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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'

#171

Post by slowmovintarget »

DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #160
slowmovintarget wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The powerless are usually the victims, not the criminals. Criminals are by definition exerting their power (usually through physical violence) over people who have even less "power." Not everything is about power dynamics, and crime rarely is. Far more often it is about selfishness.

This is just CRT nonsense.

Where in my comment did I bring up race?

The comment I was replying to claimed criminals were criminals because they were powerless. I think most criminals are criminals because they're bad people (the opposite of CRT's Marxist analysis).

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

#172

Post by bill_joy_fanboy »

Barrin92 wrote: post #76
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing punishment by the state. One is entitled to move on from a fine or imprisonment. One is not entitled to a clean social or occupational reputation. There's a good reason those consequences exist.

>One is not entitled to a clean social or occupational reputation In plenty of jurisdictions people are entitled precisely to that. Here in Germany the entire basis for punishment is a right to full reintegration after you have been punished . A just community punishes once , not five hundred times over and that goes both for the people and the state (which are the same thing in a democracy, the latter punishes on be…

> we have an actual duty to resocialize you

You may feel that you have this duty. I do not feel that I have this duty. You are placing upon me an obligation that I will not accept.

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

#173

Post by gjm11 »

gruez wrote: post #35
gjm11 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll vary a lot by demographic. It's not that 1/3 of every group of US adults has ever been arrested, it's that there are some groups where hardly ever have and some groups where a huge fraction have, and it averages out to 1/3. 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…

>[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 :-) How are you calculating the proportion of black men with criminal records? The pdf mentions that black men are 6x more likely to be incarcerated , but that's not the same as having a crimin…

Yeah, that's one reason why the arithmetic is crude. The PDF says the following things:

About 1/3 of US adults have been arrested by age 23.

About 1/3 of US adults have a criminal record.

Black men in the US are about 6x more likely to be incarcerated than white men in the US.

These figures aren't all about the same thing -- different classes of (alleged) offence, and also "adults" versus "men" -- and indeed the black:white ratios may be different for arrests, and criminal records, and incarcerations.

It's not obvious to me whether we should expect the black:white ratio to be much higher for incarcerations than for arrests or criminal records. If it is, then that would indeed be one of several possible explanations for how the crude calculation ends up with more than 100% of black men in the US having a criminal record.

Anyway, my calculation just pretended that the black:white ratio is the same for arrests / criminal records (take your pick, both are alleged to be up to ~1/3 of US adults) among adults as for incarcerations among men. Probably false, but I was just looking for a ballpark figure.

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

#174

Post by worik »

dylan604 wrote: post #123
cj wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article isn’t strictly talking about prisoners. In the example in the article, a kid vandalized a tombstone in a graveyard, and can’t find a job years later.

The negative knee jerk reaction to things has become comical. It's to the point where schools will not allow the parents of a student that has a record to come on school campus. They don't even care what the offense was for; they only look that there's not a clean slate.

> schools will not allow the parents of a student that has a record to come on school campus

It is even wider than that. I have noticed in my wider circle of friends. Deciding somebody is "bad" and ostracising them.

Often when people are at their most vulnerable and need to wrapped in love by their friends they get the opposite.

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

#175

Post by bongodongobob »

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.

Well arrested doesn't mean thrown in jail. Sometimes you are arrested then just given a citation. Open intoxicant, noise violation, underage drinking, speeding, bonfire in a field, peeing behind the bar, etc. I can see it.

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

#176

Post by ghaff »

tokai wrote: post #122
SoftTalker wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The local newspaper here recently shut down. They had close to 100 years of archives, went to the dump. They tried to give them to the library, to the local university, to anyone. No takers.

Again I don't know the scope of US mandatory deposit. But in the countries such as the UK, the Scandinavian countries, or Germany tall issues of such a newspaper would already be in the archive of the national library, in two copies.

Basically, as I understand it, there is none. If you want to collect copyright infringement damages, you have to register for copyright, pay, and deposit a copy. Otherwise you have a copyright on creation and don't need to deposit anything. The vast majority of created works are not deposited anywhere.

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

#177

Post by bb88 »

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 the prosecution dropped the charges, but the reality is that at where I live, the arrest makes news but the prosecution dropping charges does not.

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

#178

Post by carlosjobim »

krapp wrote: post #149
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.

What's the name of the most powerful drug trafficker in your region?

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

#179

Post by slowmovintarget »

xrd wrote: post #98
slowmovintarget wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The powerless are usually the victims, not the criminals. Criminals are by definition exerting their power (usually through physical violence) over people who have even less "power." Not everything is about power dynamics, and crime rarely is. Far more often it is about selfishness.

Again, would love to be proved wrong, but I think physical violence is far and away the majority of crime reported, but the minority (in my own definition) of crimes committed. As an example, I think RealPage and the rent collusion they were doing clearly is illegal. And, has impacted hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.. But, you'll see a lot more reporting on a shooting in every newspaper, even though…

I suspect the majority of crime committed to be civil infractions and petty crime (speeding, parking violations, minor theft, vandalism, then on to things like drug use and DUI). Then you get to violent crime. By sheer quantity, I'd guess there are more violent crimes than fraud.

Fraud may impact far more people at once, but there are a lot fewer instances of it than of violence, if we're talking quantity of commission and not quantity of victims.

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

#180

Post by worik »

smsm42 wrote: post #161
jmyeet wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-priso…

> 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. Minimum wage is supposed to cover sustainable food, shelter, clothing and other basic physical needs (leaving aside the question whether it really does, it is the intent). The prisoner has these basic physical needs already taken care of. Therefore, it m…

> Minimum wage is supposed to cover sustainable food, shelter, clothing and other basic physical needs

* Many people locked up (in my country) are their families breadwinners * Many would if they could pay compensation, and victims would, if they could, receive it and improve their lives * Many leave prison with nothing. The ones not in the first clause often do not have families, nor friends left on the outside * Prisoners have, or can learn, valuable skills

Put it all together, please.

People (our fellow citizens, our comrades) should be sent to prison as punishment. Not for punishment. If they do not come out better than they went in (often a low bar) then we have failed.

We can do so much better

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