There is another way in which people are mistreated at the intersection of the legal and the mental healthcare systems. People arrested for misdemeanor charges, if they are experiencing mental illness they can be found “incompetent to stand trial” and then sent to a state psychiatric hospital for weeks to get treatment till they are either restored or the case is dismissed (in which patients are often kept on civil commitment). People spend weeks being treated and “restored” only to plead guilty to non-violent charges like loitering, trespassing, etc. In fact, there seems to be a culture of arresting mentally ill individuals on misdemeanor charges as a way of getting them into treatment (a cruel and inefficient way) without any regard for the detrimental consequences of doing so.
> Delaware, which bars people with misdemeanor convictions from its witness protection program.
This was so surprising and egregious that I looked into it a little. It's hard to find much more about it, though there's a 2016 publication from the ACLU[1] that notes that Delaware convicts are "Ineligible to use witness protection program substitute address".
There is a relevant law amendment from 2022 that I suspect is intended to fix this[2]. There used to be a list of people eligible for the witness protection program with the text "The following persons shall be eligible to apply to become program participants: [1. victims of specified crimes; or 2. people who have a deal with the DIJ; or 3. family members of the above; or 4. domestic violence victims]"
They changed it to "*All of the* following persons are eligible to apply to become program participants: [1. victims of specified crimes. 2. People who have a deal with the DIJ. 3. Family members of the above. 4. Domestic violence victims.]
I'm not a lawyer, but I speculate that the initial law might have been intended to cover all four cases, but some agency invented exclusion criteria and argued that just because the law said those people were eligible doesn't mean that *all* of them are eligible. Seems like they patched that in 2022.
If loitering were legalized, what would a woman do when her ex boyfriend spends the night on the sidewalk across the street, staring at her house? You could try to call the police for stalking, but that requires much more evidence than loitering. There are countless public places that can be rendered unusable by a large, poorly groomed man with a sneer on his face. Imagine a guy who looks like Ed Norton from the cover of American History X is walking in circles around a children’s park. Would you seriously let your kids play there? We either criminalize loitering or abandon our public, community places to the worst elements of society.
I was surprised you didn’t include “behaviors that are fine in moderation but that we still want to limit, so we make them nominally illegal so that you *could* get in trouble if you do it egregiously enough” as a reason for rules against e.g. jaywalking. But I was more surprised that these injustices barely touch on that category at all! I could imagine a society where all of these problems are fixed with minimal disruption to nudges against antisocial behavior.
Thank you for this excellent overview!
There is another way in which people are mistreated at the intersection of the legal and the mental healthcare systems. People arrested for misdemeanor charges, if they are experiencing mental illness they can be found “incompetent to stand trial” and then sent to a state psychiatric hospital for weeks to get treatment till they are either restored or the case is dismissed (in which patients are often kept on civil commitment). People spend weeks being treated and “restored” only to plead guilty to non-violent charges like loitering, trespassing, etc. In fact, there seems to be a culture of arresting mentally ill individuals on misdemeanor charges as a way of getting them into treatment (a cruel and inefficient way) without any regard for the detrimental consequences of doing so.
It kind of amazes me that we haven't managed to declare anti-loitering laws unconstitutional the way we have with vagrancy laws.
> Delaware, which bars people with misdemeanor convictions from its witness protection program.
This was so surprising and egregious that I looked into it a little. It's hard to find much more about it, though there's a 2016 publication from the ACLU[1] that notes that Delaware convicts are "Ineligible to use witness protection program substitute address".
There is a relevant law amendment from 2022 that I suspect is intended to fix this[2]. There used to be a list of people eligible for the witness protection program with the text "The following persons shall be eligible to apply to become program participants: [1. victims of specified crimes; or 2. people who have a deal with the DIJ; or 3. family members of the above; or 4. domestic violence victims]"
They changed it to "*All of the* following persons are eligible to apply to become program participants: [1. victims of specified crimes. 2. People who have a deal with the DIJ. 3. Family members of the above. 4. Domestic violence victims.]
I'm not a lawyer, but I speculate that the initial law might have been intended to cover all four cases, but some agency invented exclusion criteria and argued that just because the law said those people were eligible doesn't mean that *all* of them are eligible. Seems like they patched that in 2022.
[1] https://www.aclu-de.org/sites/default/files/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Collateral-Consequences-Reform-in-Delaware-booklet-April-2016_small2.pdf
[2] https://legis.delaware.gov/SessionLaws/Chapter?id=41492
If loitering were legalized, what would a woman do when her ex boyfriend spends the night on the sidewalk across the street, staring at her house? You could try to call the police for stalking, but that requires much more evidence than loitering. There are countless public places that can be rendered unusable by a large, poorly groomed man with a sneer on his face. Imagine a guy who looks like Ed Norton from the cover of American History X is walking in circles around a children’s park. Would you seriously let your kids play there? We either criminalize loitering or abandon our public, community places to the worst elements of society.
I was surprised you didn’t include “behaviors that are fine in moderation but that we still want to limit, so we make them nominally illegal so that you *could* get in trouble if you do it egregiously enough” as a reason for rules against e.g. jaywalking. But I was more surprised that these injustices barely touch on that category at all! I could imagine a society where all of these problems are fixed with minimal disruption to nudges against antisocial behavior.