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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'

#141

Post by WalterBright »

SoftTalker wrote: post #114
Filligree wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s useful for society if there’s a way for criminals to reintegrate into society. If potential employers can always check for a criminal record, and refuse to hire criminals, then guess what those criminals will do? The answer isn’t “starve to death”. Previously there were practical limits to how long a sentence could follow you. If you moved across the country, you might lose whatever family you still have, but at…

There are employers who don't care about criminal records, at least up to a point. Most trade unions don't, and many other blue-collar employers don't. A criminal record isn't going to prevent you from working, but it might limit your choices.

It depends on the crime and the job. I wouldn't hire an embezzler to do the books, for example.

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

#142

Post by UncleEntity »

yuliyp wrote: post #47
janice1999 wrote: post #2

> 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.

I'm trying to figure out where that number comes from. The link to The Sentencing Project claims this, but the link to NCSL instead states "Approximately 77 million Americans, or 1 in every 3 adults, have a criminal record." Like, this feels like it's got to include speeding tickets in the mix to get something that high.

> Like, this feels like it's got to include speeding tickets in the mix to get something that high.

Speeding is a civil, not criminal, infraction.

You can't have the highest prison population in the world for decades and not end up with a bunch of people with criminal records.

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

#143

Post by atq2119 »

wat10000 wrote: post #65
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.

It’s a difficult balance. On one hand, privacy is important. On the other hand, visibility into the system is an important check on the power of law enforcement. It’s especially important for arrests; you really, really do not want the police to be allowed to secretly jail people. But it’s important for other things too. In this example, if the police were using rollerblading citations as a way to harass a certain gr…

The solution is to make summary statistics available to the public but no names.

Just publicize that there have been 471 citations for rollerblading without listing the names of those affected.

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

#144

Post by WalterBright »

datavirtue wrote: post #115
yuliyp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to figure out where that number comes from. The link to The Sentencing Project claims this, but the link to NCSL instead states "Approximately 77 million Americans, or 1 in every 3 adults, have a criminal record." Like, this feels like it's got to include speeding tickets in the mix to get something that high.

Speeding tickets are not criminal.

In the 1960s, the Air Force decided that they had too many candidates for pilots, and to winnow it down all candidates with a speeding ticket were disqualified.

I've often felt this was unwise, as you want fighter pilots to be aggressive.

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

#145

Post by ocschwar »

steelframe wrote: post #74

I used to work with someone who was arrested for having a beer in his possession when he was 20 years old. The circumstances were pretty colorful, and so it made the local news. He had since worked his way into management at the company we worked for. One day he mentioned that the article about his arrest finally fell off the Google index after more than a decade, and he was relieved about that. One of his reports in…

I'm honestly surprised that after 20 years of the Internet "never forgetting" things like this, we haven't gotten a lot better about forgiving them instead.

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

#146

Post by yuliyp »

UncleEntity wrote: post #142
yuliyp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to figure out where that number comes from. The link to The Sentencing Project claims this, but the link to NCSL instead states "Approximately 77 million Americans, or 1 in every 3 adults, have a criminal record." Like, this feels like it's got to include speeding tickets in the mix to get something that high.

> Like, this feels like it's got to include speeding tickets in the mix to get something that high. Speeding is a civil, not criminal, infraction. You can't have the highest prison population in the world for decades and not end up with a bunch of people with criminal records.

The U.S. prison population is around 2M people. I'm not sure how that translates to 77M people with criminal records. (I'm serious about wanting to know more about these statistics and how they're generated. My brief searches trying to find where the data claimed in the linked infographics comes from got me nowhere.

EDIT: I found the [National Longitudinal Survey of Youth](https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm) and as far as I could tell from some super quick excel formulas it's about 32% of interview subjects (people born 1980 - 1984) reported being arrested at least once by 2021.

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

#147

Post by jmyeet »

krapp wrote: post #130
jgalt212 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the prison slavery system. extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is the enslavement?

Read the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution: "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." The US penal system is explicitly a continuation of the former slave system. Slavery wasn't outlawed in the US, just made a monopoly franchise of the US governmen…

Not sure who's downvoting this because the comment is objectively correct [1][2][3].

The practice of "convict leasing" is modern day slavery. This system should be abolished or, at a minimum, the prisoners should be paid at least minimum wage so we don't have the state to pay to lock people up and then some private corporation to profit off slave labor.

[1]: https://harvardpolitics.com/involuntary-servitude-how-prison...

[2]: https://innocenceproject.org/how-the-13th-amendment-kept-sla...

[3]: https://www.newsweek.com/book-american-slavery-continued-unt...

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

#148

Post by gojomo »

Reminds me of a laugh-out-loud closing paragraph in a 2009 NYT article about the clash between Wikipedia & German lawyers over some infamous murderers' right-to-be-forgotten.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13wiki.html

Read the whole thing for maximum effect, but for me it beautifully demonstrates the contrast between the USA/Wikipedia/NYT ethos of "the truth is always printable and your speech is by default 'on the record'" and alternate expectations elsewhere.

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

#149

Post by krapp »

mmooss wrote: post #139

This could create an imbalance of power: It could prevent the public from knowing of the past misdeeds of the powerful. It's much different to give someone with no power an opportunity to move forward, compared to removing an essential check on people who have power. Also, it seems likely that powerful people will still have access to this data, in news databases, in the data accumulated in the profiles of marketing…

>It could prevent the public from knowing of the past misdeeds of the powerful.

In a world where books, radio, movies, television and the internet didn't exist, and where people had memories like goldfish, maybe.

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

#150

Post by CuriouslyC »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #73
CuriouslyC wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine someone who got pardoned by the state for a minor crime (so a clean criminal record) but who still had a newspaper article about them. That would be a raw deal.

Not a raw deal, just the truth. Why should information be deleted? That IS Orwellian.

Because people are prejudiced, and the newspaper article doesn't include an addendum that it should be taken with little to no value, so the impact it could have on someone's life due to people's stupidity is unwarranted.

If we lived in a perfect universe where people were thoughtful and wise I wouldn't care.

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