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

When they get to jail, every one of their friends is there already, so it's way easier for them to process and deal with than it is for some random middle-class white dude.

It's horrible that if you go to prison once, then that's basically your whole life from now on. Most people will never escape the revolving door.

Every single person I know who has been to prison is counting down the days until they end up locked up again.

Australia does somewhat better than the US, but it's sharply broken on various demographics leading to rate quotes ranging from 32%, to 50%, to 60% (close to the US) depending on which populations are focused on.

FWiW the US inspires much health, education, prison, etc. policy here .. albeit more often as a counter point or warning.

I think so long as the media outlet isn't publishing the name of the accused then I don't know how much I care about what they are publishing. Stuff blows over and is especially hard to put together if there's not a name/face with a story. I'd suspect that without a name/photo that a media outlet would simply not publish anything. If it's linked to an org I could see a "Boy scout leader accused of CSAM" and I'm not entirely against that. I think conversations about what orgs in charge of kids are doing to prevent abuse are valuable ones.

> Or what if one of the hundreds of affected parents started publicly campaigning for the person to be locked up?

I think that campaign is probably fine and publishing "100 parents calling for the arrest of a boy scout leader" is also probably fine so long as the name isn't published. There is a bit of a fuzzy line, though. For example, if a TV news station decided to cover the issue it might be easy for a parent to slip in the name which wouldn't be great.

To me, the biggest problem is how long such a name ends up staying in the public consciousness. Particularly if the individual ends up with a not guilty ruling.

> I think there should be limits, perhaps such as criminalising the sharing of that information unless it's from the police/courts.

I disagree about the police/courts as that's too early in the criminal justice process. In my book, the name getting published should happen after a conviction/guilty plea and not before.

> I don't think it even matters if the secretary at your school kept the person's name a secret, as people will jump to conclusions and start accusing others, and the whole problem here is that unfounded accusations can still cause real harm to people.

I agree. But I also don't think it's a huge problem because I've, frankly, already forgotten this individual's name. I'm sure with a bunch of extra effort I could find them and a photo (since they were convicted). If someone is accused and not convicted, then the absence of their name in a newspaper/news report would mean that it'd be quite hard to actually link their past accusation to themselves. That, IMO, is the ideal balance. That the public knows the name isn't as important as it is that if I google "cogman10" it doesn't come up with an old arrest record with my photo and "cogman10 accused of murdering a health insurance CEO" even though I wasn't found guilty.

Where this gets tricky is what do we do with a parent that decides to setup a "cogman10 accused of murdering a CEO!" webpage. Part of what's tricky here is such a webpage would be factual. Further, for very powerful people/orgs I don't like the idea that they could sue into the ground anyone that publishes something negative against them. For example, imagine an organization with rampant problems of sexual abuse but whenever it comes up they immediately settle with an NDA to silence the victims and then sues anyone that publishes information about it.

I don't have a perfect solution here. I think this is probably something better handled not by the legal system but rather journalistic ethics... but I get that that is already the system we have and it currently sucks.