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US newspapers are deleting old crime stories, offering subjects a 'clean slate'

theguardian.com

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Re: US newspapers are deleting old crime stories, offering subjects a 'clean slate'

#311

Post by FireBeyond »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #222
FireBeyond wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A three strikes rule would eliminate nearly half of all violent crime because nearly half of violent crime is committed by people who have already been convicted of 3+ other violent crimes. LMAO. Twenty-nine states have a three strikes rule, and their violent crime hasn't decreased by half. Source: https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/three-strikes...

Maybe it has dropped relative to what it would have been otherwise.

Then presumably the states with these rules will be the least violent in the country, right?

Spoiler: they’re not. In fact several of the states without those rules have less violent crime.

If you want to say each state is different, sure. But there is zero way of proving your hypothesis.

Re: US newspapers are deleting old crime stories, offering subjects a 'clean slate'

#312

Post by sgjohnson »

profile53 wrote: post #44
1over137 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a record of such a minor infraction doesn’t seem to me a problem, in and of itself. The problem would be if such records were public, available to potential employers, etc. If the records were private to the courts, that’d be something else. Not sure how it is in USA.

In the USA it is public record which in practice means anyone with money can get the record. This is potentially a large part of the high US recidivism. Once you have been convicted once, most employers will see the record and refuse to hire you forever.

I don’t think anybody particularly cares about non-violent misdemeanors, except maybe drug or alcohol offenses.

Felony on your record? Yeah, you’re basically fucked for life.

Re: US newspapers are deleting old crime stories, offering subjects a 'clean slate'

#314

Post by in-pursuit »

danpalmer wrote: post #303
bb88 wrote: post #177

IRL I knew someone who was charged with child sexual abuse. He went to prison awaiting trial, but the prosecution dropped the charges before it got there. He was released and went about his life. Meanwhile his mug shot photo in the local paper was the number one google search result for his name. And then it reached syndication for other news sites as well. Ideally those news paper articles should be updated to say t…

I knew someone charged with having large amounts of CSAM. He was also named in local media before conviction, although you really had to go looking for it to find it. More importantly perhaps, he was a scout leader and his scout group were informed, I believe by the police, as early as the investigation began - i.e. before being charged, let alone convicted. Given the topic of the investigation, as much as I think pe…

Were they convicted? It seems irresponsible to let someone strongly suspected of harming children to continue to have close contact with children. “Innocent until proven guilty” is a criminal justice concept. It actually doesn’t apply to civil matters.

Re: US newspapers are deleting old crime stories, offering subjects a 'clean slate'

#315

Post by ddingus »

adriand wrote: post #304
ddingus wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True story: In the late 70's my Uncle had a run of bad luck and a dubious business partner basically sink him financially. After some discussion, he made a plan. It was simple: Uncle goes back to Virginia to lay low in one of the back hollers. My mom gets his mail, due to him living with us for a while[1], and writes "Deceased" on it, and "Return to Sender" 5 years pass. Maybe 4, I can't remember. Uncle shows up, eve…

Why did he feel he had to run? Did he owe people money?

Yes. It was to shake off debt. Records were far from unified back then.

So, he took advantage of that by essentially living out of range. Once all the companies charged him off and basically moved on, he was free to come back and pick up where he left off with few worries.

Re: US newspapers are deleting old crime stories, offering subjects a 'clean slate'

#316

Post by DAGdug »

defrost wrote: post #287
DAGdug wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you click through to glance through the paper linked? I was hoping the author would posit a causal model, adjust for a few different factors, and have something robust. Nope, nothing - just a wall of text even quoting Derrida. Empiricism is slowly dying, in large part due to truth seeking becoming subservient to confirmation bias.

> Did you click through to glance through the paper linked? Yes. > I was hoping the author would posit a causal model, adjust for a few different factors, and have something robust. They did to a degree. > Nope, nothing Perhaps you might click through and read again. > just a wall of text A "wall of text" is something , this one was broken up with paragraphs and had a number of observations regarding systems in two c…

> They did to a degree

Where? I’m fairly facile with causal inference; this is the crudest observational “study” without even qualitative heuristics to make the comparisons apples-to-apples.

> and expand on why that particular quote offends you?

Generic low tolerance for high V, low M academics: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1

This is the paper he links to, where you can find references to Derrida: https://unisapressjournals.co.za/index.php/Phronimon/article...

Anyway, if this is the kind of nonsense that convinces you, I don’t intent to continue this discussion. We have very different notions of what qualifies as evidence.

Re: US newspapers are deleting old crime stories, offering subjects a 'clean slate'

#317

Post by whoitwas »

nyolfen wrote: post #267
whoitwas wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US police and prisons are directly derived from slave patrols. This is history and factual. In prison and jail inmates work for rates like $.25 an hour. Many places in the south prison inmates are contracted out to work minimum wage jobs and denied parole. Recidivism rates for people incarcerated more than 6 months is something like 66% for one year post release. There are private prisons that benefit from mor…

> In the US police and prisons are directly derived from slave patrols. This is history and factual. and human rights are derived from feudal rights. okay, and? is this just supposed to make you feel bad with scary words? > Recidivism rates for people incarcerated more than 6 months is something like 66% for one year post release. this sounds very much like you are mixing up cause and effect. is it surprising that so…

I'm sorry if words scare you. The prison system is a direct continuation of slavery in the US. I'm not sure what you're analogy attempts to prove.

My point on recidivism is that US jails focus on punitive rather than rehabilitative justice.

Re: US newspapers are deleting old crime stories, offering subjects a 'clean slate'

#318

Post by danpalmer »

in-pursuit wrote: post #314
danpalmer wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew someone charged with having large amounts of CSAM. He was also named in local media before conviction, although you really had to go looking for it to find it. More importantly perhaps, he was a scout leader and his scout group were informed, I believe by the police, as early as the investigation began - i.e. before being charged, let alone convicted. Given the topic of the investigation, as much as I think pe…

Were they convicted? It seems irresponsible to let someone strongly suspected of harming children to continue to have close contact with children. “Innocent until proven guilty” is a criminal justice concept. It actually doesn’t apply to civil matters.

I don't think the conviction matters to the point. They were convicted, but my point is that a suspicion that causes an investigation should probably warrant telling those who could be at risk, even if the investigation ends up going nowhere.

Not sure what you mean about the civil matter, CSAM offences are criminal, so I'd expect "innocent until proven guilty" to apply in this case. If you mean that for other civil matters there's no need to notify those at risk, I would agree, I doubt anything civil meets the bar of risk.

Re: US newspapers are deleting old crime stories, offering subjects a 'clean slate'

#319

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

bko wrote: post #219

I wish newspapers were more concerned about being an objective system of record rather than trying to push social goals by helping rewrite history. They should post follow-ups for those wrongly convicted or after the fact caveats but completely memory holeing news stories strikes me as deeply disturbing

Ideally we would live in a society that simply didn't give weight to arrests or accusations, only convictions. (Exceptions may be made for outstanding cases, such as a preponderance of evidence or accusers that appears only after the statute of limitations is up.)

Re: US newspapers are deleting old crime stories, offering subjects a 'clean slate'

#320

Post by teachrdan »

FredPret wrote: post #230
teachrdan wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they’ve all been captured by the private prison industry This is a straw man argument, which is also discouraged on HN. Literally no one -- besides you and the sibling comments below -- has suggested that everyone has been captured by private prisons. Instead there are businesses all along the spectrum of those that incidentally do businesses with prisons to those that exclusively do business with prisons to those…

Now you’re strawmanning. Read the thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42596079 says: > “I'm surprised at this concept spreading in the US, since the system would generally benefit from having perpetual perpetrators percolating through the prison slavery system.” A sweeping statement about the entire conceptual space of a huge country based on ideas about the private prison system manipulating an entire count…

“the system” here is specifically referencing the web of government and corporate interests that benefit from a large and growing prison population. There is no reasonable reading of this which implies the author naively believes EVERYONE supports prisons.

Please do a better job of close reading and critical thinking. Especially with “now you’re strawmanning,” the rhetorical equivalent of “I know you are but what am I?”

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