Psych! To be fair the NYT used a click bait headline first
This is what happens when a culture sees the criminal justice system as 100% punitive instead of correctional. "You deserve what you got, even if you were only accused and passing through the system," is the ignorant voice you can expect after leaving incarceration spoken by people who either don't know or don't care about our founding ideals in the US.
My ex girlfriend was married to a law enforcement officer. I told her what I went through after being charged and held for a minor nuisance crime. She did not give a fuck because "most of those people are guilty." Tone deaf entirely to whether I deserved that treatment for minor crimes I'd committed, irrespective of the seriousness of my crime and the innocent people I was held with, because that is how baked into culture punishment as correctional is. Despite the fact that it clearly only produces career criminals. (She also thought she had special authority on the matter because her husband fed her a steady diet of how shitty the people he dealt with are and how they're all guilty but that complicates my example more than reinforcing it. Whatever.)
'Corrections facility' and any other euphemism that implies reforming criminals is a joke, and a particularly unfunny one to those of us who have experience in said facilities.
It's a serious conversation that needs to be had. Unfortunately it's one that the MRAs have hijacked and robbed of its legitimacy in doing so. Because they're largely a bunch of whiny antifeminists who care more about losing their implicit power than any legitimate issue they may put forth.
Yep. Secured bond (my state uses "bond" to refer to both secured and unsecured) is an interesting alternative. The idea is that you have to put up some kind of stuff. It obviously results in more security from the court's standpoint. But it could also potentially be a good alternative for someone who's cash poor but who may have something else like a car. I could see someone being able to put up a car worth $500 (which they'd still get to drive in the meantime) but not $500 cash. It's not a perfect solution, but I think it's something that should be used as an alternative for people who don't have the money sitting around. Anyone who has neither money nor stuff doesn't really have anything we can hold over their head anyway, and just assuming that poor = unreliable is shitty.
It needs to be rethought entirely but I don't think I'd say it should be abolished. I've been to county jail and that shit's fucked up on its own. But there are people who need to be separated from society, forever in extreme cases. The goals need to be rethought. As it stands its purely punitive. I don't think punishment is the answer for many things in life and it should be rethought of as reformative. But mine is a pipe dream for many foreseeable years. So its an area of interest in my statement of intent to master's programs. Which personally benefits me as a byproduct.