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Judges Junk Jailcam
theodp writes "With one dissenting opinion, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an AZ sheriff's use of Webcams to broadcast prisoners being booked and held in cells constituted a profoundly undesirable level of humiliation, rejecting the sheriff's argument that the Webcasts deterred crime and showed the public how jails work." The Village Voice has a good article from a few years ago detailing how the jailcams work.
I ever ended up in jail and I knew there was a jail cam. It's like putting a mirror next to an item that's commonly stolen in a store. If a person feels like they're being watched, they're a lot less likely to try anything 'funny'.
Since we have this notion of someone being "innocent until proven guilty," I can see why having a webcam on while someone is being *booked* can be a problem. If (theoretically) everyone in the world can see John Doe getting booked for a crime which he may or may not have committed, how can he ever get a fair jury?
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I can see the point that this is no different than celebrities or politicians being booked and the media showing up. How about if it were done after one is proven guilty - sort of as an extra punishment.
Visit Tim's Journal, yes?
guess the sheriff forgets that small rule in our american society, alot of people goto jail for doing something then get it thrown out or dismissed in court, therfor making them not guilty, and not criminals. (though this is abused sometimes, there really are some innocent people that do goto jail for a night or so)
Remember that openness, while embarrassing for some, could also help protect those arrested from abuse.
It seems to me that individuals in jail still have rights, no matter how detestable they are, and I'm pretty sure that having a camera trained on you 24x7 against your will violates those rights.
If I was in prison I would WANT jailcam all over the prison and in my cell.
Ordinary security cameras protect you from your fellow prisoners by alerting guards to misconduct. broadcasting this on the web and archiving images on the same site protects you from misconduct by guards. Trust me... No guard wants his mother to see him beating a prisoner to a bloody pulp and then sodomizing him.
of course to work right you need lots of cameras protected from abuse and positioned so you can see who tampers with them. My only loss as a prisoner in such a facility is that I have to be more cautious in my masturbation.
Prison is about taking away some freedoms of a person convicted of a crime. I prefer to louse my privacy than my religious or sexual preference. Never mind life and limb.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I think it was a perfectly ACCEPTABLE level of humiliation for prisoners.
It would probably be a perfectly acceptable level of humiliation for convicts. The problem was that the cams were broadcasting from the holding cells for suspects.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
So let's see here. It's ok for national television to display home video footage of police beating the snot out of these people on the street, but as soon as the perp is dragged in to prison, now we must spare them the "humiliation" of broadcasting their incarceration on the Internet?
But God demonstrates his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us - (Romans 5:8)
We're supposed to be punishing people for being convicted not for being arrested.
The cake is a pie
There is a camera in the cop car that pulls you over.
The camera in the cop car isn't being broadcast to the whole world. These jailcams were.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
there's the "treated as innocent until proven guilty" part of US tradition that you seem to be overlooking: if you were booked because you matched the description of a bank robber, would you want your booking to be shown to the world? Especially when your release when your fingerprints didn't match those at the scene took place off-camera?
Next, a realization that prison rape is not "funny", is a violation of basic human rights, and that /. comments about "bubba the love bunny" deserve a -1, flamebait mod, not a +1 funny.
In a civilized society, prisoners are sentenced to time in jail.
They should not be subject to torture at the hands of other inmates, and it is the duty of the State to prevent such abuses.
So it's okay to fry a man to death but it's not okay to broadcast pictures of people being locked up because it's 'humiliating.' If both of these issues went before the 9th circuit then I'm sure there'd be a bit more consistency.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Don't they take a mug shot of you during booking? And we've seen those turn up online frequently for celebs, so are they a matter of public record?
For the most part, jail is for suspects awaiting trial and prison is for convicts convicted of something.
I don't think Joe Arpaio (the sheriff's name here for those of you who don't live in Maricopa county, Phoenix or points south) has really done much to lower crime with his "tough ways". Sometimes I think he's more of a joke than anything else
Sometimes jail is actually just about punishment too you know...
I like his policies, though I would probably agree with him more if he were running a prison rather than just a holding cell (where people not yet found guilty are held as well).
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Yeah, ever wondered why some faces of the suspects were blurred out, and not others?
Humiliation makes others feel better, but the target tends to feel pissed off, c.f. Columbine shootings. If you assume from the start they can't be rehab'd, you might as well kill them, quickly. Putting them in jail doesn't solve anything.
Prison should not provide anything remotely beneficial beyond educational, occupational, or psychological support. There should be light at the end of the tunnel for those who want to travel that route and the rest can rot in a 4x6 cell.
"The area of penetration will no doubt be sensitive." ~ Spock
Musta hit the 'any key' earlier when I posted as AC. Sorry. I'm gonna repost and face the wrath of moderation, considering how strongly I feel about this :
My new reality TV show.
'CellBoss 2004'. Not only will we be able to vote over the internet to give rapists and child abusers more time, but we can vote naughty/ugly/unpopular cons straight into segregation! Imagine the possibilities regarding aliances!
Joking aside, as someone who has spent significant time locked up, I find the idea of a webcam monitoring convicts quite disgusting. The simple fact of the matter is (IMHO) that this will do nothing but undermine what little integrity these guys have. Whether or not it might make things 'safer' is silly to me, considering the faulty foundation the Prison Industrial Complex is based on. This alongside of the fact that people in these holding cells are NOT necessarily guilty. The more we trivialize things like prison -- this indirectly relates to the COPS television show (ever seen a white collar criminal arrested?) -- the more people will ignore that America has the highest recorded rate of incarceration in the world and that 80% of those in prison are in for non-violent crimes.
_____ "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -- Orwell
No. I cannot disagree more. Jail is never about punishment. It is nobody's job to punish anyone, and it is certainly not the job of the the state to dole out punishments. Jail should purely be about rehabilitation, and if it isn't about rehabilitation then we have a problem. People like this twisted fuck are sick and need rehabilitation themselves.
Idiots like Sherriff Arpaio know that deterrence does not work. They do it because they want to mete out further punishment, beyond the convict's actual sentence. They feel, quite incorrectly, that they have the right and/or duty to make prisons and jails living hells for the inmates.
We need to do something to stop this. Most people are indifferent because they have no family members or loved ones behind bars. But take it from me: it can happen to you; it can happen to anyone. When you least expect it, someone you know will screw up and get thrown in prison. You won't feel so indifferent then.
In Puritan New England, public stocks filled on the judgement of the local cult leader prevented crime through intimidation, at the cost of Justice. But that's OK with AZ Sheriff Arpaio, and CA Judge Bea:
"Judge Carlos Bea wrote that using jailhouse Webcams to post images over the Internet did not violate the constitutional rights of detainees."
These "detainees" are merely arrested, not found guilty of any crime. The public defamation, now global across the Internet, is an obvious destruction of the rights of the accused. That's consistent with the new class of subhuman "detainees" everywhere, no longer protected by laws administered by fascist judges like Bea, and executed by fascist cops like Arpaio.
--
make install -not war
Until convicted, like when arrested, booked and held, people are innocent of the crime of which they are accused. Any treatment of them other than obtaining their presence in the justice system, which could prove their guilt, is unacceptable, and threatens us all.
--
make install -not war
Purely?
"Sorry, you've shown insufficient remourse for illegally downloading Michael Jackson's album; so you're going to have to stay in prison for another 5 years. You're clearly not rehabilitated." :-)
Historically, that's what it really meant; some people never got out of the joint for relatively minor crimes. Is that just?
Hint: no.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"...is seen as funny by society at large. Why is this? Its because a) they are criminals b) they are men If there was any place where women knowingly got raped there would be an outcry, investigation etc etc. But as it is, it is an accepted, and even condoned by society. After all, these are criminals, they should pay their debt. Rape is rape, no matter who it happens to.
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
A sadist is generally someone who derives pleasure by causing suffering to others. The person in question causes suffering to others by forcing them to [i] go hungry, [ii] live in 100F+ heat, [iii] humiliating them, [iv] depriving them of entertainment. Keep in mind, these are just the things he admits to in an interview.
In the interview snippit provided, he finds the suffering amusing (his crack about 2 meals a day being a 'brunch'), and is incapable of understanding why others object to him literally treating dogs better than people.
These methods, irregardless of the morals, have done nothing to decrease the crime rate in his jurisdiction.
We are left with someone who finds the suffering he causes to a great number of people under his control amusing; suffering that he causes for no reason other than his own, internal, motivations. He is a sadist.
If you still don't understand, please describe what you consider to be sadism.
All it takes for someone to lose their freedom in the "Land of the Free" is being laid off at precisely the same time that a parking ticket comes due - Pay the government before you feed your family, or else there will be no family.
Anyone remember why the citizens of the United States were guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms by the revolutionaries that founded our country? The first revolution was started over taxes on tea...will the next revolution be more like the one started at the Bastille?
With large portions of our population imprisoned either wrongly or for silly reasons (like parking tickets), we have an unhappy powder-keg on our hands, and the population continues to ignorantly re-elect animals like this Arizona Sheriff. Criminals they may be, but do you really want them to be angry, humiliated, and desperate criminals?
Most people don't care, they just want "justice". Someone once arrogantly said "Let them eat cake", and that person ended up in two pieces at the hands of criminals with a burning desire for blood. What will happen to this Sheriff if a lot of angry people catch him alone? Will his voters save him? I doubt it. They'll probably just watch it happen on TV. Would we have had Adolf Hitler if the Allies had been more empathetic with post WWI Germany? Maybe...then again, if Germany hadn't been so angry and humiliated, they might have just continued to make the world's best children's toys, just like before. Instead, they killed millions.
What can 1 out of 75 American men do? What can one 1 of 12 black American men do? What can 50 million ex-cons do? Do you really want to make that many people desperate and angry? Do you really want to publically humilate them? Do you really want to keep them unemployed and homeless? Do you really want the ruthless Sheriff of Nottingham doling out "punishment" to the mob that may kill you one day?
The French Aristocracy had an army of Swiss mercenaries armed with state-of-the-art muskets. The prisoners killed them all with sticks and shovels. Can a haggard bunch of desperate criminals wreak havoc on the smooth operation of the USA? A dozen or so foreigners managed to cripple the US economy on September 11th, 2001. What can 50 million of our own home-made suicidal killers do? These are valid questions...ones that are probably going to be answered in the most unfortunate way possible. Maybe our new criminal leaders will be wiser than our democratically elected ones.
Sure, but people being booked into county jail aren't convicted of a crime yet, in most cases.
Carpe Deez