Yeah, that’s something that absolutely has to change. I don’t care if “career criminals get out of charges all the time”. A false charge should not follow you for the rest of your life.
Then again, I also believe that if you serve your time in prison and are released, you should not have a publicly searchable record that can be used to deny you opportunities. So take my opinion as you will
Agreed, and prison should be for rehabilitation.
Perhaps prisoners could be released in one of two states: completed time or rehabilitated. The latter carries a much lower chance of recidivism. Maybe the first iffense could be hidden regardless, and expunged entirely after some period of time (10 years?), whereas on the second offense, both are searchable.
IDK, but I do believe in forgiveness.
I think a lot about the Scandinavian prison where the guards forgot to lock the cells and the inmates used the night to do some baking.
Right! Which of you fuckers made … mmm nom … these … nom nom … really tasty fairy cakes?
I do agree on principle but somewhere in the back of my brain it’s going “what about repeat violent offenders.” But I feel like any solution I can come up with could be pretty easily used by the state as a force of marginalization anyway. So back at square one.
“what about repeat violent offenders.”
This is conservative paranoia propaganda at work. People who are violent offenders become repeat violent offenders because of the system that we have in place not in spite of it. And the percentage of violent offenders in our prison system is severely out of proportion to those of the nonviolent variety who make up the bulk of our inmate population.
Even when it’s repeat violent offenders - why would you want to prevent them from getting jobs? What do you think will happen if you release them from prison, once they finish serving their sentence, and they can’t get jobs?
That’s good. These ideas of focusing on the potential career criminals are deeply ingrained in our culture, but when we challenge the potential outcomes we can resist giving the government more power to hurt innocent people
sqgl@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
My friend in Australia had a judge lie that he pleaded guilty to a previous crime (in reality the chips dropped the charge). That kind of bias can invalidate her decision should he appeal (there were plenty of other errors in the decision too).
However it is near impossible to find a lawyer who will appeal and point out the judge lied because that lawyer would fear coming up against the corrupt judge in future.