Wage Theft - Crime and abolitionists

And this is where they scream - SOCIALIST.

 

He's not wrong.

Seems to be a restorative justice guy. Been seeing inroads of restorative justice ideas in church as the more Christian and biblical response to crime and sin. For the uninitiated, the idea is that instead of punishing wrongdoers, you focus on having wrongdoers working to restore to the victim what was lost and making amends for their wrongdoing. I'm not totally convinced it can be done sufficiently well at scale, but it's an alluring idea to contemplate.

 

There's a lot of false equivalency in this series of tweets by some random law student. There's no "restorative justice" that's going to make it OK to the victims of violent crime. There's not a dollar amount some murderer can pay that is going to fairly compensate the victim's family (to say nothing of the person who died). There's no restorative justice to the victims of child molestation.

My bet is that this guy has never been the victim of a violent crime. Declassifying an area as a "high crime neighborhood" in this guy's mind does not make it any safer for the people who live in that neighborhood to sleep at night. Some of them hear gunshots on a near-nightly basis and are at a much higher multiplier for being victimized by all kinds of crimes. They don't have the luxury of leaving. (By the way, the people in those neighborhoods are probably the victim of wage theft as well at a much higher rate than the general population).

The idea that all crime is "socially constructed" is simply false. There are many crimes that are "malum per se" like rape, robbery, murder, theft, etc. No societies condone it. The fact that one can add to the definition of theft by including unfair payment practices does not change the fact that a person who breaks into houses has always been considered to be committing crime, in any and every society, since forever. Some crimes are socially constructed (like the criminalization of drugs), many are not.

 

Not really what he is saying.There are criminal penalties and civil penalties and we have separate courts for each (with some cross over).

There is no "restorative justice" to the people that died from large corporations knowingly poisoning waterways. There is no restorative justice to the people that worked around Round Up and are dying of lymphoma because the company suppressed information. The point being there is lots of cross over between what we define as "violent crime" and "not violent crime".

That isn't his point. He isn't excusing violent crime....... what he is saying is that many crimes we label as not a criminal crime should be.

I don't see how this is relevant...... but no, the crimes you listed have not always been considered crimes depending on the circumstances involved.

 

I definitely agree with these points that those behaviors you've described are beyond the scope of restorative justice to cure. There should be criminal penalties. People who commit acts knowing that they will cause suffering should be held accountable, if that was the case in the Monsanto situation. But again, the addition of additional "violent crimes" to the list should not remove or excuse those crimes that already qualify. Frankly, there's already a mechanism to sue for murder and other violent crimes (see the OJ case), but most violent criminals don't have enough money to justify the cost of a lawsuit.

I think you're missing part of what he is saying. He is clearly in favor of abolishing prison and substituting accountability without prison. I agree with the other point, which is that there are things labeled non-criminal that should be crimes.

The fact that there are justifications for many acts such as killing, and stealing, and rape, in some societies, in some circumstances, doesn't mean that the general classification of those as criminal behavior is not true. My point was that generally, we as humans generally criminalize those sorts of behaviors universally, with some exceptions.

 

Criminal codes should be uniformly applied.

I have lived in some pretty rough neighborhoods. I've been a crime victim. More importantly, I've spoken to many, many crime victims and helped them get justice.

"Try something different" is not a solution in itself. We are always "trying something different" by implementing new procedures and laws. But if you believe that crime can be solved by removing all the police and all the prisons, then my belief is that your ideas are dangerous and counterproductive.

What I meant was that crime was defined by the existence of societies, which have been around since our early history. Laws have existed in society for many thousands of years, and they tend to all criminalize at the least some of the things we've discussed.

Murder is in fact NOT defined different for different people in our society. The law does not say "cops can kill people". Cops are prosecuted for all sorts of crimes they commit. But the law itself defines situations where it is ok to kill. Someone breaks into your house and threatens your life, you may be justified in killing them. Any officer's use of force is similarly defined. I think some of those things that you list like "location" and "situation" should be considered under the law. Do you think differently?

 

I do not know anyone that wants to live without a police system and some form of prison.

There is a gulf of middle ground between the for profit prison system we have now and not having any prisons or jails. The same is true for police powers.

We currently live in a country with a lot of inefficiencies that harm society and productivity. For example, corporations regularly pass on negative external costs to society as a whole and profit from it. This needs to stop and a penal code can play a part in doing that. The negative consequences also tend to impact the poor more than the rich, which has a strong negative association with equality of opportunity and that harms society.

As for prisons. There will always need to be some prisons. However we need to ask ourselves why we incarcerate more people than any other nation on the planet. What are the underlying causes? Is this something that is positive? What are the costs. Should more money be put into poor areas or town or into mental health and less money spend on prison? Should prisons be more in the business of rehabilitation and less in draconian punishment? Which is more effective?

With the police force, do we need to change the culture around what it means to be a policeman? What is the role, what should be the expectations of the public? Should we spend more money on crime prevention and decrease the police force and budget? Would we see less need for a large police force?

This isn't an absolute black and white issue..... many people that are calling for radical change are doing so because the status quo isn't good enough in their opinion and I agree on some of their points. The USA isn't Brazil, but it also isn't Ireland or Finland either..... with our resources and wealth, we can do better. The USA was founded on change, it isn't a bad thing.

 

7% of state prisoners are held in private (for profit) prisons. I think it should be zero percent. But it's a relatively small percentage in the scheme of things. "For profit prisons" is an argument I think is often brought up by people who don't understand how small a part they play in the system.

I think the incarceration numbers in the US are too high. So is the homicide rate (7x higher than other high income countries). The gun homicide rate is 25x higher. Violent crime rates in general are higher. So many societal factors contribute to these issues. Poverty is an issue. Single parent families is an issue. Mental health (often combined with substance use) is a problem. Gangs are a problem. Policing can definitely be a problem too when they act in an unlawful manner.

Asking the question "should prisons focus on rehabilitation or draconian punishment" is presenting your answer in the form of a question. Obviously, prisons should be in the business of rehabilitation. The system should be in the business of rehabilitation. A judge I know would always say his goal was to give people as many chances as he could give reasonably them, especially on the less serious cases, but also to sentence those who presented the most danger to sentences long enough to adequately protect the public. The fact is that there are definitely some people out there who are dangerous, and who should be housed for a long while for the safety of the rest of us.

It would be easy to reduce the incarceration levels to those of Norway or Finland. We could reduce the prison population across the board and grant pardons or parole to most or all the violent offenders. Look how much money would be saved! But ultimately, that wouldn't solve many of the societal problems that result in higher crime rates. And in fact, if you release enough antisocial personalities with a history of violence, you'd almost certainly increase the short term violent crime rates based on the risk they imposed. If you can reduce the societal factors that result in our higher crime rates, you can do meaningful work to reduce incarceration rates. But the presence of guns in cities is imo something that we have difficulty controlling and negatively impacts us vis-a-vis other countries that we typically use for comparison.

 

If you're trying to make a case using twitter, you're an idiot. This is not what twitter is for.

This guy obviously doesn't know jack **** about corporate law. Either do I.

If he wants to make a case about wage theft (which is very legit), dont drag in some idiotic red herring about murder and or other criminal behavior.

 

I think you missed the point.

 

Thanks for giving them knowledge 99er

 

First, there are roughly 150,000 Americans in private prisons with the majority being immigrants. The total number of people in private prisons has increased almost 40% over the last twenty years, the last time I checked. There shouldn’t be any private prisons. The Trump administration rolled back Obama regulations on private prisons.

Second no one is talking about releasing violent sociopaths. Do you believe the nearly 2,000,000 Americans in prison are all psychopaths? Do you believe even a quarter are? The US prison system sucks at rehabilitation with the private prison system being far worse. We are not in the business of rehabilitation.

I am not advocating opening the prison doors and letting everyone out. 99% of the people pushing reform do not want that. Resources need to go towards rehabilitation, mental health and addiction resources. With better prevention and treatment, we will not have a need for 2,000,000 prison beds and all associated costs. Even a 50% decrease in the prison population would be a major change.

FWIW I don’t think we are really saying much different. As a former DA, I can tell you there are some people that need to spend their lives in jail but there are also many that would benefit from a better support system and not be a risk.

 

how was the 19 billion number formulated?

what would the number be if you took out all the illegal hispanics who pick vegetables or in the food industry? This is very much all focused in agriculture. Everyone here needs to pay more for food if they have an issue with wage theft.

 

As expected - no response.

 

Law are a social construct so crimes is naturally also a social construct. Outside of ethics and moral, we probably should have a system that have more severe punishment for actions with the most impact to society as a whole. A $100 theft is nothing compared to a $10M theft in term of impact to society, so it's weird that the punishment is more severe for the $100 theft. Should be re-calibrated to be more in-line with the impact.




Not surprising... stats said wage theft crosses all boundaries - race, ethnicity, age, citizenship status...

Food and drink services has the most wage theft (14% of workers).

TX has the largest $$ of wage ($85 per week) theft per employee experiencing wage theft.

https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-from-workers-paychecks-each-year/#:~:text=Figure B shows that workers,earned pay to wage theft.