https://www.thenation.com/article/society/ssi-rules-families-poverty/
The Supplemental Security Income program (SSI) was created in 1972 under the Nixon administration to provide financial support to low-income seniors and disabled people. An effort to federalize state-level adult support programs across the country, SSI is a means-tested program—there are financial requirements to be eligible. In the case of SSI, as of its last adjustment in 1989, enrollees cannot have savings of more than $2,000 as an individual or $3,000 as a family. Furthermore, SSI beneficiaries are prohibited from having retirement accounts, life insurance policies, certain types of personal property, funeral/burial policies, and access to other types of income.
[emphasis mine]
OMG I’m gonna test some means! 
These fucking limits that are enacted without mandatory, automatic inflation adjustments really just gives up how much of a sham this country is. Even at the best of times, these “solutions” were just never intended to be supported.
unrelated anecdote about damage limits in criminal statutes
I knew somebody who the cops charged with a fucking 3rd degree misdemeanor over breaking a window while they were drunk - which they’d already paid for - because the bill was >500$ and that was the limit PA had set IN 1991 or earlier (that was the earliest version of the statute with a digitized copy available). Thankfully we got it thrown out, almost certainly because they were white.
Same thing happens with some kinds of theft and shoplifting charges. When the limits were set they were worth vastly more. With inflation the limits are now trivial amounts of money compared to what they were intended to be. But hey, more slave labor for the state amirite?
The charge categories are becoming less and less relevant as it’s getting more and more likely that they just summarily execute you
Word. Anyone who looks at US convictions and sees that something like 98% of federal convictions and 95% of state convictions are obtained via plea bargains? That’s not a legal system, that’s forced confessions. “I don’t give a shit if you did it. Sign the paper and you get two years plus probation. Force this to go to trial and you get 10 years. Now sign.”
If this was an “in bad country” thing everyone would assume those rates were gotten under torture. Like America is so efficient we don’t even bother with show trials, we just force them to confess and send them to prison.
The threat of a long sentence at the end of a trial if you lose is one aspect, but the really insidious part is that you’ll probably spend longer locked up (in pre-trial detention) regardless of whether you are found innocent, compared to just taking the plea bargain.
Right to a speedy trial*
*On a geological timescale
You pretty much always have to waive that right in order to do anything more than accept the first plea bargain in a case. Even negotiating for a better plea they make you waive it, because everything takes so long. Took me like almost a year of pre-trial supervision before we finally reached a plea I felt I could take. I did fuck up though, so I definitely wasn’t going to take it to trial if I could avoid it. I can’t imagine how horrid the process is for those innocent or being charged with ridiculous charges. It was bad enough living in that hell knowing that I’d fucked up and deserved some sort of justice applied against me. Thankfully I pulled my head out of my ass, sobered up, and funny enough, once I wasn’t drunk all the time, my left leanings came flooding back in a wave of memories as I could think again and I went even further left than I was before I got pulled into hedonism.
You have the right to a speedy trial, and you’ll only get the evidence through discovery the day before the trial commences.
Yeah. There’ve been so many maddening, terrifying stories of people, kids, being held in pre-trial detention of years, or even dying, because
“they’re a flight risk”.
and often people in county lockup are postively wistful for DOC prison time. 23/7 lockdown, often maximum security facilities and because of overcrowding, 3 or 4 to a cell
obviously don’t get me started on jails in the desert states of the U.S.
it’s designed to break you even though you are technically “innocent until proven guilty”
In Norway they have a queueing system (
) where you can be sentenced to prison but put on a waitlist until a slot opens up.
It can really fuck with people because they don’t know when the government is going to pick them up and chuck them in prison (only that it will happen in the next couple of years)
What’s even the point? If they’re not enough of a threat to society to be immediately isolated then this is just pure sadism.
Perfectly efficient technocratic sadism
I always get into arguments with people trying to do the “East Asian (usually Japan in the past, sometimes China now due to the propaganda push) countries legal systems are so draconian, 99% conviction rate omg” thing because when you look at things from a material perspective, the “someone in the government with relevant authority decided you might have done a crime, do you end up in prison as a result?” rates aren’t higher than in the US, they’re lower.
In China prosecutors drop cases that don’t looks like they’re going to result in conviction. In Japan, cases that aren’t a lock just don’t get an indictment in the first place. In Japan or China you can be judged likely innocent by the system and not lower the conviction rate while you can be deemed guilty in the US without raising the rate.
It’s entirely "bizarre and mysterious orient " shit.
Right? It’s so incredibly ass over teakettle 1984 catch-22 the matrix simulacra and simlution schniff schniff ideology that it’s absolutely maddening!
As if through the power of complicated accounting and terminology one can change reality. “Well mine is called a plea bargain so it’s not really a conviction.”