21–30 of 390 posts
The punishment for crimes should come from the justice system and people should be able to pay their dues and move on.
> One in three U.S. adults has been arrested by age 23. Does that seem crazy to anyone else? I'm in Ireland and can't think of one person in my extended family and friends that has any interaction with the police beyond routine insurance/DUI checkpoints or reporting incidents like car accidents.
> One in three U.S. adults has been arrested by age 23. Does that seem crazy to anyone else? I'm in Ireland and can't think of one person in my extended family and friends that has any interaction with the police beyond routine insurance/DUI checkpoints or reporting incidents like car accidents.
In particular, I bet that if you look at poor black men who live in US cities the figure is very very high. Maybe it's close to 100%.[1] If you look at middle-class white women living in the suburbs, not so much.
Also: the fact that the report is about the US and you're in Ireland is very relevant; the US has a lot more arrests than Ireland. (I would guess, though I haven't looked at stats and I don't know whether they exist, that the US also has more racial divergence in the figures than Ireland.)
(I shall not get into the highly contentious and political question of why these things are the case.)
I'll guess that your extended family and friends are mostly (1) not in the US, (2) white, (3) middle class, and (4) not living in city centres. All of which makes them drastically less likely to end up having difficult interactions with the police.
[1] I did some crude arithmetic on the figures at https://www.sentencingproject.org/app/uploads/2022/08/Americ... and got an estimate that 108% of black men in the US have a criminal record. That seems unlikely to be correct :-) but suggests that the real figure is probably pretty high. (I suspect it does also indicate that the "up to 1/3" is an overestimate.)
> One in three U.S. adults has been arrested by age 23. Does that seem crazy to anyone else? I'm in Ireland and can't think of one person in my extended family and friends that has any interaction with the police beyond routine insurance/DUI checkpoints or reporting incidents like car accidents.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Criminal records would include all misdemeanors. You can get a misdemeanor without ever being arrested. In some cases trivial things like speeding can be a misdemeanor requiring a court appearance.
25 years ago I got a misdemeanor citation for rollerblading on the sidewalk in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, which required me to make a court appearance and pay for a VERY expensive lawyer to get the charge thrown out. If instead I'd paid the $25 fine, I'd have had a permanent misdemeanor charge on my record.
To me it seems unreasonable to require publishers to keep an immutable record. Shouldn't be forced by law to keep up your blog posts. National Libraries and legal deposit were literally made to solve this issue.
I'm ok with this, as long as it's systemic. Otherwise it's just another way for people with means to get a leg up on people without means. If it's, "we delete all crime stories after N years", then fine, especially for low level, non violent stuff. The punishment for crimes should come from the justice system and people should be able to pay their dues and move on.
This is codeword for financial, white collar crimes. So, it is definitely a policy serving the rich.
> One in three U.S. adults has been arrested by age 23. Does that seem crazy to anyone else? I'm in Ireland and can't think of one person in my extended family and friends that has any interaction with the police beyond routine insurance/DUI checkpoints or reporting incidents like car accidents.
Ah yes, rewrite history to not offend, what got us here in the first place