I have used it now for almost 7 years running a law firm. It's worked great for exactly our use case: privileged emails, including attachments, can be time and passworded with legit TNO encryption. I initially used nextcloud/webDAV for our own calendar, but switched over recently to protonmail and it hasn't been an issue. Some storage space is useful. Haven't used the VPN. It's a boutique firm. We have only 4 employees. YMMV
No one is freeing up resources for a felony prosecutor by eliminating Driving Under Suspended cases, handled by a completely different prosecutor in a completely different courtroom.
No one's saving a felony docket by eliminating the need to prosecute niche crimes like aviation fraud or abortion or unlawful dog breeding.
No one can undisputedly connect bail reform with an increase or a decrease in crime or pre-trial recidivism.
No one can glean statistics from major cities only, conclude they are not harmful, and then imply reform must not be harmful for rural areas. There are usually more prosecutors elected in rural areas than populated ones.
Crime is tightly situational, geographically tied, culturally bound. Policies therefore must also be situational, geographically tied, and culturally bound. Some things might be universally bad. Those should be excised everywhere. But things that are not universally good should not be endorsed universally. I got the impression here that the writer wants some reforms to be endorsed universally.
I am a prosecutor. I used to be a criminal defense attorney. Crime comes from a complicated collection of sources and circumstances. Efforts to reduce crime, therefore, require an evaluation of the complications and circumstances in a given area. The causes of crime are geographically, economically, and culturally bound, and solutions probably should vary dramatically from area to area.
I know some people may not agree, but an oft-overlooked component of crime and law enforcement is culture. American crime, at least in part, is what it is today from our country's own defiant and ignorant understanding of what freedom is. "You can't tell me what to do with a gun." "You can't tell me to get out of my own car." Combine it with an unhealthy dose of American exceptionalism and social circumstances that contribute to crime and we get stupid like sovereign citizens, election denialism, and hilarious black-or-white efforts to villify law enforcement. Our country breeds criminals and idiocy in the classroom almost as much as bad parenting because we're told over and over that this is the best and most free place in the world and children in africa are starving. It's in our collective psychology. So every social pain is both a source of cognitive dissonance and King George III back from the dead to tax our freedoms. This is evident to me in the way the law in other countries is both written and enforced. Japan's violence is a far cry from ours. Canada isn't some paragon of legislation, yet their crime rates are very low. Interestingly enough, Canada's indigenous people make up a disproportionately HUGE amount of their incarcerated, but no one cares. But American cops were just born bad and are taught only to shoot the black people. As if law enforcement doesn't come out of the exact same pool of people who become office workers who screw around when they probably should be working, teachers who diddle their students, and negligent engineers who cheated their way through school. School shootings in America exist because they're a cultural touchstone for malignant attention and perverse notoriety, yet the issue is reduced to being either mental illness or guns. The fact that nobody can touch our guns is a symptom of the death caused, not the source of the issue.
Prosecutor's are little more than a reflection of the cultural expectations and demands of a given area. Articles like this are therefore both laughably myopic in their conclusions and a little dangerous in the way they perpetuate this tug of war we seem to be in. That said, I'm glad there are efforts from new prosecutors to reduce both disparity in treatment of people and legitimate efforts to eliminate waste and unneeded suffering in reducing crime. But the solution isn't a decision not to prosecute ABORTION, for which there are probably like 10 cases a year for. We'll never come up with consistent cause and effect relationships with this kind of whack a mole policy making. America needs to start thinking differently, starting with an admission that where there are people there will be criminals and understanding those criminals is more important than any other effort to reduce injustice for anyone.
Note though that there are around 6 times as many White people in the US, so Black people are about twice as likely to be arrested. That any given arrest is slightly safer for them is probably not really very reassuring to them.
Crime means something to us Americans when we have actually harmed someone and not simply offended some behavioral code. Where police and the "justice system" get a bad rap is they [typically] act like Cartman anytime their authority isn't immediately respected. A great example is the police chase: Trying to pull someone over for a broken tail light or for running an intersection and they take off? Cool, let 'em go and catch up with the registered owner later because you have the plate. You don't see anyone dying in the car, there is no emergency where you have to interact RIGHT NOW GODDAMNIT OR I'LL PIT- YOU I SWEAR!!! Another set of problems come from the absolute involuntary nature of it combined with the straight gaslighting about The Social Contract (yeah produce it with my ink signature) we received as school children. If we were customers to government the same way we were to Albertson's or BestBuy, I would have zero to do with them for sticking me in a mancage for a few days because I broke corporate policy X.YZ. Yet somehow religiously, it's OK for a special group which wears the abstract armor of god to? My neighbors have no more right to determine that my cooking and use of methamphetamine should put me in a cage, anymore than I have the right to steal back in value my time taken from me in the form of property they own.
Until governments wall off large sections of their land to form "free zones" similar to nature preserves, so that temporary or permanent expatriations become viable options in lieu of man cages or executions, this is not an actual justice system but a war-machine. The War on Crime has been the most abused and bastardized excuse for expanded state-gang power, feeding on peoples fears of a little bad guy so they need big bad guy to protect them (for a small tax, or you get the cage... no third choice other than be killed in a shooting fight). Criminal justice should not be about revenge but instead safety and rehabilitation. Caging a human animal involuntarily instead of merely excluding it from the rest is still barbaric. When someone going in for decades says he'd rather be dumped at the international border for equally long (or permanent) expatriation, you and taxpayers should be excitedly jumping with joy that $50,000/yr is going to be saved. If you feel bad because he did a no-no against you and now he's in Mexico sipping malgaritas? Grow up, or get a gun to go down there and fix it yourself! Quit giving power to religious institutions (the State is a religious institution, or homomorphic to it).
The impulse to "Take nice things away" from someone to make them miserable for something which I am sure they never agreed to in the first place needs to be stricken and actively prosecuted as prisoner abuse. A non-abusive SHU would have the victi... err prisoner, move his belongings which can keep him occupied into that solo cell. When a prisoner refuses to work, you do not take away his private entertainment devices from his room. That is abusive behavior, if he had the choice he would run away from you or shoot you for assaulting him in taking his TV and locking him in a SHU with nothing but his cloths for weeks.
I swear on the fabric of the universe itself that, if I end up on a jury trial for someone accused of assaulting law enforcement, I will most likely jury nullify unless it was literally a patrol man saying hi and instantly getting punched, or something. We don't have the institutional power to put you in cages similar to the ones you use, so we have to hack the system other ways and since a juror does not need to justify himself in being unconvinced a single juror can stop your human mulcher dead.
Finally, go lock yourself up for a few months, tell me how anyone slighly brain-broken is going to be helped by that (let alone recover for many).
All these games we play, are to attempt to supercede natural law: you attempt to predate me, I attempt to kill you in self defense. I don't mean legal defense, according to Criminal Code X.YZ, but natural defense like the gazelle getting lucky impailing the lioness. This only works so long as people in general have something to lose at the end of your gun, give some a 6-mo terminal diagnosis or the possibility of life in a cage if caught and they may opt to naturally defend themselves (and like the French I agree with this sentiment, and reserve jury nullification for it).
I’ll start by saying I’m a lawyer, not ever a professional coder. Years ago, I wanted to help a friend translate a Japanese video game and release a fan translation. I had some experience in assembler a long time before it, but I had forgotten most. I had little experience in disassembly. I also had never learned anything about compression algorithms or theory.
Turns out this particular game company (Falcom) had a habit of implementing their own compression on their assets. So I had to painstakingly read the disassembly. It got to the point that I had notebooks of hand written disassembly so I could read and think about the code when not at a computer. Eventually I figured out how to both decompress images and text and then save the decompressed assets in a way that bypass the compression. I wrote the hack and patch and was super happy. Of course it blew up the size of the game assets for translated materials, but it worked.
I recommend you read the first four chapters of The Startup Owners Manual by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf. In those chapters, they talk about the importance of understanding your users, not “build it and they will come.” I think if you understood people’s response to what you’ve made very well, you would know a few things to tweak to fix a lot of concerns.
This is going to depend heavily on the state, unless you try to volunteer with federal prison (called the bureau of prisons). Most states call their state prison system the department of corrections. I would conduct a search for your state and area based on this info. I wouldn’t spend too much time looking at anything other than DOC or BOP. Local jails generally don’t have long term rehabilitative programs like learning to code.
That could end up as part of the bail condition. Some places use it more than others. I'm not sure why it isn't more common. Police response time could still be an issue.
Domestic violence and DR attorney here, formerly DV prosecutor. Depending on the laws on the state, she needs to find a way to authenticate her worries about his cyber-stalking. If she has enough to validate the concern (not just speculation; won’t need much), she should seek a civil protection order precluding him from use of all electronics. The judge probably won’t do that for a number of reasons, but considering the DV cycle and pattern here, there will be a secondary civil protection order issued which will specifically consider the danger imposed by the cyber stalking. At that point if there’s even a whiff of improper use, he’s going back to jail.
Of course this will depend on the state. I can’t give general advice in the US.
