The amount of Type I errors that get made (that we know about) in our (USA) justice system is really wild when you truly consider the consequences.
The Innocent Project estimates that 1% of all prisoners are innocent. Hard to say if that number is accurate, but go ahead and cut it in half if you like. 0.5%. Doesn't seem like a lot in percentage terms. But of the 850 people in the jail system that the EFF is talking about here, that means at least 4 people are innocent and can't even receive a letter. Imagine if that was you. Man, it's hard to imagine. It's hard to even imagine.
"Nationwide, over 500,000 people are incarcerated in county jails like the one in Redwood City, 427,000 of whom have not been found guilty and are still awaiting trial." Apply that same 0.5% here, and that's 2,135 people. There are literally thousands of innocent people in the prison system. Thousands. A bus seats like 50 people. Imagine 40 buses full of innocent people going to jail, and that's the reality we live in.
> "Nationwide, over 500,000 people are incarcerated in county jails like the one in Redwood City, 427,000 of whom have not been found guilty and are still awaiting trial." Apply that same 0.5% here, and that's 2,135 people. There are literally thousands of innocent people in the prison system. Thousands. A bus seats like 50 people. Imagine 40 buses full of innocent people going to jail, and that's the reality we live in.
Nitpick: that's 427,000 innocent people incarcerated, not 2,135. They all deserve the presumption of innocence.
The decision to grant bail is in part based on the strength of the evidence and the danger to the community calculation is also in part based off past convictions. Not saying that is entirely fair, but the truth is most people in jail really are guilty which is the reason voters either don't care about this issue or even want to make the system more stacked against defendants.
> But even worse, we're talking about many of people who are still awaiting trial-- presumably they are innocent at a greater rate than those convicted.
"Awaiting trial" or even "Awaiting details of the charges to be hammered out" seem to be depressingly time unrestricted. I sat in on some of the hearings, and there was a lot of "Well, we're not ready, can we push this out for 2 weeks?" sort of scheduling going on.
The person I'm familiar with this from basically spent 2 months in jail (not prison, apparently the difference is that prison is nicer, jail is really just a holding tank) on false charges that were then dropped as they were "literally impossible." He wasn't in the state when the claimed events happened.
Finally think of the large number of people imprisoned for violation of laws which ultimately don't matter, like all the people in prison for lower level drug related offenses. One of my favorite authors, Peter McWilliams, died while facing federal charges. I spoke to his mother once and she said that during this time they denied him access to vital medication, and she believes this led to his death. His crime was providing marijuana to cancer patients, something which had been legalized in CA at the time!
I just read about a guy that was jailed for 30 years with a sentence of 400+ years because the 800 years that the prosecutors wanted were too harsh so the judge decided to make the sentence 400ish years to be "fair". the crime this innocent man did that put him in jail for 30 years before being released was driving a getaway car while two other men robbed someone at gunpoint. nobody died to my knowledge. he couldn't give up the information because he was innocent so the prosecutors asked for that because he wasn't telling them what he couldn't know. crazy travesty of justice there. I'm sure there are tons more like this.
There's probably also a fair amount of "guilty of a lesser crime, but pressured by the plea bargain system to plea to a greater crime".
And, of course, innocent or not, there's merit in the argument of whether they should be able to receive mail, have actual physical books in their possession, and so on.
> The Innocence Project estimates 2-10% of convictions are wrongful
This is exactly why I find the death penalty unconscionable. 1,567 people have been executed in the US since the 1970s (https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/executions-overview). How many of them were wrongfully convicted? If someone is wrongfully imprisoned, at least we can let them out when they are exonerated - damaged, but with a chance to rejoin society. That's not the case with the death penalty. Without a perfect justice system, which is unattainable, the death penalty will take the lives of innocent people.
> have not been found guilty and are still awaiting trial
PIMA had an interview with a sheriff recently. The figure that stood out to me was when he said it takes an average of 1.8 years for people in his jail to finally get to trial.
1.8 years in jail before they even decide if you're guilty. Hard to even imagine.
This is what I assume as well. But this is just an assumption I have. I don't even know exactly where it comes from. Is it correct? I just assume I can pay my way out… but what if I can't? I would think it really depends what you are accused of. I really don't know what I'd be able to afford.
And it's even more bizarre to think that's just how it works.
> But of the 850 people in the jail system that the EFF is talking about here, that means at least 4 people are innocent
Saying "at least 4" is pretty misleading here, since you're assuming the 0.5% is perfectly distributed. That estimate could be accurate without a single innocent in these specific 850.
It's not that misleading even if the distribution is not perfect. It would be extremely unlikely that not a single person is innocent.
Given that this is a jail and not a prison, these people are mostly awaiting trial. From a certain point of view (innocent until proven guilty), most of these people are innocent and they can't even get a letter.
True, but I think that misses the point. I think the comment was an attempt at facilitating empathy for the incarcerated who are in this situation since for most people they don't see themselves as criminals (even those who are in fact criminals) and it is harder to empathize with those who you see as being part of a different tribe/group/class.
The fact is that these are fellow humans who are suffering, not because we decided as a society that this was what justice means, nor because this was the result of some study that figured out this would decrease recidivism, but just because some for profit institution decided they wanted to do something that would directly result in them suffering. That is enough for me to support this lawsuit.
Good. I'll have to send them a check and mention it's to support this lawsuit. //EDIT: Printed, signed, and mailed. I wonder what junkmail I'll get as a result of this donation...
I've had the recent displeasure of seeing the jail system far more up close than I'd prefer (from the outside, someone lied and someone I know well ended up in jail for a few months, left with all charges dropped). It's an absolutely vile system, and letters were one of the very few ways one could actually have long form conversations without paying through the nose.
Every aspect of the system is designed to extract money from those outside. You want to send messages? Great, install this app, add money (of course, a bunch of what you put in goes to mandatory fees for the privilege of putting money in), and then it ends up with pay-per-message with character limits (remember $0.25/text?), via an app that is... very permissions-grabby.
Should you want to send money through the fee system for them to buy things at the internal store, you pay your fees, and then can either pay online via a "We need to know everything about you" app, or at an in person kiosk, which tries to collect all the same information, including a photo of you, your driver's license, and whatever else they can grab.
Should you want to set up a video chat, you have to agree to a EULA that, among other things, includes "We will voiceprint anyone on the call and share that with law enforcement, and we will try to biometrically identify your facial features and do the same." And it's $7+ for 30 minutes.
Of course, it's all logged and analyzed.
I understand the need to keep communications somewhat monitored, but it feels far more like a blatant cash grab than anything else, which, given for-profit prisons, it almost certainly is.
So, of course, the one thing that bypassed this (letters were opened, read, anything useful like tape on them was removed, etc) has to go away. Because how dare someone be able to actually interact with people outside. If they do that, why, they might not come right back in on release! And that would be Bad for Profits.
Cram 80 people in a room built for 20? That's fine. Let them actually read letters? Can't have that!
My opinion of the prison system was fairly low to start with, and it rather exceeded my expectations for just how utterly evil the whole thing is, through and through.
Recently went through the same thing. The person was moved twice so all the money on the app was lost since it was a different system at a different prison. Then at the last place, they changed vendors and the money on the app was lost again. I could've gotten it back, but I would've had to jump through a bunch of hoops and made a bunch of calls so I didn't worry about it which I'm sure is what they were hoping for by making it such an ordeal in the first place.
One of very few times I've seen her genuinely pissed off was after attempting to deal with some of the tech support for this system, because money ended up in the "wrong account" (via all the dark patterns you can imagine for the methods of donating), and the only way to move it was more or less for her to provide DNA samples to the prison (despite having nothing to do with anything) - it was that much information that they wanted to "maybe be able to help."
The system is designed to extract money at all costs, and they seem very, very good at doing so, via hook or by crook.
If Americans had to spend one night in some of their jails they would be shocked at the inhumanity of them. American jails such as King County Jail in Seattle and Rikers are some of the worst places to be held in the post-industrial world. Prison is in fact preferable because states are much more compotent than counties at managing these kinds of facilities. If you are ever facing time, hope for a year and a day because usually that is the determinant if you will serve in jail or prison. You want prison.
> Printed, signed, and mailed. I wonder what junkmail I'll get as a result of this donation.
I've been regularly donating to the EFF for years, and one of the things I love about them is that I've never received junk mail as a result (that I know of). They send out periodic newsletter-type email, but unsubscribing from them is easy and actually works.
Most groups, if you send money to support them, seem to then turn around and sell your info to every other group on the planet that might be related, on the "We got a live one!" list or something. It's impressive to watch, but it's also kept me from donating to certain groups, because it's such a royal pain to get off these lists. It typically takes 3-4 "Please take me off your list!" requests to get anywhere to listen, and a few groups have ignored me so long that I've resorted to Sharpie obscenities scrawled on their return mail to get my point across. Some don't even listen then.
But I could probably heat my house on the amount of "THIS OUTRAGE IS HAPPENING AND HERE IS A LOT OF... (over, please) INFORMATION ABOUT WHY YOU SHOULD BE UPSET AND... (next page please) WILL YOU DONATE????????" junk I get.
I have a standing policy of not giving anything to groups that insult me by putting "directions of how to read a multi-page letter" at the bottom, though. It's a thing on almost everything I receive.
Even better the calls from prison can often get instamarked as spam by Google with little way to know they're potentially being silently dropped if you want an ounce of quiet from your cell phone. Recently saw a video from a guy who had a friend get incarcerated and they had a hell of a time getting calls through because of spam blocking.
I'm not certain what legal consequences she may face as a result - I also slightly don't care, as it's far enough outside the bounds of that which I can control that I don't have reason to pay close attention to it.
> were charges filed against the liar?
I don't know.
> What was the lie?
Particular claims made about events and the timing of said events were simply wrong, rather conveniently so. The defense eventually was able to point out the accused was literally living across the country, with solid evidence thereof, at the time of the claimed events.
> Did the liar have to pay the costs incurred?
I don't think said person has any resources to pay. But the accused didn't exactly have much to their name either. It was a mess all around.
I got called up to handle a case in court and had to delete my draft comment. I'm glad I did. I think that this type of first-person experience is often lacking in these discussions.
The true issue is that legacy technology like telephone and US mail are being removed in favor of the surveillance-capitalist dystopia described here. Yes, they read your mail and record your phonecalls, but the new generation of rights abuse is indescribably worse.
Sibling comments mention that the EFF may not be the proper organization for this, but I think that it's valuable to have them in the conversation since they are experts in the policy implications, alternatives, and real impact of this type of user-hostile technology.
I think that it is on the interest of society the inmates are allowed to access things that keep their mental health. Being imprisoned is already punishment enough, isolating them completely from society, relatives and friends is akin to torture, and will surely backfire.
Indeed. Some of this ties into the debate over the purpose of prison (is it to punish or rehabilitate?), but no matter where you fall in that argument, there is one absolute truth:
The vast majority of these people will eventually be released. Even ignoring important issues like ethics, I think it's clearly in society's best interest that they are as healthy as possible when they get out.
If this riles you up and you want to do something, there's a new program at Georgetown opening up for technologists called the Judicial Innovation Fellowship which places tech folks with different jurisdictions to help them improve the system.
It's kind of interesting in this context because it's mostly the tech solutions here that are famously extractive. The old ways of phone calls and letters work well. We don't need technologists, we need politicians.
I agree that a lot of tech solutions are extractive, but a huge amounts of comments on this thread are about the people who are stuck waiting for court dates and who end up stuck in the system because of how slow it is and I think there are ways technology solutions can be used to help speed up the judicial system. No question it also needs politicians (although, I am not sure most voters care about this and might even be more likely to say who cares, lock them up and throw away the key) who are willing to work on real solutions.
Heh, yeah, good. Similarly, Chicago Police Department has denied FOIA requests of people in jail because they claim they'd have to provide the records as a CD.. arguing that the CD could be used as a weapon.
a CD could be snapped and the shards used as a weapon
keep in mind we are talking about things fashioned into weapons to kill other prisoners...the prison warden has an obligation to keep inmates from getting murdered
I knew an inmate in Pennsylvania, the prison system there stopped accepting physical mail if you wanted to write an inmate, you sent a letter to a company in Florida. While their name was also in the address, the letter was to "Smart communications," in a state where you knew they were not located. That's probably the excuse they'd use -- the actual mail is not being sent to the addressee.
(In Florida, the letter was opened and scanned, then transmitted to the prison, where it was printed and delivered. It was always unclear whether it was read and reviewed in Florida or Pennsylvania or both.)
This is the truth. The legal exception is literally carved out in the 13th amendment; the government reserved the right to make slaves of its prisoners.
They lace their mail with spice as a way to smuggle it into prison. You have to live under certain restrictions when you are a prisoner because of the consequences of your actions.
I agree that forcing people to read their mail on only certain devices at certain times under supervision is not a human-being-respectful rule. But there is also the consideration that probably it's there for the reason of preventing drugs from being laced into the mail, even into the very paper.
How about they do the simple step of scanning the mail, and reprinting it for the inmates to receive a physical copy? Of course, then you get into the problem of how much a markup is the shitty jail company going to apply to that.
Drugs are pretty freely available in prison; you buy them from the guards. If that were the problem they were trying to resolve there are other paths to take. It isn't though.
> But there is also the consideration that probably it's there for the reason of preventing drugs from being laced into the mail, even into the very paper.
Nah, my money's on this being the latest in a campaign of depriving prisoners of vices. First they came for the cigarettes.
This is more likely about porn. Some of the most inventive smut I've ever seen was written by/to prisoners. You have to be a real poet laureate to get erotica past dedicated censors without too many redactions.
Moving this correspondence to digital, limited-access kiosks means you don't have any romantic hope to cling to (or jerk off to) back in your cell.
As an EFF supporter I'm a little worried about this phenomenon where nonprofits sprawl out into many unrelated areas. The ACLU, for example, started off very focused on civil liberties but in the Trump era it seemed to generalize into opposing everything Trump did.
Which, I mean, I don't support the average thing that Trump did, but it started to feel like donating money to the ACLU was just the same as donating it to the Democratic Party. And isn't someone else going to be better at spending that money effectively, if your area of expertise is "everything"?
Similarly, here in the Oakland area I was looking for food banks to donate to, but there seems to be no organization that simply provides food to needy people. Everything I could find was like, well the name of our organization is the Oakland Blah Blah Food Bank, but in practice we regrant donor money to many other causes, we do many other things, we don't really just provide food to people.
The EFF has always been deeply interested in the intersection of privacy and the digital world. That has oftentimes manifested as privacy in the digital world, but not always. This is one of those examples. The EFF is saying "privacy and this digital service cannot coexist; the digital service must therefore lose, and we know what we're talking about because we are well-versed in this policy area."
Also, a lot of not-for-profit entities intentionally branch out because such is the nature of helping the group of people they want to help. The term for it is intersectionality. That not-for-profits are heavily siloed is less a matter of intent and more a matter of history. If you are a food bank, you recognize that your intended client base needs food. But, second-order to that, why do they need to come to you? Is it because they need a job? Well, they're already here, so why not engage in skills enhancement and training? And since you'll be at the city council anyway doing advocacy for access to food, why not also advocate for more housing? If those continue to be siloed, you wind up with three separate groups, working at separate-but-related aims, each with their own overhead and inefficiencies.
It's vertical integration, in the not-for-profit advocacy space.
It opposed everything trump did because Trump is a vile person who doesn't want equal civil rights for everyone, thus his clashes with the ACLU. He is a racist psychopath who needed to be fought on every front. ACLU is closely aligned with democrats because it supports civil rights and equality unlike the current iteration of the republican party (at least most of it, I know a few libertarian types who respect civil and personal rights as well)
Point of order: Is it not possible that Trump in particular just stood in opposition to the ACLU's worldview/mission statement? For that matter, they're not really keen on some of Biden's immigration policies either.
A large chunk of the visible mainstream Republican platform is not very civil liberty friendly at this point, and the Dems have not been let entirely off the hook.
"The American Civil Liberties Union is our nation's guardian of liberty, working daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country."
Readit News
The Innocent Project estimates that 1% of all prisoners are innocent. Hard to say if that number is accurate, but go ahead and cut it in half if you like. 0.5%. Doesn't seem like a lot in percentage terms. But of the 850 people in the jail system that the EFF is talking about here, that means at least 4 people are innocent and can't even receive a letter. Imagine if that was you. Man, it's hard to imagine. It's hard to even imagine.
"Nationwide, over 500,000 people are incarcerated in county jails like the one in Redwood City, 427,000 of whom have not been found guilty and are still awaiting trial." Apply that same 0.5% here, and that's 2,135 people. There are literally thousands of innocent people in the prison system. Thousands. A bus seats like 50 people. Imagine 40 buses full of innocent people going to jail, and that's the reality we live in.
Nitpick: that's 427,000 innocent people incarcerated, not 2,135. They all deserve the presumption of innocence.
It's worse than this.
The Innocence Project estimates 2-10% of convictions are wrongful.
But even worse, many of the people we're talking about are still awaiting trial-- presumably they are innocent at a greater rate than those convicted.
"Awaiting trial" or even "Awaiting details of the charges to be hammered out" seem to be depressingly time unrestricted. I sat in on some of the hearings, and there was a lot of "Well, we're not ready, can we push this out for 2 weeks?" sort of scheduling going on.
The person I'm familiar with this from basically spent 2 months in jail (not prison, apparently the difference is that prison is nicer, jail is really just a holding tank) on false charges that were then dropped as they were "literally impossible." He wasn't in the state when the claimed events happened.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/26/us/peter-mcwilliams-dies-...
And, of course, innocent or not, there's merit in the argument of whether they should be able to receive mail, have actual physical books in their possession, and so on.
This is exactly why I find the death penalty unconscionable. 1,567 people have been executed in the US since the 1970s (https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/executions-overview). How many of them were wrongfully convicted? If someone is wrongfully imprisoned, at least we can let them out when they are exonerated - damaged, but with a chance to rejoin society. That's not the case with the death penalty. Without a perfect justice system, which is unattainable, the death penalty will take the lives of innocent people.
PIMA had an interview with a sheriff recently. The figure that stood out to me was when he said it takes an average of 1.8 years for people in his jail to finally get to trial.
1.8 years in jail before they even decide if you're guilty. Hard to even imagine.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/chicagos-renegade-sheriff-w...
This is an outrage.
People don't "imagine if that was you" because they KNOW it would not happen to them.
And it's even more bizarre to think that's just how it works.
Saying "at least 4" is pretty misleading here, since you're assuming the 0.5% is perfectly distributed. That estimate could be accurate without a single innocent in these specific 850.
Given that this is a jail and not a prison, these people are mostly awaiting trial. From a certain point of view (innocent until proven guilty), most of these people are innocent and they can't even get a letter.
The fact is that these are fellow humans who are suffering, not because we decided as a society that this was what justice means, nor because this was the result of some study that figured out this would decrease recidivism, but just because some for profit institution decided they wanted to do something that would directly result in them suffering. That is enough for me to support this lawsuit.
I've had the recent displeasure of seeing the jail system far more up close than I'd prefer (from the outside, someone lied and someone I know well ended up in jail for a few months, left with all charges dropped). It's an absolutely vile system, and letters were one of the very few ways one could actually have long form conversations without paying through the nose.
Every aspect of the system is designed to extract money from those outside. You want to send messages? Great, install this app, add money (of course, a bunch of what you put in goes to mandatory fees for the privilege of putting money in), and then it ends up with pay-per-message with character limits (remember $0.25/text?), via an app that is... very permissions-grabby.
Should you want to send money through the fee system for them to buy things at the internal store, you pay your fees, and then can either pay online via a "We need to know everything about you" app, or at an in person kiosk, which tries to collect all the same information, including a photo of you, your driver's license, and whatever else they can grab.
Should you want to set up a video chat, you have to agree to a EULA that, among other things, includes "We will voiceprint anyone on the call and share that with law enforcement, and we will try to biometrically identify your facial features and do the same." And it's $7+ for 30 minutes.
Of course, it's all logged and analyzed.
I understand the need to keep communications somewhat monitored, but it feels far more like a blatant cash grab than anything else, which, given for-profit prisons, it almost certainly is.
So, of course, the one thing that bypassed this (letters were opened, read, anything useful like tape on them was removed, etc) has to go away. Because how dare someone be able to actually interact with people outside. If they do that, why, they might not come right back in on release! And that would be Bad for Profits.
Cram 80 people in a room built for 20? That's fine. Let them actually read letters? Can't have that!
My opinion of the prison system was fairly low to start with, and it rather exceeded my expectations for just how utterly evil the whole thing is, through and through.
One of very few times I've seen her genuinely pissed off was after attempting to deal with some of the tech support for this system, because money ended up in the "wrong account" (via all the dark patterns you can imagine for the methods of donating), and the only way to move it was more or less for her to provide DNA samples to the prison (despite having nothing to do with anything) - it was that much information that they wanted to "maybe be able to help."
The system is designed to extract money at all costs, and they seem very, very good at doing so, via hook or by crook.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/nyregion/rikers-detainees...
What's notably bad about this one?
I've been regularly donating to the EFF for years, and one of the things I love about them is that I've never received junk mail as a result (that I know of). They send out periodic newsletter-type email, but unsubscribing from them is easy and actually works.
Most groups, if you send money to support them, seem to then turn around and sell your info to every other group on the planet that might be related, on the "We got a live one!" list or something. It's impressive to watch, but it's also kept me from donating to certain groups, because it's such a royal pain to get off these lists. It typically takes 3-4 "Please take me off your list!" requests to get anywhere to listen, and a few groups have ignored me so long that I've resorted to Sharpie obscenities scrawled on their return mail to get my point across. Some don't even listen then.
But I could probably heat my house on the amount of "THIS OUTRAGE IS HAPPENING AND HERE IS A LOT OF... (over, please) INFORMATION ABOUT WHY YOU SHOULD BE UPSET AND... (next page please) WILL YOU DONATE????????" junk I get.
I have a standing policy of not giving anything to groups that insult me by putting "directions of how to read a multi-page letter" at the bottom, though. It's a thing on almost everything I receive.
> were charges filed against the liar?
I don't know.
> What was the lie?
Particular claims made about events and the timing of said events were simply wrong, rather conveniently so. The defense eventually was able to point out the accused was literally living across the country, with solid evidence thereof, at the time of the claimed events.
> Did the liar have to pay the costs incurred?
I don't think said person has any resources to pay. But the accused didn't exactly have much to their name either. It was a mess all around.
The true issue is that legacy technology like telephone and US mail are being removed in favor of the surveillance-capitalist dystopia described here. Yes, they read your mail and record your phonecalls, but the new generation of rights abuse is indescribably worse.
Sibling comments mention that the EFF may not be the proper organization for this, but I think that it's valuable to have them in the conversation since they are experts in the policy implications, alternatives, and real impact of this type of user-hostile technology.
Dead Comment
The vast majority of these people will eventually be released. Even ignoring important issues like ethics, I think it's clearly in society's best interest that they are as healthy as possible when they get out.
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/tech-institute/initiatives/ge...
a CD could be snapped and the shards used as a weapon
keep in mind we are talking about things fashioned into weapons to kill other prisoners...the prison warden has an obligation to keep inmates from getting murdered
(In Florida, the letter was opened and scanned, then transmitted to the prison, where it was printed and delivered. It was always unclear whether it was read and reviewed in Florida or Pennsylvania or both.)
How about they do the simple step of scanning the mail, and reprinting it for the inmates to receive a physical copy? Of course, then you get into the problem of how much a markup is the shitty jail company going to apply to that.
Nah, my money's on this being the latest in a campaign of depriving prisoners of vices. First they came for the cigarettes.
This is more likely about porn. Some of the most inventive smut I've ever seen was written by/to prisoners. You have to be a real poet laureate to get erotica past dedicated censors without too many redactions.
Moving this correspondence to digital, limited-access kiosks means you don't have any romantic hope to cling to (or jerk off to) back in your cell.
Which, I mean, I don't support the average thing that Trump did, but it started to feel like donating money to the ACLU was just the same as donating it to the Democratic Party. And isn't someone else going to be better at spending that money effectively, if your area of expertise is "everything"?
Similarly, here in the Oakland area I was looking for food banks to donate to, but there seems to be no organization that simply provides food to needy people. Everything I could find was like, well the name of our organization is the Oakland Blah Blah Food Bank, but in practice we regrant donor money to many other causes, we do many other things, we don't really just provide food to people.
Also, a lot of not-for-profit entities intentionally branch out because such is the nature of helping the group of people they want to help. The term for it is intersectionality. That not-for-profits are heavily siloed is less a matter of intent and more a matter of history. If you are a food bank, you recognize that your intended client base needs food. But, second-order to that, why do they need to come to you? Is it because they need a job? Well, they're already here, so why not engage in skills enhancement and training? And since you'll be at the city council anyway doing advocacy for access to food, why not also advocate for more housing? If those continue to be siloed, you wind up with three separate groups, working at separate-but-related aims, each with their own overhead and inefficiencies.
It's vertical integration, in the not-for-profit advocacy space.
A large chunk of the visible mainstream Republican platform is not very civil liberty friendly at this point, and the Dems have not been let entirely off the hook.
"The American Civil Liberties Union is our nation's guardian of liberty, working daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country."
That sounds a lot like the position of the Republican Liberty Caucus. https://rlc.org/statement-of-principles-positions/