,196
Also, "despite tense debates over online manipulation, the government indulged in requests for over 800,000 of its citizens personal data in 2019 alone." which is the highest in the wold.
The good news is that here in the United Panopticon of the United States the police can tell you where a criminal is, what he had for breakfast and everything single thing he does throughout the day whether he is actually in prison or not. The bad news is that the government can do the same with you and use it's massive volume of laws to charge you with something at will anytime it wants.
The take away from this data for those who worry about former criminals leaving prison is that they never really did. They simply transferred to the open air prison from the previous one.
I appreciate your response. I don't think anyone wants a police state, but I do think people want a series of lifestyle conditions that can only be achieved through a police state. The police in America currently have more surveillance and arrest power over their citizens than at any time in human history. They will tell you they currently need more power and less restraints to get the job done.
Without knowing the circumstances of the case you cite I can't address it, but I follow these things and can't currently find a single article that supports someone raping their son now being free 4 months later. I can find countless stories of judges demanding prisons release prisoners and he prisons refusing. I can find plenty of examples of people being incarcerated past their incarceration date despite we being in the middle of a pandemic. These things are wrong without a pandemic. They are criminal with one.
Limbaugh would've known how to popularize this dry, legalistic content. But he's dead.
"During the pandemic, however, jury trials were suspended in many jurisdictions. In some of those places, it was understood that speedy trial rights simply had to be put on hold until officials could, as Donald Trump would say, figure out what the hell is going on." Why does Taibbi mention Trump in this report? Does he have a personal relationship with Trump? Is this a famous Trump paraphrase? Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump!
"Covid-19 struck hard at the elderly in rest homes..." (Fact check this statement with Cuomo). " ...but the population that took perhaps the toughest hit was behind bars. By June, the rate of infection in America’s jails and prisons was seven times that of the general population." Oh wait, I thought were were comparing prison populations to rest home populations? And infection rates are worse than death rates? Great journalism here, Matt.
"However, official concern for jury safety seemed limited in some places to trials. Police continued to arrest people and prosecutors continued to use grand juries to indict."
And surfing alone in the Pacific got you arrested, but going to Target with thousands is OK. Anti lockdown protests are bad, but blm protests without masks are mostly peaceful AND ok. Florida has been open since September, and has similar graphs to California, which has had brutal and savage lockdowns. I can go to Wal Mart but the local restaurant down the block from me here in NYC has only recently been 'allowed' to have 25 percent capacity.
Hey Matt: You need to put your head down, close your mouth and FOLLOW THE SCIENCE PUNK!