15
votes
San Francisco jails are packed for the first time in decades
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- Title
- SF led the way for justice reform. Now its jails are at capacity.
- Authors
- Jonah Owen Lamb
- Published
- Mar 14 2025
- Word count
- 885 words
From the article:
Although, looking at the graph, another way to put is is that the number of people in jail is about the same as just before the pandemic, and lower than any year between 1985 and 2013.
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Good to see San Francisco getting back to what's really important: depriving inconvenient people of their freedom.
Maybe they can volunteer them to test the safety features of autonomous cars. I bet that would help their bed shortage.
I can’t speak for all of these arrests, but what I’ve seen first hand at 16th and Mission is police breaking up the sale of stolen goods and certainly fentanyl as well. There are still homeless people on the streets around there so I don’t think it’s just about “inconvenient” people.
I think incarceration is a far more serious thing than the majority of US culture appreciates. We're far too blasé about locking people up, especially considering the evidence for its efficacy as a deterrent is spotty at best.
I'll put it another way: I believe that incarceration is in essence and in practice the most socially acceptable form of torture. Statistics suggest that its reformatory and deterrent effects are dubious, at least as practiced widely in the US. We've known this for decades, if not centuries, yet we continue to see broad cultural support for its practice. Why? I think it's because we view it solely as punitive, and that other reasoning is largely post hoc rationalization. We do it because we want to hurt the people who hurt us, either individually or as a society. We do it to inflict suffering. We do it to torture.
Thus, to my thinking the use of incarceration should always be scrutinized and criticized, even when it can't be reasonably argued that the imprisoned only committed "victimless crimes." This doesn't mean that I'm in favor of its abolition entirely; I do think there are valid reasons to incarcerate some people that go beyond our desire for punitive suffering. But I think this also means that each case should be scrutinized far more gravely than we are apt to do.
You're making an assumption that the use of incarceration didn't receive scrutiny first. San Francisco, as a very liberal part of the country, did take a very forgiving approach to crime. How do you know that the previous incarceration levels were the correct levels?
The "correct" levels are probably fundamentally unknowable, statistics being what they are. My opinion is that it should be as close to zero as we can ethically manage, so any increase is worthy of skepticism and scrutiny.
I agree that prisons need a serious reform. I don't think people deserve torture because they committed a felony. And I doubt that that's the average outcome, but it shouldn't even be a possibility.
I would like to know more about what people are getting charged with and what happens when they get in front of a judge.
Most probably aren't going in front of a judge, the vast majority of cases are settled via plea deal, because it's too expensive, your counsel isn't great*, or by the time you get through the court case you'll have been kept in jail for as long as your sentence.
*Public defenders as a whole are great and necessary and also underpaid and overworked. Often the plea deal is in the clients best interest, practically, regardless of guilt. And that's another problem with the system.
That's rich coming from you—San Francisco's best detective. How many criminals have you personally put in prison, Mr. Monk?? All you ever wanted was to be a cop (and to solve your wife's murder, I guess) and now you push back on the incarceration of criminals while neglecting to mention your own culpability in this crisis? Shame on you, Adrian. Shame on you.
I've seen cops hassling the street merchants, but whether the brand new clothes and household supplies being sold at a discount on the sidewalk are stolen is an open question. Also an open question is whether they're being targeted because of a proven crime, or because they're inconvenient to people who would like the Mission District to be a "nicer" neighborhood.
Looks like you need a license to sell merchandise on the street in San Francisco. The permit only lets people sell stuff in particular locations, and the vendor has to show proof of ownership for the goods being sold.
If it's properly enforced, it seems like a pretty good workaround for allowing some street vending without allowing it get out of hand?
Not really. These are basically vagrancy laws that target the ways that poor people make money. You know how you can get arrested for homelessness in some places? It is the legal equivalent of putting bars on your benches so that no one can lay down on them and they are actually less accessible to everyone else. Aka hostile architecture.
It really doesn't solve anything and just criminalizes more behavior
It does have that vibe. It depends how it's implemented.
Fencing is a common crime. Retailers don't lock up stuff in many American cities for fun. They do it to limit losses in areas where shoplifting is common and isn't strictly penalized.
I'm aware that fencing is a crime. But in a just society there are steps between there being a crime on the books and shaking down people on the street purely on the suspicion of committing said crime.