Unlike some here I am not a sentimentalist about crime. Being a criminal defense lawyer sorta makes you cynical about your clients. My murderers are all guilty, my fraudsters are all crooked. Don't get me started on the antitrust violators. While clerking in the district court I saw lots of crimes that made you glad that the defendants were locked up. Still, I also saw a lot of cases of pointlessly ruined lives, particularly in drug cases -- people senta way for 10 years because they posses a handful of crack vials, that sort of thing. There is no federal parole, btw. And recent revisions of the criminal code have upped the penalties, so you can get 20 years for mail fraud, not just five as before. This gives prosecutors unbridled power to coerce pleas -- you have to understand that if you go to trial, you pretty much go to jail. And if you are indicted, you are convicted. There is a 98% conviction rate in fed ct.
We have to decide whether, even if lots pf people guilty of crimes, we want to lock all of the up for long times. It is expensive, for one thing.
jks
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> boddhisatva wrote:
>
> >Yes, but Doug that 25% probability does not
> represent laughing chance.
> >Certainly we can agree that a great preponderance
> of the black males who do
> >get locked up do the crimes they are accused of.
>
> And many don't, but that's not the question. Unless
> you believe in
> some innate predisposition to criminality - a belief
> that would be
> grounds for explusion from civilized society - then
> you have to ask
> why so many black men turn to crime. I don't think
> the answer is very
> complicated - the heritage of slavery and pervasive
> racism, which
> most white people won't admit to. And that, as I
> said earlier, is
> seriously fucked up.
>
> Doug
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