America’s incarceration rate is in decline

I live in a deep Red Bible thumping, back the blue, law and order county / state.

About 7 years ago a former schoolmate of mine shot a man 6 times over a bad drug deal, fled the state to California. He was captured by the US Marshal and brought back to the county jail where he bonded out after 3 month.

After his bonding out, he drove over to the victim’s parent’s house and performed a drive-by shooting, injuring none but did kill livestock.

He was arrested again, taken to the county jail, and bonded out after several months.

The issue finally reached a plea bargain, they dropped all charges related to both shooting, had him plead guilty to felony firearms charge, and gave him time served and 5 years probation.

This man is a grown adult with felony priors, and got a proverbial slap on the wrist. Never saw a day of state prison, likely never will.

If this is how we treat serious violent crime, I’m not surprised in TFA at all.

There should be statutory limitations for prosecutors concerning the use of plea deals. No more than 1% of cases in any calendar year should be permitted to even offer plea deals, so that they use that tool sparingly and only when appropriate. If they waste it out of laziness or apathy, then the subsequent cases that year would have to be brought to trial.

This would cut down on alot of the bullshit (and not just for cases like the one you describe, but where plea bargaining is used to bully people into pleading guilty where they are not).

Most convictions are due to plea deals. If you limit that tool, people would simply have charges dropped due to Sixth Amendment violations and people languishing in prison awaiting trials. It would be gridlock.

"Plea bargaining accounts for almost 98 percent of federal convictions and 95 percent of state convictions in the United States."

https://legalknowledgebase.com/what-percentage-of-criminal-c...

I live in super liberal Illinois, which recently ended cash bail. It was a rough transition period but now it is fully implemented and every judge and prosecutor knows how everything works.

Cook County Jail (Chicago and close-in suburbs) population is higher than it has been in over a decade. They had to reopen a section of the jail to deal with it. Because people who do what that guy did no longer get to bond out. If someone fled to California and got brought back by the Marshal’s service, he’s sitting in jail until trial. And he is the one that needs to negotiate and offer concessions.

Note: crime is now dropping a lot [1]. Trying setting the date range to “last 28 days”

[1] https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/vrd/home.html

I think a public trial serves as a form of oversight. Widespread plea bargaining means we'll never know how many of these people even committed crimes, much less how the justice system operates.

The problem is not the judge that approved a plea deal - the problem is the prosecutor who gave (negotiated maybe is a better term) such a lousy plea deal. After fleeing the state and being brought by US Marshal service I would think the prosecutor should have pushed for some state jail time.

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 the bail bondsman.

Simply obeying the 8th amendment would have fixed everything, and so much better too.

In some cases, high bail was used because judges were pussies who refused to deny bail to those who were actual threats to the public (see this alot whenever you hear bullshit about some killer whose bail is set at $5 million or whatever). Other times, it was just the status quo, and judges were giving no real consideration to the problem.

> Most convictions are due to plea deals.

Probably, but why should that matter?

>If you limit that tool, people would simply have charges dropped

So you mean that charges that don't matter are often pressed anyway, because prosecutors have a cheat code to short circuit the long and arduous process of trial which is supposed to be long and arduous? No thanks.

If they could prosecute fewer cases, then they would pick the ones that mattered. Last time I did grand jury duty, it was 40 cases every day, most of them bullshit drug possession charges.

Or maybe, maybe they really do have so many important cases that this would become a problem. Then it should become a problem, so the public is forced to realize it must fund a more robust judicial system that can handle that high load. Either way, I do not want prosecutors using plea deals. And you shouldn't either.

>"Plea bargaining accounts for almost 98 percent of federal convictions and 95 percent of state convictions in the United States."

There was a slow day at the grand jury, and the assistant DA was talking to us jurors. Claimed that our small city had about 4000 cases per year, and only 30 or so ever went to trial. How can justice be served if that's the case? He certainly thought that he was doing justice, but some of those people were just pleading out so that they could put an end to the nonsense, and not out of any true guilt. Whether they were forced to go to trial so that they would be then compelled to assert their (true) innocence, or whether the prosecutor would just stop making up bullshit charges, we'd all be better off. He genuinely thought of trials as some sort of fun distraction instead of what it really was... the entire point of his job. It was fucked up.

The trouble with our world isn't that there aren't solutions, it's that when someone proposes them, they sound outlandish to people who subconsciously want the problems to persist.

The whole concept of pretrial detention is fraught with problems.

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.

Sixth Amendment is the right to a speedy trial. They would have to expand the courts to thousands of more courts to get that done. And then there are appeals, and appeals of appeals, etc.

Not to mention lawyer fees would go up 10x or 100x for any simple thing.

Want to get charged $10k for a speeding ticket? This is how it happens.

>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 this bodes ill, myself. I expect a slowly-but-steadily rising culture that just skips out on trials altogether, because there are no immediate (or even longterm) costs to doing so. Though you might argue that in such cases judges will just issue bench warrants, this too will stop when everyone involved becomes too apathetic and demoralized to do so.

Bail would be fine if it were carefully set such that the person can always scrape and afford it, enough that they wouldn't risk losing it but still low enough that they can gather it. Is there any reason at all that your anecdote had the judge set it to $20k? That's ridiculous. And for a homeless man as well... that's constructive bail denial. That judge should be censured and forced to retire.

Just once I would like to see a policy adjustment that wasn't absurd overcompensation. I turn 51 in a few months so I've got maybe 2 decades left but I don't think it's going to happen.

>They would have to expand the courts to thousands of more courts to get that done.

Possibly. But if they're denying justice because "it would cost too much to do it correctly", then maybe the taxpayers just have to pony up more cash.

But it's also possibly the case that they don't need more courts, they just have to stop focusing on bullshit drug charges that absolutely no one gives a shit about. If drug addicts want to commit slow suicide doing the stuff, let them. If you want to instead focus on the drug dealers, there are simple policies that would put street dealers out of business instantly.

Your objections don't really line up with your goals, no matter what your goals happen to be. Think about it all a bit more carefully.

One issue is that most bails hearings I saw (and I sat through thousands) in Illinois were basically one-minute affairs with literally zero evidence presented on the person's ability to pay. I've heard that bond hearings in Illinois are now significantly longer and more evidence-based.

The judges were just making emotional decisions based on the heinousness of the crime, the ethnicity of the person, whether their family was in the room supporting them, etc. And the outcome was essentially random and arbitrary.

The cellmate who had the $20K bail set was a completely arbitrary number. It was a victimless offense to do with paperwork. All I did was file FOIA requests to prove no offense had been committed. I was infuriated that the judge reset bail to $200 knowing the guy was clearly innocent, and also knowing he was homeless.

Judges were ordered again and again and again in Illinois to run their bond hearings in a fairer manner, but it never happened.

So we're now in the situation we're in. A lot of detainees are on house arrest, and this is better for their mental health, but also presents enormous problems of their own. If you are ordered released on house arrest, but you have nowhere to go, then you get stuck. If you are on house arrest, often you can't get a job, so how do you pay rent and eat? Often if you're on house arrest the judge won't allow you to even leave to obtain groceries or medicine, which is a problem.

These are hard problems. I don't want to be the one trying to solve them because there is no way to make everyone happy.