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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 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.
But he's quite powerful in the political sense. And taking down the cams ain't gonna make much difference. The guy needs to go. Well, hopefully this coming election.
The jail cams in question were for the holding cells of suspects, not of convicted criminals. Thus, the ruling that cameras were not allowed -- it amounts to conviction without a trial.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Arpaio never met a reporter he didn't like, nor a PR stunt he wouldn't pull. Local opinion is that he's not a sheriff, he just plays one on TV.
His jailhouse tactics have cost the county millions in legal fees and settlements, and he is accused at the moment of having set up a squad of detectives to harass political opposition (in AZ, a county sheriff is an elected official).
Hey, I've tried to get on juries in the past. I'd like to participate in the process. My work schedule has either always been a problem or they culled me before I ever got to the interview. Maybe it's because I bring reading material rather than watch TV - "No, not him. Attention span may be too long. Hey, what about the guy trying to channel surf using a candybar for a remote control...?"
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As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
I'm all for freedom of privacy and not humiliating people... but c'mon, what about COPS? They feature criminals kicking, screaming, and drunkenly making themselves look like idiots on national television! Even if they give their consent to have it played on TV, it seems like most of them are too out of it to know what's going on...
"In a Democracy, people get the kind of government they deserve." -Winston Churchill
Ah- but what about his recidivism rate? Or is that also faked?
And before you say it- if I was a criminal I'd want to get the hell out of that county also, so his recidivism rate might just be the "scare them out of the county" rate.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Not to mention that his never-ending stream of publicity stunts cause tons of lawsuits, many of which the county has to settle with cash. Regardless of the morality of his prisoner treatment practices, he's costing the taxpayers in AZ a lot of money and ignoring problems (like understaffing of prisons) which have a real impact on things.
I bet if they left something like that on they'd have to lay off the minorites. In Tulsa, latinos are labeled the same as whites when they get booked. A camera may be more truthful.
Personally- I like some of the sci-fi methods better if we're going to get into unusual punishments:
1. Coventry- Set aside land for criminals who refuse to acknowledge the government. Dump them in there and let them starve or survive based on their own skills.
2. Reeducation- brainwashing, an alternative to Coventry. This option, with number 1, was known as "The Two Alternaives" in Heinlein's _Revolt_in_2100_.
3. Death of Personality- this one comes from Babylon 5, where a sort of chemical amnesia is induced in the criminal. They aren't allowed to know their former life- and their present one is as a slave to the family of their victims, with all wages earned going to restitution.
4. The Hole- another Heinlein idea, done by aliens in _Have_Space_Suit_Will_Travel_. Basically a smooth sided hole in the ground 30 feet down. First 15 feet is a 40" pipe (you've got to put the prisoner on a diet first). Second 15 feet is a 10x10 room with a fountain in the center and a drain with a pressure switch that shuts off the fountain if the drain gets plugged. Throw your prisoner in, feed him as long as you're interested in keeping him alive, and leave him there. Neat replacement for the Death Penalty.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I live here in Phoenix. His own political parties aren't going to sponsor him for this election, and with good reason. He's more likely to call Fox News before he calls backup.
A while back he lost a case about some young kid he said was threatening to bomb him here in phoenix. problem is the kid wasn't, they had no proof, and they called the news to tag along during the bust. it was obviously all just publicity but the kid still spent 2 years in jail.
joe needs to go, he's just another dirty lieing politian.
Okay as dumb as this sounds, I can't find the jail cam this article talks about, it references 'crime.com' but that doesn't seem to exist either. I did find this Tennessee jailcam however.
Since it has been shows that he has not reduced the crime rate he just seems like a sadist who got a ton of human beings to play with. He humiliates them and gets off on his absolute power over these people.
Probably all for the better though. If he did not have prisoners to torment god knows what kind of a sadistic psycho he would have turned out to be.
It sure sounds like he is having fun though and the people of mericopa seem to be having fun vicariously too.
evil is as evil does
During that same weekend in incarceration, my friend witnessed the brutal beating of a suspect by three armed guards. The suspect had not assaulted anyone, but was being verbally abusive to the guards. The suspect lost consciousness, a lot of blood from a nasty head wound, and had to be carted to the infirmary.
Where did all this happen? Good ole NYC.
All of this happened in front of multiple surveillance cameras. I would surely like to review those tapes myself, but the general public is not allowed access to them.
What do you all suggest we do? Perhaps a public oversight committee that reviews the prison/jail surveillance tapes? This committe might be comprised of responsible citizens, selected via a process similar to jury duty selection.
This guy was recently profiled on "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!", specifically their episode about the War on Drugs. Apparently he used to station cops at the county border to do random stops and searches for contraband. Towards the end of the episode he snorts with derision at the suggestion that we should have freedom to choose our destinies, and declares that the government must enforce social norms. The existence of people like that is the best argument I've yet seen in favor of drug legalization.
Actually, that's an especially good time for it. Arrests must be public. Yes, it's horribly embarrassing to be arrested, and I will feel ashamed if I am ever arrested, but secret arrests are tyrannical.
Your signature reads "The cure for 1984 is 1776." Well, why does the fourth amendment to the US constitution prohibit unreasonable seizures? It's because the british used arbitrary and secret arrests to lock up troublemakers (arguably they did so as well against the IRA). How can you have habeas corpus (or look here -- warning pdf) if you don't know who was arrested? (sorry, another pdf)
Once you've been convicted (or even once you're booked) it seems unreasonable though I agree with the poster who said he'd like it for his own protection!
Agreed, Innocent is not the same as being found Not Guilty in a court.
Well, it appears you do.
Being presumed innocent doesn't mean the crime wasn't committed and that the person who committed it isn't dangerous.
Don't you know that JUSTICE is like SCIENCE, and guilt exists only when proven, just like facts exist only when proven, independent of the events themselves?
Er, no. Facts are facts regardless of whether or not they are discovered. If someone commits a crime and doesn't get convincted of it, it doesn't mean they didn't commit the crime (it just means they got away with it).
Perhaps you'd like to explain how people didn't go floating off into space thousands of years ago, given you think gravity didn't exist until Newton discovered it ?
Events at that prison in Iraq go way beyond "humiliation" as the Republican apologists call it. After all, electrocuting you on the nuts is more than just "humiliation". Sticking broomsticks up your ass is more than just "humiliation". Being killed is more than just "humiliation". Also remember that not a single person there was convicted of a crime, because the American system of truth and justice just isn't compatible with Bush's worldview.
Public not exposed?! Like hell they are not exposed. They are exposed like the recent case in Florida when a con that spent the last 15 years in some slam induced three others with weak minds to beat six innocent people to death because they would'nt let him and his druggy friends squat in a house they did not own, use electricity they did not pay for, and make life hell for all around them. It was originally thought it was all about a fight over a damn 'x-box' (gee, maybe ole Bill Gate$$$ ought to be investigated for distributing violence inducing electronic devices and prostituted for terririzm and sent to gitmo with the other Americans), then it turned out to be about a man who should have never been out of prison in the first place. Damn x-box was probably stolen to boot. Story is all over the web. We certainly ARE exposed to the situations we create in our prison system. Almost ALL of those AIDS and HepC and syphillis and gonorrhea infested professional horses asses WILL hit the bricks eventually. They will be far more dangerous when they get OUT than when they went IN. They know how to work the system now. They know how to feign contrition and religion to gain temporary advantage with weak minded people who substitute their faith for good judgement and their defective 'moral code' for wisdom. This incident resulted in the firing of three probation officers evidently involved in the fatefull decision to let that particular asshole to his the bricks. No matter, he would have gotten out sometime anyway. They all will. Then YOU WILL BE EXPOSED....SOME OF YOU.....BUT WHO? When a physically weak prisoner gets AIDS just because he does'nt want to or is unable to fight off his prison rapist, the incident does not end there. When the cost of his treatment gets high enough, the prison system will find a way to 'commute his sentence', or 'give him a compassionate release', or whatever. The bottom line is the bottom line in that business, and when the costs go over budget for those self righteous slimeballs that are probably more evil than the prisoners they jailed and administer, then those prisoners will be unleashed on society for the time they have left. These show up at public hospitals and contaminate bathrooms, waiting rooms, the air in emergency rooms, everything they touch, etc. These become germ bombs for the time they have left and leave a trail of sorrow and disease in their wake. We have no national health care in this country. If a terrorist wanted to do us in, I could find no other more effected nor more fearsom vector of death than one of these abandoned ones. Having no stake in society, their society has no stake in them. It was said that Jack the Ripper, infected by a prostiture with syphillis in an age when it was not curable, sought to kill as many other prostitutes as he could find...out of 'revenge'. How much more terrible a revenge if terrorists that hate us plant the biological instruments of our destruction on so hatefull and fertile a ground as those prisoners and others that we as a society cast off as not having value. Take a drive in your city. Go downtown. Go just outside downtown. If in Washington D.C., go northeast from the Capitol center and up Rhode Island Avenue...for about 30 miles. Go past the blocks of empty looking brownstones and the empty eyes of slackjawed and listless pedestrians and hungry prostitutes and garulous beggars. Drive by the thousands of abandoned cars in the sidestreets that no law wants to touch for fear of overloading every dump in the surrounding states. Do not get out of your car! For the empty houses are not, and a gruesome fate awaits the foolhardy there.
We are exposed every day to the products of our correctional system; we just do not realize it.
Until the shoplifter who got AIDS in prison goes home on early release becaues of 'overcrowding'. He does not know he acquired AIDS because the correctionsl system thought it too expensive to do periodic checks...and they quietly figured that if they DID find new cases, the
It seems the US is about the worst place for knee-jerk publicity seeking tough on crime laws & law 'n order auctions every election campaign.
In regards knee jerkism, look at the way many state & local authorities banned GHB within days of sensationalist reports of body builders abusing this vetinary anasthetic (to aid testosterone production from deep sleep) & gays getting off on thershold dose recreational use. The end result was the new illegal status attracted publicity way out of proportion to the recreational reality of the drug itself & pharmacuetical supplies were replaced by underground chemist supplies, which of course leads to dangerous quantity/quality irregularities, which is the very thing that makes GHB dangerous.
So the chief effect of politicians taking a opportunity to knee-jerk over the American public's anger over people daring to get off on things they shouldn't get off on, are law 'n order bills which have made the drug much more attractive to use & inherently much many more dangerous to use too. The end result being a logrithmic increase in overdoses from virtually none before hand (relative to the US population)
Now in regards the law 'n oder auctions every elections, the end result has been the US having both incarceration & policing rates that are logrithmically higher than anywhere else in the world (there's that big L word again).
This has led to a significant proportion of a significant American minority being totally disenfranchised & huge costs to the American tax-payers that get sucked in by all this law 'n order fear mongering. To the point that many US states now spend more on jails than education (which definitly doesn't bode well for the future), the maning, building & servicing of jails has become the biggest growth industry in the US & if US incarceration levels continue to grow at the same rate they have over the last 15 years, then by 2037 every American will be either employed by the 'jail industry' or incarcerated themselves.
This has been devastating to America's underclass - just look at those snitch snowballs in Tulia, Texas & Union, Alabama caused by knee-jerk & law 'n order election year 'auction' bills for mandatory minimums & forfeiture legislation. In both cases we had cops arresting people based on the uncorroberated testimony of a paid snitch & then threatened with mandatory minimums if they didn't snitch on any of their mates that were poor but had property (via such things as inheritances, redundency payouts, divorce settlements or people that had done well in the past but are now down on their luck). Meaning they were good forfeiture material as they were worth persecuting but didn't have the incomes to stand up for themselves in the justice system.
This leads to a snowballing effect as people are threatened with the mandatory minimum to plead out on lesser chargse (meaning they still get convicted & all their property forfeited) on the condition they snitch on any aquaintence, relative or mate that the cops want them to snitch on. Meaning a huge snowballing tragedy of justice in which the evidence is rarely tested in court & when it is tested, it's tested in some hick court where the judge & jury automatically take the cops side, with the legal aid lawyer is hung-over & nodding off in court all day (leading to situations where jurors refuse to admit their mistake & are still convinced that certain defendents are guilty, even though they won appeals due to ironclad alibies, simply because their adament that 'cops are good & don't lie').
Or look at the many Americans that feel the need to keeped a loaded firearm within axcess of the bed to protect the family from home intruders. Nevermind the fact that if one isn't a drug dealer or a Asian business man/woman with a reputation of keeping large quantities of cash at home, the chances of one's family falling victim to a home invasion if one's a member of the suburban middle class, is probabl
The real question is what kind of situation would be most likely to allow criminals to turn their lives around. The penal system used to involve rather extreme deterrents. The Quakers as I understand it, came up with the idea of leaving an offender alone with a Bible-and their only human contact a minister. This practice of isolation was abandoned because a lot of the guys "went crazy". I tend to personally feel that allowing prisoners to mix may in some cases be a bad idea-as is allowing exposure to network TV. Computers are cheap enough, we _could_ conceive of allowing the worse prisoners only contact via internet chat lines with carefully screened volunteers.