Author: admin

Google has thrown its support behind the growing movement to eliminate cash bail by purging bail bond advertisements from its platform.

Beginning in July, Google will no longer accept advertisements from private bail bond services. David Graff, Google’s director of global product policy, explained the decision Monday:

We made this decision based on our commitment to protect our users from deceptive or harmful products, but the issue of bail bond reform has drawn support from a wide range of groups and organizations who have shared their work and perspectives with us, including the Essie Justice Group, Koch Industries, Color of Change and many civil and human rights organizations who have worked on the reform of our criminal justice system for many years.

Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, put out a statement Monday afternoon supporting Google’s decision:

No one should be incarcerated—before they’ve even been tried or convicted of a crime—simply because they can’t afford not to be. With this ban, Google is doing its part to protect people from unscrupulous advertisers who are taking advantage of the fact that most people will do whatever they can to avoid having to spend time, or having their family member spend time, in jail.

This morning, Google hosted these organizations at a bail reform panel in D.C. to discuss the push for court systems across the country to move away from using cash bail systems. The Charles Koch Institute was represented at the panel and provided a brief statement to Reason show support for bail reform:

The Charles Koch Institute (CKI) is interested in driving solutions to the many barriers to opportunity caused by monetary bail. We believe that decisions to detain an individual accused of a crime should be based on public safety and flight risk. These decisions should be consistent with the Bill of Rights and the Eight Amendment, and not be based solely on an individual’s ability to pay. CKI is excited to lend our voice to this issue alongside leaders like the Pretrial Justice Institute.

New Jersey courts have largely eliminated cash bail. Alaska this year changed its system to rely less on cash bail and to use pretrial risk assessments and monitoring tools to try to keep more people out of jail if they have not been convicted. Other states, such as California, are considering changes—and if they don’t, civil rights groups plan to force the matter with lawsuits.

But refusing to run ads for bail bond companies isn’t changing the law. It limits publicity for a service that many people need to get out of jail right now. The American Bail Coalition, which represents the industry, is not happy with Google’s decision and disagrees with the Koch Institute’s interpretation of the Bill of Rights. In a prepared statement, American Bail Coalition President Jeff Clayton responded:

It is shameful that Google would deny people access to bail services, which are heavily regulated by state insurance commissioners around the country. For years, Google has taken money from bail companies, like all other legal businesses, to let the marketplace help consumers of services find and research the providers of such services that they need. However, it would appear that Google and Koch Industries have decided to pander to special interests in an attempt to re-engineer society according to their own dictates. Unfortunately, their alarming move to re-write state and federal statutes on their own is inconsistent with the rule of law and the U.S. Bill of Rights.

People who are actually in need of bail bondsmen are still going to be able to track down services. But it’s not like Google is purging those companies from its search results. Well, at least not yet. It’s worth considering that possibility given that the company says it believes these bail services are a “deceptive and harmful product.”

President Donald Trump has decided to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear deal.

According to a Tuesday New York Times story, Trump told French President Emmanuel Macron that he intended to withdraw from the Obama-negotiated deal—formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA—which saw the Iranian government agree to limits on its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

Trump has been uniformly critical of the deal both on the campaign trail and in office, threatening to withdraw from the arrangement numerous times.

The president had planned an announcement about his administration’s continued participation in the nuclear pact for this afternoon. Trump’s reported comments to Macron apparently confirms many analysts’ assumption that the president would use the announcement to scuttle the deal.

According to the Times, the deal-breaker for Trump had been his demand that limitations on Iran’s nuclear fuel production continue past 2030, when current restrictions are scheduled to be lifted. The United States’ withdrawal means the re-imposition of sanctions that had prevented the sale of Iranian oil and froze billions of the country’s assets.

Trump’s decision is sure to upset America’s European allies, who were also party to the agreement, and who have been urging the president to remain in the deal. Britain’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson met with Vice President Mike Pence this week to try and persuade the administration to keep the JCPOA in place. France’s Defense Minister has referred to the deal as “a factor of peace and stabilization in a very eruptive region.”

Voices inside the administration had likewise worked to keep Trump from tearing up the deal, most prominently former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster. Their ouster in favor of Iran uber-hawks Mike Pompeo and John Bolton effectively removed any internal opposition to today’s decision.

Reason contributor Steve Chapman has objected to the conflicted reasoning of Trump and other critics for ending the Iran deal, who’ve taken the JCPOA to task for both imposing ineffective restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program and for putting an expiration date on those restrictions.

“The weird logic of the opponents is that because parts of the accord will end too soon, we should end the whole thing even sooner—right now,” wrote Chapman. “Their implication is that all the flaws would be acceptable if only they would remain in effect until the end of time.”

Tearing up a deal now “would be diplomatic malpractice” argued Reason contributor and Defense Priorities Fellow Daniel DePetris, who argued that whatever its imperfections, the JCPOA has lowered the possibility of a military confrontation with Iran.

“Jettisoning a nuclear deal that is working, despite the problems buried in the text, would run counter to the realism embedded in the Trump administration’s national security doctrine,” wrote DePetris. “And it may very well put the United States in the position of fighting a fourth war in the Middle East, a possibility the American people are neither prepared for nor willing to support.”

Trump is scheduled to officially announce his withdrawal from the deal at 2 p.m. Eastern today.

After just a few years in operation, Delaware’s Human Trafficking Court is shutting down. The court’s rise and fall offers valuable lessons for similar systems across the country and shines a light on how trending problems lead to stupid policy—something those in the throes of the “opioid epidemic” panic would do well to remember.

The court was killed by Judge Alex Smalls, chief of Delaware’s Court of Common Pleas, citing a plan to consolidate several community court programs into one multipurpose court. The shift will save money and streamline responses to cases with a social-service component, said Smalls.

But the trafficking court’s closure goes beyond simple bureaucratic shuffling. It comes following a 2016 report from the Delaware Criminal Justice Council, which found less than a third of people who started the alternative-to-jail program actually completed it and that there was “little evidence to suggest the defendants of this court are the subjects” of sex-trafficking enterprises.

Delaware’s News Journal describes the Human Trafficking Court as “a special treatment court for adult prostitutes” and said Smalls’ decision to close it has “riled trafficking victims advocates.” These advocates argue that “free will is an illusion,” writes Margie Fishman, and they insist the definition of sex-trafficking victim should be expanded to include anyone who exchanges sexual services for money, even those who work entirely independently.

Sadly, this position has become a popular one in recent years, as law-enforcement agencies around the nation get federally funded (and sometimes mandated) “human trafficking awareness” training to shift their thinking about sex workers. The approach has gained oodles of good PR for allegedly being more compassionate, enlightened, and feminist than previous police views of prostitution—treated as a community nuisance—and sex workers, previously seen as morally depraved, deliberately lawless, and lying in the beds they made for themselves. The new national message on prostitution is that the vast majority of women involved were forced or coerced, if not by a literal “pimp” or “trafficker” than by the circumstances of their lives.

This is insane, obviously. But it informed (and still informs) a rash of recent bad policies, starting under George W. Bush but really picking up steam in the later years of the Obama era. Without the Bush-tinted veneer of being a socially conservative or Christian enterprise, anti-sex-trafficking crusades were quickly seized upon by Democrats and other mainstream liberal types, and “human trafficking” legislation became a frantic and bipartisan affair at the federal and state levels. But even though Bush-era language specifically condemning consensual prostitution was gone, the policies had the same in effect.

States—including Delaware, New York, and Michigan—and cities created special courts during this time to deal with the purported human trafficking “epidemic” sweeping America. Delaware’s court was created in 2012 (“one of 14 nationwide when it was first established,” according to the Journal). Like other so-called human trafficking courts, it handled criminal cases related to adult prostitution, regardless of whether anyone was alleging force, fraud, or coercion.

These courts garnered a lot of good headlines as well as praise from high-powered people—plus the public funds that came with that—by promising to treat all arrested sex workers as potential sex-trafficking victims and offer them a way to dodge jail time with counseling and social services. But it turned out that many arrested on prostitution charges didn’t want to declare themselves victims, name names of “traffickers,” enter a months-long state-run “treatment” program, or even leave prostitution in the first place. And those that were open to state aid with starting a new life could find themselves presented not with practical assistance but things like yoga classes and group counseling—if not worse: There have been multiple reports of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement using human-trafficking courts to find immigrants who have been working in prostitution, which is grounds for deportation even if they are in the country legally.

In some areas, those who complete human-trafficking court programs can be cleared of prostitution charges. Delaware’s program only provided a way to avoid jail time, not a criminal conviction altogether. In order to be eligible for the program, an arrested person had to plead guilty to misdemeanor prostitution and would be put on (usually) one year probation. Those who couldn’t keep up with program requirements—regular class attendance, drug testing, no new arrests or probation violations—were sent swiftly back to the typical criminal-justice route.

Once in the program, women “pursued their GEDs” and were trained for jobs at local ShopRite stores, reports the Journal. The court helped people like “Clorissa,” now 29, who “left behind an abusive, controlling boyfriend, a heroin addiction and thousands of dollars that she earned” via street-based sex work, according to the paper.

Of course, not everyone arrested on prostitution charges (and certainly not everyone engaging in prostitution) needs to exit an abusive relationship, shake a drug problem, finish a high-school diploma, or get trained to work at a minimum-wage job. Yet instead of saving the Clorissas while letting non-victims get on with their lives, these programs only offer alternatives for people willing to be “saved.”

Of the 110 people who entered Delaware’s human trafficking program, the Journal reports, only 30 have completed it.

The Criminal Justice Council report concluded that it “finds it difficult to continue to justify the resources that have been expend on so few probations who have demonstrated a low rate of success.” It recommended at least moving to a program where those who completed it could avoid a criminal conviction (known as the diversionary model), but it does not seem that authorities have accepted this recommendation.

Ultimately, it looks like the prostitution arrest model in Delaware may return to its previous status quo, where the state still punishes adults for paid sex but at least doesn’t pretend like that’s part of some humanitarian mission. We’ll see. For now, the shift in (media- and politics-created) social priorities in the state is interesting.

The feds gave at least $1.5 million over five years to Delaware’s Brandywine Counseling and Community Services, which worked with the Human Trafficking Court in addition to doing street-based sex worker outreach. CEO told Lynn Fahey that funding has dried up recently, however, as “the attention shifted to the opioid epidemic.” Sometimes there’s only room for one trending panic in town.

After just a few years in operation, Delaware’s Human Trafficking Court is shutting down. The court’s rise and fall offers valuable lessons for similar systems across the country and shines a light on how trending problems lead to stupid policy—something those in the throes of the “opioid epidemic” panic would do well to remember.

The court was killed by Judge Alex Smalls, chief of Delaware’s Court of Common Pleas, citing a plan to consolidate several community court programs into one multipurpose court. The shift will save money and streamline responses to cases with a social-service component, said Smalls.

But the trafficking court’s closure goes beyond simple bureaucratic shuffling. It comes following a 2016 report from the Delaware Criminal Justice Council, which found less than a third of people who started the alternative-to-jail program actually completed it and that there was “little evidence to suggest the defendants of this court are the subjects” of sex-trafficking enterprises.

Delaware’s News Journal describes the Human Trafficking Court as “a special treatment court for adult prostitutes” and said Smalls’ decision to close it has “riled trafficking victims advocates.” These advocates argue that “free will is an illusion,” writes Margie Fishman, and they insist the definition of sex-trafficking victim should be expanded to include anyone who exchanges sexual services for money, even those who work entirely independently.

Sadly, this position has become a popular one in recent years, as law-enforcement agencies around the nation get federally funded (and sometimes mandated) “human trafficking awareness” training to shift their thinking about sex workers. The approach has gained oodles of good PR for allegedly being more compassionate, enlightened, and feminist than previous police views of prostitution—treated as a community nuisance—and sex workers, previously seen as morally depraved, deliberately lawless, and lying in the beds they made for themselves. The new national message on prostitution is that the vast majority of women involved were forced or coerced, if not by a literal “pimp” or “trafficker” than by the circumstances of their lives.

This is insane, obviously. But it informed (and still informs) a rash of recent bad policies, starting under George W. Bush but really picking up steam in the later years of the Obama era. Without the Bush-tinted veneer of being a socially conservative or Christian enterprise, anti-sex-trafficking crusades were quickly seized upon by Democrats and other mainstream liberal types, and “human trafficking” legislation became a frantic and bipartisan affair at the federal and state levels. But even though Bush-era language specifically condemning consensual prostitution was gone, the policies had the same in effect.

States—including Delaware, New York, and Michigan—and cities created special courts during this time to deal with the purported human trafficking “epidemic” sweeping America. Delaware’s court was created as part of omnibus “human trafficking” legislation the state passed in 2014 (“one of 14 nationwide when it was first established,” according to the Journal). Like other so-called human trafficking courts, it handled criminal cases related to adult prostitution, regardless of whether anyone was alleging force, fraud, or coercion.

These courts garnered a lot of good headlines as well as praise from high-powered people—plus the public funds that came with that—by promising to treat all arrested sex workers as potential sex-trafficking victims and offer them a way to dodge jail time with counseling and social services. But it turned out that many arrested on prostitution charges didn’t want to declare themselves victims, name names of “traffickers,” enter a months-long state-run “treatment” program, or even leave prostitution in the first place. And those that were open to state aid with starting a new life could find themselves presented not with practical assistance but things like yoga classes and group counseling—if not worse: There have been multiple reports of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement using human-trafficking courts to find immigrants who have been working in prostitution, which is grounds for deportation even if they are in the country legally.

In some areas, those who complete human-trafficking court programs can be cleared of prostitution charges. Delaware’s program only provided a way to avoid jail time, not a criminal conviction altogether. In order to be eligible for the program, an arrested person had to plead guilty to misdemeanor prostitution and would be put on (usually) one year probation. Those who couldn’t keep up with program requirements—regular class attendance, drug testing, no new arrests or probation violations—were sent swiftly back to the typical criminal-justice route.

Once in the program, women “pursued their GEDs” and were trained for jobs at local ShopRite stores, reports the Journal. The court helped people like “Clorissa,” now 29, who “left behind an abusive, controlling boyfriend, a heroin addiction and thousands of dollars that she earned” via street-based sex work, according to the paper.

Of course, not everyone arrested on prostitution charges (and certainly not everyone engaging in prostitution) needs to exit an abusive relationship, shake a drug problem, finish a high-school diploma, or get trained to work at a minimum-wage job. Yet instead of saving the Clorissas while letting non-victims get on with their lives, these programs only offer alternatives for people willing to be “saved.”

Of the 110 people who entered Delaware’s human trafficking program, only 30 completed it.

The Criminal Justice Council report concluded that it “finds it difficult to continue to justify the resources that have been expend on so few probations who have demonstrated a low rate of success.” It recommended at least moving to a program where those who completed it could avoid a criminal conviction (known as the diversionary model), but it does not seem that authorities have accepted this recommendation.

Ultimately, it looks like the prostitution arrest model in Delaware may return to its previous status quo, where the state still punishes adults for paid sex but at least doesn’t pretend like that’s part of some humanitarian mission. We’ll see. For now, the shift in (media- and politics-created) social priorities in the state is interesting.

The feds gave at least $1.5 million over five years to Delaware’s Brandywine Counseling and Community Services, which worked with the Human Trafficking Court in addition to doing street-based sex worker outreach. CEO told Lynn Fahey that funding has dried up recently, however, as “the attention shifted to the opioid epidemic.” Sometimes there’s only room for one trending panic in town.