Decius wrote:

I’ve become completely convinced that we need to begin a process of fundamental political change in the U.S., not in the form of a new party per se as a new multi-faceted movement of ideas, organizations, and cultures, based around a vision of democracy which is fundamentally open, participatory, and decentralized.

Mitch Kapor wants to change the political system.

This is interesting...

I've been thinking recently that the criminal justice system needs be reformed...

We have all these forensic scientists, lawyers, and other experts that we pay to prosecute people. Their job isn't to determine what happened. Their job is to convict people regardless of what happened. On the other side you have whatever counsel you can afford. The process is punative. Your only chance to get out unpunished if you go in is to funnel your life savings at a defense, as the government is unwilling to invest a similar amount of money in defense that they are in prosecution. (Which would be an obvious prerequisit for fair decision making in the process that we currently have.)

The ultimate goal of this system is to determine what happened, and yet no one is actually professionally responsible for that. To fill that role we pull random people off the street, and from that group we cull anyone who understands the subject matter at hand in the case or who has critical thoughts about the rules being enforced. The rules are created to sell an election bid to the sheep, rather than to produce a desireable sociological result. And despite the fact that judges have been removed from the process of determining guilt, they are still responsible for handing out punishments, something which they become numb to over the course of years...

And the crooks? We throw them into cells with eachother so they can fester together, harden, and organize. Its common knowledge that people get raped in prison. Is this a reasonable thing for our society to broadly accept? The products of the prison system are things like street gangs and neo nazis...

I have serious concerns about whether the system we have ever produces useful results. It seems obvious that its imbalance and mispriority can only produce useful results by chance. I can name many specific examples of cases where the results were detrimental.

Does anyone actually think about these things? Does anyone really analyze criminal judicial processes and pushiment systems and publish information about their effectiveness and about alternative architectures?

This is the kind of thing that humans are highly irrational about. These subjects are dominated by partisanship and pseudo-science in which the conclusions preceed the questions. This is the kind of space where we ought to have a lot of really smart people devoted to asking hard architectural questions in an objective fashion. Where are those people?

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Decius wrote:

I’ve become completely convinced that we need to begin a process of fundamental political change in the U.S., not in the form of a new party per se as a new multi-faceted movement of ideas, organizations, and cultures, based around a vision of democracy which is fundamentally open, participatory, and decentralized.

Mitch Kapor wants to change the political system.

This is interesting...

Short, though... I'm waiting for more. Some of the links in his comments point to some interesting stuff.

I've been thinking recently that the criminal justice system needs be reformed...

You're not the only one. One major question that comes to mind when I think about this topic is how one states the purpose of a justice system. Fundamentally, the idea is to provide safety and stability to society, unless I miss my mark. The complication comes when we get into how such ends are to be realized.

For one, ought we to punish evil or reform the misguided? It hinges on the point Jello brought up, that being the question of whether criminals are in general reformable, with a corrolary questioning if the cost of reform is considered reasonable.

The entire process of determining the truth of the situation is lead up to whatever action is taken to achieve the goal of the justice system. Addressing whatever flaws there are in the process of acquiring truth rank, i think, a close second to answering the question of what we are to do having arrived at the truth.

We've applied a punishment-as-reform mentality in this country. The current system operates on the assumption that inflicting punishment will serve the purposes of a) righting the wrong, b) preventing further wrongs and c) reforming the perpetrator.

Point (a) assumes that we view justice primarily as retribution : as in, eye-for-an-eye (or perhaps equivalently-damaging-punishment-for-an-eye). I think it's doubtful a rape victim feels she has been made whole when the rapist gets 30 years in prison. Even if he was put to death, it seems unlikely to conclude the matter for the victim. But, perhaps that's the best we can do.

Prisons certainly serve the purpose of point (b), at least for the term of the sentence, and as long as we leave out wrongs committed against the incarcerated. The death penalty also acheives this, though it remains a matter of debate as to whether execution is, in and of itself, a societal wrong.

As for (c), I hardly believe anyone thinks our prisons are achieving this. The extention of this point -- that is, the prevention of crime, something like reforming the character of a pre-criminal -- is likewise unresolved because for many criminals, prison doesn't seem so bad compared to the "free" life they're leading. Is there any valid deterrent for someone who feels they've nothing to lose?

I've had discussions bef... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]