[ethics, crimjust] Outside the System

[siderea]

Someone (maybe on metafilter? I've lost the source) pointed me at this article: Let's Make A Deal. It explains: Imagine you’re browsing at Bloomingdale’s when a security guard taps you on the shoulder and accuses you of shoplifting. He takes you to a private room, sits you down, and runs your name through a database to see if you have any

Comments

[heron61]

I see two ways this is terrible. The first has nothing to do with this program being terrible, but with the fact that the criminal justice system is often drastically unequal, but that really says nothing about this program, beyond it giving some people an out

[alexx_kay]

Agreed. And the second issue is only problematic *because of* the first. The standard societal "due process" forms an upper limit on the corruption possible in the privatized version. For minorities, that upper limit is distressingly high.

[siderea]

Hmm, see my comment below:
http://siderea.livejournal.com/1199297.html?thread=8897217#t8897217

[siderea]

if people who appear vulnerable because of their race, background, or other qualities are targeted, some of them will pay up even if they are innocent, even if they only reason they were accused was in the hopes of forcing them to pay for this program.

This is an excellent point. Hmm, a related point is that the threat of extortion could also be used to discourage "undesirables" from patronizing one's store. Actually falsely accusing every black customer to cross your threshold of shoplifting doesn't work so well if the cops have to be called every single time. But if you can reliably assume that black patrons won't insist on their innocence, and will pay the extortion, then you can use the accusation of shoplifting in conjunction with this scheme to drive black customers away.

[conuly]

After all, it's just a more extreme form of pleading out. By taking this opportunity to admit it upfront and accept private punishment, before the criminal justice system gets involved, one is just doing a more extreme version of pleading guilty in hopes of a lighter sentence, or accepting a plea bargain.

Did you know that 95% of felony convictions are obtained via plea bargaining?

More and more, I'm seeing plea bargaining as a crime against justice. It's a way to circumvent due process and to avoid paying up for public defenders and hiring more judges and all that. Shuttling even that into for-profit industry strikes me as a seriously bad idea.

[siderea]

Did you know that 95% of felony convictions are obtained via plea bargaining?

I had definitely gotten that impression from working with inmates and people awaiting trial.

It's a way to circumvent due process and to avoid paying up for public defenders and hiring more judges and all that.

Offering plea deals is all that. Accepting plea deals is an attempt to placate a terrifying ravenous monster that wants to eat you. I can't see blaming anyone for accepting such a deal if offered.

[alexx_kay]

Agreed that victim-blaming would be beside the point.

[livredor]

I don't see any possible way this doesn't turn into an extortion racket. Even leaving aside the racism angle, even if this weren't taking place in a society where African-Americans regularly get harassed with false accusations of shoplifting when there's no financial incentive. I could perfectly well believe that this Corrective Education Company is entirely legit, but once you establish that system as the norm, what's to stop any store, any security guard, even any random scammer who's able to put on a plausible act from approaching people and demanding arbitrary amounts of money not to call the cops? What's to stop the mafia from setting up the Correctional Educational Corporation such that when people take the anti-shoplifting course, it turns out that it's not just $320, there's an administrative fee here and an ongoing protection payment there and hey, they can still call the cops after they've taken your money? And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-

[nancylebov]

I wonder whether people who are subject to that sort of extortion are doing more of their shopping online?

Some of them don't have access to that solution (can't afford to be online, don't have a place that's safe for mail deliveries), but many do have access.

[hudebnik]

My gut feeling, of course, is "what a terrible, extortionistic system." It sounds disturbingly reminiscent of the Ferguson-and-nearby-towns practice of balancing municipal budgets with cascading court fees, imposed mostly on poor black people who can't afford to fight them.

Rationally, I recognize that given our current criminal-justice system, it allows guilty and/or dark-skinned people to avoid interacting with that system by paying a substantial, but not life-changing, amount of money.

On the third hand, not only does it offer lots of opportunities for abuse (kickbacks, keeping out "undesirable" customers, protection rackets, etc. as others have pointed out) but it gives the powerful players in the system an incentive for the criminal-justice system to become even worse, even more racist, even more Draconian, even more unpredictable.

[dpolicar]

As has been said by others -- the terrible thing is the unjust larger system in which this practice is embedded.

Usually, the way the argument goes at this point is that by providing a painless-by-comparison way of accommodating that injustice, this practice is enabling and partaking of the terribleness of that larger system. Better not to accommodate it painlessly, from this view.

Usually this argument is made by people who aren't feeling that pain themselves, IME. They just think it's better for everyone if someone else does.

Which sometimes it is.

I'm not actually trying to convince you of the justice of this; I'm pretty ambivalent about it myself.

[siderea]

Usually this argument is made by people who aren't feeling that pain themselves, IME. They just think it's better for everyone if someone else does.

Yes, beautifully put. That's kind of the crux of matter for me.

This is a giant Nash equilibrium/tragedy of the commons. It's in every individual's immediate best interests to deal, but the community's, and the individuals' longterm best interests to refuse the deal, so there's no path from this situation to the obviously superior one.

And then there's the fundamental question - much on my mind because I just read a very thought-provoking piece about exactly this sort of fundamental question before liberals - of whether the situation is fixable. Is it possible to have a justice system which isn't terrible, and isn't racist?

Or in a metonymic nutshell: so long as we use juries in a society prone to racism, how can we possibly have a justice system which isn't "three wolves and a sheep debating what to have for dinner"?

[dpolicar]

Yeah. Very much this.

I don't know, of course. And I despair over the problem.

That said, I also try very hard to remember that I frequently despair of the unfixability of systems that somehow, mysteriously, turn out not to get consistently worse and even sometimes get better, so my despair over the unfixability of a system is not reliable evidence of much of anything except my own emotional state.

But remembering that is very much not the same as having grounds for faith that the system is fixable, let alone an actual vision for how to get from here to there.

My usual line at this point is "I, for one, am holding out for our future robot overlords." Which is to say, get human decision-making out of the loop altogether and replace it with some other system that is capable of reliably optimizing for the long term.

But this is of course deeply problematic in many ways, and the idea of an implementation of this that avoids the pitfalls involves handwaving over a lot of potentially intractable complexity, and might well just be

[siderea]

*solidarity fistbump*