Backed by Trump, the House passed the First Step Act, but opposition remains entrenched.
The prison population in the United States is exploding.
But this burgeoning population isn’t merely the result of cleaning our streets of violent offenders; it’s also due to overzealous prosecutors eager to tout their toughness in America’s war on crime.
Consequently, the United States has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its incarcerated people, according to National Review’s Conrad Black. “The American conviction rate of nearly 99 percent, 97 percent without a trial,” says Black, is the result of a plea-bargain system that places the U.S. “in criminal-justice matters from the category of its socioeconomic and democratic peer countries and places it, in matters of criminal procedure and conviction rates, disgracefully among the totalitarian states.”
Plea-bargaining is one of the primary reasons why the prison population has risen so dramatically in recent decades. The process gives prosecutors “broad, opaque powers” according to Dylan Walsh at The Atlantic.
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DelMarVa's Premier Source for News, Opinion, Analysis, and Human Interest Contact Publisher Joe Albero at alberobutzo@wmconnect.com or 410-430-5349
2 comments:
Public defenders have so many cases on their plates that plea bargaining is the way to go in so very many of them. Sad,but true.
As a former public defender investigator in a major western city, I can tell you what the problem is. From my experience, about 85 to 90 % of crimes, particularly violent crimes, are committed by the same demographic that populates the majority of spaces in our prison system. After. Their arrest, it was my job to re-investigate what the police department had reported and to determine if the violator had a reasonable alibi.
I found that in ten years there were only two cases where the wrong person had been arrested. The rest were guilty as charged and both the violator and his public defender knew it. It is always best to accept a plea bargain than to drag a loser case through court because ultimately they get a stiffer sentence. Heard so many tomes “not guilty, dindu it” and the minute they got a deal they took it. They just game the system and are very good at it. So, getting to my point, we will never solve the problem as long as we have a continuous demographic source that will never do anything productive for society. They will always be members of our permanent criminal underclass. Think of the money we would have saved in paying police, court officers and prison personnel if the source had been returned to their countries of origin.
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