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More than 60 percent of people in America’s overcrowded jails are there because they can’t afford to pay their bail amou

ipple effect

questions about America’s pretrial system and the way it affects the lives of unconvicted people.

A quarter-century ago, in 1994, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, on any given day, was holding somewhere around 5,500 immigrants in “immigration detention.”For fiscal year 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget documents projected an average daily population in detention of roughly 31,000. That increase—nearly six-fold in 25 years—made the Enforcement and Removal Operations division of ICE roughly the 13th largest prison system in the country. On its busiest days in FY 2017, ICE housed a population well above that.  

As of 2016, only about 10 percent of detainees were held in federal facilities at all; the remainder were housed in state, county, or city jails (25 percent) or private for-profit prisons (65 percent). Each of the local or private facilities is governed by an agreement with ICE governing inmate conditions, and the agreements aren’t uniform. Some require better conditions than others. Even ICE’s defenders do not seriously contest that ERO detention facilities are rife with poor physical conditions, inadequate medical care, and physical and sexual abuse of the inmates.

Justices Samuel Alito, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch, read the statute as forbidding bail hearings for the immigration inmates, and thus authorizing ERO to detain them for weeks, months, or even years. Two of the five, Thomas and Gorsuch, wrote separately to suggest that the inmates should not be allowed to challenge their detention in court until after their cases are complete and they are facing deportation. The five-justice majority opinion, without quite saying so, also suggested that the constitutional issue is really not of much importance at all. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. (Justice Elena Kagan recused herself, because she had authorized a pleading in the case when she was U.S. Solicitor General.)

Some elections are determined in the mad rush of a campaign’s final days. And others are effectively over before they begin. In New York, the Democratic supermajority in control of the legislature made two fatal mistakes driven by arrogance and incompetence that sealed the fate of its congressional candidates many months ago

Those mistakes point up the dangers of one-party rule, especially when it becomes so entrenched and beholden to its most activist wing — and in this case causes some Democrats to vote Republican just to break that stranglehold.

The first mistake: After an independent commission created by voters failed to agree on a new map of House districts in New York, Democrats got greedy. Instead of drawing maps that were modestly advantageous, they went whole hog — producing an extremely gerrymandered map that invited a successful legal challenge.

Bail was set at $2 million on Monday for a 17-year-old from Illinois accused of killing two men during an August protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after the father of one victim told the court the teen “thinks he's above the law" and would disappear if freed before the trial.

Kyle Rittenhouse, of Antioch, Illinois, is charged with fatally shooting Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber during a protest over a police shooting in August.

In addition to the homicide charges, Rittenhouse faces counts of attempted homicide, reckless endangerment and being a minor in possession of a firearm.

The federal bail system’s presumption of release makes it better and more humane than most state systems

But you can still see the impact of wealth. First, because Sam Bankman-Fried broke the law by (allegedly) stealing billions of dollars instead of by being paid a hundred bucks to transport half a key of black tar heroin, there was no presumption he should be detained. That reflects society’s values. Moreover, rich people are more easily able to satisfy elaborate bail conditions. They have stable families in whose homes they can live, their families can post substantial home equity, they can afford the cost of home monitoring, they can afford to travel back and forth from home to court, they have rich friends who will sign bonds pledging money. Poor people don’t have those things, and so the magistrate judge finds that no combination of conditions — that is, no combination of conditions that this defendant can meet — will assure they won’t be a flight risk or a danger.

No matter how much President Donald Trump and his acolytes persist in trying to minimize the dangers of the coronavirus, the rest of the world -- and the virus -- are not following his lead.

As the number of cases kept climbing, the virus continued to drive uncertainty in the stock market, which fell steeply following the start of an oil price war. Trump flailed desperately on Twitter, and his Health and Human Services Secretary, of all people, raved in support of his boss that the economic fundamentals are "unbelievable."

Unlike during the 2008 Great Recession, when the government leaped to assist financial institutions, the first priority this time should be helping individuals in need. Only then should we help businesses caught in this storm.

The real lesson from financial crises is that, at the pit of the crisis, you do what you have to do. You bail out the banks. You bail out the weak European governments. But, at the same time, you lock in policies that reinforce the fundamental link between effort and reward. And, as soon as the crisis passes, you move to repair the legitimacy of the system. That didn’t happen after the American financial crisis of 2008. The people who caused the crisis were never held responsible. There never was an exit strategy to unwind the gigantic debt buildup. The structural problems plaguing the economy remain unaddressed. As a result, the United States suffers from a horrible crisis of trust that is slowing growth, restricting government action and sending our politics off in strange directions.

The British police have arrested a 15-year-old boy in Northern Ireland in connection with a recent hacking attack on the telecommunications operator TalkTalk.

On Saturday, the broadband provider said on its website that the stolen customer data had been less sensitive than initially thought and did not include complete credit card numbers or customers’ passwords, for instance.

the third cyberattack on the company in 12 months. It became aware of the breach late on Wednesday.

When White Girls Deal Drugs, They Walk

In the days after her arrest, multiple news organizations ran stories focusing not on her crimes as much as her “photogenic smile.”

In a 2009 report, Human Rights Watch found black adults to be arrested for drug charges at rates 2.8 to 5.5 times higher than those of white adults in every year from 1980 through 2007

Washington (CNN)Welcome to CNN's fact check coverage of the eleventh Democratic presidential debate from Washington, DC, ahead of the nation's third super Tuesday, where primaries will be held in Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio on March 17.

As Vice President, Biden campaigned with New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2015 to increase the state minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Asked whether he would order a national lockdown to combat the coronavirus pandemic, Biden took a swipe at Sanders' "Medicare for All" proposal. He pointed to Italy, saying that its single-payer health care system hasn't worked to stem the outbreak there.

New York City’s jails were under such threat from the coronavirus last spring that city officials moved swiftly to let hundreds of people out of the crowded, airless old buildings. The effort shrank the jail population to its lowest point in more than half a century.

There are now more than 5,500 people in the city’s jails, slightly more than were detained last March. About three-quarters of the people being held have not been convicted. Many are awaiting trial much longer than usual, as the court system continues to operate at a near standstill during the pandemic.

Those behind bars are at high risk for contracting and spreading the virus, and correctional facilities have been home to some of the largest outbreaks nationally. Often, those outbreaks have spread into the community at large, as people shuttle in and out of detention. Few of those being detained in New York have been offered vaccines.

A year later, jails are more crowded than they were when the pandemic began. And there has been an increase in infections in recent months that could pose a public health risk even beyond the jail walls.

About three-quarters of the people being held have not been convicted. Many are awaiting trial much longer than usual, as the court system continues to operate at a near standstill during the pandemic.

In lawsuits, prisoners and guards alike have called the living conditions inside unsanitary and dangerous.

A Wisconsin court commissioner on Monday set bail at $2 million for Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old accused of killing protesters in Kenosha,

Rittenhouse is accused of fatally shooting two demonstrators and injuring a third during protests on Aug. 25 that followed the shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man who was shot several times at close range by Kenosha police and is now paralyzed.

The charges include first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide.

Can China, by offering itself as an alternative trading partner, bail out Putin’s economy?

No, it can’t.

it’s hard for Russia to pay for imports — sorry, but you can’t carry out modern international trade with briefcases full of $100 bills. In fact, even Russian trade that remains legally permitted seems to be drying up as Western companies that fear further restrictions and a political backlash engage in “self-sanctioning.”

visitors to an interactive theater will be presented with the stark choices that confronted the nation’s 43rd president: invade Iraq or leave Saddam Hussein in power? Deploy federal troops after Hurricane Katrina or rely on local forces? Bail out Wall Street or let the banks fail?

The hypothetical exercise, which includes touch screens that let users watch videos of “advisers” before voting on whether they would make the same choices that Mr. Bush did, revisits the most consequential moments of his administration. In the process, the country is being asked to re-evaluate the two-term president who presided over some of the most tumultuous years in the nation’s history.

The museum’s 14,000 square feet of exhibits present the presidency Mr. Bush intended (tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, faith-based social services) juxtaposed against the presidency he ended up having (terrorism, war and financial crisis)

Feds: NSA contractor's secrets theft 'breathtaking'

A former government contractor who's charged with stealing thousands of classified and sensitive intelligence files committed "breathtaking" crimes, according to a new filing from federal prosecutors.

Before his arrest, Martin worked as a contractor to the National Security Agency through

A massive nationwide protest against President Nicolas Maduro is expected Wednesday.

Venezuela's democracy is nearing collapse after Maduro quashed a referendum vote seeking to remove him from office.

All this is happening in a year when its citizens have battled with food and medicine shortages, sky high inflation and dwindling options.

there were four trends that led the country to reject its post-World War I constitutional, parliamentary democracy, known as the Weimar Republic: economic depression, loss of trust in institutions, social humiliation and political blunder.

To a certain degree, these trends can be found across the West today

All this happened as traditional ways of life and values were being shaken by the modernization of the 1920s. Women suddenly went to work, to vote, to party and to sleep with whomever they wanted. This produced a widening cultural gap between the tradition-oriented working and middle classes and the cosmopolitan avant-garde — in politics, business and the arts — that reached a peak just when economic disaster struck. The elites were blamed for the resulting chaos, and the masses were ripe for a strongman to return order to society.

The Democrats are a class party; it’s just that the class in question is not the one we think it is. It’s not working people, you know, middle class. It’s the professional class. It’s people with advanced degrees. They use that phrase themselves, all the time: the professional class.

What is the professional class?The advanced degrees is an important part of it. Having a college education is obviously essential to it. These are careers based on educational achievement. There’s the sort of core professions going back to the 19th century like doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, but nowadays there’s many, many, many more and it’s a part of the population that’s expanded. It’s a much larger group of people now than it was 50 or 60 years ago thanks to the post-industrial economy. You know math Ph.Ds that would write calculations on Wall Street for derivative securities or like biochemists who work in pharmaceutical companies. There’s hundreds of these occupations now, thousands of them. It’s a much larger part of the population now than it used to be. But it still tends to be very prosperous people

there’s basically two hierarchies in America. One is the hierarchy of money and big business and that’s really where the Republicans are at: the one percent, the Koch brothers, that sort of thing.