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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'

#201

Post by bdangubic »

jgalt212 wrote: post #198
Brybry wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to sibling comments about the 13th amendment's exception clause (which is what legally allows forced prison labor[1]): forced prison labor has been a state-level ballot issue in recent years. Colorado voted to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime in 2018 (though enforcement is reportedly poor). [2][3] In other states voters have upheld forced labor[4] but sometimes it's because of…

> You can argue it's involuntary servitude instead of slavery but to most people that's a meaningless distinction. The purchase and sale of humans, or the lack of such transactions is a meaningless distinction?

The purchase and sale of humans, or the lack of such transactions is a meaningless distinction?

by which definition of slavery do we have “purchase and sale of humans” as part of that definition?!

Article 1(1) of the 1926 Slavery Convention: “Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.”

just because you are not purchased/sold does not mean your condition cannot be defined as slavery

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

#202

Post by rufus_foreman »

gjm11 wrote: post #23
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.

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…

>> I bet that if you look at poor black men who live in US cities the figure is very very high

Blacks are 14% of the population, so black men would be under 7%, poor black men who live in cities would be less than that.

So that doesn't explain the statistic.

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

#203

Post by phil21 »

1over137 wrote: post #32
bookofjoe wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> Not sure how it is in USA.

Assuming the record was as an adult, it will be reported publicly by the county (or other jurisdiction) court system and be on public record. This used to be a musty records keeping office somewhere you'd have to go in person and request the records of the individual in question - so without prior knowledge of where a conviction was it was difficult to "background check" people without extensive investigation.

Then these became digitized and put on-line most places.

The larger issue is data brokers who aggregate the records of literally everyone in the entire US (or close to it) into one database you can pay them to make lookups into. They send someone to every courthouse in the US (well, they sub-contract others who sub-contract, etc.) and get all new records. This builds a nationally searchable database that more or lives on indefinitely. All legal since the records are public information.

You can get records sealed and such by court order, but once it's aggregated it's basically a game of whack-a-mole. You can go further and get it expunged which typically requires a state governor signature or similar, where then you might have better luck with said data brokers as the penalties for reporting it are heavy in some states.

It's a very fractionalized system, built out of bailing wire and duct tape like most such records are in the US for historical reasons.

Some employers simply have a binary policy of "zero criminal records" and don't go any further into detail beyond that. Other employers are more lenient, but the more desirable a job is the more likely you are to run into the former policy.

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

#204

Post by UncleEntity »

phil21 wrote: post #187
yuliyp wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The vast majority of those with criminal records do not serve prison time. They plea bargain for work release, probation, diversion programs, etc. For example some types of DUI (drunk driving) is a felony in many states, but extremely common in the population as a whole. Very few do actual prison time unless especially egregious, are repeat offenders, or if they hurt someone during the commission of that crime. Many…

I used to know this guy that got two felony DUIs in a week (both with injuries) and all he ended up with was six months in county jail (plus, I'm guessing, a shitton of fines) after all was said and done.

Dude totaled at least his two cars (don't know what happened to the cars he hit), hurt some people and obviously didn't care since he did it twice. Of course it was over a woman...

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

#205

Post by epicureanideal »

plemer wrote: post #162
jbmchuck wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that is true but here is the difference: organizations that benefit from fewer prisons have a multitude of other things they benefit from (and can lobby for). Private prison operators on the other hand really only have one thing that can improve their bottom line at the end of the day - more prisons. Outside of a few non-profit orgs I suspect there aren't a lot of dollars lobbying for fewer prisons, it's no…

“Dispersed cost, concentrated gain”

We need a way to concentrate the gains of things going in the other direction as well.

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

#206

Post by sethhochberg »

ocschwar wrote: post #145
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.

Much has been written about Gen Z having a tiny appetite for risky behavior, and the causes are attributed to all sorts of stuff. But my entirely unscientific bet is that there is a real chilling effect to growing up as the first generation that had entirely digital “permanent records” and zero tolerance policies for their entire lives. Very little room for error when, regardless of whether you learned anything from it or not, your mistake is recorded forever and searchable by anybody. And because the rest of society didn’t grow up with that level of retention, they’ll still judge you for it being documented.

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

#207

Post by jfengel »

jgalt212 wrote: post #198
Brybry wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to sibling comments about the 13th amendment's exception clause (which is what legally allows forced prison labor[1]): forced prison labor has been a state-level ballot issue in recent years. Colorado voted to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime in 2018 (though enforcement is reportedly poor). [2][3] In other states voters have upheld forced labor[4] but sometimes it's because of…

> You can argue it's involuntary servitude instead of slavery but to most people that's a meaningless distinction. The purchase and sale of humans, or the lack of such transactions is a meaningless distinction?

Given the for-profit prisons, it comes very close to being the purchase and sale of humans.

It's not full chattel slavery such as was legal before the 13th Amendment, but the word "slavery" has always encompassed definitions short of that, e.g. in ancient Rome.

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

#209

Post by impossiblefork »

evujumenuk wrote: post #37

I understand this is the general policy in a few places, like Germany. The general idea seems to be that it is more beneficial to a society if criminals are given a viable avenue to lead non-criminal lives again, with the alternative being people going "ah fuck it, I guess I'm a criminal now". I'm surprised at this concept spreading in the US, since the system would generally benefit from having perpetual perpetrator…

There are enormous problems with this kind of thing though, especially when for example, a murderer is part of the establishment or is cuddled by the big established entities.

There was a guy who was a motor journalist for a major Swedish newspaper (Dagens Nyheter) who stabbed a man to death while his friends prevented the man's escape, and you basically don't get to hear about. It's even been removed from the journalist's Wikipedia page.'

I think truth is much more important and I think what a court does must be inherently public and I see a court, is as a proxy for going before the people itself to deal with a matter that can't be decided privately (and obviously, when somebody is dead, there's private way to make up), and therefore I believe their decisions have to stand forever and should be as public as possible.

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

#210

Post by dsego »

evujumenuk wrote: post #37

I understand this is the general policy in a few places, like Germany. The general idea seems to be that it is more beneficial to a society if criminals are given a viable avenue to lead non-criminal lives again, with the alternative being people going "ah fuck it, I guess I'm a criminal now". I'm surprised at this concept spreading in the US, since the system would generally benefit from having perpetual perpetrator…

Historically criminals from Germany would find a new life in Argentina. And they mostly lived out plain unremarkable lives, so this does work. Not sure everyone appreciated the benefits to society though.
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