So, uh, I know the US criminal justice system was screwed up...

[Galactus]

Thanks to Coates I'm reading The New Jim Crow and honestly? It's pretty sickening the way people are stripped of their rights even *after* serving their sentence.

[karaddin]

Also pretty sickening - the undisguised racism becoming more common in GenChat recently.

But yeah, the whole felon trap for minor offences is awful and absurd. It's also part of a larger system that makes it virtually impossible to get out of poverty once you fall into it, I'm remembering a piece early last year about someone driving without a licence or vehicle registration because they needed to work to get money for it, getting caught and then a series of fines that meant further work was only ever paying these off, never getting the registration. Eventually the minor offences lead to prison, and that family is now perma fucked. Driving was the only method of getting to work naturally, because everyone has a car so public transport isn't needed!

[jarl the climber]

Thanks to Coates I'm reading The New Jim Crow and honestly? It's pretty sickening the way people are stripped of their rights even *after* serving their sentence.

Yeah if you count the illegal immigrants and the individuals entangled in the legal system about 5% maybe a little bit more of the population in the US has limited legal rights and are more or less at the mercy of the authorities. Its mostly males and minorities but it also effects the their families as Kara rightly pointed out. The rest of us, if we are wise, take it as a warning. It is really shitty if you dwell on it.

[ThinkerX]

Been a few years...but the last pizza hauling gig I had in the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession...

...EVERYBODY but me in that shop - a good 12-15 employees (turnover), was a felon. And from what I could see, pretty much unreformed felons. The manager could not get female employees to work for him because he had...'that kind of reputation.' He made his oldest two boys assistant managers, despite one doing a courthouse-work treadmill and the other being a serious meth head. During the year plus I was there, the top cook had to take time off to go back to prison - twice. The other delivery drivers, with a couple of exceptions, all acted like wanna-be race car drivers. A couple had something like forty points against their license. This plus free-time scams and inventory games.

[Snowy89]

And the shop still turned a profit?

Been a few years...but the last pizza hauling gig I had in the immediate aftermath of the Great Recession...

...EVERYBODY but me in that shop - a good 12-15 employees (turnover), was a felon. And from what I could see, pretty much unreformed felons. The manager could not get female employees to work for him because he had...'that kind of reputation.' He made his oldest two boys assistant managers, despite one doing a courthouse-work treadmill and the other being a serious meth head. During the year plus I was there, the top cook had to take time off to go back to prison - twice. The other delivery drivers, with a couple of exceptions, all acted like wanna-be race car drivers. A couple had something like forty points against their license. This plus free-time scams and inventory games.

[ThinkerX]

And the shop still turned a profit?

A very modest profit.

Under the previous manager - wasn't there then, but knew her slightly - the place was deep in the red through local and corporate incompetence. Things that *had* to be done were not getting done.

What the criminal manager did was fix those things and do some serious brown-nosing of the district level people - plus he kept a damn close eye on the tills. His issue wasn't so much theft as it was women - no women in the area were willing to work for him. His kids were pretty much the only other ones with direct access to the tills, and the manager had them cowed...but they were still constantly getting in trouble elsewhere.