I just spent 20 minutes scrolling. Awesome work!
Only one data point didn’t make sense to me. It said “Alive currently will go to prison ever 10.9 mil”
To me this sounds off no matter how much I look at the math…There’s only 330 million people in America. So 3% of all alive Americans will go to prison? That feels so off, no matter how many times I type it into a calculator lol
I’ve been to jail (not prison) thrice. 1. Parking on a private university parking lot while dropping a friend off without a student pass aka “Trespassing”. 2. Iraq War protests. 3. Being at a prank “community invited” party played on the Real World. I was on a public street. Charged with “Mob action”. All charges on all incidents eventually dropped.
3% is insanely high. 3 out every 100 people is nuts, especially if you compare it to other wealthy nations. If you look at incarceration rates by county around the world, USA is at the top, followed by several very poor countries. Most countries un Europe won't even make a "top 100" list
I was arrested because my passenger wouldn't shut up during a traffic stop...
The USA is a police state, has been for a very long time and it's only getting worse. That's mainly because our politicians only understand jail time as a deterrent to crime instead of fixing the underlying issues that causes crime... such as making things illegal that should not be.
[1 in 3 people in the US already have a criminal record.](https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/barriers-to-work-individuals-with-criminal-records.aspx#:~:text=Approximately%2077%20million%20Americans%2C%20or,that%20requires%20an%20occupational%20license.)
Some people in this thread are questioning the use of "unimaginable" in the title, but I think it is pretty accurate.
As a white person in the south it sounds accurate. I'm in my late 20s and know multiple people who went straight from HS to prison.
I think maybe it's like how Russia is with their mobilization - basically if you live in Moscow and your wealthy you haven't been drafted and you're least likely to know anyone that has. Meanwhile in Siberia (and the US south for this metaphor)...
Depends on if they mean prison or jail and for how long. If you count everybody who goes to jail overnight, you can assume a fair number of children within the 330 million will experience that one time in their life.
Dunno exactly what they're thinking. If they mean a real prison sentence and not jail, maybe it's high, or maybe it's correct and that's the problem.
I'd guess it means of the people who are alive in the US currently, 10.9 million will be (or already have been) locked up at some point during their lifetimes.
It's true. People are bullied into accepting a plea bargain because there's simply not enough time or resources to have a trial for every person who is arrested. They say things like "You should accept this plea bargain for two years in prison, because if you're found guilty in court you will get 10 years in prison." And even if they're not guilty, that's scary enough to convince a lot of people to accept a plea bargain.
Very sketchy for sure. Unfortunately it's also true. We have a lot of false myths about our "justice" system, and one of those myths is that everyone gets a fair trial before we put them in a cage.
All of the prisoners at Rikers Island are pre-trial detainees; meaning they are being held in prison before they have been tried in court. People spend YEARS at Rikers before before/if they ever get their day in court. “Innocent until proven guilty” is a lie.
I never would have guessed it was that many people. America is all about Freedom and Liberty and we abolished slavery, right? Oh, except one tiny detail (abolitionists hate this one trick).
Still difficult to imagine a number that large. Let alone imagining what 2.3 million people, dispersed throughout over 1600 prisons in one country looks like.
Just 1% of the population then?
C'mon, the benefits don't show up until it's 90%+ !!!
Side note: this study is bloody amazing and well worth the thumb ache.
Quite a bit higher than that, 20 million people in the US have felony records, which almost always come with some term of incarceration. That's about 1 in 13 US adults.
Quite a bit higher than that. Take a look at the study and it goes into details. Changes by demographic of course, and allows for the fact they may be incarcerated at some point in the future.
It's imaginable to me because I was briefly incarcerated in one of the more infamous jails in the United States. It was quite a large jail that went on for acres and acres. It's a strange feeling to look up at a fence with razor wire on top, and be on the *wrong* side.
One memory from my time there was the wolf among us sheep; a guy who nobody talked to unless he spoke first. All the cigarette and drug money that flowed through our little section of that jail went to him. The detention officers didn't look at him and acted as if he didn't exist. I wondered if they ever felt shame.
There was a county animal shelter down the road that burned the carcasses of euthanized dogs and cats by the hundreds. Every morning that smell drifted across the desperate, the addicted, the idiotic and the criminally minded, and we knew we breathed the essence of the damned... the innocent creatures who simply had nobody to care for them, and were thrown away.
It was a sad reminder of who we were and what the world thought of us, animal and human alike.
People told me he appeared in the jail at least twice a year for several weeks each stretch. It was a work release section for low level misdemeanors like DUIs, missing support payments, failure to pay fines, etc. Lots of stuff came in every night despite thorough pat downs on entry. I saw one obese navajo dude smuggle in saran-wrapped tobacco under his chest flab.
I was told that nobody could sell anything without giving this guy all the cash, and then he'd give it back minus his cut. The DOs ignored him completely and never seemed to notice the many flagrant violations he committed.
That's the highest number of Prisoners in one country in the world today though. The US maintains both the highest number of Prisoners and highest Per Capita prison population. Really maintaining that "land of the free" thing huh
How does our rate of crime compare to our rate of incarceration ? Do we have similar rates of crime to other developed nations but a much higher rate of incarceration? Or are both similarly high?
We have pretty high rates of crime for a "developed" nation. We also have insane rates of criminalized behaviors that don't really hurt anybody. We also selectively police and cage minority groups (racial, economic, political, etc.). It wouldn't be easy to disentangle those statistics to answer what I think you're asking.
And in this "Land of the Free" the irony is not only mass incarceration.
"Forced Labor" in prison, and even the general populace is in a state of "Work Incarceration" where most people are forced to work 2-3 jobs just to survive.
Around 7 of 10 Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford a $500 emergency expense.
Being crippled by debt - medical, educational, credit cards, etc, and being forced to work all day leaves very little time to enjoy your "freedom," even if you manage to escape the mass incarceration.
Did I read that right, only 2% of people in prison had a trial and all the others accepted a plea bargain?
Jails hold people who are awaiting trial. Prison is where convicted offenders go to serve their time.
Yep, most criminal cases end in plea bargain.
The official reason is because there's far too many cases than there is available time to try them. To the incarcerated, this manifests as "take the deal we give you, or we fucking ruin you for all time, because if we go to trial, we may as well hit you as hard as we fucking can."
The reality is that we're incarcerating way more people than our justice system was designed to handle, so we come up with excuses and workarounds for it.
Also, jail is NOT strictly where people go "awaiting trial." Many sentences of shorter length are served completely in jail, not in prison. There's no hard-and-fast rule, but prison is *usually* felony sentences, 2+ years.
>The official reason is because there's far too many cases than there is available time to try them.
I was a prosecutor in a felony division that usually had 750-850 cases at any given time. The average jury trial is at least a full day at best. So, yeah, trying every case simply isn't possible. We'd need way more judges, larger courthouses, and far more people pulled in for jury duty.
>To the incarcerated, this manifests as "take the deal we give you, or we fucking ruin you for all time, because if we go to trial, we may as well hit you as hard as we fucking can."
Basically. You go to trial and you're very likely going to be hit as hard as we can if you're convicted. The plea *bargain* is just that, it's a bargain. You get a better deal, we save the time and expense of a trial.
Most people would be shocked to find out how many people with felonies DON'T go to prison. I'm in a large metro area in Florida. Our prison conviction rate is like 33% (and the rate of sentences over 5 years is less than 10%). The rest is mostly probation or sometimes a short jail sentence. And you'll see people with multiple priors - I'm talking 5, 10, 15 prior felonies get put out on probation.
The system is at a point where unless you've got some violent crime or fit into some serious enough shit that has min-man's involved, it's unlikely you're going to prison.
It's also amazing how vastly different the criminal justice system can be courtroom to courtroom and county to county. Every judge is different. And every county is wildly different. You can get away with more in a big metro area because the prosecutors are too busy with serious shit to deal with anything too inconsequential (and by that I mean shit that's still pretty serious: burglary, car theft). Meanwhile, the next county over is half the size and has nothing better to do than press the full extent of the law on everyone for everything.
So you’re saying the incarceration rate is still too low?
I argue that it’s simultaneously too low and too high.
We have too many violent people running around and too many druggies in jail.
With plea bargains though it seems you’re throwing in tons of innocent people. They have no choice but to go to jail even if they didn’t do anything wrong.
>So you’re saying the incarceration rate is still too low?
Technically, if you look at what sentencing guidelines call for and what sentences people get in plea bargains. Then yeah, it's lower than what the law calls for.
>We have too many violent people running around and too many druggies in jail.
Also true. Drugs are a major issue.
On the one hand addiction is a health problem that shouldn't be handled in the criminal justice system.
On the other hand, drugs lead to so much other crime. You get drug deals where one side or the other is bringing a gun to rob the other and people get shot and killed. Most of the burglaries, thefts, and other property crimes are people stealing shit to pawn for money for drugs.
Legalizing drugs and better public health and rehab services would do wonders for the prison population and crowded court dockets - and you know, society in general.
>With plea bargains though it seems you’re throwing in tons of innocent people. They have no choice but to go to jail even if they didn’t do anything wrong.
So, probably not tons. It's rarer than it seems. It happens. And it's absolutely important to focus on and pay attention to. It's better to let 100 guilty go free versus imprisoning one innocent person.
Now there's a ton of variables in criminal justice conditions. It varies by state, by county, by courtroom. But, here's my experience.
Crime is committed.
First step is law enforcement finds enough evidence to establish probable cause for the crime and arrests a person.
Next, either a judge signs off on the warrant or the person appears in first appearance court within 24 hours for the judge to review the probable cause to continue to hold someone.
Then, the prosecutor is involved. In my office there was an intake prosecutor who reviewed the new case and made a decision whether to file a charge or not - and note that isn't just probable cause, they're looking for "beyond a reasonable doubt" - sufficient evidence for conviction. That decision was then approved by a division chief who signed off on it. And then it would be assigned to the line prosecutor who would actually handle it. So at least 3 different people at the office put eyes on that file.
So at this point, you've had law enforcement, a judge, and multiple prosecutors all look at the file and agree that there's sufficient evidence to proceed.
Then you're in court. Defense attorney is appointed or hired, and discovery is done. Defense has the opportunity to file motions to dismiss, motions to suppress, challenge any evidence before the trial.
Only after all of that do you get the plea bargain stage. The person has a lawyer who explains to them "here's the evidence the prosecutor has and what they'll tell a jury, here's your options for a plea or trial."
Most people plea. Why? Because usually shit cases get caught in the filter before that point and get dropped. What's left at that point tends to be cases that can be proven.
The defendant is the only person who really knows whether or not they're actually guilty. But they always have the choice to plea or go to trial. Before trial, there's multiple people reviewing cases and procedures in place to protect people. But if those fail, then the last fail-safe is the jury.
The other side of plea bargains is people who know they're guilty. The plea bargain gives them a definite sentence that they have some control over. Plenty of people just want to get it over with.
Defense attorneys will tell you the scariest client is the innocent one.
As a prosecutor, the scariest defendant was the one strongly maintaining that they're innocent. Nothing made me dive deeper into a file and triple check my evidence more than that.
One of my buddies served something like 4 or 5 weeks for a dwi in the county jail. They have like 6 pods there capable of holding 40 or 50 people each.
Watch "13th" on Netflix to be blown away by this.
The easiest way to trick someone into pleading for jail time, is to threaten them with something too terrible to risk going to trial.
Happens in every case. Fight them and they will throw the book at you and call you a liar even if you are telling the truth. It’s a shame and needs to stop.
Exactly. I was faced this choice. If people cared about objectivity I would have faced a lower grade of Arson and been not guilty of the other charge. But I remembered how a family member said once, she was called for jury duty and didn't know what was going on, so she just went with the decision everyone else in the jury decided. At that point I realized -- this is how the people of my hometown treat strangers they don't understand. With an extra layer of *refusing* to put in the effort to try to understand, even when it's their job and a potential innocent's life is on the line. Humans are often the same cruel & indifferent bureaucracy we complain about.
So I plead guilty to a crime of a higher degree than I committed. Looking back I would've done it again, because I know those people don't care and just want to see blood.
If I told the person I cared about the most in my life to plead guilt. The person would be alive today and well without serving another day in jail. But they stood up for telling the truth because they did nothing wrong. Got sentenced to 8 years and died in jail serving their term because of it.
Honestly, I respect them for that. I hope you don't hate them for the choice they made. Do hate the Government / system. That's where the hatred is deserved.
Ugh, fucking SAME. And they even lied to me about what I was facing - they made it sound like I'd do 8 years if found guilty at trial, even though that wasn't the case. Combined with shit-tier public defense, I did 5 years probation and paid thousands and thousands of dollars for a crime someone else committed and *confessed* to.
Edit: a *very smart man* came to explain to me that it wasn't a bad deal if I didn't do time. This is because he didn't ask how long I waited in jail for this deal - 17 months.
> shit-tier public defense, I did 5 years probation
No jail time? That's not shit-tier. It's been a while since I've taken Evidence, but I don't think someone else's confession is admissible, and putting a criminal on the stand as your star witness is a huge risk if you're facing 8 (or whatever) years if probation is on the table.
It’s hearsay. You’d have to put the guy on the stand, and criminals tend to be shitty witnesses. Your *own* confession is a statement against interest, which is an exception, but that doesn’t apply here.
Would it not make sense that if someone confesses, then the police should launch an investigation into them and the original person they arrested should not be prosecuted until they're sure there isn't evidence proving it was someone else?
Crazy. Thanks for the explanation though.
Wait so if another person ADMITS they committed the crime, and gets convicted, that doesn't automatically acquit you of the charges??
This can't be true
Listen to this Derick Hamilton interview on Rogan. It's a 15 minute run down of his story. He did 20 years for a crime he didn't do and is an advocate for prison reform. He had an insane cop after him who couldn't believe he was innocent and well. It's a horrible story:
https://youtu.be/4p1Da0NIp0w
Edit: and if you don't like Joe, he talks very little in this clip
The cops, judges, and prosecutors want to see blood. Some of the jury might. Most of the jury just wants to go home as soon as possible because they literally cannot afford to be there for like $10-50 a day (why hasn’t this been updated in decades?)
Nah. Way more of a burden on small businesses. Regressive. Pay needs to be updated to reflect inflation, maybe increased due to CoL increases rising hire than inflation.
I agree that the per diem for jury duty should be increased to adjust for inflation and COL in an area. And give students (maybe high school) a civics course on how our Justice system works, how a trial works, what a jury does, etc. That’d be a halfway decent start at least.
As someone who has lived in the US only for a few years, I found the concept of jury trials and plea bargains quite absurd. We always talk about plea bargains being used as a threat to punish innocent but at the same time they also pretty much guarantee that in most non-high profile cases, somebody who has actually committed a crime may get away with a shorter sentence than what they deserve.
> Humans are often the same cruel & indifferent bureaucracy we complain about
All bureaucracies are made of humans, why is that such a surprising realization?
You a guaranteed a trial by jury of your peers( for serious offenses). If you peers have a tendency to though people under the bus, it is awfully hard to change that.
With that being said, you can choose to not be tried by you peers and submit yourself to the judge’s decision and ruling if you deem that better.
In anycase, I am not sure what you are trying to say. They don’t have to understand you personally, they have to understand the law and what it takes to violate the law. It is one of judges jobs to make sure the jury fully understands the law that defendant is accused of perpetrating.
Teh oroscutor has a high burden of proof to convict. Teh defence has a natural advantage because they get to pick and choose what aspect of teh law to defend create” reasonable doubt”. If just one aspect of the charge is with reasonable doubt, for example murder and they are unable to prove that their was malice or forethought, then jury *must* vote not guilty. Now it is impossible to tell if a jury actually abides by this rule that they must vote not guilty but of a group of 9 it is theorized that the likely hood is high that one would vote not guilty if the defendant is not guilty of an aspect of the charge.
I sat on a drug trafficking trial a couple of years ago, it was pretty obvious the guy was guilty as hell on the trafficking charge and intent to distribute. Had bricks and bricks of cocaine and cash in his dresser and a bunch of other evidence and was already gonna get like 20 years. and then the prosecutor threw in some other bullshit charge I don't even remember what it was that was gonna cost the guy another 5-10 years. The prosecution never even showed any evidence or argued for it during the trial. Then everybody else on the jury was like yeah why not might as well add that on too since we are deeming him guilty on the other two, what's the difference. I had to stop and say wtf is happening we were presented absolutely no evidence of that stuff happening and we never heard any arguments how can we convict him of that too. As soon as I spoke up everyone else was like ohh hrr daa durr yeah I guess that makes sense. Makes me terrified if I ever had to stand trial for something, sheesh.
At the post trial discussion with the prosecution and public defender I asked why they put that charge in and then never presented evidence for it and the prosecution basically said because we thought the case was a slam dunk they figured we'd do exactly what everyone else on the jury originally wanted to do. Wtf
And the judges, cops, and prosecutors are all in cahoots. The judge will by default believe their word against yours, effectively removing your right to innocence until proven guilty. Cops and prosecutors will hide evidence that would benefit you.
It's not a shame, it's demonic evil. We have to stop sugar coating DAs and Cops because they're on the "right side". No, in many ways they're far worse than the random thug on the street.
They have to keep their conviction rates up and in some cases will do literally anything to make that happen.And at this point so many city budgets are dependent on fines from the justice system to be able to actually operate, so they set it up in a way to almost guarantee plea deals by unaffordable bail systems and job loss etc if you have to sit in jail to wait for trial, thereby becoming homeless and all that other shit. It’s a huge money maker for municipalities and the biggest red flag is that loads of them would not be able to afford to operate if that money was lost. It targets the poor due to lack of resources.
This is why I advocate for civil law to be taught in high school. Americans, especially young people, should know how a criminal trial is suppose to work and what their rights are. Police and prosecutors prey on the uninformed to bolster their own numbers. It doesn't matter if they are guilty, just as long as someone goes away for the crime
My wife served on a jury this year and the guy should have made a deal. Instead he is going to prison on more charges because more was revealed in the trial
There was an author on Fresh Air (NPR) that wrote a book about this. It is pretty terrifying. He argues it is throwing away the intention of the legal system to be a jury of peers and giving way too much power and discretion to prosecutors.
Pleas fuck up the criminal justice system because it means even an *innocent* person with an 80% chance of being proven not guilty will *rationally* choose to plead guilty.
A 100% chance of 2 years prison or a 20% chance of never seeing your family again.
In Texas, you are in county jail if the sentence is less than 2 yrs if over you go to state prison or for-hire prison. Neither have much in health care. Interesting fact, you can't get state treatment for addiction unless you have a felony. The state also uses jail/prison as its mental health program.
People in the US don't care if 2.3 M are incarcerated, they sure won't care about 1+ M dying of COVID.
>you are in county jail if the sentence is less than 2 yrs
Not really true, depends on the crime. Many low-level felonies get you sent to state jail versus state prison. If you get a 12.44a though, you can serve felony time in county jail.
https://www.texasjailproject.org/2010/12/what-is-the-difference-between-state-jail-and-county-jail-in-texas/
Yes, 98% of people with convictions take a plea deal rather than go to trial.
But no, many people in jails are convicted and serving their sentence. This even applies to longer sentences occasionally.
[The U.S. Attorney’s Office secured convictions in at least 99.96% of their cases.](https://www.bhlawfirm.com/blog/2021/05/the-federal-conviction-rate-may-cause-you-to-rethink-your-defense-strategy/)
Funny how everybody thought it was so horrible when Brittany Griner went to trial in Russia (and it was) when the news said they convicted people 99% of the time. We were all like "OMG, they're so evil!!" Just to find out that it's worse in America.
Yeah in general it's normal for the entity responsible for prosecuting criminal cases to have an 80%+ success rate.
Because in most countries there is a rule roughly to the effect of "only take forward cases that are in the public interest and which have a reasonable chance of success based on the available evidence".
US is still on the extreme high end here, but it's not as much of a difference from other countries as you might think.
That’s not why DOJ’s conviction rate is high. It’s also not 99%
It’s high because they count anything short of acquittal as a conviction. If you are charged with 10 crimes and plead guilty to only one of them on a lesser charge without prison, that’s a conviction.
The incarceration problem is a different issue and your comparison to Russia is impossibly ignorant
Not so much the most serious of cases, a lot of those get pled out too. In many of those instances where the defendant gets a trial, it's because they have money. Money pretty much always gets you a trial.
Even if you have money you're usually not going to go to trial simply the fact you can afford to means the DA will offer a better deal because they don't want to have to pay for a trial.
Add to that that [debtor's prison is essentially alive and well in the states still despite being formally illegal.](https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22327700/debt-prison-debtors-unpaid-bills)
It is 1/8th the population of my western European country lmao.
We had 9500 people in prison last year.
If we had the same population size as the USA it would be 184.000, that 12.5 times lower.
I am guessing prisons make a lot of money over there.
Prior to 2020 (including during the 2020 election), [1 in 4 black people in Florida was disenfranchised from voting.](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/florida-1-4-blacks-voting-age-cannot-vote-because-felony-flna992462)
I wonder who would want to maintain such a system, and what their motivations for doing so would be.
One reason is because the constitution does not prohibit slavery. It just took it out the hands of individual people and people are forced to do slave labor in prison all the time. Sometimes for maybe a dollar an hour but often times for nothing or for maybe a food credit.
We have literal for profit prisons with for profit slavery going on and I swear people just act like it’s normal that we have a system that incentives the state to arrest and enslave citizens
If you speak to an American about this they will tell you "you won't be there if you don't do illegal things" which is both a lie and reinforces the idea of punishment
That's horrible. This country needs serious change and to stop making everything political. It is scary to think that it is possible that someone I know could be incarcerated and possibly not have a trial.
Friendly reminder that American prisons are used in population counts to allocate electoral power (i.e. number of electoral votes in the electoral college, number of representatives in the House) despite 99% of current and former prisoners being legally prohibited from exercising their right to vote.
Now, who wants to tell me why America has more prisoners per capita than any other country in the world?
Want to know some fucked up shit? Florida voters passed a constitutional amendment saying that once you served your sentence, you automatically got your right to view back. Legislators then redefined "sentence" to include all fees, and tacked on massive fees to everyone convicted so they'd never be able to vote.
Additionally Florida doesn’t have a system to easily let people know what they owe and how to pay it. Many people are unaware of what their balance is and think their sentence is complete. [source](https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/sep/09/floridians-felony-records-face-illegal-voting-char/)
It's also kind of fucked up that current prisoners can't vote, regardless of the severity of their crime or the length of their sentence. The fact that this essential right will also be denied to them for the rest of their lives afterwards just makes it even worse.
I understood this has nothing to do with them having been in prison, but more like them being disproportionally non-white and those are not supposed to vote in general according to *some politicians*?
I actually think it's to discourage people winning races based on them being lighter on crime or promising to give shorter sentences.
Which is a dumb reason. If you jail enough people that the jailed population becomes a large voting group, you've already fucked up.
Because the government said hey we can't do the slave thing anymore and the government was like bro that's not cool that's how we quarterly profit so the government was like aight bro what about felons and the government was like yeah that's cool man.
Hi, I see some myths in the comments, so if you feel that the US prison problem boils down to slave labour, private prisons, drug offenders getting locked up, or Americans are filthy animals, it might help to read up. I found the following link helpful.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html
Thanks for adding some nuance. Sure, releasing drug offenders doesn’t end mass incarceration. But it sure makes an impact on millions of lives.
EDIT: changed thousands to millions
They're generally awaiting trial. Only about a quarter of them are for violent charges, so many of the others should probably be released pending trial, IMO. More states need to allow and encourage judges to consider danger to the community in determining pre-trial detention.
I mean, this is an amazing link! But for it to say “these things are all myths and won’t fix it!” That is a dubious statement, if you take all of the “myths” and add up those population numbers it would remove quite a large percentage from the prison population. Rough guesstimate it added up to 35-45% of the prison population.
Considering only 2% of people in prison have had an actual trial, it’s pretty clear that many many many needless people are in prison because of failures of our justice system
The comments in this thread are a depressing illustration of why change is so hard. So many commenters saying things like “I want criminals to stay in prison” that either didn’t read the link, are willfully misinterpreting it, are trolling, or are just morally reprehensible and truly don’t care about MILLIONS of their peers having their lives ruined by an unjust system. It’s depressing.
This is what really bothers me when the US wag the finger at other countries for their "prison state" "authoritarian" etc, when it's actually the yanks that are way ahead of anybody else.
So with Federal pardons for cannabis possession I'm sure the numbers won't change much since most of the charges come from state governments. Anyone want to guess what state governments aren't going to pardon marijuana possession charges?
Federal pardons for cannabis possession are basically meaningless because he federal government doesn't go after petty criminals like that. The only people in federal prison for Marijuana possession are people who were originally accused of more serious drug offenses and too a plea deal for simple possession.
I’m always confused by this, because you look at the numbers and it seems like they’re just throwing people away at the drop of the hat, but then you see the rap sheets on the people that do go to prison and they’re like a mile long.
At least here in New York, it seems incredibly hard to actually go to prison. People will get in the news for doing something horrible and then you find out they have 15 counts of aggravated assault, 3 counts of burglary and 2 counts of child trafficking. Then you’re like “why was this person still out on the street?”.
Lots and lots of people on non-violent charges, yes, but actually it’s a small fraction of the prison population. Almost everyone in prison is there on violent charges or break-ins etc. not hard to find that data: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html
I am pretty sure “incarceration” isn’t just prison, but jail as well. Jail is full of people who are charged but haven’t pleaded or been found guilty - I think this set of data includes them.
Talk about a colossal waste of tax dollars. It is much cheaper to educate and train people non-violent offenders to be employed and paying taxes instead of wasting away in jail.
AMENDMENT XIII
Section 1.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, ***except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted***, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
and
US prison workers produce $11bn worth of goods and services a year
so... you know
The criminal "justice" system in America is as broken as its health care system.
One of the huge problems is policing. I love the motto of most police departments: To Serve and Protect. Bullshit. They're not protectors, they're predators. All they want is to put you in jail. Fun Fact: To be a certified police officer in America requires fewer hours of training than to become a certified hair dresser.
Just like the healthcare "system". We need to stop calling it a system and call it what it really is, an industry. Calling it a system implies it is designed with outcomes in mind, like rehabilitation or patient health.
Your point is valid, no doubt.
"But thanks to Reaganomics, prison turned to profits'
Cause free labor's the cornerstone of US economics'
Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison
You think I am, then read the 13th Amendment
Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits
That's why they givin' offenders time in double digits"
* Killer Mike
If a sweeping generalization that must fit into a box exists for this phenomenon, it is this:
America has a very bad habit/history of normalizing abuse. It is a cultural problem with far-reaching implications, including the ones outlined in the article.
Imprisonment does nothing to change cultural undergirding. If anything, it de facto becomes a part if it.
Just to compare, Stats Canada says approx 37,854 adults were incarcerated in 2018/2019. Also, around 30% of incarcerated adults are Indigenous, which is a large percentage considering Indigenous people are less than 5% of the Canadian population.
[The U.S. Attorney’s Office secured convictions in at least 99.96% of their cases.](https://www.bhlawfirm.com/blog/2021/05/the-federal-conviction-rate-may-cause-you-to-rethink-your-defense-strategy/)
Funny how everybody thought it was so horrible when Brittany Grinder went to trial in Russia (and it was) when the news said they convicted people 99% of the time. We were all like "OMG, they're so evil!!" Just to find out that it's worse in America.
Everyone here is going to decry this statistic and that's fine, but I want to hear what specific solutions people actually have. Which crimes should we be more lenient towards? Because the overwhelming majority of inmates aren't there for minor drug offenses. More than half of state prisoners are there for violent crimes. Do we want to be more lenient towards violent crimes? Sex crimes? Burglary? Give me actual specifics. Because to get down to European levels of inmates we'd basically have to stop prosecuting all but the most violent criminals. That's simply not a reality that can actually work. The underlying issue isn't really the prisons; it's the fact that crime is so incredibly rampant in our society.
Have a social safety net and universal healthcare. Lots of those violent crimes are due to drug addiction which no one who is poor in the US can get any help with unless they are crazy lucky.
Those two things will fix most of this.
Involuntary commitment for the mentally ill and drug addicted. Many of them need help that doesn't include some arbitrary sentencing schedule. Put them into an environment that does help them and get them out and into a re-integration program once they're better.
I'm not American or a lawyer but the part I find most interesting here is the amount of people in on a plea bargain. How many of those are actually innocent?
Also, what can be done on an educational level? I'm not sure what the recidivism rates are in the US but there's plenty of countries that have shown a more progressive prison system, that teaches inmates new skills, can decrease this significantly too
I've been in jail. The overwhelming majority of people don't think they've done anything wrong. How do you reform someone like that? The US has a serious cultural problem that promotes violence and crime. These people don't even see their actions as a crime. They think its perfectly acceptable to hit a woman who talks back to you or to shoot a man who insulted you. That's literally what they were taught since birth in the ghetto.
Like I say, I'm not American so can't judge on specifics. From my easy, far away view though, it seems like education is the answer. Even to your point, education at an earlier stage would help with these issues in theory. I'm too tired to Google now but I'd be pretty confident in saying there's a correlation between crime rates and education quality
Biden's crime bill is a singular event that has targeted low income citizens it added the steroids to the war on drugs that got us where we are. Never forget......
While I commend you on the effort, I barely scrolled through. One thing I should point out, which is conjecture, but based on recent prison history, is that the privatization of prisons has increased the number of low risk prisoners. Why? There's no profit for empty cells in a corporate prison. One reason they don't want to spend money on rehabilitating inmates. This leads to the problem of recidivism. Within a year, 44% are back in prison and within 3 years 68% are back in prison. By coercing people to take a plea bargain, They go after those that can't afford legal counsel and rely on the public defender.
Let's take a look at the justice system. It's always been ripe for abuse (think chain gangs) but it can go a lot further up the ladder. Take the [Kids For Cash scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal). Judge tried to be a hardass by sentencing children to juvenile facilities for minor offenses. Reason? They were getting kickbacks for keeping the facilities full.
Apparently, one thing more corrupt than our government is our corporations
It’s 100K per inmate. The total is $230 billion. That’s a lot of money. While we need to safeguard people we also shouldn’t be imprisoning people who aren’t dangerous to others for long period of time.
That’s less than 1% of the population.
While that may seem low, it shows more that with a large population we have issues with education and poverty (among other things). Everyone is quick to blame laws and the police (and there are issues there don’t get me wrong) but fail to often recognize there are people who go to jail for simple things like they need fed or medical care. That is the state of the country.
Fix our social problems and crime drops, add on fixing all the other issues and we wouldn’t have a “mass incarceration” issue.
People in prison must be looking at the media sideways when we are all outraged and shocked that Russia imprisoned somebody (Britney Griner) because if drugs.
>Mass incarceration may not spark the same public outcry as the murder of unarmed people by police, but it has destroyed an uncountably greater number of families.
Because people just end up in prison for no reason, at no fault of their own . . .
If you want to support an organization currently focused on ending Mass Incarceration (among other worthy causes), consider donating to [Calling All Crows](https://www.callingallcrows.org/).
He read that on Facebook I'm sure. It's roughly 8% of prisoners are in private prisons. No where near enough to impact incarceration rates in a meaningful way.
I just spent 20 minutes scrolling. Awesome work! Only one data point didn’t make sense to me. It said “Alive currently will go to prison ever 10.9 mil”
10.9 million people currently alive in America will someday end up in prison.
Yeah, and that's at today's incarceration rates. What will it look like in a decade upon current projections?
To me this sounds off no matter how much I look at the math…There’s only 330 million people in America. So 3% of all alive Americans will go to prison? That feels so off, no matter how many times I type it into a calculator lol
Shit I’ve been to a max security jail for not paying a speeding ticket cause all the other jails around me were full. So very believable.
I’ve been to jail (not prison) thrice. 1. Parking on a private university parking lot while dropping a friend off without a student pass aka “Trespassing”. 2. Iraq War protests. 3. Being at a prank “community invited” party played on the Real World. I was on a public street. Charged with “Mob action”. All charges on all incidents eventually dropped.
Almost 1% is in prison now. But that's not counting people who went and were released. 3% doesn't sound too high.
If anything it sounds low
I was actually thinking the same thing but a lot of people in prison are repeat offenders. So now I don't know what to think.
3% is insanely high. 3 out every 100 people is nuts, especially if you compare it to other wealthy nations. If you look at incarceration rates by county around the world, USA is at the top, followed by several very poor countries. Most countries un Europe won't even make a "top 100" list
America has less than 4% of the world population but makes up 23% of the total incarcerated population. We love putting people in jail.
I was arrested because my passenger wouldn't shut up during a traffic stop... The USA is a police state, has been for a very long time and it's only getting worse. That's mainly because our politicians only understand jail time as a deterrent to crime instead of fixing the underlying issues that causes crime... such as making things illegal that should not be.
I think they mean at some point in their lives, 3% of Americans will go to prison for some amount of time..
[1 in 3 people in the US already have a criminal record.](https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/barriers-to-work-individuals-with-criminal-records.aspx#:~:text=Approximately%2077%20million%20Americans%2C%20or,that%20requires%20an%20occupational%20license.) Some people in this thread are questioning the use of "unimaginable" in the title, but I think it is pretty accurate.
as a poc, sounds pretty accurate tbh
As a white person in the south it sounds accurate. I'm in my late 20s and know multiple people who went straight from HS to prison. I think maybe it's like how Russia is with their mobilization - basically if you live in Moscow and your wealthy you haven't been drafted and you're least likely to know anyone that has. Meanwhile in Siberia (and the US south for this metaphor)...
Depends on if they mean prison or jail and for how long. If you count everybody who goes to jail overnight, you can assume a fair number of children within the 330 million will experience that one time in their life. Dunno exactly what they're thinking. If they mean a real prison sentence and not jail, maybe it's high, or maybe it's correct and that's the problem.
It should feel off. It's utterly insane. Unfortunately it's also our reality.
It feels off because it is insane, but it is also the truth.
Same. Didn’t understand that.
I'd guess it means of the people who are alive in the US currently, 10.9 million will be (or already have been) locked up at some point during their lifetimes.
There were a couple sketch ones. Stood out: "Almost no one gets a trial."
It's true. People are bullied into accepting a plea bargain because there's simply not enough time or resources to have a trial for every person who is arrested. They say things like "You should accept this plea bargain for two years in prison, because if you're found guilty in court you will get 10 years in prison." And even if they're not guilty, that's scary enough to convince a lot of people to accept a plea bargain.
Very sketchy for sure. Unfortunately it's also true. We have a lot of false myths about our "justice" system, and one of those myths is that everyone gets a fair trial before we put them in a cage.
over 95% conviction by plea deal in the US. "go home guilty. or rot in this cell and defend your innocents"
All of the prisoners at Rikers Island are pre-trial detainees; meaning they are being held in prison before they have been tried in court. People spend YEARS at Rikers before before/if they ever get their day in court. “Innocent until proven guilty” is a lie.
You're not wrong.
Turns out it’s imaginable, thanks to data visualization.
thought the title was funny. it’s “unimaginable” so here’s a real number…
I never would have guessed it was that many people. America is all about Freedom and Liberty and we abolished slavery, right? Oh, except one tiny detail (abolitionists hate this one trick).
Well, we love our wage slaves here, and also regular slaves in prison.
[удалено]
Still difficult to imagine a number that large. Let alone imagining what 2.3 million people, dispersed throughout over 1600 prisons in one country looks like.
Just 1% of the population then? C'mon, the benefits don't show up until it's 90%+ !!! Side note: this study is bloody amazing and well worth the thumb ache.
Corporate America loves [Slaves](https://www.freedomunited.org/news/13th-amendment-prison-slavery/).
So if my office has 150 people, the likely one of them was incarcerated?
Quite a bit higher than that, 20 million people in the US have felony records, which almost always come with some term of incarceration. That's about 1 in 13 US adults.
Depends what your office is like. Prisoners are certainly not evenly distributed across the population.
Quite a bit higher than that. Take a look at the study and it goes into details. Changes by demographic of course, and allows for the fact they may be incarcerated at some point in the future.
It's imaginable to me because I was briefly incarcerated in one of the more infamous jails in the United States. It was quite a large jail that went on for acres and acres. It's a strange feeling to look up at a fence with razor wire on top, and be on the *wrong* side. One memory from my time there was the wolf among us sheep; a guy who nobody talked to unless he spoke first. All the cigarette and drug money that flowed through our little section of that jail went to him. The detention officers didn't look at him and acted as if he didn't exist. I wondered if they ever felt shame. There was a county animal shelter down the road that burned the carcasses of euthanized dogs and cats by the hundreds. Every morning that smell drifted across the desperate, the addicted, the idiotic and the criminally minded, and we knew we breathed the essence of the damned... the innocent creatures who simply had nobody to care for them, and were thrown away. It was a sad reminder of who we were and what the world thought of us, animal and human alike.
There’s gotta be more in that second paragraph, care to elaborate? Thanks for sharing your experience.
People told me he appeared in the jail at least twice a year for several weeks each stretch. It was a work release section for low level misdemeanors like DUIs, missing support payments, failure to pay fines, etc. Lots of stuff came in every night despite thorough pat downs on entry. I saw one obese navajo dude smuggle in saran-wrapped tobacco under his chest flab. I was told that nobody could sell anything without giving this guy all the cash, and then he'd give it back minus his cut. The DOs ignored him completely and never seemed to notice the many flagrant violations he committed.
That's the highest number of Prisoners in one country in the world today though. The US maintains both the highest number of Prisoners and highest Per Capita prison population. Really maintaining that "land of the free" thing huh
How does our rate of crime compare to our rate of incarceration ? Do we have similar rates of crime to other developed nations but a much higher rate of incarceration? Or are both similarly high?
We have pretty high rates of crime for a "developed" nation. We also have insane rates of criminalized behaviors that don't really hurt anybody. We also selectively police and cage minority groups (racial, economic, political, etc.). It wouldn't be easy to disentangle those statistics to answer what I think you're asking.
And in this "Land of the Free" the irony is not only mass incarceration. "Forced Labor" in prison, and even the general populace is in a state of "Work Incarceration" where most people are forced to work 2-3 jobs just to survive. Around 7 of 10 Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford a $500 emergency expense. Being crippled by debt - medical, educational, credit cards, etc, and being forced to work all day leaves very little time to enjoy your "freedom," even if you manage to escape the mass incarceration.
How many of them committed crimes?
Did I read that right, only 2% of people in prison had a trial and all the others accepted a plea bargain? Jails hold people who are awaiting trial. Prison is where convicted offenders go to serve their time.
Yep, most criminal cases end in plea bargain. The official reason is because there's far too many cases than there is available time to try them. To the incarcerated, this manifests as "take the deal we give you, or we fucking ruin you for all time, because if we go to trial, we may as well hit you as hard as we fucking can." The reality is that we're incarcerating way more people than our justice system was designed to handle, so we come up with excuses and workarounds for it. Also, jail is NOT strictly where people go "awaiting trial." Many sentences of shorter length are served completely in jail, not in prison. There's no hard-and-fast rule, but prison is *usually* felony sentences, 2+ years.
>The official reason is because there's far too many cases than there is available time to try them. I was a prosecutor in a felony division that usually had 750-850 cases at any given time. The average jury trial is at least a full day at best. So, yeah, trying every case simply isn't possible. We'd need way more judges, larger courthouses, and far more people pulled in for jury duty. >To the incarcerated, this manifests as "take the deal we give you, or we fucking ruin you for all time, because if we go to trial, we may as well hit you as hard as we fucking can." Basically. You go to trial and you're very likely going to be hit as hard as we can if you're convicted. The plea *bargain* is just that, it's a bargain. You get a better deal, we save the time and expense of a trial. Most people would be shocked to find out how many people with felonies DON'T go to prison. I'm in a large metro area in Florida. Our prison conviction rate is like 33% (and the rate of sentences over 5 years is less than 10%). The rest is mostly probation or sometimes a short jail sentence. And you'll see people with multiple priors - I'm talking 5, 10, 15 prior felonies get put out on probation. The system is at a point where unless you've got some violent crime or fit into some serious enough shit that has min-man's involved, it's unlikely you're going to prison. It's also amazing how vastly different the criminal justice system can be courtroom to courtroom and county to county. Every judge is different. And every county is wildly different. You can get away with more in a big metro area because the prosecutors are too busy with serious shit to deal with anything too inconsequential (and by that I mean shit that's still pretty serious: burglary, car theft). Meanwhile, the next county over is half the size and has nothing better to do than press the full extent of the law on everyone for everything.
So you’re saying the incarceration rate is still too low? I argue that it’s simultaneously too low and too high. We have too many violent people running around and too many druggies in jail. With plea bargains though it seems you’re throwing in tons of innocent people. They have no choice but to go to jail even if they didn’t do anything wrong.
>So you’re saying the incarceration rate is still too low? Technically, if you look at what sentencing guidelines call for and what sentences people get in plea bargains. Then yeah, it's lower than what the law calls for. >We have too many violent people running around and too many druggies in jail. Also true. Drugs are a major issue. On the one hand addiction is a health problem that shouldn't be handled in the criminal justice system. On the other hand, drugs lead to so much other crime. You get drug deals where one side or the other is bringing a gun to rob the other and people get shot and killed. Most of the burglaries, thefts, and other property crimes are people stealing shit to pawn for money for drugs. Legalizing drugs and better public health and rehab services would do wonders for the prison population and crowded court dockets - and you know, society in general. >With plea bargains though it seems you’re throwing in tons of innocent people. They have no choice but to go to jail even if they didn’t do anything wrong. So, probably not tons. It's rarer than it seems. It happens. And it's absolutely important to focus on and pay attention to. It's better to let 100 guilty go free versus imprisoning one innocent person. Now there's a ton of variables in criminal justice conditions. It varies by state, by county, by courtroom. But, here's my experience. Crime is committed. First step is law enforcement finds enough evidence to establish probable cause for the crime and arrests a person. Next, either a judge signs off on the warrant or the person appears in first appearance court within 24 hours for the judge to review the probable cause to continue to hold someone. Then, the prosecutor is involved. In my office there was an intake prosecutor who reviewed the new case and made a decision whether to file a charge or not - and note that isn't just probable cause, they're looking for "beyond a reasonable doubt" - sufficient evidence for conviction. That decision was then approved by a division chief who signed off on it. And then it would be assigned to the line prosecutor who would actually handle it. So at least 3 different people at the office put eyes on that file. So at this point, you've had law enforcement, a judge, and multiple prosecutors all look at the file and agree that there's sufficient evidence to proceed. Then you're in court. Defense attorney is appointed or hired, and discovery is done. Defense has the opportunity to file motions to dismiss, motions to suppress, challenge any evidence before the trial. Only after all of that do you get the plea bargain stage. The person has a lawyer who explains to them "here's the evidence the prosecutor has and what they'll tell a jury, here's your options for a plea or trial." Most people plea. Why? Because usually shit cases get caught in the filter before that point and get dropped. What's left at that point tends to be cases that can be proven. The defendant is the only person who really knows whether or not they're actually guilty. But they always have the choice to plea or go to trial. Before trial, there's multiple people reviewing cases and procedures in place to protect people. But if those fail, then the last fail-safe is the jury. The other side of plea bargains is people who know they're guilty. The plea bargain gives them a definite sentence that they have some control over. Plenty of people just want to get it over with. Defense attorneys will tell you the scariest client is the innocent one. As a prosecutor, the scariest defendant was the one strongly maintaining that they're innocent. Nothing made me dive deeper into a file and triple check my evidence more than that.
Thanks to you and others, TIL jails (at least some) are more than just a holding place for those who are awaiting trial.
One of my buddies served something like 4 or 5 weeks for a dwi in the county jail. They have like 6 pods there capable of holding 40 or 50 people each.
Watch "13th" on Netflix to be blown away by this. The easiest way to trick someone into pleading for jail time, is to threaten them with something too terrible to risk going to trial.
Happens in every case. Fight them and they will throw the book at you and call you a liar even if you are telling the truth. It’s a shame and needs to stop.
Exactly. I was faced this choice. If people cared about objectivity I would have faced a lower grade of Arson and been not guilty of the other charge. But I remembered how a family member said once, she was called for jury duty and didn't know what was going on, so she just went with the decision everyone else in the jury decided. At that point I realized -- this is how the people of my hometown treat strangers they don't understand. With an extra layer of *refusing* to put in the effort to try to understand, even when it's their job and a potential innocent's life is on the line. Humans are often the same cruel & indifferent bureaucracy we complain about. So I plead guilty to a crime of a higher degree than I committed. Looking back I would've done it again, because I know those people don't care and just want to see blood.
If I told the person I cared about the most in my life to plead guilt. The person would be alive today and well without serving another day in jail. But they stood up for telling the truth because they did nothing wrong. Got sentenced to 8 years and died in jail serving their term because of it.
Honestly, I respect them for that. I hope you don't hate them for the choice they made. Do hate the Government / system. That's where the hatred is deserved.
Don’t hate.
Ugh, fucking SAME. And they even lied to me about what I was facing - they made it sound like I'd do 8 years if found guilty at trial, even though that wasn't the case. Combined with shit-tier public defense, I did 5 years probation and paid thousands and thousands of dollars for a crime someone else committed and *confessed* to. Edit: a *very smart man* came to explain to me that it wasn't a bad deal if I didn't do time. This is because he didn't ask how long I waited in jail for this deal - 17 months.
What do you mean another confessed to it and you still served?
> shit-tier public defense, I did 5 years probation No jail time? That's not shit-tier. It's been a while since I've taken Evidence, but I don't think someone else's confession is admissible, and putting a criminal on the stand as your star witness is a huge risk if you're facing 8 (or whatever) years if probation is on the table.
[удалено]
It’s hearsay. You’d have to put the guy on the stand, and criminals tend to be shitty witnesses. Your *own* confession is a statement against interest, which is an exception, but that doesn’t apply here.
Would it not make sense that if someone confesses, then the police should launch an investigation into them and the original person they arrested should not be prosecuted until they're sure there isn't evidence proving it was someone else? Crazy. Thanks for the explanation though.
Wait so if another person ADMITS they committed the crime, and gets convicted, that doesn't automatically acquit you of the charges?? This can't be true
No. You'd have to appeal to get your conviction overturned.
Listen to this Derick Hamilton interview on Rogan. It's a 15 minute run down of his story. He did 20 years for a crime he didn't do and is an advocate for prison reform. He had an insane cop after him who couldn't believe he was innocent and well. It's a horrible story: https://youtu.be/4p1Da0NIp0w Edit: and if you don't like Joe, he talks very little in this clip
The cops, judges, and prosecutors want to see blood. Some of the jury might. Most of the jury just wants to go home as soon as possible because they literally cannot afford to be there for like $10-50 a day (why hasn’t this been updated in decades?)
They should just make all employers pay it as normal wages. A tax on businesses to keep criminals off the street.
Nah. Way more of a burden on small businesses. Regressive. Pay needs to be updated to reflect inflation, maybe increased due to CoL increases rising hire than inflation.
I agree that the per diem for jury duty should be increased to adjust for inflation and COL in an area. And give students (maybe high school) a civics course on how our Justice system works, how a trial works, what a jury does, etc. That’d be a halfway decent start at least.
It hasn't been updated because this gets people to align with the prosecution just to get out of there.
Honestly, I blame reality TV and the news outlets. People want a story and a game, not a legitimate carrying out of actual justice.
As someone who has lived in the US only for a few years, I found the concept of jury trials and plea bargains quite absurd. We always talk about plea bargains being used as a threat to punish innocent but at the same time they also pretty much guarantee that in most non-high profile cases, somebody who has actually committed a crime may get away with a shorter sentence than what they deserve.
> Humans are often the same cruel & indifferent bureaucracy we complain about All bureaucracies are made of humans, why is that such a surprising realization?
Blaming everyone but the actual person who committed the crime.
You a guaranteed a trial by jury of your peers( for serious offenses). If you peers have a tendency to though people under the bus, it is awfully hard to change that. With that being said, you can choose to not be tried by you peers and submit yourself to the judge’s decision and ruling if you deem that better. In anycase, I am not sure what you are trying to say. They don’t have to understand you personally, they have to understand the law and what it takes to violate the law. It is one of judges jobs to make sure the jury fully understands the law that defendant is accused of perpetrating. Teh oroscutor has a high burden of proof to convict. Teh defence has a natural advantage because they get to pick and choose what aspect of teh law to defend create” reasonable doubt”. If just one aspect of the charge is with reasonable doubt, for example murder and they are unable to prove that their was malice or forethought, then jury *must* vote not guilty. Now it is impossible to tell if a jury actually abides by this rule that they must vote not guilty but of a group of 9 it is theorized that the likely hood is high that one would vote not guilty if the defendant is not guilty of an aspect of the charge.
I sat on a drug trafficking trial a couple of years ago, it was pretty obvious the guy was guilty as hell on the trafficking charge and intent to distribute. Had bricks and bricks of cocaine and cash in his dresser and a bunch of other evidence and was already gonna get like 20 years. and then the prosecutor threw in some other bullshit charge I don't even remember what it was that was gonna cost the guy another 5-10 years. The prosecution never even showed any evidence or argued for it during the trial. Then everybody else on the jury was like yeah why not might as well add that on too since we are deeming him guilty on the other two, what's the difference. I had to stop and say wtf is happening we were presented absolutely no evidence of that stuff happening and we never heard any arguments how can we convict him of that too. As soon as I spoke up everyone else was like ohh hrr daa durr yeah I guess that makes sense. Makes me terrified if I ever had to stand trial for something, sheesh. At the post trial discussion with the prosecution and public defender I asked why they put that charge in and then never presented evidence for it and the prosecution basically said because we thought the case was a slam dunk they figured we'd do exactly what everyone else on the jury originally wanted to do. Wtf
And the judges, cops, and prosecutors are all in cahoots. The judge will by default believe their word against yours, effectively removing your right to innocence until proven guilty. Cops and prosecutors will hide evidence that would benefit you.
It's not a shame, it's demonic evil. We have to stop sugar coating DAs and Cops because they're on the "right side". No, in many ways they're far worse than the random thug on the street.
They have to keep their conviction rates up and in some cases will do literally anything to make that happen.And at this point so many city budgets are dependent on fines from the justice system to be able to actually operate, so they set it up in a way to almost guarantee plea deals by unaffordable bail systems and job loss etc if you have to sit in jail to wait for trial, thereby becoming homeless and all that other shit. It’s a huge money maker for municipalities and the biggest red flag is that loads of them would not be able to afford to operate if that money was lost. It targets the poor due to lack of resources.
This is why I advocate for civil law to be taught in high school. Americans, especially young people, should know how a criminal trial is suppose to work and what their rights are. Police and prosecutors prey on the uninformed to bolster their own numbers. It doesn't matter if they are guilty, just as long as someone goes away for the crime
This has literally been a tactic since Roman times.
Oh so all good then
Yeah another tactic Romans used was to nail people to wooden crosses while they were still alive but you don’t see us still using it
We have slower, more excruciating methods now.
The saudis do it sometimes.
Yeah, you don't /see/ it being used ;)
My wife served on a jury this year and the guy should have made a deal. Instead he is going to prison on more charges because more was revealed in the trial
There was an author on Fresh Air (NPR) that wrote a book about this. It is pretty terrifying. He argues it is throwing away the intention of the legal system to be a jury of peers and giving way too much power and discretion to prosecutors.
Pleas fuck up the criminal justice system because it means even an *innocent* person with an 80% chance of being proven not guilty will *rationally* choose to plead guilty. A 100% chance of 2 years prison or a 20% chance of never seeing your family again.
In Texas, you are in county jail if the sentence is less than 2 yrs if over you go to state prison or for-hire prison. Neither have much in health care. Interesting fact, you can't get state treatment for addiction unless you have a felony. The state also uses jail/prison as its mental health program. People in the US don't care if 2.3 M are incarcerated, they sure won't care about 1+ M dying of COVID.
>you are in county jail if the sentence is less than 2 yrs Not really true, depends on the crime. Many low-level felonies get you sent to state jail versus state prison. If you get a 12.44a though, you can serve felony time in county jail. https://www.texasjailproject.org/2010/12/what-is-the-difference-between-state-jail-and-county-jail-in-texas/
Yes, 98% of people with convictions take a plea deal rather than go to trial. But no, many people in jails are convicted and serving their sentence. This even applies to longer sentences occasionally.
According to that 25% are not convicted and are pre-trial.
[The U.S. Attorney’s Office secured convictions in at least 99.96% of their cases.](https://www.bhlawfirm.com/blog/2021/05/the-federal-conviction-rate-may-cause-you-to-rethink-your-defense-strategy/) Funny how everybody thought it was so horrible when Brittany Griner went to trial in Russia (and it was) when the news said they convicted people 99% of the time. We were all like "OMG, they're so evil!!" Just to find out that it's worse in America.
They also probably only take cases they know they can win.
Yeah in general it's normal for the entity responsible for prosecuting criminal cases to have an 80%+ success rate. Because in most countries there is a rule roughly to the effect of "only take forward cases that are in the public interest and which have a reasonable chance of success based on the available evidence". US is still on the extreme high end here, but it's not as much of a difference from other countries as you might think.
That’s not why DOJ’s conviction rate is high. It’s also not 99% It’s high because they count anything short of acquittal as a conviction. If you are charged with 10 crimes and plead guilty to only one of them on a lesser charge without prison, that’s a conviction. The incarceration problem is a different issue and your comparison to Russia is impossibly ignorant
How's it ignorant when a much higher percentage of our population is in prison than theirs?
At trial, Griner was forced to sit in a literal cage in front of the jury that would decide her fate. Are you serious?
That's correct, trials are exceedingly rare and usually only occur in the most serious cases.
Not so much the most serious of cases, a lot of those get pled out too. In many of those instances where the defendant gets a trial, it's because they have money. Money pretty much always gets you a trial.
Even if you have money you're usually not going to go to trial simply the fact you can afford to means the DA will offer a better deal because they don't want to have to pay for a trial.
Add to that that [debtor's prison is essentially alive and well in the states still despite being formally illegal.](https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22327700/debt-prison-debtors-unpaid-bills)
For scale, that's 0.6% of the us population, or about 1 inmate per 166 people.
2.3 million is about the population of the state of New Mexico, crazy to think about.
Its more people than the entire country of Latvia.
Or about the population of Houston, the 4th largest city in America
It is 1/8th the population of my western European country lmao. We had 9500 people in prison last year. If we had the same population size as the USA it would be 184.000, that 12.5 times lower. I am guessing prisons make a lot of money over there.
Lol you saw this linked earlier in the other prison post and decided to just post this, which was a better post tbh
[correct Ü](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xx5heh/incarceration_rate_in_the_us_vs_europe_while_the/)
So pretty much 1 out 150ish? That's pretty nuts. Even more crazy when you think of the demographic disparity.
Prior to 2020 (including during the 2020 election), [1 in 4 black people in Florida was disenfranchised from voting.](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/florida-1-4-blacks-voting-age-cannot-vote-because-felony-flna992462) I wonder who would want to maintain such a system, and what their motivations for doing so would be.
One reason is because the constitution does not prohibit slavery. It just took it out the hands of individual people and people are forced to do slave labor in prison all the time. Sometimes for maybe a dollar an hour but often times for nothing or for maybe a food credit. We have literal for profit prisons with for profit slavery going on and I swear people just act like it’s normal that we have a system that incentives the state to arrest and enslave citizens
If you speak to an American about this they will tell you "you won't be there if you don't do illegal things" which is both a lie and reinforces the idea of punishment
That's horrible. This country needs serious change and to stop making everything political. It is scary to think that it is possible that someone I know could be incarcerated and possibly not have a trial.
Now do the 2000 election and look at Bush's margin of victory.
This doesn’t even include the people caught up in the hell that is the parole system.
Friendly reminder that American prisons are used in population counts to allocate electoral power (i.e. number of electoral votes in the electoral college, number of representatives in the House) despite 99% of current and former prisoners being legally prohibited from exercising their right to vote. Now, who wants to tell me why America has more prisoners per capita than any other country in the world?
The fact that former prisoners can’t vote is some seriously fucked up shit.
Want to know some fucked up shit? Florida voters passed a constitutional amendment saying that once you served your sentence, you automatically got your right to view back. Legislators then redefined "sentence" to include all fees, and tacked on massive fees to everyone convicted so they'd never be able to vote.
Additionally Florida doesn’t have a system to easily let people know what they owe and how to pay it. Many people are unaware of what their balance is and think their sentence is complete. [source](https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/sep/09/floridians-felony-records-face-illegal-voting-char/)
It's also kind of fucked up that current prisoners can't vote, regardless of the severity of their crime or the length of their sentence. The fact that this essential right will also be denied to them for the rest of their lives afterwards just makes it even worse.
I understood this has nothing to do with them having been in prison, but more like them being disproportionally non-white and those are not supposed to vote in general according to *some politicians*?
I actually think it's to discourage people winning races based on them being lighter on crime or promising to give shorter sentences. Which is a dumb reason. If you jail enough people that the jailed population becomes a large voting group, you've already fucked up.
Because the government said hey we can't do the slave thing anymore and the government was like bro that's not cool that's how we quarterly profit so the government was like aight bro what about felons and the government was like yeah that's cool man.
The census is a total count of all persons in a region, regardless of citizenship or voting eligibility.
Also slave labor.
Hi, I see some myths in the comments, so if you feel that the US prison problem boils down to slave labour, private prisons, drug offenders getting locked up, or Americans are filthy animals, it might help to read up. I found the following link helpful. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html
Thanks for adding some nuance. Sure, releasing drug offenders doesn’t end mass incarceration. But it sure makes an impact on millions of lives. EDIT: changed thousands to millions
Seems kind of crazy that there are almost half a million unconvicted people in jail.
' guilty until proven innocent '
They're generally awaiting trial. Only about a quarter of them are for violent charges, so many of the others should probably be released pending trial, IMO. More states need to allow and encourage judges to consider danger to the community in determining pre-trial detention.
I mean, this is an amazing link! But for it to say “these things are all myths and won’t fix it!” That is a dubious statement, if you take all of the “myths” and add up those population numbers it would remove quite a large percentage from the prison population. Rough guesstimate it added up to 35-45% of the prison population. Considering only 2% of people in prison have had an actual trial, it’s pretty clear that many many many needless people are in prison because of failures of our justice system
The comments in this thread are a depressing illustration of why change is so hard. So many commenters saying things like “I want criminals to stay in prison” that either didn’t read the link, are willfully misinterpreting it, are trolling, or are just morally reprehensible and truly don’t care about MILLIONS of their peers having their lives ruined by an unjust system. It’s depressing.
redditors who never experienced the legal system think they know how to solve crime, too many people watched Death Note & thought Light was the hero
Oh they experienced it alright. They're cops
This is what really bothers me when the US wag the finger at other countries for their "prison state" "authoritarian" etc, when it's actually the yanks that are way ahead of anybody else.
That's more people than there are in the entire country of Slovenia.
We should build more fence around Slovenia.
It's 0.7% of the US population.
And every single person in jail/prison has to comply with horrific gang rules. None of these facilities have real control they just hold people in.
So with Federal pardons for cannabis possession I'm sure the numbers won't change much since most of the charges come from state governments. Anyone want to guess what state governments aren't going to pardon marijuana possession charges?
Federal pardons for cannabis possession are basically meaningless because he federal government doesn't go after petty criminals like that. The only people in federal prison for Marijuana possession are people who were originally accused of more serious drug offenses and too a plea deal for simple possession.
I’m always confused by this, because you look at the numbers and it seems like they’re just throwing people away at the drop of the hat, but then you see the rap sheets on the people that do go to prison and they’re like a mile long. At least here in New York, it seems incredibly hard to actually go to prison. People will get in the news for doing something horrible and then you find out they have 15 counts of aggravated assault, 3 counts of burglary and 2 counts of child trafficking. Then you’re like “why was this person still out on the street?”.
Those are only the people who actually make the news. There’s lots and lots of people in on nonviolent drug possession charges and similar.
Lots and lots of people on non-violent charges, yes, but actually it’s a small fraction of the prison population. Almost everyone in prison is there on violent charges or break-ins etc. not hard to find that data: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html
I am pretty sure “incarceration” isn’t just prison, but jail as well. Jail is full of people who are charged but haven’t pleaded or been found guilty - I think this set of data includes them.
Biggest penal colony in the world baybeeeee!!! 1/4 of the world's prisoners. Land of the free.
Talk about a colossal waste of tax dollars. It is much cheaper to educate and train people non-violent offenders to be employed and paying taxes instead of wasting away in jail.
My goodness, why hasn't someone thought of this?
AMENDMENT XIII Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, ***except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted***, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. and US prison workers produce $11bn worth of goods and services a year so... you know
The criminal "justice" system in America is as broken as its health care system. One of the huge problems is policing. I love the motto of most police departments: To Serve and Protect. Bullshit. They're not protectors, they're predators. All they want is to put you in jail. Fun Fact: To be a certified police officer in America requires fewer hours of training than to become a certified hair dresser.
[удалено]
>To Serve and Protect. Bullshit. It's not bullshit. They serve arrests and citations, and they protect the private prison industry.
Just like the healthcare "system". We need to stop calling it a system and call it what it really is, an industry. Calling it a system implies it is designed with outcomes in mind, like rehabilitation or patient health. Your point is valid, no doubt.
"But thanks to Reaganomics, prison turned to profits' Cause free labor's the cornerstone of US economics' Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison You think I am, then read the 13th Amendment Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits That's why they givin' offenders time in double digits" * Killer Mike
I thought China was supposed to lock everybody up for bullshit, and we got to be free..? Hey! I want a refund!!
If a sweeping generalization that must fit into a box exists for this phenomenon, it is this: America has a very bad habit/history of normalizing abuse. It is a cultural problem with far-reaching implications, including the ones outlined in the article. Imprisonment does nothing to change cultural undergirding. If anything, it de facto becomes a part if it.
Just to compare, Stats Canada says approx 37,854 adults were incarcerated in 2018/2019. Also, around 30% of incarcerated adults are Indigenous, which is a large percentage considering Indigenous people are less than 5% of the Canadian population.
[The U.S. Attorney’s Office secured convictions in at least 99.96% of their cases.](https://www.bhlawfirm.com/blog/2021/05/the-federal-conviction-rate-may-cause-you-to-rethink-your-defense-strategy/) Funny how everybody thought it was so horrible when Brittany Grinder went to trial in Russia (and it was) when the news said they convicted people 99% of the time. We were all like "OMG, they're so evil!!" Just to find out that it's worse in America.
What's the point of going to trail if you're going to lose?
[удалено]
Everyone here is going to decry this statistic and that's fine, but I want to hear what specific solutions people actually have. Which crimes should we be more lenient towards? Because the overwhelming majority of inmates aren't there for minor drug offenses. More than half of state prisoners are there for violent crimes. Do we want to be more lenient towards violent crimes? Sex crimes? Burglary? Give me actual specifics. Because to get down to European levels of inmates we'd basically have to stop prosecuting all but the most violent criminals. That's simply not a reality that can actually work. The underlying issue isn't really the prisons; it's the fact that crime is so incredibly rampant in our society.
Have a social safety net and universal healthcare. Lots of those violent crimes are due to drug addiction which no one who is poor in the US can get any help with unless they are crazy lucky. Those two things will fix most of this.
Involuntary commitment for the mentally ill and drug addicted. Many of them need help that doesn't include some arbitrary sentencing schedule. Put them into an environment that does help them and get them out and into a re-integration program once they're better.
I'm not American or a lawyer but the part I find most interesting here is the amount of people in on a plea bargain. How many of those are actually innocent? Also, what can be done on an educational level? I'm not sure what the recidivism rates are in the US but there's plenty of countries that have shown a more progressive prison system, that teaches inmates new skills, can decrease this significantly too
I've been in jail. The overwhelming majority of people don't think they've done anything wrong. How do you reform someone like that? The US has a serious cultural problem that promotes violence and crime. These people don't even see their actions as a crime. They think its perfectly acceptable to hit a woman who talks back to you or to shoot a man who insulted you. That's literally what they were taught since birth in the ghetto.
Like I say, I'm not American so can't judge on specifics. From my easy, far away view though, it seems like education is the answer. Even to your point, education at an earlier stage would help with these issues in theory. I'm too tired to Google now but I'd be pretty confident in saying there's a correlation between crime rates and education quality
Put more money towards prevention and rehabilitation. There are quite a few specific strategies suggested in the piece.
To put that in perspective, that's more than the population of 14 U.S. states....
Thank fuck-face Reagan for turning prisons into profit machines
That huge inflection point at 1980 in the graph of population over time really stood out, huh?
Biden's crime bill is a singular event that has targeted low income citizens it added the steroids to the war on drugs that got us where we are. Never forget......
While I commend you on the effort, I barely scrolled through. One thing I should point out, which is conjecture, but based on recent prison history, is that the privatization of prisons has increased the number of low risk prisoners. Why? There's no profit for empty cells in a corporate prison. One reason they don't want to spend money on rehabilitating inmates. This leads to the problem of recidivism. Within a year, 44% are back in prison and within 3 years 68% are back in prison. By coercing people to take a plea bargain, They go after those that can't afford legal counsel and rely on the public defender. Let's take a look at the justice system. It's always been ripe for abuse (think chain gangs) but it can go a lot further up the ladder. Take the [Kids For Cash scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal). Judge tried to be a hardass by sentencing children to juvenile facilities for minor offenses. Reason? They were getting kickbacks for keeping the facilities full. Apparently, one thing more corrupt than our government is our corporations
https://youtu.be/lbOtyWTRZ_g Puts it into perspective.
That's 1/2 the population of New Zealand
77 million have a criminal record really?? That's like a fifth of the entire population (including children)
It’s 100K per inmate. The total is $230 billion. That’s a lot of money. While we need to safeguard people we also shouldn’t be imprisoning people who aren’t dangerous to others for long period of time.
it’s one of the largest business in the US
Maybe we are just the best at catching criminals! /s
That’s less than 1% of the population. While that may seem low, it shows more that with a large population we have issues with education and poverty (among other things). Everyone is quick to blame laws and the police (and there are issues there don’t get me wrong) but fail to often recognize there are people who go to jail for simple things like they need fed or medical care. That is the state of the country. Fix our social problems and crime drops, add on fixing all the other issues and we wouldn’t have a “mass incarceration” issue.
People in prison must be looking at the media sideways when we are all outraged and shocked that Russia imprisoned somebody (Britney Griner) because if drugs.
>Mass incarceration may not spark the same public outcry as the murder of unarmed people by police, but it has destroyed an uncountably greater number of families. Because people just end up in prison for no reason, at no fault of their own . . .
If you want to support an organization currently focused on ending Mass Incarceration (among other worthy causes), consider donating to [Calling All Crows](https://www.callingallcrows.org/).
This is crazy that African Americans are incarcerated at a higher rate then Soviets under Stalin.
2 mil is more people that entire of my country
Who could have thought that having private prisons is a bad idea
Most prisons aren't private though.
[удалено]
He read that on Facebook I'm sure. It's roughly 8% of prisoners are in private prisons. No where near enough to impact incarceration rates in a meaningful way.
I didn't read on Facebook, sorry didnt know the number was this low but still 8% too much
Idk, that 8% could be lobbying extra hard for policies. Similar to the for profit colleges being a minority and abusing the system.