471–480 of 586 posts
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Everything bad is due to lack of intelligence and everything good is caused by intelligence. Average day on the HN.
The irony is that seeing things that way implies a massive lack of intelligence.
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At what point in the last 30 years did cannabis possession account for even a plurality of incarcerated persons, in any state or federally? Cannabis is not the high order bit.
Well apparently 43% of American inmates are incarcerated for drug related offenses. https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen... This article claims that about 32k people in 2021 were for cannabis related offense, and simply carrying that to today would be 23% of the prison population: the largest offense type. https://www.lastprisonerproject.org/cannabis-prisoner-scale
This is good news. The level of crime and number of offenders has decreased. Quotes from the article: > As of 2016—the most recent year for which data are available—the average man in state prison had been arrested nine times, was currently incarcerated for his sixth time, and was serving a 16-year sentence. > But starting in the late 1960s, a multidecade crime wave swelled in America, and an unprecedented number of…
Crime is still happening. The arrests are just not being made. There is a readon why us stores have more and more stuff behind locks.
To foment hysteria in feeble minded neurotics?
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> the act of having a child is much more deliberate and the parents likely having more resources This is both good and bad. Having a child is very difficult, but it gets harder as you get older. You lack a lot of monitory resources as a teen or the early 20s, but you have a lot more energy, as you get older your body starts decaying you will lack energy. A kid had at 40 will still be depending on your when you are 55…
Lifestyle is key here. An older friend conveyed to me pretty much the exact same thing you are, that he cannot imagine having kids at 40 because you will not be able to keep up with them energy wise. You get old and your body really starts to give in. Alright Geoff, thanks, but you are 54 and do zero exercise, have a diet of eating out at fast food and fast casual restaurants, a body type that would be described as "…
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That’s interesting. Because I genuinely feel I’m much better cut out to be a parent now. Is it different for you? I have so much patience and understanding, and I see that lacking in many of the younger parents around me. I see them and I remember myself. And the life I have would just not have been possible if I had a child back then. Not even if I completely sacrificed family time and attention back then, which I n…
> I have so much patience and understanding I'm 32, and I think I currently have much less patience and understanding than I did at say 22. Life has basically broken me to the point that I simply don't have the capacity for these things that I used to.
While my Target puts Legos behind plexiglas. While my Safeway puts deodorant behind plexiglas. Statistics are amazing. Even crime stats are "down". Don't report, don't convict - done.
Or maybe they're low sales-volume items in a low profit margin store and it's cheaper to put some things behind glass than post up a security guard to deal with the fact that almost everyone, even nice old ladies at the grocery store, steal things sometimes?
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Yeah, this is exactly something to discuss early. My wife and I were on the same page from earlier in dating about having kids in our 20s.
Absolutely. It serves as a filter, if people are being honest. It also highlights the bizarre dating culture and view of life we've adopted. This dating culture has produced a good deal of rotten fruit. The ultimate purpose of dating is to meet your future spouse. We're turned it into some kind of senseless sexual escapade, and this has poisoned the relations between men and women. It makes them exploitative and dehu…
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The end of cash bail was the right idea, though. At the time it ended there were ~100 homicide defendants out on bail (usually $150K+), yet there were hundreds of people held for months or years on petty offenses for want of under $250 to bail out. Wouldn't wish my worst enemy to be held in the CCJ, though. Easily one of the worst detention facilities in the USA.
I disagree. Cash bail is about holding someone's money hostage to secure their presence at court... the problem always was the violation of 8th amendment rights. By demanding excessive bail, the person couldn't possibly cough up the amount, which forced them to utilize bail bondsmen instead. Except that turns bail into a fine, because unlike true bail which is returned when they appear at court, bonds are retained by…
At least in Illinois, the theory is that now most defendants should be able to be free, or on house arrest, until their trial.
Illinois doesn't allow bondsmen, which, while it meant you got your bond back† it also meant that, unlike other states, you couldn't pay a smaller amount to a bondsman for him to get you out. So I imagine in Illinois at least, more people were stuck in pretrial due to (as you say) excessive bail.
One issue is that a lot of defendants have zero cash, or zero access to their cash. You can't pay your own bond. Someone has to pay your bond for you. You can't go to an ATM and get the money out. You can't access the Internet to sell your shares or take a loan against your real estate. These people are stuck in pretrial until their case is resolved, which can take over a decade in some instances.
I had a cellmate who was wrongfully arrested and had a $20K bond set. He was homeless. I proved the case was frivolous and sent him to court with the paperwork. The judge agreed, but gave the prosecution 60 days to respond. He reset the bail at $200. I offered to pay it, but instead he just asked to use my phone credit. He spent all day calling his homeless friends and over the next three days over a dozen of them walked to the jail and dropped off $10 and $20 bills until he had enough to leave.
If a judge sets excessive bail, which the vast majority do, then you can appeal it. It's usually immediately appealable. In most states this would be a 6-stage appellate process to exhaust your rights. Each level taking usually one to two years.
The conditions in county jails are vastly more punitive than even the harshest supermax prisons, generally. Absolutely abominable conditions. I remember one recent case where a homeless person was grabbed off the street for having a bag of white powder. He was put in pretrial detention. He pled guilty to possession of cocaine and took (IIRC) a 5-year prison sentence. Just before he was shipped out the lab results came back as negative for cocaine. The bag was powdered milk he had obtained from a food bank. The judge asked why he pled guilty and he simply pointed out the conditions of the jail were so harsh that he couldn't take it. Pretrial detention vastly increases both the conviction rate (you're more likely to plead guilty even if the charges are wrong) and also the length of sentence (people dressed in suits coming from the street just look less criminal and are sentenced a lot lighter, compared to people in Hamburgler outfits coming from jail).
I think the writing is on the wall, though. There has been an absolute ton of hardcore litigation in the last decade on the legality of bail, and the intermediate appellate courts are striking it down. I think if SCOTUS had a slightly different makeup, then we'd see bail abolished at the federal constitutional level right now. The reason for the new statutes in Illinois and other states, counties and cities is that they are getting ahead of the problem. Better to fix it now than get sued down the road.
† You'd rarely get it back. Often the judge would impose a fine, if you were sentenced, that would swallow your bond. One bonus, though, is that you could usually make your bond do "double-duty" by using it to bail out, but at the same time signing it over to an attorney to pay his costs. When the case reaches disposition the bond would go directly to the lawyer.
> Rapidly declining numbers of youth are committing crimes, getting arrested, and being incarcerated. This matters because young offenders are the raw material that feeds the prison system: As one generation ages out, another takes its place on the same horrid journey. Another factor which will soon impact this, if it isn't already, is the rapidly changing nature of youth. Fertility rates have been dropping since 200…
We may have swung the pendulum a little too far towards deliberate, though. The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off. We need to figure out how to build an economy and society that can facilitate deliberate responsible parentage younger and more often. Luckily we have generat…
*capitalist society will die off. ( )
See also: automation, ai, robots.... we probably don't need as many people / are headed for work shortages anyway.
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All the other members of the family were active and produced useful things - both kids and women. The iddle lifestyle was limited to richer classes.
Who said anything about the idle lifestyle?
In reality in most families all family members were contributing something to the household income.