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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.
Technology has started to be used in one way which helps in the criminal world. When someone is booked, instead of waiting some time for arraignment, they can sit in a booth and meet with a judge via two-way video|audio, should they choose to do so. These are taped (both video|audio) and occasionally played on TV (I have no idea what type of releases have to be signed to permit that to happen). This obviously doesn't help those who "lawyer up" as the tv shows call it; or at least, the local news folks haven't said what happens when that occurs. This is in the county just north of Indianapolis (where there's a bit more bread to spread around for things like this - over the previous ten years, one of the fastest-growing counties in the country.
In Downtown Indianapolis, however, there is so much overcrowding the courts haul in the Chief of Police and Sheriff (they have the same territorial area(s) as Indianapolis and the county are the same thing, known as "UniGov") and these two fine gentlemen are told to "find a way to alleviate the overcrowding or the courts will with the money coming out of their budgets. As a result, people caught smoking some redbud or soliciting a prostitute are taken in, ticketed, and released. All of the Sheriff's candidates campaign under the banner of "I've got a plan for fixing overcrowding" but no one ever says what it is so you just have to trust them at their word and pray they are right.
Anyway, there are ways jailcams can be beneficial. There could be judges serving off-hours on-alert and available when needed for such things.
Yuck. They just advertised the state fair starting next week. They showed deep fat fried Oreos this year (two years ago, it was deep fat fried Milky Way candy bars, last year, it was deep fat fried Twinkies). For each of those, we bought one, went over to the trash can (just in case), took a bite, and had to spit it out. Fortunately, everyone shared the price to get a single bite to find out how bad it was.