We've all seen the sickening video by now of a sixteen year old girl being beaten to the point where she required hospitalization by six other teenage girls, while two teenage boys acted as 'lookouts.'
And we've heard how the Dr. Phil show has gotten into some hot water for bailing out the alleged ringleader, apparently with the promise of a future interview on the show.
It is also true that the six girls and two boys are being charged as adults. And I agree that the beating was severe enough that this is appropriate.
According to reports published late last week in the Lakeland-area newspaper The Ledger, and to Polk County Sheriff's Office affidavits, Mulberry High School cheerleader and honor student Victoria Lindsay had fought with her mother and was temporarily staying with her friend Mercades Nichols, 17, at Nichols' grandmother's house. On the evening of March 30, Lindsay entered the house, and Nichols and 17-year-old Brittini Hardcastle began to threaten her. Fourteen-year-old April Cooper struck Lindsay in the face and slammed her head into a bedroom wall, knocking her unconscious. Lindsay awoke on the living room couch, surrounded by Nichols, Hardcastle, Cooper, and three other girls, 17-year-old Britney Mayes, 16-year-old Cara Murphy and 15-year-old Kayla Hassell. Lindsay's complaint also alleges that she was held down and prevented from escaping as the girls took turns beating her while they videotaped the incident, statements supported in the video obtained by law enforcement.
What I disagree with is the prospect that at least three of the girls may be facing a life sentence in prison.
All eight suspects are being charged as adults with kidnapping and battery, say court records. The kidnapping charges constitute a first-degree felony, with a maximum sentence of life in prison. The battery charges are first-degree misdemeanors with a maximum sentence of a year in jail. Three of the girls are also charged with witness tampering, a third-degree felony with a maximum of five years in prison.
A stint in prison is probably appropriate for a serious case of assault. And the lack of remorse by the principles involved (and their parents) is sickening. But I'm not sure that a life sentence, or even a very long prison sentence is the answer. Clearly the girls who perpetrated the assault require a lot of counseling (and there are likely some home issues involved that resulted in their becoming this violent) but five year (or life) prison sentences are most likely going to transform them from out of control youth to career criminals.
I believe that some serious work, in the form of community service, may be in order, and that they probably should all go on the 'Dr. Phil' show-- to apologize publically to the victim (with all proceeds from the show to go to her.)
But while it may be appropriate to charge them as adults, I hope that the court will see the wisdom in sparing them serious prison time.
Showing posts with label criminal justice system. Show all posts
Showing posts with label criminal justice system. Show all posts
Monday, April 14, 2008
Friday, February 29, 2008
Millions incarcerated. But do they all need to be?
So it's here.
The day when 1%, 1 out of a hundred of the U.S. adult population is incarcerated.
NEW YORK (AP) -- For the first time in history, more than one in every 100 American adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report.
The report, released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.
Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 -- one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world....
"For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling," the report said. "While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine."
The nationwide figures, as of January 1, include 1,596,127 people in state and federal prisons and 723,131 in local jails -- a total 2,319,258 out of almost 230 million American adults.
There are of course some people for whom there is no other option than to keep them in prison-- incorrigible, violent criminals. But what we've done in seeking to always get tougher and tougher on crime is create a system which threatens to collapse under its own weight.
To cite one example, using the statistics cited in the report, it costs $21,000 per inmate to house them, including security, food clothing and medical care. Those costs fall on the rest of the population to pay, and together with years of tax cuts and otherwise tight state budgets it is quickly becoming far too burdensome for many states to pay.
The standard response from many staunch conservatives when you cite prison costs is to 'make them pay.' They want to create more work crews so the inmates can 'pay' for their stay. Of course this is ridiculous. I'm not against putting inmates to work, but when organized into work crews it takes additional security, as well as the costs of transportation, and if anyone really thinks that the value of the work they do picking up litter on the side of the road is valuable enough to offset these higher costs they are really out of touch with reality. Work crews are for the benefit of the inmates who we want to incentivize to stay out of prison in the future, and of society in general (or to satisfy those who want to make sure prison isn't a 'walk in the park'). But financially they only add to the bill. Imagine how much your employer would be in the hole if they had to post a crew of licensed and trained guards to watch you do menial and simple tasks while providing secure transportation to and from your work site every work day, even if they didn't have to pay you.
The second response from staunch conservatives is that limiting appeals and hastening the death penalty would reduce the prison population. This also fails to recognize numerical reality. I remember reading a few years ago that if you took every person on death row at that time in the country and executed them immediately, the prison population would be back where it was in two weeks. I don't know if that statistic is still true, but I'm sure it is not too far different from that. Even if we ignore the flaws in a death penalty system in which over a hundred people who had been on death row have by now been exonerated, the numbers are so small that arguing over them in the context of the prison population is like waiting until a flood goes through your house and then arguing over whether turning the sink off will do anything about the flood. Just as a matter of scale, it won't.
There are three questions we can ask here. The first is how we got into this situation, The second is whether locking this many people up is an effective way to fight crime and worth what it is costing us,and the third is what we can do instead of incarcerating people.
The answer to the first question is that it is a confluence of many factors. The most obvious is that during the 1990's we spent a lot of money to build more prisons. More prisons so that we could lock up more inmates for a longer time, and then we passed legislation like mandatory decades long prison sentences for selling drugs and three strikes laws to help stock the new prisons and make sure that they all became just as full as the old ones. Getting tough on drugs has really made a difference in the prison population, and even today half of all crimes are drug crimes-- and many ordinary addicts (and even most sellers got there by being addicts) spend a lot of time in prison, and ironically don't get any help with breaking their addiction (so as soon as they are out they are able to renew it-- and maybe get back to prison.)
But that is not the only explanation. It is also true that in the 1970's and 1980's, we shut down many of the mental institutions. This came about by an unlikely alliance of liberals and conservatives. The liberals felt that locking someone up in one indefinitely was a moral dilemma-- even more so given the expose of abuses that had occurred in some mental institutions, and painted in the worst possible light by movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The conservatives felt that the mental institutions were expensive and with a typical Social Darwinist attitude felt that the best therapy was to let the mentally ill or deficient survive in the real world and compete against everyone else on equal footing. The result has in fact been a tragic miscalculation by both sides. The prison system is where the highest concentration of mentally ill individuals end up, and as we see their conditions of confinement are much worse than they ever were in the old mental hospitals. Furthermore, rather than learning to survive in the real world, many, perhaps most of them have proven that they are not suited for life on the outside and have gone to a place where they require much more security and supervision than where they were. And to put the cherry on top, the only chance that they might improve is through treatment, but the budget for that is cut by legislatures as they try to figure out ways of paying for more and better prisons.
The answer to the second question is to note that while crime did in fact go down during the 1990's (the period of new prison construction), it is much lower still in industrialized countries that don't lock so many people up. So at best the idea that it prevents crime is limited to the obvious fact that while a person is locked up they aren't on the outside committing a crime. But it doesn't go beyond that, and then we have to ask whether it is legitimate to spend thousands of dollars per year just to make sure someone doesn't steal any more pizza (the now infamous crime that earned a hapless prisoner in California the first 'three strikes and you're out' life sentence.)
The answer to the third sentence is that there are better ways of dealing with some criminals-- especially non-violent offenders, primarily drug offenders. According to the article, Texas and Kansas are leaders in looking for more efficient ways to treat criminals without locking them all up. Often various combinations of fines (which add money to the system rather than subtracting from it), probation and other punishments are more appropriate than prison or jail time. This is a good start. But we also need to combat recidivism by giving prisoners help with reforming their lives after they leave prison. Crime is always available as a career path, so we have to make sure that there are other career paths available to them. I once wrote a post entitled, "The prison which follows prison" in which I pointed out that no matter how much people like to run down rehabilitation programs, we have to keep trying because it is certain that virtually everyone in prison-- other than the very few who will stay there until they die-- will sooner or later be back out among us. We certainly should do everything we can to make sure that rehab programs are as efficient and as successful as possible, but given the cost of failure, not trying is not an option (though ironically, programs designed to provide education and job training to prisoners are invariably among the first to face cuts from misguided state legislators who are focused on that year's budget and willing to shunt aside the costs associated with their decisions-- both the economic and human costs-- to future years, and future legislators.) As I wrote in my post on prisons linked to above,
Now, I'm not going to stupidly sit here and say that if we funded more of these things, you wouldn't still have recidivism. Some people are habitual criminals and you could hand them a million dollars in cash and make them the CEO of a Fortune 500 Company, and the next day they would still be out running a con, knocking over a liquor store or beating someone up or raping or killing someone.
People like that need to be in prison, and there is little anyone can do to change that. But I am saying that regardless of the success rate (or failure rate) of rehabilitation programs, we as a society have an obligation to TRY. Because except for lifers or people on death row, the rest of the prison population will sooner or later be out among the rest of us, either rehabilitated or not.
We also should consider re-establishing (and/or expanding where they still exist) state mental hospitals. That way people who need treatment rather than incarceration will be able to get it (and it goes without saying that a prison atmosphere, with all the attendant sources of added stress and danger is probably not the ideal atmosphere to recover from a mental illness). A great deal more is known about mental illness and the psychology and biochemistry of the brain than was known in the past, so it would be much more difficult for someone to 'fake' their way into a mental institution in order to avoid prison. In any case though, to not invest in mental health care because we are worried about someone who doesn't need it 'gaming' the system is like not building a building because you are worried there might be termites someday. The way to handle it is to prosecute fraud aggressively when it is found, but not deny the benefits of treatment to the hundreds of thousands who need it because you are worried about a few 'McMurphees' (to also refer to the afformentioned movie.)
We also have to do a much better job of integrating prisoners back into society after they leave prison. There are far fewer halfway houses now than there were, and as I wrote in the previous prison post linked to above,
However, in some cases, we seem to be going beyond the pale in meting out punishment AFTER the punishment that the legal system decreed has been paid. In other cases, we are, simply by the mechanisms we put in place in society, setting them up to fail and return to crime (a career choice which is, after all, always available if no other options are).
For example, we say that convicted felons have the right to seek employment. However, we have for years cut the budgets for prison programs that seek to educate inmates about a trade (I have first hand knowledge of several educational institutions that suspended or ended their prison programs because of state or Federal budget cuts). We have also cut funding for job placement programs and halfway houses for prisoners. So, not surprisingly, when people who get out of a long term in prison with nothing to show on their resume other than a long stint in prison, have trouble getting a job, they often find that the easiest, and perhaps the only, way to earn a living wage, is through returning to a life of crime.
Another problem is that many people frankly expect and even want felons to fail. That is part of their dogma. As I blogged (ironically defending a campaign worker for conservative Republican Fred Thompson),
First and foremost, it's a matter of time. I wrote a post once, called "the prison that follows prison" that dealt with how hard it is for a convicted felon in America to become a productive member of society, or for that matter to be anything other than a convicted felon in the eyes of most people. For that matter, unless he's had his rights restored, Philip Martin would not be allowed to vote in most states. But look, his last conviction was TWENTY-FOUR years ago! TWENTY-FOUR bloody years ago! Do we EVER forgive anybody, or let them move ahead with their lives? The man has kept out of trouble for nearly a quarter of a century, and some people want to haul up what he did in 1979 or 1983. Guess what? Besides it being a long time ago, he was also a lot younger then. Sometimes younger people do foolish things, and then they learn from them. All the evidence is that Philip Martin did learn from his mistakes.
The attitude that prevailed towards Philip Martin prevails in the eyes of many if someone has ever been convicted, of anything (for the record he had two drug convictions that are decades old.)
It is understandable that many people would prefer to hire someone who is not a convicted felon. However, it seems as though our entire societal structure, between our indifference to the difficulties faced by those who genuinely want to make a living within the law and without committing any crimes, and our active hostility to those who may have once upon a time (even decades in the past) made a mistake, almost seem to be telling felons that they are always felons, and cannot ever fully repent.
A system which neither forgives nor forgets, and continues to punish people forever no matter how hard they try to change.
It's a good thing that God doesn't use the same standard of justice.
The day when 1%, 1 out of a hundred of the U.S. adult population is incarcerated.
NEW YORK (AP) -- For the first time in history, more than one in every 100 American adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report.
The report, released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.
Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 -- one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world....
"For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling," the report said. "While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine."
The nationwide figures, as of January 1, include 1,596,127 people in state and federal prisons and 723,131 in local jails -- a total 2,319,258 out of almost 230 million American adults.
There are of course some people for whom there is no other option than to keep them in prison-- incorrigible, violent criminals. But what we've done in seeking to always get tougher and tougher on crime is create a system which threatens to collapse under its own weight.
To cite one example, using the statistics cited in the report, it costs $21,000 per inmate to house them, including security, food clothing and medical care. Those costs fall on the rest of the population to pay, and together with years of tax cuts and otherwise tight state budgets it is quickly becoming far too burdensome for many states to pay.
The standard response from many staunch conservatives when you cite prison costs is to 'make them pay.' They want to create more work crews so the inmates can 'pay' for their stay. Of course this is ridiculous. I'm not against putting inmates to work, but when organized into work crews it takes additional security, as well as the costs of transportation, and if anyone really thinks that the value of the work they do picking up litter on the side of the road is valuable enough to offset these higher costs they are really out of touch with reality. Work crews are for the benefit of the inmates who we want to incentivize to stay out of prison in the future, and of society in general (or to satisfy those who want to make sure prison isn't a 'walk in the park'). But financially they only add to the bill. Imagine how much your employer would be in the hole if they had to post a crew of licensed and trained guards to watch you do menial and simple tasks while providing secure transportation to and from your work site every work day, even if they didn't have to pay you.
The second response from staunch conservatives is that limiting appeals and hastening the death penalty would reduce the prison population. This also fails to recognize numerical reality. I remember reading a few years ago that if you took every person on death row at that time in the country and executed them immediately, the prison population would be back where it was in two weeks. I don't know if that statistic is still true, but I'm sure it is not too far different from that. Even if we ignore the flaws in a death penalty system in which over a hundred people who had been on death row have by now been exonerated, the numbers are so small that arguing over them in the context of the prison population is like waiting until a flood goes through your house and then arguing over whether turning the sink off will do anything about the flood. Just as a matter of scale, it won't.
There are three questions we can ask here. The first is how we got into this situation, The second is whether locking this many people up is an effective way to fight crime and worth what it is costing us,and the third is what we can do instead of incarcerating people.
The answer to the first question is that it is a confluence of many factors. The most obvious is that during the 1990's we spent a lot of money to build more prisons. More prisons so that we could lock up more inmates for a longer time, and then we passed legislation like mandatory decades long prison sentences for selling drugs and three strikes laws to help stock the new prisons and make sure that they all became just as full as the old ones. Getting tough on drugs has really made a difference in the prison population, and even today half of all crimes are drug crimes-- and many ordinary addicts (and even most sellers got there by being addicts) spend a lot of time in prison, and ironically don't get any help with breaking their addiction (so as soon as they are out they are able to renew it-- and maybe get back to prison.)
But that is not the only explanation. It is also true that in the 1970's and 1980's, we shut down many of the mental institutions. This came about by an unlikely alliance of liberals and conservatives. The liberals felt that locking someone up in one indefinitely was a moral dilemma-- even more so given the expose of abuses that had occurred in some mental institutions, and painted in the worst possible light by movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The conservatives felt that the mental institutions were expensive and with a typical Social Darwinist attitude felt that the best therapy was to let the mentally ill or deficient survive in the real world and compete against everyone else on equal footing. The result has in fact been a tragic miscalculation by both sides. The prison system is where the highest concentration of mentally ill individuals end up, and as we see their conditions of confinement are much worse than they ever were in the old mental hospitals. Furthermore, rather than learning to survive in the real world, many, perhaps most of them have proven that they are not suited for life on the outside and have gone to a place where they require much more security and supervision than where they were. And to put the cherry on top, the only chance that they might improve is through treatment, but the budget for that is cut by legislatures as they try to figure out ways of paying for more and better prisons.
The answer to the second question is to note that while crime did in fact go down during the 1990's (the period of new prison construction), it is much lower still in industrialized countries that don't lock so many people up. So at best the idea that it prevents crime is limited to the obvious fact that while a person is locked up they aren't on the outside committing a crime. But it doesn't go beyond that, and then we have to ask whether it is legitimate to spend thousands of dollars per year just to make sure someone doesn't steal any more pizza (the now infamous crime that earned a hapless prisoner in California the first 'three strikes and you're out' life sentence.)
The answer to the third sentence is that there are better ways of dealing with some criminals-- especially non-violent offenders, primarily drug offenders. According to the article, Texas and Kansas are leaders in looking for more efficient ways to treat criminals without locking them all up. Often various combinations of fines (which add money to the system rather than subtracting from it), probation and other punishments are more appropriate than prison or jail time. This is a good start. But we also need to combat recidivism by giving prisoners help with reforming their lives after they leave prison. Crime is always available as a career path, so we have to make sure that there are other career paths available to them. I once wrote a post entitled, "The prison which follows prison" in which I pointed out that no matter how much people like to run down rehabilitation programs, we have to keep trying because it is certain that virtually everyone in prison-- other than the very few who will stay there until they die-- will sooner or later be back out among us. We certainly should do everything we can to make sure that rehab programs are as efficient and as successful as possible, but given the cost of failure, not trying is not an option (though ironically, programs designed to provide education and job training to prisoners are invariably among the first to face cuts from misguided state legislators who are focused on that year's budget and willing to shunt aside the costs associated with their decisions-- both the economic and human costs-- to future years, and future legislators.) As I wrote in my post on prisons linked to above,
Now, I'm not going to stupidly sit here and say that if we funded more of these things, you wouldn't still have recidivism. Some people are habitual criminals and you could hand them a million dollars in cash and make them the CEO of a Fortune 500 Company, and the next day they would still be out running a con, knocking over a liquor store or beating someone up or raping or killing someone.
People like that need to be in prison, and there is little anyone can do to change that. But I am saying that regardless of the success rate (or failure rate) of rehabilitation programs, we as a society have an obligation to TRY. Because except for lifers or people on death row, the rest of the prison population will sooner or later be out among the rest of us, either rehabilitated or not.
We also should consider re-establishing (and/or expanding where they still exist) state mental hospitals. That way people who need treatment rather than incarceration will be able to get it (and it goes without saying that a prison atmosphere, with all the attendant sources of added stress and danger is probably not the ideal atmosphere to recover from a mental illness). A great deal more is known about mental illness and the psychology and biochemistry of the brain than was known in the past, so it would be much more difficult for someone to 'fake' their way into a mental institution in order to avoid prison. In any case though, to not invest in mental health care because we are worried about someone who doesn't need it 'gaming' the system is like not building a building because you are worried there might be termites someday. The way to handle it is to prosecute fraud aggressively when it is found, but not deny the benefits of treatment to the hundreds of thousands who need it because you are worried about a few 'McMurphees' (to also refer to the afformentioned movie.)
We also have to do a much better job of integrating prisoners back into society after they leave prison. There are far fewer halfway houses now than there were, and as I wrote in the previous prison post linked to above,
However, in some cases, we seem to be going beyond the pale in meting out punishment AFTER the punishment that the legal system decreed has been paid. In other cases, we are, simply by the mechanisms we put in place in society, setting them up to fail and return to crime (a career choice which is, after all, always available if no other options are).
For example, we say that convicted felons have the right to seek employment. However, we have for years cut the budgets for prison programs that seek to educate inmates about a trade (I have first hand knowledge of several educational institutions that suspended or ended their prison programs because of state or Federal budget cuts). We have also cut funding for job placement programs and halfway houses for prisoners. So, not surprisingly, when people who get out of a long term in prison with nothing to show on their resume other than a long stint in prison, have trouble getting a job, they often find that the easiest, and perhaps the only, way to earn a living wage, is through returning to a life of crime.
Another problem is that many people frankly expect and even want felons to fail. That is part of their dogma. As I blogged (ironically defending a campaign worker for conservative Republican Fred Thompson),
First and foremost, it's a matter of time. I wrote a post once, called "the prison that follows prison" that dealt with how hard it is for a convicted felon in America to become a productive member of society, or for that matter to be anything other than a convicted felon in the eyes of most people. For that matter, unless he's had his rights restored, Philip Martin would not be allowed to vote in most states. But look, his last conviction was TWENTY-FOUR years ago! TWENTY-FOUR bloody years ago! Do we EVER forgive anybody, or let them move ahead with their lives? The man has kept out of trouble for nearly a quarter of a century, and some people want to haul up what he did in 1979 or 1983. Guess what? Besides it being a long time ago, he was also a lot younger then. Sometimes younger people do foolish things, and then they learn from them. All the evidence is that Philip Martin did learn from his mistakes.
The attitude that prevailed towards Philip Martin prevails in the eyes of many if someone has ever been convicted, of anything (for the record he had two drug convictions that are decades old.)
It is understandable that many people would prefer to hire someone who is not a convicted felon. However, it seems as though our entire societal structure, between our indifference to the difficulties faced by those who genuinely want to make a living within the law and without committing any crimes, and our active hostility to those who may have once upon a time (even decades in the past) made a mistake, almost seem to be telling felons that they are always felons, and cannot ever fully repent.
A system which neither forgives nor forgets, and continues to punish people forever no matter how hard they try to change.
It's a good thing that God doesn't use the same standard of justice.
Monday, November 05, 2007
Thompson can tell the difference between a crook and a former crook; Rudy can't.
It's very rare that I am complimentary towards a Republican. It's even rarer that I would be complimentary towards a Republican running for President. It's most vanishingly rare that I would be complimentary towards a rabid right-wing Republican running for President like Fred Thompson. In fact in my only post specifically devoted to Thompson, back when he was higher in the polls as a not-yet-announced candidate than he has been since he announced, I poked some fun at him while pointing out his deficiencies.
But I'm going to say he is doing the right thing today. And it's not about any laughing matter. Specifically, he is standing by Philip Martin, who is the co-chair of his campaign. It was reported over the weekend by the Washington Post that Martin has a criminal past, which between 1979 and 1983 included convictions or guilty pleas for selling marijuana and cocaine.
In today's 'gotcha' environment, many politicians would immediately sever all ties with Martin. But I'm glad that Thompson is taking a stand and not severing them, especially now that the campaign is entering a critical stage. We will see how intense the heat is and whether he continues to stay with Martin, but it does speak well that at least Thompson's initial reaction was to stand behind Martin.
So why am I applauding Thompson for standing by Martin, especially when I've been very critical of Rudy Giuliani's decisions to hire mob associate Bernard Kerik, coke dealer Thomas Ravenel or child molester Alan Placa?
First and foremost, it's a matter of time. I wrote a post once, called the prison that follows prison that dealt with how hard it is for a convicted felon in America to become a productive member of society, or for that matter to be anything other than a convicted felon in the eyes of most people. For that matter, unless he's had his rights restored, Philip Martin would not be allowed to vote in most states. But look, his last conviction was TWENTY-FOUR years ago! TWENTY-FOUR bloody years ago! Do we EVER forgive anybody, or let them move ahead with their lives? The man has kept out of trouble for nearly a quarter of a century, and some people want to haul up what he did in 1979 or 1983. Guess what? Besides it being a long time ago, he was also a lot younger then. Sometimes younger people do foolish things, and then they learn from them. All the evidence is that Philip Martin did learn from his mistakes. I'd expect that the Thompson campaign probably did a background check on him (or maybe he's known Thompson for some time) so what this says is that Fred Thompson actually can recognize that people can change if they have the opportunity (now if only that would give rise to a progressive social policy when it comes to prison reform and rehab programs.)
In stark contrast, as was reported in the March 30 New York Times, Giuliani hired Kerik as police commissioner in 2000, shortly after he was advised that Kerik was very closely associated with known mobsters (and as we now know he was getting 'free' work done by them for him while he was police commissioner.) It is true that Rudy may not have known about Ravenel (who resigned from Rudy's campaign after being busted for dealing coke), but Placa, whose association with Rudy goes back to high school, was hired by Rudy's law firm after he was suspended by the Catholic Church from continuing to practice as a priest following the 2002-2003 investigation by the Suffolk County Grand Jury into child molestation in the Diocese of Rockville Center, in which Placa figured prominently. Unfortunately the statute of limitations has run out on many of the crimes which Placa was tied to in the investigation (you can read more in the link I provided above if your stomach is strong enough) but that is hardly the same thing as Martin having plead guilty on the cocaine charge and paid his debt to society.
With the recency of the crimes, and in particular Rudy's being willing to hire a guy with known mob ties as police commissioner, it seems as if Rudy Giuliani just doesn't care about whether he hired criminals or not, and it raises some serious judgement issues.
And that's where it is also an issue. Giuliani has demonstrated poor judgement by continuing to hire criminals who have committed crimes in the very recent past (or are under suspicion at the time of continuing to commit them, as the March 30 Times article made clear in the case of Kerik) while Thompson is giving a second chance to a guy who has kept his nose clean for 24 years. I call that compassionate, and that's very, very rarely a word I'd ever put in a sentence with Fred Thompson.
But I'm going to say he is doing the right thing today. And it's not about any laughing matter. Specifically, he is standing by Philip Martin, who is the co-chair of his campaign. It was reported over the weekend by the Washington Post that Martin has a criminal past, which between 1979 and 1983 included convictions or guilty pleas for selling marijuana and cocaine.
In today's 'gotcha' environment, many politicians would immediately sever all ties with Martin. But I'm glad that Thompson is taking a stand and not severing them, especially now that the campaign is entering a critical stage. We will see how intense the heat is and whether he continues to stay with Martin, but it does speak well that at least Thompson's initial reaction was to stand behind Martin.
So why am I applauding Thompson for standing by Martin, especially when I've been very critical of Rudy Giuliani's decisions to hire mob associate Bernard Kerik, coke dealer Thomas Ravenel or child molester Alan Placa?
First and foremost, it's a matter of time. I wrote a post once, called the prison that follows prison that dealt with how hard it is for a convicted felon in America to become a productive member of society, or for that matter to be anything other than a convicted felon in the eyes of most people. For that matter, unless he's had his rights restored, Philip Martin would not be allowed to vote in most states. But look, his last conviction was TWENTY-FOUR years ago! TWENTY-FOUR bloody years ago! Do we EVER forgive anybody, or let them move ahead with their lives? The man has kept out of trouble for nearly a quarter of a century, and some people want to haul up what he did in 1979 or 1983. Guess what? Besides it being a long time ago, he was also a lot younger then. Sometimes younger people do foolish things, and then they learn from them. All the evidence is that Philip Martin did learn from his mistakes. I'd expect that the Thompson campaign probably did a background check on him (or maybe he's known Thompson for some time) so what this says is that Fred Thompson actually can recognize that people can change if they have the opportunity (now if only that would give rise to a progressive social policy when it comes to prison reform and rehab programs.)
In stark contrast, as was reported in the March 30 New York Times, Giuliani hired Kerik as police commissioner in 2000, shortly after he was advised that Kerik was very closely associated with known mobsters (and as we now know he was getting 'free' work done by them for him while he was police commissioner.) It is true that Rudy may not have known about Ravenel (who resigned from Rudy's campaign after being busted for dealing coke), but Placa, whose association with Rudy goes back to high school, was hired by Rudy's law firm after he was suspended by the Catholic Church from continuing to practice as a priest following the 2002-2003 investigation by the Suffolk County Grand Jury into child molestation in the Diocese of Rockville Center, in which Placa figured prominently. Unfortunately the statute of limitations has run out on many of the crimes which Placa was tied to in the investigation (you can read more in the link I provided above if your stomach is strong enough) but that is hardly the same thing as Martin having plead guilty on the cocaine charge and paid his debt to society.
With the recency of the crimes, and in particular Rudy's being willing to hire a guy with known mob ties as police commissioner, it seems as if Rudy Giuliani just doesn't care about whether he hired criminals or not, and it raises some serious judgement issues.
And that's where it is also an issue. Giuliani has demonstrated poor judgement by continuing to hire criminals who have committed crimes in the very recent past (or are under suspicion at the time of continuing to commit them, as the March 30 Times article made clear in the case of Kerik) while Thompson is giving a second chance to a guy who has kept his nose clean for 24 years. I call that compassionate, and that's very, very rarely a word I'd ever put in a sentence with Fred Thompson.
Friday, June 08, 2007
Criminal justice: Paris Hilton case makes it clear how corrupt it is.
Paris Hilton was sentenced to 45 days in jail (since reduced to 30) for violating probation in her reckless driving case. Of course, probation by definition is a punishment that is given in lieu of jail time, so if you can't abide by probation you should go to jail.
But after only three days, she has been released (to house arrest-- in effect another form of probation) because of an unspecified 'medical condition.' I guess the oficial name for it is 'spoiled little princess.' But now after the outrage that ensued, Los Angeles county officials have hauled her back into court where a judge may send her back to finish out her sentence.
Jail isn't supposed to be fun. That's why people are supposed to want to avoid it (well, other than of course Timothy Bowers of Columbus Ohio, an unemployed 62 year old man who robbed a bank last year and then called the police and waited at the bank so he could be sentenced to two years until he qualified for Social Security-- that's how desperate some people are these days.)
In jail, many prisoners die of natural causes. They don't get to serve under 'house arrest' because of their 'medical condition.' And I guarantee you that when Paris' sentence is over in about a month she will be hitting the Hollywood party scene just as hard as she always has. If she has a medical condition it might be nausea at having to make her own bed in the morning.
But whatever the result of today's hearing is, the fact that it is happening at all only shows how spineless the officials are-- their first decision was obviously made due to pressure from Paris and her lawyers, but the reversal is due to pressure from the public-- the consistent point being that they buckle under pressure.
It also shows that I was right about something I wrote regarding the Duke rape case (in which justice was in fact finally served when three fairly wealthy guys who could afford good lawyers were able to endure the attempt by a politically motivated D.A. to railroad them).
It would be a mistake to suggest that the problems with the criminal justice system begin and end with the Durham county prosecutor's office. It is true that in even the best criminal justice system mistakes are bound to be made (one big reason I oppose the death penalty). But the criminal justice system we have in America is far, far from the best, and perhaps we should go through it from one end to the other and try to figure out what it will take to, as Joe Friday used to say, focus on 'just the facts.'
On the other end of things, we've seen people who did not have access to good attorneys who did get railroaded. In the Duke post, I linked to a story about a man who spent 22 years in prison for a series of rapes he did not commit, and who could have been allowed out sooner if he had been willing to confess to the crimes he was in fact innocent of. We've also seen cases like that of Anthony Porter, who was literally two hours away from execution in Illinois for a murder he did not commit (in fact he was saved by a class of Northwestern University law students who first, working on their own, uncovered enough evidence to cast doubt on the case and earn him a stay of execution, and then later tracked down the real murderer and proved that Porter was innocent.) In many of these cases, because the defendant was poor, he or she could not afford adequate legal representation and was shafted by the same system that is giving special privileges to Paris Hilton. Earlier this year I posted a story about a substitute teacher who is facing forty years in prison, frankly because the jury in the case was unaware of what a 'mousetrap' program is, something which has happened to me when I hit a link on a webpage and it started opening windows automatically which I did not have any interest in (in particular, pornographic windows.) I also posted a case of a man who was cleared of a rape by DNA after he paid for it himself-- after the police lab refused to carry out the test and instead chose to be lazy and not consider the possibility that he might not have done it (of course whoever did is still out there.)
There have been times when I've been complimentary towards the job the cops do but there are also times when they are either too lazy or too busy to adequately investigate cases, so they settle for the easiest explanation, whether they get it right or not. Of course this sort of attitude isn't unique to police and the criminal justice system, we've all seen it here and there in our daily lives, when we do business with someone who has a bad attitude about their job. But when people's lives are on the line, it is even more important to get it right.
And that's what is most troubling about the Paris Hilton case. Apparently someone didn't want to bother putting up with listening to her and her lawyers whine.
But after only three days, she has been released (to house arrest-- in effect another form of probation) because of an unspecified 'medical condition.' I guess the oficial name for it is 'spoiled little princess.' But now after the outrage that ensued, Los Angeles county officials have hauled her back into court where a judge may send her back to finish out her sentence.
Jail isn't supposed to be fun. That's why people are supposed to want to avoid it (well, other than of course Timothy Bowers of Columbus Ohio, an unemployed 62 year old man who robbed a bank last year and then called the police and waited at the bank so he could be sentenced to two years until he qualified for Social Security-- that's how desperate some people are these days.)
In jail, many prisoners die of natural causes. They don't get to serve under 'house arrest' because of their 'medical condition.' And I guarantee you that when Paris' sentence is over in about a month she will be hitting the Hollywood party scene just as hard as she always has. If she has a medical condition it might be nausea at having to make her own bed in the morning.
But whatever the result of today's hearing is, the fact that it is happening at all only shows how spineless the officials are-- their first decision was obviously made due to pressure from Paris and her lawyers, but the reversal is due to pressure from the public-- the consistent point being that they buckle under pressure.
It also shows that I was right about something I wrote regarding the Duke rape case (in which justice was in fact finally served when three fairly wealthy guys who could afford good lawyers were able to endure the attempt by a politically motivated D.A. to railroad them).
It would be a mistake to suggest that the problems with the criminal justice system begin and end with the Durham county prosecutor's office. It is true that in even the best criminal justice system mistakes are bound to be made (one big reason I oppose the death penalty). But the criminal justice system we have in America is far, far from the best, and perhaps we should go through it from one end to the other and try to figure out what it will take to, as Joe Friday used to say, focus on 'just the facts.'
On the other end of things, we've seen people who did not have access to good attorneys who did get railroaded. In the Duke post, I linked to a story about a man who spent 22 years in prison for a series of rapes he did not commit, and who could have been allowed out sooner if he had been willing to confess to the crimes he was in fact innocent of. We've also seen cases like that of Anthony Porter, who was literally two hours away from execution in Illinois for a murder he did not commit (in fact he was saved by a class of Northwestern University law students who first, working on their own, uncovered enough evidence to cast doubt on the case and earn him a stay of execution, and then later tracked down the real murderer and proved that Porter was innocent.) In many of these cases, because the defendant was poor, he or she could not afford adequate legal representation and was shafted by the same system that is giving special privileges to Paris Hilton. Earlier this year I posted a story about a substitute teacher who is facing forty years in prison, frankly because the jury in the case was unaware of what a 'mousetrap' program is, something which has happened to me when I hit a link on a webpage and it started opening windows automatically which I did not have any interest in (in particular, pornographic windows.) I also posted a case of a man who was cleared of a rape by DNA after he paid for it himself-- after the police lab refused to carry out the test and instead chose to be lazy and not consider the possibility that he might not have done it (of course whoever did is still out there.)
There have been times when I've been complimentary towards the job the cops do but there are also times when they are either too lazy or too busy to adequately investigate cases, so they settle for the easiest explanation, whether they get it right or not. Of course this sort of attitude isn't unique to police and the criminal justice system, we've all seen it here and there in our daily lives, when we do business with someone who has a bad attitude about their job. But when people's lives are on the line, it is even more important to get it right.
And that's what is most troubling about the Paris Hilton case. Apparently someone didn't want to bother putting up with listening to her and her lawyers whine.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Duke rape case just the tip of the iceberg in a broken criminal justice system.
Today the North Carolina Attorney General announced that the rape charges and all other charges against three members of the Duke LaCrosse team were being dropped, and went so far as to declare that the men were innocent. He pointedly, without naming Durham county prosecutor Mike Nifong, indicated that the prosecutor in the case had committed a serious ethical breech in continuing to push the case even when more and more evidence piled up that contradicted the accuser's story, including DNA evidence, other witness testimony and contradictions within her own story of such a magnitude that they simply could not be reconciled.
Now, I wish the three young men the best with their lives. Now that they have been cleared, they will certainly be in line to sue the county prosecutors office, and possibly others. Potential targets could include members of the media, Duke University, Mr. Nifong personally and conceivably even the accuser personally if they can prove that she intentionally gave false statements to the police.
What this does though is crack a lid on a larger issue. This case got national exposure and high profile coverage. Also, the accused had access to some very good legal representation. But is there anyone who believes that Mike Nifong is the only prosecutor in America who might be willing to twist evidence, move ahead on a case that shouldn't be pushed forward in the face of inadequate or exculpatory evidence, or pull out all the stops to try and send people who he knows full well might be innocent to prison?
Over the years we've seen more and more evidence of innocent people being released from prison, and in fact just today Florida moved forward on a bill that would pay people falsely imprisoned $50,000 per year of false imprisonment. This is a good bill which should become law and hopefully will serve as a model for other states.
In fact, given the adversarial nature or our prosecutorial system and the fact that prosecutors are generally either politicians who have to run for election themselves or are answerable to politicians, it is quite likely that there are many more Mike Nifongs out there, who simply have not made the mistake of trying to railroad rich white kids at an elite university who can afford good attorneys and get national press coverage, but have instead done so to poor, mainly minority defendants who can only afford a public defender. Certainly that was the case with Anthony Porter, who came within two hours of getting a lethal injection a few years ago in Illinois, along with the majority of the other over one hundred and counting former death row inmates who have since been exonerated (this is in contrast to the thousands who have simply received a new trial or had their sentences commuted on a technicality.) In fact, the one hundredth man exonerated after having spent time on death row in the United States for a crime that he did not commit was an Arizonan, Ray Krone.
I mention this only because of the fact that while those on death row may have been sent there for a different crime-- murder-- than the majority of prisoners, those one hundred give us a snapshot of those sent to prison and later exonerated. And the large majority of them are poor, minorities (Krone was an exception) and had been represented by public defenders. Some public defenders are quite good, but then it is also true that many lawyers who are chronic losers and can't get hired anywhere else, end up as public defenders.
Life in prison can also be tough for the innocent. They are of course convicted felons, like all the others in prison. And there is no doubt that at least 95% of the people in prison are guilty as heck and should be there, and we know some of what goes on in there. And then comes the parole hearing. As we read last week after Anthony Capozzi was exonerated after living in prison for 22 years for a series of rapes that he did not commit,
He had been denied parole five times since becoming eligible in 1997. His refusal to admit the crimes made it impossible to complete a mandatory sex offender program, his defense said.
“It’s the biggest Catch-22,” [his lawyer] said.
How many have simply realized that the real truth didn't matter and confessed to a crime they did not commit in order to get out of prison (or for that matter to cut a plea deal before they go in?)
It would be a mistake to suggest that the problems with the criminal justice system begin and end with the Durham county prosecutor's office. It is true that in even the best criminal justice system mistakes are bound to be made (one big reason I oppose the death penalty). But the criminal justice system we have in America is far, far from the best, and perhaps we should go through it from one end to the other and try to figure out what it will take to, as Joe Friday used to say, focus on 'just the facts.'
Now, I wish the three young men the best with their lives. Now that they have been cleared, they will certainly be in line to sue the county prosecutors office, and possibly others. Potential targets could include members of the media, Duke University, Mr. Nifong personally and conceivably even the accuser personally if they can prove that she intentionally gave false statements to the police.
What this does though is crack a lid on a larger issue. This case got national exposure and high profile coverage. Also, the accused had access to some very good legal representation. But is there anyone who believes that Mike Nifong is the only prosecutor in America who might be willing to twist evidence, move ahead on a case that shouldn't be pushed forward in the face of inadequate or exculpatory evidence, or pull out all the stops to try and send people who he knows full well might be innocent to prison?
Over the years we've seen more and more evidence of innocent people being released from prison, and in fact just today Florida moved forward on a bill that would pay people falsely imprisoned $50,000 per year of false imprisonment. This is a good bill which should become law and hopefully will serve as a model for other states.
In fact, given the adversarial nature or our prosecutorial system and the fact that prosecutors are generally either politicians who have to run for election themselves or are answerable to politicians, it is quite likely that there are many more Mike Nifongs out there, who simply have not made the mistake of trying to railroad rich white kids at an elite university who can afford good attorneys and get national press coverage, but have instead done so to poor, mainly minority defendants who can only afford a public defender. Certainly that was the case with Anthony Porter, who came within two hours of getting a lethal injection a few years ago in Illinois, along with the majority of the other over one hundred and counting former death row inmates who have since been exonerated (this is in contrast to the thousands who have simply received a new trial or had their sentences commuted on a technicality.) In fact, the one hundredth man exonerated after having spent time on death row in the United States for a crime that he did not commit was an Arizonan, Ray Krone.
I mention this only because of the fact that while those on death row may have been sent there for a different crime-- murder-- than the majority of prisoners, those one hundred give us a snapshot of those sent to prison and later exonerated. And the large majority of them are poor, minorities (Krone was an exception) and had been represented by public defenders. Some public defenders are quite good, but then it is also true that many lawyers who are chronic losers and can't get hired anywhere else, end up as public defenders.
Life in prison can also be tough for the innocent. They are of course convicted felons, like all the others in prison. And there is no doubt that at least 95% of the people in prison are guilty as heck and should be there, and we know some of what goes on in there. And then comes the parole hearing. As we read last week after Anthony Capozzi was exonerated after living in prison for 22 years for a series of rapes that he did not commit,
He had been denied parole five times since becoming eligible in 1997. His refusal to admit the crimes made it impossible to complete a mandatory sex offender program, his defense said.
“It’s the biggest Catch-22,” [his lawyer] said.
How many have simply realized that the real truth didn't matter and confessed to a crime they did not commit in order to get out of prison (or for that matter to cut a plea deal before they go in?)
It would be a mistake to suggest that the problems with the criminal justice system begin and end with the Durham county prosecutor's office. It is true that in even the best criminal justice system mistakes are bound to be made (one big reason I oppose the death penalty). But the criminal justice system we have in America is far, far from the best, and perhaps we should go through it from one end to the other and try to figure out what it will take to, as Joe Friday used to say, focus on 'just the facts.'
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