CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Our Awful Criminal Justice System  Sun May 31, 2020 7:39 am | |
| Many readers took my partial defense of prosecutors taking longer than they should have in arresting Derek Chauvin for killing George Floyd as an endorsement of the system. It was not. Rather, it was a description of the system.
We have written 53,202 posts at OTB over the years and it’s rather difficult to sift through them to find discussions of particular topics. And it’s made more challenging by it having been a group blog for the last seventeen years. Doug Mataconis, both because he’s trained as an attorney and because he was for many years more prolific, has written tons on the criminal justice system over the years. His fellow libertarian, Steve Verdon, tended to handle that beat in the earlier years. And I seldom engaged issues they’d already dealt with in posts of my own unless I either strongly disagreed or otherwise had a markedly different take.
Still, I have written a lot on the topic.
- Rise of the Warrior Cop (The paramilitarization of American law enforcement has had deadly consequences.) July 9, 2013
- Militarization of Police (David Rittgers, a legal policy analyst at the Cato Institute who served three tours in Afghanistan as a special forces officer, laments the militarization of police in America.) June 15, 2011
- Criminal Injustice (A system designed to protect the innocent has instead become a menagerie to imprison them. A legal code designed to proscribe specific behavior has instead become a vast, vague, and unpredictable invitation to selective enforcement.) June 6, 2011
I’m sure there are older examples but that takes us back almost 13 years. I’ve also written a ton on the horrendous conditions to which convicted felons are subject in our prison system.
- Solitary Confinement as Torture (WikiLeaker Bradley Manning has been held “under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture” for seven months and counting.) December 16, 2010
- Prison Rape and the 13th Amendment ( The state has an 8th Amendment duty to protect those it incarcerates from brutality, a duty which it quite often fails to carry out because of indifference and the hiring of “corrections officers” who are often of incredibly low intellectual caliber and moral character.) April 12, 2008
- Prison Rape (Rape is the de facto sentence for prisoners placed in many of our prisons and penitentiaries.) February 12, 2007
- Domestic Prison Abuse (Many of the things that happened at Abu Ghraib routinely take place in our domestic penitentiary system.) May 8, 2004
Again, there are likely hundreds of other posts of that sort in the archives, and probably dozens more by me.
Given how much my views on other issues have evolved over the last sixteen years, I’m surprised how consistent I’ve been. Indeed, the only real critique 2020 me would offer 2004 me is how little attention I paid until recent years to the disparate racial impact of these outrages.
https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/our-awful-criminal-justice-system/
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Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis, OZschwitz Contraband
“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner
"Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
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