Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

US Incarceration Rates Are Out of Control

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

I knew it was bad, but not this bad:

(Spotted via Ian Welsh, Justice is not Law, Law is Not Justice.)

I admit the graph is a tiny bit misleading — it uses absolute numbers rather than percentages of population, which would be better. But even making that correction doesn’t change much: US population grew from 226.5 million in 1980 to 308.7 million in 2010, a 73%36% increase. Meanwhile, however, the number of persons incarcerated almost quadrupled.

Our incarceration rate is by far the highest in the world. The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. However you draw it, we need to change the shape of this curve. Drug laws are probably the place to start. Three strikes rules would be next. Preventing the privatization of prisons — which creates a lobby for more incarceration — is another good move. Similarly, changing the electoral rule that counts prisoners as (usually non-voting due to felony disqualification) residents of the district in which they are incarcerated rather than their last regular address would also decrease the incentive for state and congressional representatives from those rotten boroughs to push for more rules that create more prisoners.

Ian Welsh argues that plea bargaining should be eliminated also. Civil law trained ethicists tend to agree, however, that the plea bargaining system is immoral since it empowers the prosecutor at the expense of the neutral (the judge) thus producing outcomes we have less faith are just, and puts the defendant to a terrible choice in which he is threatened with punishment — more charges, no deal on sentence — for exercising his right to mount a defense. I’ve long thought there’s something to it but one has to admit that as things stand eliminating plea bargaining would drive the system to a halt unless we first cut down on the number of things we call crimes.

Keep all this in mind while you enjoy thinking about the beneficial effects on the crime rate caused by removing lead from the environment.

Posted in Law: Criminal Law | 20 Comments

Eno Worries

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

Edge.org asked Brian Eno what we should be worried about. I like his answer (and really like his music):

We Don’t Do Politics

Most of the smart people I know want nothing to do with politics. We avoid it like the plague—like Edge avoids it, in fact. Is this because we feel that politics isn’t where anything significant happens? Or because we’re too taken up with what we’re doing, be it Quantum Physics or Statistical Genomics or Generative Music? Or because we’re too polite to get into arguments with people? Or because we just think that things will work out fine if we let them be—that The Invisible Hand or The Technosphere will mysteriously sort them out?

Whatever the reasons for our quiescence, politics is still being done—just not by us. It’s politics that gave us Iraq and Afghanistan and a few hundred thousand casualties. It’s politics that’s bleeding the poorer nations for the debts of their former dictators. It’s politics that allows special interests to run the country. It’s politics that helped the banks wreck the economy. It’s politics that prohibits gay marriage and stem cell research but nurtures Gaza and Guantanamo.

But we don’t do politics. We expect other people to do it for us, and grumble when they get it wrong. We feel that our responsibility stops at the ballot box, if we even get that far. After that we’re as laissez-faire as we can get away with.

What worries me is that while we’re laissez-ing, someone else is faire-ing.

Part of the series 2013 : WHAT *SHOULD* WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?

(Thanks to DF for the pointer.)

Posted in Readings | 2 Comments

Robot Update

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

The We Robot 2013 conference will be in Stanford — and back in Miami for 2014. Paper proposals are due Friday. The conference will be April 8-9, 2013 at Stanford Law School and the theme is “Getting Down to Business”.

Meanwhile the folks here at UMiami have been getting into the spirit of thing, and produced this amazing magazine cover for the inaugural issue of Miami Law Magazine

I had some work done

Posted in Robots | 3 Comments

Why Does It Take Two Days for an E-Payment to Move Between Two Big US Banks?

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

When I use online banking to instruct Very Major National Bank #1 to send a payment to my credit card run by Very Major National Bank #2 at a future date, the website at VMNB#1 tells me it will be sent by “electronic payment”. Yet it takes two days for the e-payment to show up as received at the credit card account run by VMNB#2. 1 This is not much of an advance over writing a paper check.

Can inter-bank electronic payment really be that slothful? VMNB#2 says I should ask VMBN#1 why it takes so long. And indeed, VMNB#1’s web site does say, in a well-buried FAQ, that

If the payment is electronic, you should allow at least 2 business days for it to be received and processed.

So this is a feature, not a bug. VMNB#1 debits my account the day after I instruct it to send the payment — that is, one day before VMBN#2 credits it. Are they just splitting the float?

  1. Update: Just to clarify–On Day one I instruct VMNB#1 to send a payment to VMNB#2 on Day 10. On Day 11 VMNB#1 debits my account. On Day 12 VMNB#2 shows a payment to my credit card account. The point of mentioning the advance directive is that there’s nothing last-minute or surprising about the payment instruction that could explain the delay.[↩]
Posted in Econ & Money | 7 Comments

And the Winner Is Boring

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

The Buzz has the story on Florida’s license plate design competition. All four choices were pretty boring.

Then again, having the winner be the least bad of lousy choices does make the outcome somewhat better than the average Florida state election.

Posted in Florida | Comments Off on And the Winner Is Boring

Public Participation in State Rate Setting

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

Eye on Miami has a great letter from a citizen who tried to participate in state electric power rate-setting. Putting FPL on the spot should be required reading for anyone interested in energy law, state administrative law, or more general questions of public participation in government.

Here is just a small taste:

My first stop on my adventure was the public service hearing held in Sarasota on May 31, 2012. Here I first saw the most shocking thing about the public hearing process. In the lobby of the hearing site (Sarasota City Hall) were numerous FPL customer service representatives wearing FPL shirts who are greeting members of the public arriving to speak to the rate increase proposal. And FPL seems to have their own dedicated room. Which made no sense at all. It’s like a court hearing but one of the parties to the case gets to have their own room in the courthouse and a staff to lobby everyone, judges, jurors and the public as they walk by as to why their side is right. FPL also gets to have a table handing out literature. Nobody else gets to have a room or a table or representatives right outside the hearing room. There is no Audubon Society, no Environmental Defense Fund, no Florida Public Interest Research Group in the lobby lobbying (I guess that is where the term comes from!) against the rate increase or against the proposals or actions of FPL.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. I had not yet intervened in the case but when I did subsequently intervene and speak from the stage as a party at the four Miami area public service hearings, I found that FPL gets a special room at every public hearing. They get to intercept members of the public who come to the hearings with complaints, before those members of the public enter the hearing room, and redirect them to the special FPL room and give them whatever it takes to “resolve their complaint”. The evidence indicates they are much more generous in achieving customer satisfaction in the special FPL rooms at the public hearings than they are in the normal course of their business. Essentially they run bribery rooms at every public hearing site with FPSC blessing.

Posted in Florida, Law: Administrative Law | Comments Off on Public Participation in State Rate Setting