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[quote=Anonymous]For some balance:
Suffice it to say, though, that I hope rational people can agree that Mayor Muriel Bowser, Police Chief Robert Contee, and U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves are not right-wing media personalities or dilettante pundits. Running through advocates’ side of the argument over this, it seems to me that they can’t decide whether they’re dispelling the myth that this is a soft-on-crime, anti-carceral measure or motivated by the fact that that’s exactly what it is. (…)

Statehood for the District of Columbia is mostly discussed in the national press in terms of its impact on Senate math. The real consequences of non-statehood for people who live in the District, though, include the fact that D.C. does not have state courts. Instead, all the functions that would normally be performed by a state court system are instead performed by special Article II federal courts with local jurisdiction. That’s also why we have a U.S. Attorney performing most of the functions that would normally be performed by a district attorney. But this all means that we rely on Congress to provide the resources the D.C. court system needs to function. On some level, that’s a gift to the city — we are getting services that we don’t pay for in exchange for paying taxes without representation. But on another level, it’s a huge problem. At the end of the day, courts are just not a huge line item in any state’s budget. And in exchange for saving some money, we lack a major piece of self-government.

Note that even under the current criminal code, lack of judicial resources is a huge problem for D.C. (…)

And my suspicion is that we’re moving forward with this plan because:

*** the key people driving it don’t actually think it’s a big problem to de facto decriminalize a lot of misconduct.***

(https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-im-worried-about-dcs-criminal)

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