I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime, but this sort of thing is shockingly common, even when dealing with children. Here's another case I encountered a few weeks ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Brown_case – there are so many things wrong with the entire thing, starting with charging an 11-year old as an adult(!!!) but what really takes the cake is:
"Presiding Judge Dominick Motto of the Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, Common Pleas Court initially denied decertification and transfer to juvenile court because Jordan would not admit his involvement in the crime."
"We're going to punish you harder because you claim to be innocent" What kind of backward clinically insane shitcunt logic is that?! Especially when we're talking about a 11-year old?!
It's no surprise that the "kids for cash" scandal could have continued for years, because the entire system is rotten. In any half-way decent system giving 3 months detention to a 14-year old for making a MySpace parody page of a teacher should have set off every possible alarm bell, and that it didn't is pretty damning for the entire system. Also: what kind of school brings this matter to a judge in the first place...? This along is pretty crazy.
> I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime,
In a lot of cases I think it's a proxy for racism.
I think there's also a tendency towards black and white thinking, where people are either good or bad, and they're very willing to bucket people as bad rather than considering shades of gray or that authorities did something wrong.
Additionally, in a lot of threads about crime I also sense a lot of jealousy. The sentiment resembles "I work hard to pay my bills like a chump and this guy has such a sweet and easy life not playing by the rules." They might feel their working life has them too stressed and they want to hurt "criminals" as some kind of revenge fantasy.
In this case it's a white kid though, and a lot of the kids from "kids for cash" were white. If we look at the prison population and include just the white population (~60%), the US still incarcerates vastly more people than other comparable countries. It's not even close. While in general racism is certainly a contributing factor, I don't see it being the main factor.
I don't have the impression the other factors you mention are unique to the US; people from all types of backgrounds seem to have problems with black/white thinking. This sort of thing seems innate to the human condition.
So the question remains, what is so special about the US? I don't really have a good answer to this. "Puritanism", as another commenter offered, seems too simplistic, and the US isn't the only country with a history of that sort of thing, either. Same with "war on drugs", another popular answer. Drugs are illegal (and sometimes heavily persecuted) in many countries. Maybe it's a bit worse in the US, but it's not unique to the US.
Maybe there just isn't a good/clear reason, and it's just "how the chips fell". The Aztecs went to war for no other reason than to capture people so they could rip out their hearts for sacrifice. There have been cultures where cannibalism of slaves, even child slaves, was socially acceptable for no other reason than "it tastes good". Why were these cultures like this? Who can tell... Probably a complex interaction between various factors.
Well, I don't think the tough on crime rhetoric is totally unique to the US either. I hear them coming from other countries too. Eg. when I was paying attention to Javier Milei's presidential bid in Argentina, it's largely the same talking points about crime, could have been lifted word for word from American internet comments.
From what I understand I think northern europe in particular has more of an attitude geared toward prison being about reform of criminals, and less towards vindictive punishment.
PS: Kind of tangential, but since you did bring it up: I believe a lot of the stories about natives being cruel warriors and cannibals were invented or exaggerated by Spaniards.
The thing is, the vast majority of convicts in jail are genuinely guilty. I'd put it at 99% at least, probably more. And even many of the "innocent" people there are more likely to be of the kind: "I did not rob and kill this guy, I only fenced his watch".
What can be done with it? I now believe that the only way is more aggressive policing with almost zero tolerance. At the same time, the jail terms need to go _down_.
So if you steal bread to feed your sister's starving children, you WILL go to jail, just like Jean Valjean. But only for a couple of days, not 19 years.
Additionally, prisons and jails need to become _better_. No unpaid labor, better conditions, different tiers of jails for different offenders. Mental health resources and job training.
Oh, and alternatives to jail such as community service are great too.
I think you underestimate the rate of wrongly accused and wrongly convicted. Estimates vary, iirc I've seen some papers claiming 5% and others claiming as high as 20%. There is a lot of over-charging going on too.
Then, most cases don't get to trial, so you have people pleading guilty to things they did not do because they fear wrongful conviction for something worse.
Sorry, not buying it. There's no way 20% of convictions are wrong. Even 1% is honestly pushing it, especially these days. Extrapolation from convictions overturned via the DNA evidence also results in about 0.5-1%.
I volunteered as an unpaid IT support at a non-profit working with ex-cons who were trying to get back to normal life. So I got to speak with lots of people who were actively trying to get away from the prison life. Some of _them_ were saying that _they_ met no innocent people in jail.
And this is not really an exaggeration. You can pull up a roster of prisoners in your local jail and try to do a search for their names. You'll find that pretty much everyone there has a loooong rap sheet, with jail time merely being the "crowning achievement".
And it's always the same pattern: a long list of crimes that result in no punishment (ignored fines, ignored community service, probation, ignored bench warrants, etc.) until they get unlucky and encounter a prosecutor or a judge who is not willing to tolerate bullshit. Or if they commit a grave crime that can't be ignored.
That's why I think that we should absolutely make jail time one of the _first_ deterrents. And this also should absolutely apply to juveniles (yes, "jail our kids").
HOWEVER, the jail terms also need to go down. Especially for the first time offenders. Not years and months, but days or weeks.
And there is solid research backing that up. It's the _inevitability_ of punishment that is the best deterrent, not the strictness of it (that's also why the death penalty is useless, btw).
You can keep believing this and being confidently wrong.
Seems like my point about plea deals blew past you. Repeat: Innocent people often plead guilty to lesser charges because they fear wrongful convictions for something more serious. The system is set up around this.
When wrongfully convicted, it's also very common to get denied parole because you don't admit to doing something wrong. From what I've heard it's very very hard to overturn a wrongful conviction, even in the presence of new evidence or signs of misconduct the system fights it at every turn.
>>Plea deals don't change anything, the vast majority of takers are guilty.
So all these stories where someone is put in jail, spends months waiting for trial, then the DA comes around and says "look you can go to trial and maybe get few years in prison, or you can plead guilty and we'll count your time in jail as time served so you can go home tomorrow"
1) Do you think these stories are wrong? Or rare?
2) If you were in that situation as an innocent person, can you not imagine yourself being tempted to accept just to go home to your family?
Edit: just to be clear - I don't think anyone is disputing the "majority" part. But I definitely don't think it's so insignificant to be completely ignored either.
> So all these stories where someone is put in jail, spends months waiting for trial
At least in West Coast states, you are almost guaranteed to get a low bail or no bail at all. You'll likely be denied bail only if you are accused of something heinous, so your sentence will be longer than the time in pre-trial. Or if you have a history of skipping bail.
So your scenario is highly unlikely, at least on the West Coast.
> 1) Do you think these stories are wrong? Or rare?
They certainly can happen and do happen, but they are rare. I dislike plea deals in general, and they certainly need to be reformed.
My personal philosophy is that laws must be written in such a way, that they don't require any prosecutorial discretion or plea deals.
> Edit: just to be clear - I don't think anyone is disputing the "majority" part. But I definitely don't think it's so insignificant to be completely ignored either.
If you are interested in criminal justice in the US, you should start communicating with prisoners. Your state department of justice will have a program that allows you to exchange letters with prisoners. Do it, it helps people to stay connected with the outside world.
I did that. I now think that prisoners definitely belong in jail, and that trying to reduce the jail population by just ignoring crimes is folly. However, we absolutely must _improve_ the jail conditions. A LOT.
And very few organizations are lobbying in this direction. Instead, we have people who want to "fix the root causes of crime" or "abolish incarceration". This is destructive, and it's not helping.
> (that's also why the death penalty is useless, btw).
I’d argue that if a criminal is dead, they can’t commit future crimes, therefore the death penalty is quite useful. Why waste space and resources on prisons when there is a more efficient option?
I think your estimates are way off. A study in 2014 found that 4% of death row inmates were wrongly convicted[1]. This is likely to be the highest scrutiny cases in our system, so I'd expect that non-death penalty cases would have a wrongly convicted rate of >= 4%. And that's not even counting the people that have been leveraged into plea deals for crimes they didn't commit simply because the system is so weighted against them.
The main reason is that we refuse to spend money to address the root causes of crime. We won't fix urban poverty or the failing urban education system so most people choose to live in car-dependent suburban hellholes that make our youth uniquely miserable. Some of them shoot up schools, leading to zero tolerance policies and to moral panic campaigns to ban some inanimate object as the culprit that is supposedly corrupting kids.
If we had a functioning safety net and opportunities for people who grow up in the inner city to achieve a better life that doesn't involve playing professional sports, we'd be a mostly urban population like a normal country and we wouldn't have the teen mental health problems that only we have or the school shootings that we've only had for the past 30 years or so of the 400+ years we've had gun rights. We won't do that because that would involve spending our tax dollars for the benefit of people who aren't millionaires, billionaires or corporations.
> in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards
As far as schools go, zero tolerance policies have been put in place. The concept of zero tolerance is something that just makes no sense to me. Not every thing that happens in a school needs police involvement, but because the rules/laws that have been put in place removes common sense and power from principals so that everything is now a police matter.
Legislatures have done similar things to judges with mandatory minimums and other draconian small minded knee jerk reaction to look like they are being effective.
In the 80s, kids would have bows or hunting rifles in the car or truck in the school parking lot. Now eating your pastry the wrong way gets you sent home.
In the early 2000s my middle school had archery for a few days as part of gym class as a special event. Only the girls were actually allowed to do it though, they had something else for the boys (don't remember what though).
Same was true in my middle school in the 80s. In hindsight it really was the right call. That same year we had a sub in gym class playing tennis and four of us boys managed to launch about a hundred tennis balls over the fence and into the woods home run derby style. We would have definitely put an eye out with archery equipment.
Zero tolerance policies are a direct response to discrimination claims.
If you allow people to have discretion, then it will be used(and abused).
Also some of the stories I hear about school in the 70's and 80's make me think that the current claim that "schools were always authoritarian and used to subjugate children to turn them into compliant workers" is probably BS.
Probably current administration needs to justify it's existence and high pay by making rules.
> Zero tolerance policies are a direct response to discrimination claims.
Source? Because if that's true, that's the wrong implementation of a great policy (anti-discrimination).
That's basically saying "well instead of having a policy of reasonable punishment for a given situation, we'd rather be as extreme in our punishment as possible so that we can still hurt kids we hate"
From wiki on Zero Tolerance, specifically talking about harrasment:
>Various institutions have undertaken zero tolerance policies such as in the military, in the workplace, and in schools in an effort to eliminate various kinds of illegal behavior such as harassment. Proponents hope that such policies will underscore the commitment of administrators to prevent such behavior.
It leaves out how when we went into these things, there was outcry over administrators covering up harassment, showing favoritism, etc.
If there is a fight between 2 kids, one kid gets expelled and the other does not, this situation can seem unbalanced.
>I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime, but this sort of thing is shockingly common, even when dealing with children.
The justice system has gone mad. Politicians probably encourage it behind closed doors as well. Fear is the road to authoritarianism.
> what kind of school brings this matter to a judge in the first place...?
The kind of school that prevents a student with dreadlocks to attend schold indefinitely [1]? This is happening right now. In the past, there was also the role playing game (dnd) satanism scare...
Granted, I'm not sure if there have been actual arrests, but it's the logical next step to take.
Because it shows no remorse. The reason for reduced sentences for juvenile offenders is the idea that they ‘didn’t know any better’. That they can learn and grow and NOT be a menace to society soon.
If they still refuse to take any ownership or show any contrition even after being clearly shown something was a major problem (hence the court case), then why reduce the penalty? Who would it be helping, exactly?
The alternative is to charge them as a juvenile, and to refrain from inferring a guilty conscious from their lack of "contrition" (which is a patently ridiculous thing to expect from an 11 year old - which is the real issue with charging children as adults, not that they supposedly are more reformable, but that they cannot be held to the same standards as adults).
You're engaging in a slippery slope fallacy. This was a miscarriage of justice. Civilization would not have crumbled if this child wasn't put through the wringer.
No, I’m not arguing if it is right or wrong. I’ve been explaining why the levers exist as that was what was being asked. And to be clear, the case I’m referring to the kid was tried and convicted (originally) of 1st degree murder with a shotgun. In juvenile court.
And if it turned out the kid did murder them, then people would be up in arms that he got released early - especially if he committed another murder before he got locked up again. Which could happen.
Was it a miscarriage of justice? Perhaps, I haven’t seen the evidence. The courts eventually came to the conclusion it was! Until they did, according to the courts it wasn’t.
it was also legal while it was happening.
And 11yr olds are plenty capable of being defiant, malicious, contrite, etc. too.
And active dangers to those around them.
I wasn’t there in court when this was going on, so I have no idea if the kid was being out of control, or the judge was being out of control. I’ve seen both play out. The appeals court felt it was the judge.
The whole situation is quite terrible regardless. But that’s what the criminal justice system is for - to resolve terrible situations in some eventually sensible way. Woe to whoever gets caught in its gears though.
So you want them to lie? My dad was like that. I admitted to several things I didn't do in order to reduce the amount of caning.
This led to a funny incident at school. Somebody did something, and another grassed. The bully came to question me - I had no memory of telling on him, but the way he described the comments, I though oh that does sound like something I'd say. I took the beating. Then the actual grass came up and asked me why did I admit something I hadn't done?
"Grass" means "report to the authorities." Seems to originate in Britain as rhyming slang between copper and grasshopper, though I looked up the etymology for this post.
Remorse for what? Something he didn't do? There is nothing to be remorseful about. This is the sort of non-logic where you're presumed guilty and/or punished for asserting your innocence. Aside from the obvious absurdness of it, it's also literally unconstitutional as it violates your 5th amendment rights, which is why another judge reversed the decision later on. And considering all of this is about an 11-year old makes it that much worse.
If the court finds you guilty, then by definition within the system you did it.
It doesn't mean you actually did, but it does mean the system says you did.
Which is the point of my comment. It doesn't mean it actually makes sense in real life, but it's why the system does what it does.
And the reason why the system will prosecute kids like adults sometimes - the nominal reason is because they don't think it's worth giving them a pass either due to the severe nature of the crime, or because of the lack of contrition of the accused.
If they're actually innocent, then per the system they should get zero penalty eventually regardless of how they are prosecuted.
We know that being held in an adult jail while awaiting trial is a pretty severe penalty in fact of course, which is why it eventually got thrown out that he got treated that way. Plenty of adults get stuck in jail for years while awaiting trial, then get released and theoretically suffered no penalty either. But we also know that is bullshit. No clear better alternatives (except bail) have shown themselves however.
If the kid had been caught on tape murdering a bunch of other kids and still claimed he was innocent, then no one would be objecting that he be put in an adult jail while awaiting trial though. Since putting someone that violent in a juvenile facility is making it as dangerous as an adult one.
Judges have wide discretion to make these calls, and this judge clearly screwed up.
No one found him guilty of anything at this point. How can they when deciding in which court he should be judged? That happens before the trail. You're talking complete bollocks utterly disconnected from anything to do with this case.
You might want to actually read my comment. He was arrested pending trial. They have to decide where to put him, pending trial.
If the judge expects to try him as an adult for the reasons I listed, then they're going to put him in an adult jail.
If the judge expects to try him as a juvenile for the reasons I listed, then they're going to put him in a juvenile jail.
Either way, someone does have to make the call. And there are circumstances where the call that was made is appropriate.
Since it's 'detention pending trial', if he gets acquitted or charges dropped then per the system he 'suffered no penalty'. Same as anyone else arrested and put on trial. We know that isn't true though, since anyone in jail is still in jail and jail sucks. If he is found guilty, then he gets transferred.
Clearly it was a bad call on the Judge's part doing what they did, which is why it got reversed - eventually.
But as anyone who has dealt with the courts is well aware, everything is glacial - unless it's going to make your life a pain in the ass. That usually happens quickly.
But like everyone else, one you're in the system, you're going to have a bad time regardless.
What else do you propose is going to happen though?
> What else do you propose is going to happen though?
Not parent but I don’t think that we should be holding anyone pending trial when what they’re accused of is so minor, child or otherwise.
Furthermore any decisions about pre-trial detention shouldn’t hinge on remorse or contrition, they should hinge on the alleged offenders risk of flight and their potential risk to the community.
The judge is supposed to consider severity. Obviously it went too far in this case.
Regarding remorse/contrition though - that is absolutely a factor of in potential risk to
the community.
Example - Someone gets arrested for DUI. Who is higher risk? Someone who insists they didn’t do it and fuck anyone who thinks they did and they’ll do what they want, or someone who says ‘that was terrible, and I didn’t do exactly what the prosecution says, but I’m not going to be driving anytime soon until this all gets worked out’?
Because plenty of people in the first category end up driving drunk while pending trial and kill more people.
Children might be incapable of determining certain actions are wrong or illegal. They might be able to do that, but unable to apply this knowledge to their own behavior. A trial won't fix immediately this, just like charging an 11 year old like an adult won't make him grow a beard.
Treating public school as public space with public rules creates a huge class divide with the private schools. Short of actively shooting up the place, I can't think of a single rule you could break at the private university I went to that could result in law enforcement getting involved. I knew of at least one kid who got caught with most of a kilogram of cocaine, who got off with little more than a slap on the wrist.
In contrast, a kid at my brother's public uni got arrested for petty vandalism. It's an extremely stark class divide.
It doesn’t need to be this way. Essentially all UK universities are “public” and none operate this way. There aren’t special police forces that roam their campuses (Oxford had this for a time, but I think it was the only one). Violation of university rules is no more serious from a legal perspective than violating any other private rules.
I think campus police are an insane idea. There should obviously be a good relationship between any university and the police in their area, but the idea that they should report to the university leadership is nonsensical.
Arresting kids for bringing something that's legal for them to have is one side of a spectrum of silliness, thinking that arresting a kid for violently assaulting someone is a "maybe" is pretty far on the other end of the same spectrum. There are plenty of things it's completely reasonable to arrest a child for.
You think fentanyl is magic killing dust? What are you, one of those moronic cops who thinks they'll die from seeing fentanyl?
They only way you're injuring someone with fentanyl is getting them to ingest an unsafe amount of it one way or another. That's not really different from a lot of prescription drugs. Or some OTC ones, like Tylenol. Or lye and many other cleaning agents.
The dose makes the poison. The LD50 for lye is 4,090 (rats) - 6,600 mg/kg (mice). The LD50 for fentanyl is 3.1 mg/kg in rats and 0.03 mg/kg in monkeys. So, very different.
The only way someone is ingesting that accidentally is if a classmate is attempting to poison them. There are a lot of other poisons that can be ingested in small doses if someone is trying to injure you. Fentanyl is not going to leap out of someone's pocket and fly down your throat. It's not magic killing dust.
Accidental drug dosing happens all the time, with things with much larger effective doses. People mix up drugs. Drugs absolutely fall out of people's pockets on a near constant basis.
OP is suffering from the moral panic about fentanyl. It's gotten so ridiculous that cops suffer from a collective begin near it is enough to knock them out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0Vzz_P9JBk
If people wonder how possession worked in the middle ages, look no further than this.
Maybe this is more a reflection of the US being civilized or not, but there are teenage “children” the same size as the kid in this story, using actual guns to commit violent robberies in parts of my city. So it’s not trivial to determine whether an adult-sized human holding a black gun is a threat or not.
This is America; Owning a real gun should not be an acceptable reason to be shot by the police. What the fuck is the point of all the aggressive defense around the second amendment if the second a cop sees a gun they are free to murder people?
Cops are not judge, jury, and executioners, and in fact have zero authority to hand down punishment. Being shot for holding a gun is absurd.
Is it that unreasonable? An adult-sized person was waving a realistic looking gun around and (allegedly) pointing it at houses. Some attempt at deescalation needs to be made, but if that fails, I wouldn’t want the cop to just shrug and leave. I’d expect him to do whatever it takes to remove the gun from this individual.
There’s a huge difference between simply owning a gun vs wandering around in public pointing it at people.
I was almost arrested twice; once for having phreaker box plans in my bookbag (in 1998, when they no longer worked), another time for "computer hacking" (fixing the school computer's proxy settings).
And they wonder why we grew up to hate authority figures.
