![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I was reading about Kalief Browder, who at the age of 16 was incarcerated for 3 years in New York after having been accused of a robbery which he denied committing. Due to backlogs in the court system and multiple delays requested by the prosecutors, he never even got to have a trial during that whole time. During his imprisonment, he was beaten by guards and fellow inmates, and spent a lot of time in solitary confinement. He was finally released after prosecutors admitted that they had lost contact with the man who had accused him of the crime. After being released, Kalief suffered mental illness and ended up committing suicide two years later.
2 years and 10 months after being jailed, a judge had offered to release Kalief based on the time he had already served, if he plead guilty to two misdemeanors. Kalief refused. How many other people, even if innocent, would refuse that? How many people, after having been wrongly jailed for almost 3 years and having a chance to finally go free, would trust the system enough to want to risk being wrongly convicted and incarcerated for another 10 years? And yet, pleading guilty will result in a criminal record, and will make it difficult for you to get a job or to get an apartment for the rest of your life, and will make people think that you got what you deserved (rather than recognizing the horrible injustice you suffered). You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
And that is only one small aspect of how our criminal justice system is not working like it should.
Innocent until proven guilty is a myth, isn't it?
How many innocent people are jailed or put to death?
How much racial disparity is there in arrests and convictions?
How many people commit minor misdemeanors and end up having to pay huge fees and court costs?
How does our justice system reform criminals? How many people who serve time are actually less likely to commit another crime afterwards, versus more likely?
How many people who commit crimes aren't ever even charged, convicted, or jailed?
How much likelier is it for you to have access to a good defense attorney and to be exonerated of a crime, when you are rich versus poor?
If you are convicted of a serious crime, how likely is it for you to be released before you've served your whole sentence, because keeping you in prison costs too much?
When the government hands over the running of prisons to private companies who are only interested in making money, how can we ensure that these companies uphold minimum standards and respect the inmates' human rights?
How can we expect people who have served their time to move on to a law-abiding life, when their criminal record makes it hard for them to get a job? Yet, can you blame people for not wanting to hire ex-cons? Especially when the criminal justice system isn't focused on reforming criminals, but rather on punishing them and turning them into more hardened criminals?
.
I was reading about VoIP. Neither VoIP nor cell-phones allow you to receive incoming collect calls. That must make it difficult for a lot of inmates to call home. If their friends and family can't afford land-lines, how can the inmates call home? I did a search and found that there is a service that allows you to get a phone number whereby collect calls can be redirected to your cellphone or VoIP phone number. The website doesn't at all mention how much this service costs, which makes me think that it must be expensive.
I was further struck by this entry in the website FAQ:
So most prisons only allow outgoing collect calls, but some also restrict you from using this kind of service to call a cell phone? Why??? I looked up information on these Arizona Dept. of Corrections rules.
The document indicates:
Inmates may not have a telephone card or cell phone and do not have access to email.
Inmates may only call people on their visitation list - this list may contain up to 20 people.
Before any of these people are allowed to visit or be called, they have to submit an application and be approved, a process which takes 40 to 60 days and requires a $25 background check fee.
These are not allowed: "Calls that are relayed from the number called to another number (i.e., third party calls), credit card calls and calls to 800 and 900 phone numbers."
In retrospect, I suppose those kind of calls are not allowed as it would be too easy to transfer a cell phone (etc.) to someone *not* on the approved visitation list.
Then I found this 2011 article, Prisons seek ally in crackdown on cellphones. Apparently, a lot of inmates are getting their hands on contraband cell phones. The prisons want to install equipment to block the cell phone signals, so that inmates will be forced to use the official pay phones provided for outgoing calls.
There's another issue. Why can't prisons even prevent inmates from getting their hands on contraband items? How many prison employees are illicitly making money by providing these contraband items to the inmates?
Why can't prisons prevent inmate-on-inmate violence?
2 years and 10 months after being jailed, a judge had offered to release Kalief based on the time he had already served, if he plead guilty to two misdemeanors. Kalief refused. How many other people, even if innocent, would refuse that? How many people, after having been wrongly jailed for almost 3 years and having a chance to finally go free, would trust the system enough to want to risk being wrongly convicted and incarcerated for another 10 years? And yet, pleading guilty will result in a criminal record, and will make it difficult for you to get a job or to get an apartment for the rest of your life, and will make people think that you got what you deserved (rather than recognizing the horrible injustice you suffered). You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
And that is only one small aspect of how our criminal justice system is not working like it should.
Innocent until proven guilty is a myth, isn't it?
How many innocent people are jailed or put to death?
How much racial disparity is there in arrests and convictions?
How many people commit minor misdemeanors and end up having to pay huge fees and court costs?
How does our justice system reform criminals? How many people who serve time are actually less likely to commit another crime afterwards, versus more likely?
How many people who commit crimes aren't ever even charged, convicted, or jailed?
How much likelier is it for you to have access to a good defense attorney and to be exonerated of a crime, when you are rich versus poor?
If you are convicted of a serious crime, how likely is it for you to be released before you've served your whole sentence, because keeping you in prison costs too much?
When the government hands over the running of prisons to private companies who are only interested in making money, how can we ensure that these companies uphold minimum standards and respect the inmates' human rights?
How can we expect people who have served their time to move on to a law-abiding life, when their criminal record makes it hard for them to get a job? Yet, can you blame people for not wanting to hire ex-cons? Especially when the criminal justice system isn't focused on reforming criminals, but rather on punishing them and turning them into more hardened criminals?
.
I was reading about VoIP. Neither VoIP nor cell-phones allow you to receive incoming collect calls. That must make it difficult for a lot of inmates to call home. If their friends and family can't afford land-lines, how can the inmates call home? I did a search and found that there is a service that allows you to get a phone number whereby collect calls can be redirected to your cellphone or VoIP phone number. The website doesn't at all mention how much this service costs, which makes me think that it must be expensive.
I was further struck by this entry in the website FAQ:
If the prison specifically prohibits calls to cell phones, third-party or relayed calls, can I still us Just Talk?
Yes. Just Talk has a VOIP service that can offer significant savings while still complying with prison regulations prohibiting calls to cell phones, for third-party or relayed calls, such as the Arizona Department of Corrections order 1.4.2.
So most prisons only allow outgoing collect calls, but some also restrict you from using this kind of service to call a cell phone? Why??? I looked up information on these Arizona Dept. of Corrections rules.
The document indicates:
Inmates may not have a telephone card or cell phone and do not have access to email.
Inmates may only call people on their visitation list - this list may contain up to 20 people.
Before any of these people are allowed to visit or be called, they have to submit an application and be approved, a process which takes 40 to 60 days and requires a $25 background check fee.
These are not allowed: "Calls that are relayed from the number called to another number (i.e., third party calls), credit card calls and calls to 800 and 900 phone numbers."
In retrospect, I suppose those kind of calls are not allowed as it would be too easy to transfer a cell phone (etc.) to someone *not* on the approved visitation list.
Then I found this 2011 article, Prisons seek ally in crackdown on cellphones. Apparently, a lot of inmates are getting their hands on contraband cell phones. The prisons want to install equipment to block the cell phone signals, so that inmates will be forced to use the official pay phones provided for outgoing calls.
There's another issue. Why can't prisons even prevent inmates from getting their hands on contraband items? How many prison employees are illicitly making money by providing these contraband items to the inmates?
Why can't prisons prevent inmate-on-inmate violence?
no subject
Date: 2015-09-02 04:00 am (UTC)From:Where to start...
First of all, may Kalief rest in peace. His case has bothered me ever since I first read about it, months ago. No one should be so demonized by a system set up by society - which itself is a social system and therefore should presumably be civilized and compassionate - that they feel so hopeless as to kill themselves.
Innocent until proven guilty is a myth, isn't it?
I'd say the most accurate answer - at least in the US - is ymmv. From block to block, street to street, cellblock to cellblock, warden to warden, and judge to judge. Not only is our system a perversion of the very justice it claims to uphold, but the perversion itself is unpredictable, which is another source of anxiety, since you really never know how you'll get treated from day to day by anyone over anything that happens anywhere. A guy gets shot dead for holding his hands up, unarmed. He is black and probably not the most well-to-do. A rich white man gets a good lawyer, gets treated well inside, gets told he is innocent until proven guilty, intimidates via the fact of his very white male privilege a judge and jury into being acquitted for a murder a less well-off man would be proven guilty of and locked away for, forever. Guess which one was guilty. This is a typical day in the US justice system.
How many innocent people are jailed or put to death?
Yep. Incidentally, how may rich USians are executed? Ever? Does anyone even glance at the statistics on that?
How much racial disparity is there in arrests and convictions?
I think even the most privileged whites can agree the statistics are in the white's favor on this. Only deep-seated prejudice would stop anyone from agreeing as this is simply a reading of the numbers on it and quite clear.
How many people commit minor misdemeanors and end up having to pay huge fees and court costs?
This, this, this. A thousand times, this. Turns out being charged with a misdemeanor, especially one that resolves in probation, is a huge money-laundering scheme undertaken by local and state governments and comes with such a byzantine set of ironclad rules, requirements and off-the-chart-pricey recurring payments (that must be made exactly on time each week/month in order to not instantly violate) that you are actually better off just serving time and avoiding the perils and high cost of parole or probation altogether. You can PM me for more on this (and since this a public-facing post that I'm replying to let me emphasize for the record that I am not the one who ever got in trouble, but personally know someone who is!).
How does our justice system reform criminals?
Lololol *knee-slapping*, it doesn't. Again...it's a money-laundering scheme, punitive and non-rehabilitative at best, absolutely non-reformative at worst (think bad judges, school-to-prison pipeline, having a record that keeps one from ever working again, innocents/new offenders who get pulled into gangs for the first time in their lives via those they meet/bunk with in jail; think of the distinctly unhelpful way one can be treated throughout their incarceration by both inmates and COs).
At this point I honestly think criminals reform themselves, which is exceedingly rare, which is why you don't see much of it happening.
How many people who serve time are actually less likely to commit another crime afterwards, versus more likely?
I'd love to know the statistics on this myself. I think for people on probation or parole it's especially hard to not re-offend because the system is designed to practically force you to. When you consider you can be violated for simply not having enough money to pay fines, fees, and court costs (which all occur at once in addition to your regular monthly bills, rent payments or mortgage, and the fact that on top of all that, you probably just lost your job by getting arrested and/or spending any amount of time in jail) you realize the recidivism rate is not hardly because we have such bad people in our society. It's more likely we have more good people than bad but we use financial penalties to make it seem otherwise because the entire court system is just a legal racket, and poor people especially get thrown under the bus with glee and absolute abandonment by the very officials who are imposing so-called justice by making them pay the same exorbitant fees as might be paid by the more well-off, who don't have to pay as much money nor deal with as many fees to begin with simply because they have lawyers, a luxury most lower middle class to downright poor people cannot afford. How many re-offend for not being able to meet financial obligations imposed in lieu of (or even in addition to) jail or prison time? Give me figures on that. I don't know if anyone can, but this is an area that needs to be further explored to truly address the injustices within our system. It's breaking the backs of too many otherwise sincere and well-meaning folks who simply want to put their one or few mistakes behind them and get on productively with their lives, but thanks to the onerous living requirements and financial costs of being on probation or parole, they simply can't.
How many people who commit crimes aren't ever even charged, convicted, or jailed?
If you were to do a really sweeping, honest accounting (which is actually impossible, and likely will always be impossible) and considering how many laws can be broken quite easily, often by accident or out ignorance or any sort of life-saving necessity, if you were to answer this question accurately we might all be going to jail. You could probably kiss a good 9/10ths of the population goodbye at any possible moment for at least minor infractions, such as underage drinking, smoking, shoplifting, and a range of other crimes committed by people of every age, stripe and color. After all, define crime, then explain to many people why what they're doing is a crime even if they don't see it that way or literally did not know that it was.
I'm less concerned (until you get into serious crimes, like false testimony against another, robbery, sex crimes of any sort, murder, and so on) with what people get away with than I am about what they've been charged with that they were innocent of doing, or what they've been charged with that they got the harshest sentences and fines for when they deserved to - and to succeed in life, absolutely needed to - get some sort of leniency, when there are more serious crimes committed, that people walk away from all the time with less penalty. Right now a person can get less time in this country (at least, with the right set of circumstances and a good lawyer) for killing others than they will get for "three strikes" on a crack-cocaine charge. That to me is more outrageous than not arresting Jr. for drinking at his brother's 21st birthday party or someone's neighbor who smokes pot in his backyard even though it's still against the law to do so in his state. This can get very picky, this deciding who should not get away with what; I'd rather focus on who ought to get away with less punishment or not get charged or be set free if they were innocent to begin with.
How much likelier is it for you to have access to a good defense attorney and to be exonerated of a crime, when you are rich versus poor?
Very. This is self-evident. In our country, public defenders are usually not our best attorneys and even when they are - and even if they can and want to work their asses off on every case, big or small - they can't. Their caseloads are too high, they're spread too thin, and they are not well-compensated enough to do much about it.
If you are convicted of a serious crime, how likely is it for you to be released before you've served your whole sentence, because keeping you in prison costs too much?
More likely than someone who's been convicted of a lesser crime because some byzantine sentencing structure imposed upon them locks them up longer than the average Joe because Clinton mumbled something about "high crime rates" back in the 90s, so the guy who got his murder conviction reduced (barely) to "just" manslaughter gets out faster thanks to overcrowding than our thrice-offending crack user. Welcome to America (and I'm thinking of the West Side Story song of the same name as I say so. La la la la, freakin' America).
When the government hands over the running of prisons to private companies who are only interested in making money, how can we ensure that these companies uphold minimum standards and respect the inmates' human rights?
We can't. That was the whole idea. That was why government handed off this responsibility to private companies in the first place. Explicitly to make it not their problem anymore.
How can we expect people who have served their time to move on to a law-abiding life, when their criminal record makes it hard for them to get a job? Yet, can you blame people for not wanting to hire ex-cons?
Yeah, I can blame them. Most ex-cons are not going to be the Big Bad that everyone fears. They mingled amongst us before their convictions, after all, and not all of them are guilty of the crimes they were charged with or even if they were, perhaps some of them still had the book thrown at them needlessly, thanks to our one-size-fits-all version of a criminal justice system. You might not want an ex-con as a roommate (I actually went through this, only finding out about this person's record long after the fact) but they're not going to bother most people at the job, not most of the time.
Jumping ahead now to the jail and prison phone dilemma...
If their friends and family can't afford land-lines, how can the inmates call home?
In my area/possibly my entire state, try roughly $20 for every 15 minutes which is limited to so many calls per week...the family or friend has to set up an account for the prisoner with the phone service that's used by the jail. They have to pay by debit card $25 for the first phone call, which is only 10 minutes, and $20 for every 15 minutes thereafter...or something like that. I last tried to delve into the details a while back and was so shocked by the prices I think I'm still blocking them out to this day. I wound up dropping in all in-person-like, instead. It was (in this state, at least) cheaper (free!) and allowed a video conference call that a generous CO allowed to go on for about three times longer than originally planned. This aspect of imprisonment is yet another high-cost nightmare designed to make money for the state and the private company in question. It deeply financially impacts the families and friends of people in jail who are already going broke trying to come up with bail/bond/money for a lawyer/probation/parole costs and so on. Everything is stacked against your success in the court system. Everything.
At least, if you're the average Joe. But especially if you happen to be any darker than average.