Prisons in the USA are for-profit enterprises that rely on a consistent population. They have no incentive to rehabilitate, in fact it's the opposite. What I don't understand is how a country with so many advantages like the USA could come up with arguably the worst prison system in the world. As a citizen, it's embarrassing that this is accepted by those in power as a good solution.
Private prisons are problematic in their own right, but they only make up 8% of the total prison population at the state and federal level. imo, we (the citizens) are to blame for constantly championing a system of accountability that believes accountability is putting a man in a box and taking every future opportunity he doesn't know yet away from him. You can certainly blame those in power, and they share some blame, but we also elect to these sentences.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in...
I said "prisons...are for-profit enterprises", not "prisons are privately owned". Government-owned prisons still rely on, and provide revenue to, companies specifically designed to profit from the prison population.
That’s true of everything in an economy. It’s also true that Norway’s prisons rely on, and provide revenue to, companies specifically designed to profit from the prison population. Is a prison suddenly better if a government worker builds the bars rather than a contractor?
I agree with your one example and disagree with the thousands of others designed to profit off of incarcerated individuals instead of rehabilitate them.
Ok. If there are thousands, can you give three examples of companies that are designed to profit off of incarcerated individuals rather than rehabilitate them?
I'm not defending this. It's not an argument, it's a fact. If you're not afraid of the idea, look it up. Part of the problem here is never bucking back against what we've been taught and doing our own exploration.
I'm asking for facts. Surely if there are thousands of examples, three exploitative companies shouldn’t be too difficult to find.
I think this describes the issue k1ns is referring to:https://corpaccountabilitylab.org/calblog/2020/8/5/private-c...
The next year, 111 inmates continued to produce “decorated party balloons” for MINNCOR, according to NCIA’s database. Large contracts such as this, coupled with correctional industries wages of between $0.50 and $2.00 per hour, allowed MINNCOR to make a profit of over $13 million in 2019.
Also relevant:https://minncorprod.blob.core.windows.net/files/MINNCOR%20In...
I'm actually having trouble squaring the claim from corpaccountabilitylab.org of an average of $.50 - $2/hr and what MINNCOR claims which is an average of $14.20/hr. The leading value of MINNCOR industries is to have the industrial programs pay for the prison system, thereby not passing new taxes onto residents. The only way that I can think to measure whether that system is healthy or not is to determine if it can both scaledownand scaleup. If it can't scale down, then they will indeed be incentivized to incarcerate new people.
Also of note, MINNCOR continues to employ people on release. From the report: 172 released + 753 incarcerated = 925 total active participants. The low of self-reported wages is $10/hr, the high is $22.38.
Agreed. It's not "powers that be" that impose this system on Americans, it's we Americans ourselves. We vote for politicians who are tough on crime - meaning long prison sentences, unsafe conditions, no robust public defense.
All true, but we also don’t rehabilitate. Prisoners should come out better then they went in not worse.
We are in agreement. I could have added "... prioritize retribution with rehabilitation at best an afterthought"
My main concern exactly.
Private prisons are problematic in their own right, but they only make up 8% of the total prison population
It's not how many people they are in charge of that matters, but how much money they donate to politicians to be be "tough on crime", and how much other soft money influence they have to make citizens think that crime is a problem that politicians need to be tough on, and to demonise politicians who aren't (which right-wing media is all too happy to help with).
Even if private prisons only have a small slice of the prison pie, they still work hard to make the pie as big as possible.
how a country ... like the USA could come up with arguably the worst prison system in the world
I will leave you with this quote by John Erlichman:
"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, (...) We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Source:https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
Background:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman
And, because everything is complicated, the family denies it all:
The 1994 alleged ‘quote’ we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him,” the Ehrlichman family wrote. “We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father’s death, when dad can no longer respond. None of us have raised our kids that way, and that’s because we were not raised that way.”
Source:https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...
One of the several hundred thousand nazis, erm German refugees, the Eisenhower administration brought here in 1953. This was much larger than operation paperclip. The GOP reloaded with that cohort. Their descendants are still wrecking havoc upon our country. I'm sure some come and have done well for us but many are trouble. That huge S&L scandal back in the late 80s was by some of them.
Ehrlichman was born in the US though, so I'm not sure where you take the Nazi part from?
USA loved the nazis up until they made a peace treaty with stalin and war with france and england…
What are you talking about? Ehrlichman was born in the US in 1925.
Could you provide more info on this? I haven’t heard of this before. I don’t doubt it’s true, I’d just like to see more about it.
Regarding Ehrlichman specifically, his Wikipedia page says he fought for the US during WWII, and his father died serving in the Canadian military in 1940 (when Canada was fighting, but the US was not).
So it seems pretty low to call him a Nazi.
One thing has become abundantly clear over the last few years: people in politics regularly do things that go against their most cherished beliefs when it is politically expedient. Those that hold out are notable for how rare they are, and it frequently ends their political career.
Serious question: does this come from real first hand experience of knowledge of the issue or are you simply repeating the NYT/the Atlantic/Vox etc.?
My understanding is that about 8% of US prisons are privately owned. Perhaps that's not a good thing, but I don't think it is at all correct to say that "prisons in the USA are for-profit enterprise" when the actual number is so low.
I have also heard this narrative for a long time that the prisons were filled mostly with non-violent drug offenders, only to learn that this description only applies to about 3.5% of the prison population. Maybe that's not a good thing either, but again I feel like I have been intentionally deceived after reading supposedly high-minded journalism into believing a fundamentally false understanding of what is going on.
Yes, my introduction to the world of commercial software development was an internship at a company that built products for prisons.
To be clear, I said "prisons...are for-profit enterprises", not "all prisons are privately owned". Even state-owned prisons are cash cows for the prison industry. I'm not interested in what narrative you identify with, I'm stating a fact.
Well that's true of literally every thing that is made and every service delivered. There's an absolutely huge industry build around primary education that dwarfs the prison industry by a significant margin.
Actually prisons and schools have quite a lot in common so maybe you're onto something.
I'm glad you brought up the public education system. One is designed to instill knowledge and nurture young minds (public schools) while the other is designed to make sure you come back (prisons).
The criticism of private prisons (or the prison industrial complex) in general is more than just referring to privately owned and run prisons, its referring to prisons, jails, detention facilities, psychiatric hospitals, private security and guards, transportation and logistics, health care services, surveillance and other technology providers, food/commissary/library services, communication/phone services, cash bail creditors, etc. etc. all run for-profit.
The other issue is more in general about having incarceration rates that are "four to six times that of its high-income peers in Europe and Asia". So you might recognize that as an issue too and think perhaps its the privatized prison system, the root causes for crime like inequality, disenfranchisement, homelessness, the reasons for drug use in the first place, or even just perhaps switching to an evidence-based rehabilitation system.
But now imagine you are a liberal, you need a way to acknowledge and talk about these problems without ever actually having to change anything. So that's why liberal journalists are talking about non-violent drug offenders and the 8.41% private prison population and so Biden stopped the justice department from renewing contracts for federal private prisons and he pardoned all prisoners of federal non-violent marijuana possession charges. Of course it doesn't actually do anything, but that was the point. And that's what liberalism is.
As a citizen
Of where?
I, as a lawful citizen of the United States of America, amnotembarrassed by the prison system.
Iamembarrassed, however, by folks who use hyperbole without merit to try and appease the masses without having the courage to go against the grain for fear of getting "downvoted" and losing faked internet points.
The fact that you believe the USA has the worst prison system in the world, compared to somewhere like, I dunno, Venezuela, supports my prior point.
This has nothing to do with "fake internet points" and everything to do with firsthand experience that most citizens lack completely.
You chastise those that "appease the masses" but mention Venezuela's prison system. How much firsthand experience do you have with Venezuela's prison system? My wager is that your concept of their prison system is based on articles specifically designed to "appease the masses".
As it turns out, Maine (where the author of the article ended up) has gotten rid of all their for-profit prisons, as of 2020.
A very small number of prisons are for profit and advocates of being soft on criminals love to push the idea that they make up a majority, just as you implied.
Prisons in the USA are for-profit enterprises
About 7-8% of US jail and prisoners inmates are in for-profit correctional institutions, most are in public institutions which are not operated for profit.
Private, for profit prisons are an issue, but they are very much not the norm in the US.
So he chose to go back to a life of crime and we’re supposed to feel bad for him? There’s a reason he was able to make 20k in a weekend, it’s a high risk high reward business and I have no sympathy for someone who skirts societal norms and makes a shit ton of money in the process while plenty of people suck it up and earn the 10.50 until they can get back out in their own. This guy and his entire post reeks of entitlement, beginning with “non-violent drug offenses” in the first paragraph.
That’s an opinion, he wasn’t arrested for possession in reality he made a ton of money selling dangerous drugs to kids. Maybe they should be legal, some of that I agree with (I spent a lot of my late teens and early twenties in jail or on probation for simple possession and have a felony to this day for it) but that doesn’t mean you should be able to peddle chemicals you don’t understand in large quantities. Your upbringing being bad doesn’t make that okay either.
He's not asking for sympathy. The entire article is about how he ended up where he is now, how the prison he's at now has saved him from a life of crime by giving him a meaningful chance at a career, that this is an anomaly, and that it shouldn't be.
I'm wondering if one of the factors here is that the public is funding this opportunity, and that many, many non-criminal members of that public are doing the $10.50/h thing with no such support and very limited opportunity.
If I were to choose between (a) getting such a funding/opportunity but having to spend 10 years in jail to qualify for it, or (b) not getting this funding and staying free, I’d certainly pick (b), even if my only alternative was a minimum wage job.
I’d also argue that the reason for the public to fund such opportunities is not primarily an act of humanity, but it’s rather a long-term “investment” into lowering overall recidivism rates. That being said, one way to look at it is that the public is not fundinghim, but it’s funding its own interests.
No disagreement here. The main thrust of my comment was the observation that perceived fairness is a powerful psychological factor and that it might be at play in discussions like this one.
> that many, many non-criminal members of that public are doing the $10.50/h thing with no such support and very limited opportunity.
Yes, there must exist unskilled, low-paying labor -- but therealsomust exist ample opportunity for education and self-betterment for (almost) ALL individuals.
The most heinous of persons excepted, of course.
I don't think it really matters if you feel bad for him or not, and focusing on that aspect does more harm than good. I think, given a choice between living in a fucked-up halfway house with your only prospect for the future being a shitty minimum-wage job, or falling back into your old crimes where you can make pretty solid bank doing illegal things (yes, with high risk)... most people would probably pick the latter.
I absolutely agree that "non-violent drug offenses" is a cop-out when describing high-volume drug dealing. Maybe he wasn't directly violent, but dealers like him directly contribute to dragging many more people into addiction, violence, and even death. I don't think people should be jailed (or even punished) for simple possession, but dealing -- especially on a large scale -- well, that's a different matter.
But ultimately what I really care about is outcomes. The bottom line is that it doesn't matter what wewantsomeone to choose when they get out of prison. If we don't provide a compelling path for an ex-con to go straight, that's just us shooting ourselves in our feet. If that means spending more time and money housing someone in actually good conditions, and providing them direct access to higher education and better job opportunities, so be it. Ultimately that ends up being a lot cheaper for taxpayers than what we're doing now. And we get a much healthier society in the bargain.
Acting punitive toward convicts and ex-cons doesn't help anyone. It doesn't help the person involved, and it especially doesn't help ourselves.
You’re saying if only we’d given this particular guy more free stuff he wouldn’t have gone back to flipping carfentanil for $20k a weekend? That seems pretty far-fetched.
I agree. But society has a hard time accepting that rehabilitating people with criminal records is more useful than punishing them.
Guilty once, guilty forever right? You're defined by your lowest moment and surely can never come back from it ; and surely serving your sentence is never enough to be allowed a second chance.
There's not a mention asking for sympathy in there. It's mostly factual, and explanatory of his experience. And the fact that giving opportunities to convicts to educate themselves and find their way seems a much better solution than just educating them to gang life.
*guilty twice
I agree with you that just on the basis of this piece, he does not sound accountable and can appreciate given what you've shared about your own history why it might be particularly frustrating. At the same time, there are factual elements of the story that deeply bother me about the way we treat those who have previously transgressed. I believe that we do need systems of accountability, but I also believe that our current system is broken beyond repair and is not ultimately effective. Or rather it can only be effective if we collectively agree to condemn a certain class of people as criminals and therefore deserving of treatment we would never accept of non criminals. We would all do well to remember our own incredible good fortune in life.
Of course there are people in prison who are a menace to public safety and must be dealt with. And there must be consequences for harmful behavior even when it is "nonviolent" (which is a word that diminishes non-physical harm). But I truly struggle to understand how it is a good idea to segregate all the people who have previously transgressed, deny them opportunities for betterment and fully initiate them into criminal life.
He was convicted of possessing 30 grams of carfentanil while on parole for his previous conviction. A lethal dose of carfentanil is 2mg, so it was at least 15,000 doses.
1.https://www.doj.nh.gov/news/2017/20171011-preston-thorpe-sen...
Fuck me, carfentanil is one of those things I read about years ago, that seemed like it wouldneverget anywhere near the recreational drug market, because it’s just too potent and too dangerous to handle safely…
Ah, I see from your link it was u-47700 he was arrested with. Certainly a potent and potentially lethal substance, but not exactly on the same scale as carfentanil. U-47700 is quoted as 7.5x the potency of morphine, fentanyl at 50-100x and carfentanil around 4000
Apologies. I read a news article about him being charged with carfentanil possession and assumed the conviction referred to that. Apparently the carfentanil was found in his apartment and he was later caught with the other synthetic opioid.
Well, god help whoever gets that in their syringe. AFAICT its main 'legit' use was to bring down large animals like elephants, fast, but that seems to have stopped in 2003. It has also probably been used as a chemical weapon in Russia!
I guess it was the next logical step in the "smaller quantities of more powerful stuff are easier to smuggle" race, but I'd expect to see more dealers turning up dead from accidental exposure if it became widespread.
Did you mean 30 kilograms?
2 milligrams * 15000 = 30 grams
There are plenty more, like me, that are capable of being responsible, productive, tax paying members of society if given the opportunity, but you cannot expect anyone to change when you just lock them up in a cage with a bunch of other criminals where there is a subculture of endless negativity.
Of course they expect inmates to change, but towards even more criminality, not towards rehabilitation. This will justify them for being inmates in the first place (and thus the existence of the model) and justify them to come back later. It's a very profitable business model.
The whole article is fantastic though.
Of course they expect inmates to change, but towards even more criminality, not towards rehabilitation.
Who is "they"?
Those that profit off of the prison system, whether it be the ecosystem of companies supporting the system or those that are employed by it.
This is an incredible post, and I encourage everyone to read it.
I wish I knew better how to help incarcerated people. Based on the Norway(?) model, I feel like help would reduce return rates, but I don't know how to go about it.
Recidivism rates are astonishingly high in all countries. Norway has the lowest at 20% within 2 years. The real rate is higher because most crimes aren’t solved. So in the best case, rehabilitation makes someone 300x more likely to commit crime than the average Norwegian.
It's unfair to say it "makes" them that way. They were incarcerated because they already proved willing to commit a crime. It failed to change them back into an average citizen, sure. Understandably a very difficult problem. It's quite possible that it makes them worse instead of better but we'd need different evidence to show that.
The average citizen in every country is already willing to commit a crime. The difference between the average criminal and you is a couple of meals.
No amount of missed meals will make me commit a rape, a murder, or other heinous crimes.
If you honestly believe this, you've never been truly hungry. Most to all people will kill for food.
While that's probably true, I don't really see its relevance. I'm fairly certain that exactly zero of the people spending prison time for murder in my country committed murder because they were hungry.
I'm open to the possibility that the situation may be different in other countries, but I strongly doubt it's a leading cause pretty much anywhere.
Well, as Lord Beaverbrook might have said, we've already established that we're all potential criminals. All we're haggling about now is the threshold that would cause us to commit a crime.
Without having lived the lives of others, you simply don't know if you would have committed the same (or worse) crimes in their situation. That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't punish crimes, but to imagine that you're a better person than most criminals is just self-flattery.
There is a very famous American Buddhist monk called "Ajahn Geoff" who teaches this exact thing. Most people WILL commit heinous acts under the pressure of starvation. (And that's why he and other Buddhist monastics urge the taking of the Buddhist moral precepts).
Maybe not for you, but what if your son/daughter was missing meals? Moreover, you canseeother people eating just fine, and no one will hire you? Also consider that the people you "murder" likely "had it coming" and were rapists, terrorists, blasphemers, or otherwise cultural heretics...until and unless you've been in those exact situations, it's incredulous that you'd not do what many other humans would do/have done.
People who say they wouldn’t murder people for food are saints. I would definitely do it. I like living more than I like other people living.
However, I wouldn’t murder anyone in anyone in a modern civilized society. Why not just use social services? And if that doesn’t exist, then steal. Even if you’re caught they’ll be obligated to give you food.
Society needs to devolve to far far below what is the US standard before murder becomes a reasonable solution to food problems.
So you steal and the person tries to murder you. Do you defend yourself? Even a push can knock the person over, hitting their head. Congratulations, you are a murderer.
I think it was pretty clear we were all talking about intentional crimes, not crimes of passion or accident or even negligence.
So unless I know the core of your argument, I’m not sure how to respond to this digression.
You don't know this. You can "imagine" how you'd react in a theoretical situation all you like, but It's like the first time you go skydiving - sure you know the safety record and you've got a parachute/reserve but until you get thrown out of a moving plane at 14,000 feet in the air, you have no idea whether you're going to react calmly or completely freak out.
Likewise until you're actually in a life and death situation, you don't know what you're truly capable of.
Not knowing the answer to these questions makes me wonder at who I am sometimes. How would I react to being thrown from a plane, a gun to my head, starving on the street. I thank God I haven't had to experience those things, but I still wonder at what kind of man I am.
you'll never get that "different evidence", how are you going to set up a control
I agree that it's difficult. Sometimes there are natural experiments that already happened.
Not everyone who is incarcerated committed a crime. Some are in custody for having marijuana which has since been decriminalized in some areas. Others are there because they plea bargained due to pressure. Almost no one who is in custody ever had a trial despite this being a “right” in the USA.
We're talking about averages here. Certainly there are plenty of individuals wrongly incarcerated, etc.
By that logic, the worst possible recidivism rate (surely 100%) would make someone 1500x more likely to commit crime than a non-offender. That’s still a pretty good case for having effective rehabilitation (unless you insist on the death sentence for all prisonable offences)
You don’t have to execute them, just lock them up until they’re too old to be a threat.
I’ve been a victim of violent crime at least a dozen times in my life. I wasn’t the first victim for any of my attackers. Far from it. And I wasn’t the last. Every single one of them escaped. They probably got caught on some other occasion, and maybe they spent some time in prison for that crime. And then they got out and continued robbing and assaulting innocent people. They’ll keep doing this as long as they are physically able.
I don’t really care what happens to them, because they’re basically constantly-exploding bombs that force the rest of us to pay more in taxes for police, invest in more security systems, avoid certain areas at certain times, and generally worry about safety much more than we otherwise would. Most criminals have been given countless chances to not commit crime, and they keep doing it. The sooner they’re separated from society, the better off we’ll all be.
I’ve been a victim of violent crime at least a dozen times in my life.
I can't think of a way to say this without sounding insensitive, but have you considered moving?
I've moved lots of times. In terms of crime, the SF bay area was by far the worst. The Bronx was second-worst, but I hear it's gotten a lot better since I lived there. Portland has gotten pretty bad over the past few years but at least I can legally carry a gun there.
When you're 5'6" and 120lbs, criminals will target you.
You should try Europe or Australia. The worst I've ever experienced is having someone break and enter while I wasn't there. I have lived in what could be considered less than savoury areas in Sydney and have stayed all over Europe and the world (as a digital nomad, currently at 45 countries).
And you won't feel the need to carry a gun...
I wasn't born in the US. I've lived in other countries. There are other disadvantages to places like Europe or Australia (or Japan or China, where I've also spent time) that make the tradeoff not worth it to me. The biggest issue is that you'll always be a foreigner. Even if you jump through the hoops to become a citizen, you won't be accepted the same way that Americans accept immigrants. US conservatives are painted as disliking immigrants, but that's only true for immigrants who don't culturally assimilate. Conservatives have no problem electing immigrants like Winsome Sears, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Young Kim. The mayor of Helena, Montana is a refugee from Liberia. The state with the most foreign-born governors is Georgia. Anyone who claimed that these people aren't "real Americans" would be shunned and shamed across the political spectrum.
There's also the issue of employment and compensation. My skills are worth far less in other countries. I make over $250k/year in compensation, and my taxes are low enough that I've managed to accumulate "fuck you" money before the age of 40. I could retire, but I want to maximize my family's quality of life. It'd also be nice to have an aircraft and a cabin on some land in the middle of nowhere. My chances of accomplishing those goals in another country are much lower. (I'll probably have the cabin in a few years. The aircraft... well, we'll see.)
If I wanted to move to an area with low crime, I could choose from plenty of places in the US. I don't live in those places because, similar to other countries, I'd have to take a massive pay cut. As remote work becomes more commonplace, that could change.
Interesting points. Yeah, it is pretty funny hearing conservatives being called Nazis and fascists all the time. In many ways America is already living the Star Trek future. Well, except for the UBI. (You'll probably get that soon though, the robots are just about done cooking.)
I heard you can get a used Cessna for $15k. But maybe you want something fancy ;)
This is shocking. Where have you lived that this is so common for you?
I just got out after 10 years. I work with a lot of people just coming out (just been helping a guy locked up for 40 years, he's doing great).
The biggest issue is that 95% of them will be returned within a few months. Drugs is the main cause. You get out, you have no ID, no job, no family, no friends. You're stuck in a halfway house that is just like being in prison (lots of rules, line up for meal service etc). All the other guys there have a ton of drugs and you swear you won't touch them, but then you do because you're bored and sad. And then you're addicted again. And now you need money to buy more drugs. So you go do something goofy to get money and you get caught and locked up for another 10 piece. Or your parole officer drug tests you and violates your parole and you go do another 3 piece. Or the halfway house owner gets sick of you coming in after 7pm smelling of alcohol so he calls your parole officer and you go do another 3 piece.
Cycle repeats until you die in prison.
The no ID thing is interesting. The article mentions that as a major issue as well. Seems like it'd be a pretty cheap intervention to just issue all out-going prisoners a gov't photo ID on their release.
It is so terribly insane that this isn't done. You are being held by the state. The state has elevated access to state services. How easy would it be for them to hook into the state ID/DMV system and print you a state ID or driver's license before you leave?
If they can't verify your identity while you are in prison, then what are you even doing there?
All they did before I left prison was try to sign me up for Medicaid (I'm not elligible because I'm an illegal immigrant).
They did kindly let me keep my prison ID when I left which has my photo on it and says IN CUSTODY in giant letters. (they used to say INMATE but that word has gone out of fashion and they couldn't think of another word to use on the badges)
they used to say INMATE but that word has gone out of fashion
Is this due to some kind of “political correctness” thing coming from well meaning people outside the system that the system is pleased to accommodate for easy brownie points, or are there distinct-enough tiers of people inside the system that “inmate” isn’t useful?
I feel like it grew from within the system (where change isn't possible) until it was picked up by those outside the system who would articulate the change.
I was mostly locked up in pre-trial detention and "inmate" has a serious connotation of conviction behind it, so it was considered especially ugly and demeaning there, where the acceptable term is "detainee."
Here are some quick reads on the issue:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/04/12/i-am-not-your-...
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/04/12/what-words-we-...
There are reasonable suggestions for organizations to support, at the bottom of the post.
Yes, though supporting an organization always feels like expecting someone else to do the hard work. I'd like to do more.
Recidiviz is hiring:https://angel.co/company/recidiviz/jobs
Apropos of nothing, that jobs site is technically-challenged. Recidiviz has 2 jobs posted, but looking at the filters, there are apparently 3 available in NYC or SF (and no "remote" filter, despite the fact that both jobs are listed as remote, NYC, or SF).
Have you considered writing to some of these organizations and asking them if you can volunteer your time?
I could have been that guy, and worse.
When I was 19 I got caught selling a bunch of MDMA at a night club. Undercover police caught me, and by God's grace they chose to let me go.
MDMA had just begun to carry a minimum 10 yr prison sentence throughout the state.
I had no idea what I was doing in my life, like I was asleep and not awake, until I got caught that night.
About 15 minutes into the interrogation at the scene, Officer Garcia - I still remember him - knowing my mental state of panic and realization of reality, said to me "You know, when I was your age I did the same thing, and I was forgiven and let go. So what I'm going to do is forgive you and let you go this time. Go home, and don't ever do this again."
I drove home at about half the speed limit that night, trying to process what had happened. First time I had experienced such forgiveness and mercy.
The aim of my life now is to maximize the amount of good I can do for others. I'll never forget. I could still be in prison. Maybe as an open source computer programmer, but prison nonetheless.
It's a big risk to let someone go like that; will they actually repent, or continue causing harm?
You should not have been arrested.
MDMA should have been legal.
End of story.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02565-4https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34708874/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/well/mind/mdma-ecstasy-ri...https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/07/03/australia-just-lega...
It's legal or decriminalized in Portugal, The Czech Republic, The Netherlands, and Switzerland, by the way. Surprise: Those are now the countries with the lowest number of drug deaths and drug related crimes in Europe.
Haha I understand your point. But it is a dangerous substance when used without medical supervision.
And more importantly, what I was selling was presumably MDMA. I didn't have kits to check the batches for adulteration. What if people died? I was not ready for that responsibility.
Isn't that precisely an argumentforlegalisation? You wouldn't have 19 year kids selling shit, you would have pharmacies and certification processes and etc.
In many countries street weed is much cheaper than legal one from the pharmacy.
19 years kids could be selling even more knowing they would not be locked for 10+ years.
I wonder how many people here would agree with your claim "it is a dangerous substance when used without medical supervision". Often in hacker circles soft drugs are viewed as something people can take on their own provided that, as you suggest, purity is guaranteed. And while setting and trusted and savvy companionship is important, the involvement of a medical professional may kill the whole freespirited vibe.
I sure would not have bought from you, as it's a stupid idea to buy from someone inside a club where it very well may be the case that the seller did not do quality control. For me, that would have been the part to feel bad about: "How on earth could I put other ravers lives in danger by selling pills that I have not had tested, and that could contain pretty much anything?".
I also agree that MDMA can be a dangerous substance of course. Far less toxic than alcohol, but still.
But compared to this, ending up in the US jail system carries FAR bigger risks. As you said: It could have ruined your life. It could also have ruined the life of people who bought from you, as they could also have ended up getting arrested.
I really can not imagine a drug available that will do worse things to your life than ending up inside the US jail system.
I don't think MDMA is "legal or decriminalized" in the Czech Republic...? Sure, consumption of _anything_ is decriminalized here (you are allowed to possess only a tiny amount for your own consumption) but other than that, owning, offering, selling, importing, etc. MDMA is very much criminalized here!
How does that work exactly? How does one end up with a tint amount for personal consumption if someone else couldn't legally allowed to have enough to sell?
Seems really strange that the government would have bothered decriminalizing consumption if the supply itself is illegal.
Why is that weird? You can have food, you can make food for yourself and your friend, but if you’re selling cooked food to strangers you need to have minimum standards of cleanliness etc.
Ok...? Why would you start debating MDMA legality when someone's sharing their story?
Also, all the studies you linked are about using it in therapy vs using it at a rave?
presumably because OP was traumatised by this interaction with law enforcement that - had things been only subtly different - could have been a catastrophic event in their life.
there wasn’t a moral crime here - MDMA is widely regarded to be.. safe (please don’t bite on that, i mean to say that current research indicates that it’s probably less dangerous than alcohol). so why should that have been so traumatic?
Although I agree with you, imho the point the parent was making was that:
a) when you are 16-18-20-22 you don't know sh*t about life - you are still a newbie. It doesn't mean that drug-trafficking is excused but when I look back at my 18yo self, I could have died 100 times between 18 and 22. And I could have 'taken some people with me' while doing so.
b) it's in the person. When given a second chance you can either turn your life around (and a Mr. Garcia will never see you again) or you can go back the very next day and maybe a Mr. Garcia will be finding your corpse in a back alley because a trade went sour.
As for Preston Thrope - hang in there. It's a long path to salvation - almost endless. As long as you keep your head up high and give the good fight, good things will (probably?) come. I've watched enough of John Oliver's Last Week Tonight shows to know that you got myriad of forces that want to see you fail so keep walking and dreaming!
I agree I veered off the parent's point.
In his case his whole life could have been ruined by selling a harmless (if clean!) drug to ravers who very clearly know what and why they are buying a substance from him.
Also, in my hypothetical "you should not have been arrested as it should be legal case" he might have ended poor and homeless in the street because everybody was just going to the pharmacy instead of buying from him. :)
In Switzerland the sentencing isn't very tough for possession in small quantities, but you certainly cannot _sell_ MDMA and hope for lenient treatment.
Also some the best countries to hide criminal activity without having to hide yourself. <3
That man gave you your entire life back. It's not just the time you would have served, but it would have ruined so much of the rest of your life too.
He did give him back his life.
But how is it possible that his life was at risk at all? Why a 10 year sentence for taking drugs? The government should simply not have that power.
Its kind of ironic that most law and order folks would consider this an example or dirty cops being dirty or privilegeor whatever. The fact is, this stuff doesn't really seem to happen anymore unless you're the Prime Ministers wife or something
For me that was an example of lazy cop who don't want to do extra paperwork.
It saved one life, but that person could later return to selling drugs and contribute to thousands OD's and many deaths.
Because it happens more often than not but everyone involved keeps their mouth shut. It's not something you should really plan to get viral on social media...
"Look at the cute cop who let me go with a warning after trafficking drugs" XOXO
10 year sentence forsellingdrugs, not taking them.
Oh yea. Part of me coming to reality was the officer helping me realize that it would have ruined my family, and had quite a criminal record.
Offtopic, but minimum sentences are nuts. What's the point of judges and juries etc if we make the law so aggressive that they hardly have a say anymore?
Juries ultimately have the final say in conviction. Its well within their right to go not guilty for any reason.
Judges and lawyers absolutely hate it, but juries aren't there just as a logical check on laws as written and facts as presented. Juries are a check on the legal system and laws themselves.
Sure, but saying someone is not guilty when obviously they are but a 10 year prison sentence is way out of proportion for what they did, that’s stupid too right? It means we expect juries to lie, on purpose, to prevent ruining someone’s life. It forces juries to pick between two bad extremes.
These kinds of laws remove the opportunity for juries (or judges where I live) to eg say “6 months of community service” when it’s more appropriate.
Sounds like the plot of Les Mis!
Les Mis has a totally different feel when you've been locked up. It touches me even deeper.
NACAB
The power of stories like this never fails to humble me. There are countless (less dramatic) incidents like this in every life. Your experience brings them back into focus.
I don't at all care for the way in which he mentions his crimes were nonviolent and tells us about being arrested for dealing ecstasy (a drug with little taboo associated with it) while skipping over the fact he's currently in prison for dealing choke-on-your-own-vomit synthetic opiods, not cute party drugs.
That stuff killed a coworker's son a few years ago. Died right in his own recliner.
Yeah this guy belongs in jail and clearly doesn’t think what he did was a problem at all. In the midst of an epidemic that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year the dealers of these drugs make the front page and are cheered on as “victims.”
The victims here are the families and children of the people whose abuse he profited greatly off of.
Author, here:
As a severe opioid addict myself for over 10 years, I am absolutely ashamed of having any part in that life. It is a burden that I will have to continue dealing with every day for the rest of my life.
In no way am I trying to say that I did not deserve to go to prison. The focus of this post, was about the facilities made available to those people who do end up in prison, so that they do not return.
As to the references... yes I am a non-violent drug offender. That isn't a label I gave myself, that is a fact: there to let readers know that I am not here for murder or rape or something of that sort. Involvement in opioids and that lifestyle/culture is something that I did not have any contact with UNTIL I was sent to prison. Perhaps we should consider whether 1. Prison is making people worse (that is just an objective fact) 2. We want to be institutionalizing people that clearly are capable of much more, who turn to things like dealing out of their drug habits, or lack of resources/options.
Before anyone wants to go google'ing and coming up with immediate judgements, why don't you look into that there was absolutely zero prosecution of the case being referred to.. They said they found "residue" in my apartment, put out a nationwide manhunt for me, then immediately dropped the case as soon as I was judged by the media and the judge. They couldn't just destroy my apartment and all my stuff and say "we found nothing". Leaving them to prosecute me for 1oz of a synthetic opioid 8x stronger than morphine, that itself, had a potency of roughly 1%. It was almost completely inert. absolutely useless. and this was a completely unrelated case.
To the person who said I sold drugs to kids.. Where exactly do you get off making such horrible claims about me? Do you live in such a bubble that you think that every drug dealer sits around behind dumpsters at high-schools and asks kids if they want to try some 'pot', thats really laced with angel dust? Oh and they all put rainbow fentanyl in your kids halloween candy too right?
For my curiosity, did you have to apply to be able to access HN as well as GitHub, or are you part of a trusted group of inmates who are allowed to access the Internet broadly? I guess my question is if the access is allow-list, or deny-list, or something else?
Participating in this conversation, particularly as he has been, seems very short-sighted of him.
All of his defensive comments are fair game whenever he ends up eligible for probation, parole, or whatever. And theywillbe used against him.
Hey, don't let the keyboard warriors get to you. HN commentors will always find a way to position themselves as smugly superior.
Thanks for your great blog post.
The guy is in jail and is serving his sentence. I could understand given recent scandals with opioids that people view perhaps justice in this area as "patchy", though.
It’s some strange bias that lets people get worked up about this one already-convicted dealer but pass over in silence the pharmaceutical companies that designed these opioids to be so addictive and marketed them so aggressively so that doctors would over-prescribe them.
I don’t know anyone who is ignoring their culpability. There has been an enormous amount of litigation against pharmaceutical companies in relation to opioids, resulting in tens of billions of dollars in settlements.
The opioid epidemic has killed a good chunk of my friends over the years. It was rampant in the form of "cheese" when I was a teen; one of my closest friends was left to die when he began vomiting from an overdose. When I was in the Marines I saw Marine after Marine prescribed opioids for pain and injuries after deployments, many of them separated out and continued using. As an adult I've lived in the Bay Area and Portland; I've gotten to observe first hand what culture these drugs cultivate on our streets. I've gotten to see opioids make their way, sometimes by mistake, into the rave scene and the constant fear it creates among people who want nothing to do with those drugs. We have Narcan at our house because people consistently use the church parking lot next door to shoot up in their car. I've personally ran down the street and through the fence to go bang on doors because I saw someone passed out for too long - not because I want them gone, but because I don't want to see someone else die.
To put the entire mantle on dealers would be a mistake, imo. Their choice to sell can come from a variety of incentives: sometimes from clout, sometimes their upbringing, sometimes lack of opportunity, sometimes lack of education, many times a mixture of the above. Often enough these people are users themselves; the pain the people they sell to endure they also typically endure.
I don't view this post as victim-seeking and I don't really view him as a victim. Instead, I view this as a critique of prison culture that reinforces its outcomes. I view him as someone that wants to change and has the capacity to change, but there is little if any pipeline or incentive to do so. If there is one, it seems frail. When people want to change we should have a stepped pipeline for reintroducing them to normality and finally society.
Like you, I'd like to see less opioid related deaths in the future but I think there's more than one way to get to that goal. If there's a way that can make productive citizens out of people rather than shutting them away forever then I'm all for it because, frankly, the threat of a felony or life imprisonment didn't stop people before. In fact, that's when the prison population and recidivism bloomed.
People do things they're not proud of in desperate situations. Also, everyone was 18-21 once.
Speaking as someone who (barely) survived an unintentional acetyl-fentanyl overdose that hospitalized me with rhabdo and almost killed my then-fiance -- him dealing this stuff is not the end of the world.
I think a lot of people on HN don't know what it's like to be someone below the poverty line who is also entangled with the law. If you're looking for hell in a first-world country, that's about as close as you can get in the USA.
He was 24.
People do things they're not proud of in desperate situations
See that's the thing. Did you read one word in the post about him being remorseful or apologetic to the people he might've killed by selling them U-47700, a drug that's essentially unstudied in humans? I didn't.
The thing about writing public apologies is that there's no way to differentiate them from crocodile tears. You can't tell whether the person posting it genuinely means those things or is saying them because they know other people will read them.
Obviously, anyone who causes damage to another human being, if they aren't a sociopath, feels remorse.
Of the entire post, perhaps 3 sentences talk about the specifics of crimes committed. Every day that one wakes up inside of a prison/jail, is a reminder of exactly what choices you made to get there.
Can you blame him then, for wanting to write a post that isn't focused on the wrongs he did, and rather his hope for his future?
I have to imagine that if someone in that position talks enough about their past they get a little tired of having to apologize all over again to every new person they talk to.
People do things they're not proud of in desperate situations.
Having to get an office temp job for minimum wage at 24 isn't ideal but it's a stretch to call it "desperate" and somehow justifying pushing opiates.
what it's like to be someone below the poverty line
Which he wouldn't have been with the job options he had available at the time.
He also completely glosses over why he was really in solitary confinement. I guarantee it is not merely because of his "influence".
Indeed. He had an ounce of U-47700, a synthetic opioid equivalent to about half a pound of morphine. With intent to distribute. And this is not his first prison sentence for distribution. I think opioid dealers are a different and worse class of dealers compared to, say, MDMA. That's a personal opinion. At any rate, he's paying for that crime, and when he's done he'll return to a normal life, hopefully, and I'll wish him well. Until then, he should be honest about who he is—or was—before his supposed epiphany.
https://www.doj.nh.gov/news/2017/20171011-preston-thorpe-sen...
Whatever people are incarcerated for, the fact of the matter is that 95% of the people currently incarcerated in the US will one day live next door to one or more of us. Isn't it better to prepare them to live there, self-sufficent and contributing to society? (Disclosure: I am the Cofounder of Unlocked Labs, Preston's current employer and formerly incarcerated myself). I can say without hesitation, Preston is an incredible employee whom I am happy we provided this opportunity for.
There are a lot of historical examples arguing for and against you. But murder and rape is far different than getting popped for heroin or selling weed and our laws already reflect that
What are the recidivism rates on those crimes like? Our laws often reflect misguided morals, not hard data. Justice is supposed to be blind. That's an ideal to reach for, not reject out of hand.
https://smart.ojp.gov/somapi/chapter-5-adult-sex-offender-re...
Sexual recidivism rates range from 5 percent after three years to 24 percent after 15 years.
Also, I wouldn't put murder and rape in the same sentence. There are some situations where murder reasoning might be debatable even if still wrong (self defense against and archenemy that promised to assassinate your family, for example).
But rape? There's no rationalizing rape other than mental illness.
I don't want to open a can of worms here, but I had to write this.
But rape? There's no rationalizing rape other than mental illness.
20 year old having sex with a 17 year old isn’t mental illness.
Rape is also about consent, not just age.
As an aside, I learned the other day that in Brazil the age of consent is 14:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_South_Ameri...
14 is pretty average globally speaking. It's 16 in most U.S. states, with exceptions often going down to 14 when there is an age gap of 4 years or less.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_the_United_...
The stark reality is that there’s a difference between rape (the crime) and rape (the action).
You can be convicted of the crime for a lot of reasons other than lack of consent. A common example of that is a 20 year old with a 17 year old in many states.
This obviously isn't what he's referring to and isn't illegal in most states.
I don't want to continue the can of terrifying worms :), but:
* I agree that what most of us generally mean in colloquial usage of the term "rape" is never justifiable
* However, in many jurisdictions, the legal definition of "rape" may be different and significantly broader than our colloquial usage. As an immediate example, a completely informed and consensual sexual experience between two teenagers may be considered "statutory rape", with all the prison, registered offender, difficulty getting a job and social stigma that follows a rape conviction. Whereas I personally don't think two teenagers having sex is indicative of mental illness.
It sucks, but the longer I live, the less immediately easily categorizable or black & white things are :<
I agree. It's a delicate topic full of nuances and differences in jurisdictions.
Except rape has much lower recidivism than crimes like theft or murder.
So someone who is a murderer is more likely to commit crimes when released than a rapist.
Rehabilitation is rehabilitation.
In contrast, the American system aims for penance, which is why we call it penetentiary. You have to "pay for your actions" - which has absolutely nothing to do with rehabilitation and preventing recidivism. Paying for your actions is deeply ingrained is the American zeitgeist - making the concept of favoring rehabilitation appear immoral.
Regardless, it could be argued that rehabilitating a perpetrator of more severe crimes is a harsher form of punitive justice. Living with your (newly acquired) guilt and regret about your actions is more difficult than hanging out with, and learning from, your peers in crime university - prison.
Also, selling heroin is often manslaughter.
Great to see you here Jessica =)
I didn't realize Unlocked was your organization.
Nice to see you in the conversation as well and yes, I am a cofounder
You're doing the Lord's work :) Thank you.
Almost 10 years inside here. Going on Monday to have all the charges dismissed.
Can you please let him know about this? I wanted to contact him but I can’t find his e-mail address anywhere.
Who else has an opportunity to spend 12+ hours a day learning something for years? With no other obligations or responsibilities?
Totally tangential, but this prison article reminded me of a short story by Cory Doctorow about a monastery for programmers. I imagined living in a room about the size of my home office, a bed, a desk, a decent MacBook Pro and a high-speed connection and just hanging out on the Internet all day reading articles and programming. Food and shelter taken care of, no obligations or responsibilities. Like the pictures of Norwegian prison cells.
That reminded me of a weird Internet streamer collective started by a Twitch streamer named Athene. He started a group called The Singularity Group [1] which allowed people to move into a house to volunteer work on philanthropic projects. They are responsible for the AI Jesus [2] channel on Twitch. There is some controversy since some see the streamer as having tried to start a cult [3]. They also created a few mobile games that run on their own crypto-currency.
At any rate, it is all quite interesting to me. It was very common in the past in almost all cultures for a certain number of men to just reject society and go off into hermitage. Sometimes those hermits would band together into brotherhoods. Often they would make beer, or honey or some other collective task to earn enough money for the members to spend the rest of their time in quiet contemplation. I can imagine such a life might be attractive to a lot of programmers who tend to be introverted and feel alien to normal society.
1.https://singularitygroup.net/
I managed to read over 800 books when I was locked up. Every famous book by every famous author. I read it.
Can you suggest one or two recommendations? Maybe one that surprised you and one that lived up to the hype?
Ha! My favourites that I remember are The Martian, 3-Body Problem, Wild, 1Q84. I wish I could remember them all. I wrote down the names of all 800 as I was reading them but the documents all went up in a building fire last year.
Nice! Which ones stuck with you the most?
Ha! My favourites that I remember are The Martian, 3-Body Problem, Wild, 1Q84. I wish I could remember them all. I wrote down the names of all 800 as I was reading them but the documents all went up in a building fire last year.
I've had a similar idea before.
I once was talking to someone who wanted to financially support independent scientific research. He had started a successful business (you may have heard of it, though I won't name it) and he wanted to put his money to good use.
He wanted to find people he could write a check to, basically. I suggested that if he wanted to advance science as much as possible, it would be far more efficient to run a dormitory for scientists with free room and board, as long as they do scientific research. I'm sure he could find many people who would accept a minimalist lifestyle for the opportunity to do research the system wouldn't otherwise support. (I'd be interested.)
He declined, stating that one major factor was the tax write-off he got from the donation, and I guess giving people a place to live doesn't have that benefit.
It is interesting to think that your definition of a "a dormitory for scientists with free room and board, as long as they do scientific research." is kinda-sorta what I think of when I consider the Institute for Advanced Study. If you squint hard enough, it is kinda-sorta what tenure in universities aims to provide.
I don't think those examples are similar.
A tenured professorship or position at a prestigious institution provides a lot of resources and status that the minimalist approach does not. I don't know a single professor who would accept living in the very modest setup I proposed.
Also, I don't know any research organization that provides room and board for long-term faculty/staff. IAS does not work that way. Surely there are universities that provide room and board for graduate students, and some summer research internships will provide room and board. But those cases are rare in my experience in the US, and are only be temporary at best.
Athene was indeed trying to start a cult (it had all the basic elements). And from watching him speak in the past, he did seem to me like a huge narcissist.
Haven't been following his latest projects much, and I can't speak to how the Singularity group has changed since back then. Though I have seen his AI channel sometimes. It's moderately entertaining.
I cant't comment directly on whether or not he was or wasn't actually trying to start a cult, but I am interested in cults in general (and any kind of esoteric/occult stuff) so I devoured a lot of content related to this. I mean, a 21st century digital cult!? That is some juicy stuff!
What I found was a young idealistic kid who was playing a character online. He was optimizing for views and we all know what kind of behavior gets attention online. The characterwasoverblown and narcissistic. There is zero argument from me that if you take selected clips of him from when he was at the height of his streaming fame he was a dumb-ass edge-lord playing the role of a prophet or spiritual leader. He even leaned into it when he was accused because he thought it was funny. But when you watch recent videos of him (he does a pretty good react to Asmongold's react of him), I think I saw a different side.
All that being said, he isn't a kind of character I trust. He seems to me to be very much the kind of person where the ends justify the means. He has some pretty high ideals, some of which I agree with and others which I am sympathetic towards. It's like Greenpeace or animal rights activists ... even if I agree with their overall goals I often disagree with their methods.
There was a thread or submission recently on setting up a low cost room & board for aspiring people, that I loved, but haven't been able to re-find the thread.
Sometimes those hermits would band together into brotherhoods. Often they would make beer, or honey or some other collective task to earn enough money for the members to spend the rest of their time in quiet contemplation. I can imagine such a life might be attractive to a lot of programmers who tend to be introverted and feel alien to normal society.
Lovely imagery & idea, thank you.
Rather than focus on the negative motivations (be introverted and feel alien), i think often there's hope optimism & drive; more modernly especially, some are marked out from others by beinginspiredpeople, seeking to be active forces. Caring deeply about enormous possibilities trying to spring forth. Finding capacity for the cause, finding support or even just peers for those folks is hard.
Programmers have such amazing leverage, but most day jobs are just work. The idea of sustainable no frills living among other Burton Klein type-1/Happy Warrior types, able to pursue the thing & tangle with it & ideally also have others enmeshed in their questing too: that has huge appeal. It'd be such a worthy investment to support, imo.
PhD can be like this but for a limited time.
I'm currently recovering from a grief, depression, intimate partner violence, State abuse, and whatever-the-hell-is-in-nationwide-legal-psuedo-cannabis-vapes based psychosis. Long story short: I sacrificed my physical, mental, emotional, and future well-being as a human shield so my non-biological daughter who I won't see again could have part of a childhood and not develop a cluster-b personality disorder like her mother. To those that don't understand what these people are like behind closed doors, you simply have no frame of reference. There are no words that will allow you to understand; many social workers and psychiatrists are often even fooled into serving as these people's unwitting thralls. Their nature is predatory. They smash mirrors within and without (even posting something public about it like here will summon a small herd of them to cover the tracks with doubt). They have no ideology other than predation, so they follow the ideology of the hour that gains them the most; they wear personalities like hats. It was after being attacked, yet again, that I was DARVOed (because I was actually escaping for good this time, and the cherry on top of these relationships is always, without fail, a DARVO kick-in-the-ass on the way out the door). Then, despite having over two hours of her attacking me over years of time recorded, including her pouncing atop me and snatching my phone on the very day in question, the brilliant detective at Atlanta PD warranted me, and I stayed in the Rice Street gulag where the schizophrenic kid was murdered by police via bedbug consumption (the police there use subterfugal torture methods to "keep people in line" by throwing them in freezing-in-winter, low-to-no ventilation, hot-in-summer, or bug-ridden cells, keeping lights on at all hours, refusing medical care, 30 people bricked in cells meant for 8, kept standing for days, COVID outbreaks in entire cell blocks, standard US prison system fare, torture by any sane definition of the word). It's when I looked down at the homeless man in that cell, the one laying flat directly in the piss and the shit on the floor so he can lay down in the real estate that no one wants, that I said to myself, "yeah, that's where I'm at."
It's after that, I underwent a psychosis so vast that every word, every symbol, every story, every axiom, every fear, every thought, and all of human history amassed into a unified and perfect whole; only after would I come to recognize that what I saw was identical to the ascent in Merkabah literature, Thelema's visit to the City of the Pyramids, Samadhi, and several other analogies for such experiences. Myself had disappeared, and in its place was a sacrifice burning through time like a star. There were only really two forces in the universe, entropy and creation, and the two were yet an illusion still of a singular. Dark matter became simply matter not yet light, returned to the path of least resistance towards supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies, dark energy became simply the remnant left by matter past the edge of observability to continue the pulling, decimation, and return, breaking the laws of thermodynamics that were merely local phenomenon, and creating novel matter in the process, the early stages of which would expand in an accelerated manner that would appear as a bang, but be more akin to a snake eating its own tail and growing.
I wandered in a daze, searching for what I called my fellow "wizards" or fellow autists or fellow disciples, not fully knowing what I was doing or why. I researched Benedictine and Bhuddist monestaries to try to escape the world. So yes, US hermits are very real, we are very noble, and we are fucking livid regarding the state of adequate hermitages. I'm currently in a low-rent studio, searching for minimum wage jobs, so I can pay less taxes to the undemocratic State. "Fully-employed" I'd make 1/4 million a year.
Include me in the monastery.
link to the Cory Doctorow story, "The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away", for anyone else who's interested:https://www.tor.com/2008/08/06/weak-and-strange/
I also highly recommend _Anathem_, by Neal Stephenson if the STEM monastery theme is interesting to you.
As a former software engineer for over a decade and current corrections officer in a max level state facility, this is a very interesting topic. My facility has a large college presence within it. While there are problems with it, I think overall it is probably a net positive for the staff and inmates. At the same time, I don't believe that we have more than maybe a small handful of nonviolent/drug offenders; anybody on the outside advocating for murderers, rapists, and those in for armed robbery to have access to more of the normal comforts of the outside world is going to have a hard time and not much support. Even the medium level prisons have those types of people in them. So what facilities would wider access to remote learning and work become available? There would need to be honor facilities inmates must work towards proving they're responsible enough to be transferred to. Right now budgets are being slashed, we're at 60% staffing as it is, and the whole state is in the shit. And this is a "progressive liberal" state. It would probably take the federal government to start throwing money around for pilot programs, no state is going to increase their prison budget to accommodate this.
I think for all the criminals that are going to be released back into society at some point, recidivism should be at the top of our mind, not punishment.
If you can stop them from doing it again by locking them up in comfort for 10 years instead of discomfort for 20, then that is what we should do (assuming that doesn’t cause more people to do it in the first place).
If you can stop them from doing it again by locking them up in comfort for 10 years instead of discomfort for 20, then that is what we should do.
You're never going to stop many of them from reoffending. Even the "best" rehabilitation programs have crime rates far above the general population.
The additional 10 years is 10 more years where they can't hurt innocent people. The justice system exists for the benefit of society and innocent citizens, not criminals.
assuming that doesn’t cause more people to do it in the first place
Why would you ever assume that? Punishmentsabsolutelyhave a deterrent effect.
If locking large numbers of people up for inordinately long times prevented crime, the United States would be the safest place in the world. We have 5% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prison population. We are one of a dwindling number of countries that will lock up a child for life (there was a SCOTUS case baring automatic life sentences for minors, but it leaves a loophole wide enough for a semi to allow judges to still impose life without parole to children). We've doubled down on it again and again. Looking at the results, this approach obviously doesn't work.
Given our status as a massive outlier, could it be that our current system of mass incarceration is a driver of crime? I see signs that point to yes. Many people I have talked to have said the main thing being locked up taught them was how to be a better criminal. Prisons break families. Children grow up without parents. At one of the conferences for the heads of the Departments of Corrections for US states, a question was asked of all 50 heads: are prisons effective at making society safer? About 8 said yes. About 7 said they were unsure. The remaining 35 said no.
We've tried highly punitive mass incarceration for decades and it's failing horribly. I'm not smart enough to know the correct answer, but I can say that it seems obvious that the answer is not to lock more people up for longer.
Yeah the punishments for the war on drugs has worked SO WELL. /s
The additional 10 years is 10 more years where they can't hurt innocent people. The justice system exists for the benefit of society and innocent citizens, not criminals.
By this logic we should just never release them. Should we keep the 80% that would not reoffend locked up to prevent the 20% that would from doing so?
Should we increase the sentence from 10 to 20 years to make that ratio 60% to 40%? Then we prevent more crime, and the would be criminals are off the street longer.
Maybe if we decrease the comfort of the cells and general state of the prisons, we can get the rate to 20% to 80%? Then we can practically say we’re justified to keep those 80% off the street.
Why would you ever assume that? Punishments absolutely have a deterrent effect.
Because most people aren’t stopped by the deterrent effect. It’s perfectly possible the net negative effect of locking people up for a longer time is larger than the extra deterrent effect [1].
[1]:https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...
Some statistics here:https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html
~60% of the state prison population (~600k of ~1m) are imprisoned for a violent crime. Much higher than I would have guessed.
One of the article's key points is that violent crime does not mean "caused physical harm" and that entire categories of crime are considered violent by law, whether or not any violence was perpetrated during the commission.
"The fourth myth: By definition, “violent crime” involves physical harm
The distinction between “violent” and “nonviolent” crime means less than you might think; in fact, these terms are so widely misused that they are generally unhelpful in a policy context. In the public discourse about crime, people typically use “violent” and “nonviolent” as substitutes for serious versus nonserious criminal acts. That alone is a fallacy, but worse, these terms are also used as coded (often racialized) language to label individuals as inherently dangerous versus non-dangerous."
I agree that all sides in every argument tend to twist language, statistics, the truth to their own ends. Nevertheless is there not a meaningful distinction between crime that involved physical violence to a person and crime that did not? And could we not endeavor to identify that distinction and use it to improve policy?
Thanks for more first hand insight, from a related but different perspective.
I'm curious: what led you to leave software engineering? SWE to corrections officer sounds like a rare journey.
I was going to make a joke like "He probably wanted to do less stressful work."
Then I read that it's not far from the truth:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32554517
Correctional Officer is the job that requires the least amount of work of any job I have ever encountered. You literally do nothing the entire day. If your facility is cool you can just play Angry Birds on your phone or desktop all day, or read a book if they're not that cool. You can get infinity overtime at double or triple pay.
Plus, you get the added bonus of making the lives of everyone around you as miserable as you desire.
TFA is interesting but I've got a problem with this:
I was left with the difficult choice of either living there and walking to a temp agency with hopes of making $10.50/hour doing manual labor (without an ID or social security card at this point), or getting on a bus to NYC to see some associates, and coming back in a week or so with $15-25k in my pocket and living in comfy luxury hotels until I could rent an apartment I chose the latter, obviously, and was back in prison after 14mo.
That isnotobvious. My father was left with nothing at some point in his life, living like a hobo in an abandoned, broken, leaking RV next to gypsies (heck, he'd even, for free, help the gypsies' kids with "homework").
And he was still proud --and still is-- of never having done anything illegal.
Peoplechooseto engage in crime, and there's nothing obvious about it.
Nobody needs the latest iPhone or the latest sneakers. They believe they "flex" with the latest iPhone and sneakers (I've got a whole different idea of flexing btw but that'd be another topic). Theychoosethe easy path.
And that is not obvious at all. Most poor people and by very, very, very far, even most hobos, arenotthieves and arenotdrug dealers. When you deal drugs you have on your conscience how miserable you make the lives of so many others: it's not even about legality here.
I had a friend and roommate at one point (and still friend to this day), we'd split rent and he'd barely make any money. Serving pitas at a tiny kebab/pita place three nights a week for hardly any money. And he was okay with that. He didn't care about clothes or cars or phones or fancy hotel rooms or whatever. He'd just be honest and survive.
What I'd like to know is why people believe it's "obvious" they choose a criminal life for $25 K a week instead of an honest life flipping burgers.
It's not obvious and that mindset of "fancy luxury hotel rooms" and "latest iPhone" should just die. Nobody is impressing anyone with these utterly pointless bullshit.
Asking newly-release prisoners to have the absolute strongest constitution and pain endurance is also not obvious to me. The average person would struggle in this situation, and we expect formerly-incarcerate individuals to be even stronger than them?
It doesn't offend me at all to see it highlighted as "obvious" to the author. For some high proportion of these individuals, it is obvious (and indeed seems like the only choice).
Crime will always pay better than legitimate alternatives. You can either choose to sacrifice the extra income or risk going to prison– that's kind of just how society functions.
For some high proportion of these individuals, it is obvious (and indeed seems like the only choice).
Then they can go back to prison. Society need not be blackmailed into giving ex-cons excessively lucrative jobs in hopes of luring them away from crime.
Having spent 10 years locked up with criminals I cannot think of a single one who made more money than if they had taken a legit job. Especially bad if you factor in the years behind bars.
I remember one 19-year-old kid crying in the bullpens one day. They'd just offered him 34 years. His cousin persuaded him to come rob a 7-11 with him. When they get there cousin hands him an AK47 and says "point this at the cashier while I grab the money". Kid had never touched a gun before. Accidentally pulls the trigger and fires a shot past the cashier's head into the wall. I asked him how much him and his cousin got. $1800.
Certainly. But it's not quite as binary as you make it out to be. Lowering the threshold to having a stable job for the people might change the proportion quite a bit. If we gave them excessively lucrative jobs as you suggested, we may be able to prevent most recidivism!
have the absolute strongest constitution
you don't need to have the 'absolute strongest constitution' to work a boring min-wage job in the United States of America. Ask any refugee who migrated to the country what a hard life looks like.
Smart people like this guy, who choose to go into the drug trade do it because they think a crappy 9-5 job to get back on their feet is beneath them.
This entire post is based on misunderstanding why the author used the word "obviously" here: You're reading about an incarcerated developer, so you obviously know he chose to commit a crime again at that point in the story. He wasn't saying it was the obvious choice to make.
But OP claims to be committing nonviolent drug crimes. Depending on your philosophy you may feel you’re not doing anything morally wrong by selling drugs. Upholding the law for the laws’ sake isn’t obviously good.
It’s admirable that you’re father did what he did without resorting to becoming a negative influence on society, but I bet most people on HN have broken the law in some small way many times in their life. Breaking the law and hurting others are not always the same.
You might consider emailing him. It's lonely in jail/prison. Suddenly everyone you thought were your closest friends don't speak a word to you again.
If you're lucky, you've got a wife or parents that'll write to you or take your calls.
Wow, I know you've been locked up, brother.
Nobody will take your call the second you step inside a jail. Best man at your wedding? He's not picking up, I promise you. Literally nobody will call you or write to you. You will get nothing except maybe from your mother. If you are married, forget it.
Humans only like to associate with success. Once you seem to be failing literally nobody will want to even speak to you.
Exploring the wasteland this song plays
I wanted to contact him to tell him that he was wrong (he got to the front page without using any of his proposed techniques [1]) but I couldn’t find the e-mail. I have no LinkedIn either; right now I almost feel like submitting an issue to one of his github repos just to get his attention. Can you point me to his e-mail address?
[1]https://pthorpe92.github.io/humor/How-to-get-on-hackernews-f...
Even if someone doesn't have a public email address on their GitHub profile, you can generally find a routable one in their commit messages. A corollary is you shouldn't use a non-public email address in your commit messages.
kicked out of my parents house for being a stupid 17yr old
That's child abuse in my book. If you are a parent, you are responsible for your children. That's it. No age limit. Nothing. They need a place? You are responsible for providing them a place to live. This isn't to say you have to be responsible for their crimes, but you should never be allowed to force your child out of your house. YOU brought them into this world. They are your responsibility. Forcing a child out? You are a terrible parent. Yes, some children thrive, but others don't. I'm sorry, but it's on you.
If you aren't ready to take care of your children or make sure they are taken care of for the remainder of their life, you shouldn't have children. 18 and you force them out? You are in the wrong.
That's pretty harsh. Children turn into adults, and not all of them turn out great. As a parent my responsibility is to get them to adulthood with as much chance of success as it is possible for me to provide. At some point they do absolutely become responsible for their own decisions. Do I ever want to find out what it would take to throw my own child out of the house? Of course not. Am I going to toss them out when they turn 18? No plans to. But this idea that you should be responsible for another adult for the rest of their life just because you created them...? That's silly.
In this case the one singular event of being kicked out at a specifically vulnerable age of 17-18. The rest of their life was influenced by that.
That's pretty harsh. Children turn into adults,
No, it's not. It's reality. And you only think it's harsh because you are ignorant. And that ignorance will not prepare you for reality.
But this idea that you should be responsible for another adult for the rest of their life just because you created them...? That's silly.
No, it's reality. And if you think otherwise, you are not ready to be a parent. Or you'll have a rude awakening when it turns out you are wrong.
Maybe you get lucky and they are able to support themselves, but if you think you raising them to 18 means you are done, it just means you are ignorant.
Children turn into adults,
No, they don't and that's your ignorance.
Not all children grow up to be adults mentally. Not all children grow up. There are numerous conditions that mean you are responsible for them for the rest of their life, ensuring they get the care they need.
And trying to wave that off as the exception, it just means that you are ignorant. You should go into being a parent understanding that this might happen.
I see way too many parents throwing their kids into the water and letting them sink or swim. Sorry, but if they drown, it's on you as the parent. You failed them. You are the failure.
And that's child abuse, and people that think like that are worthless.
Do better.
Author here again: I told myself I was done chiming in, but this is just something I have to clarify.
My parents are absolutely amazing people, and they are the only reason my life has any hope at this point. They were still figuring things out, and didn't understand why I was such a rebellious asshole. Having 4 kids and two of them teenagers isn't easy, and they have been incredibly supportive to my younger siblings when one went through some troubles, and have been supportive to me the entire time. I know this is something my mother feels terrible for, but I feel like I was going to do what I was going to do, and I put no blame on her for anything.
This was the only thing that was going to get me to comment, because i know it breaks my moms heart.
Doesn't change what they did. Things might be better now, but they still failed. Being a failure doesn't mean you are always a failure, and you can improve. That you have a good relationship with them now is proof of that. But it doesn't change the fact that they were wrong for what they did.
Don't take their growth away from them.
The apparent lack of opportunities for anyone is easy to solve with Dorm Room Welfare:
Open free dorms next to the campuses of community colleges. Anyone who is physically able to live on their own, but who can not afford to live on their own can move in and live there as long as they are working towards being economically self sufficient.
Working towards being economically self sufficient can mean passing academic classes, passing career and technical education classes, taking remedial classes, completing a high school equivalency degree, passing K-12 classes online, earning certifications, working in internships, working jobs at a training wage, or other things
I suggest we replace all other welfare programs with drom room welfare.
This does not solve the problem that many of us do not want to hire convicted criminals.
This sounds like the deal I have had with my (young-adult) kids (who live at home).
Unfortunately, some parents believe in "tough love" (throw them into the ocean to learn them to swim).
This does not solve the problem that many of us do not want to hire convicted criminals.
The issue that keeps people from hiring ex-offenders isn't hard to solve:
One part is social. This one requires a little leadership and a little bit of re-defining what is an acceptable attitude.
The other part is a financial issue and is EASY to solve politically: most business insurers will raise rates or not insure companies that hire ex-offenders.
In my home state we were able to get a law passed that shifted liability for a hired ex-offender who committed a crime on the job to the state so insurers could not make hiring ex-offenders ridiculously expensive.
We were able to sell the idea to our legislators and local city councilors with a simple trade: the Democrat-controlled city council wanted to pass laws making it illegal not to hire ex-offenders. The Republican-controlled legislature wanted to give tax credits to businesses that hire ex-offenders. I suggested instead of passing unconstitutional laws or handing out corporate welfare we could solve the problem by making it illegal to charge more to insure a business that hires an ex-offender, and at the same time, absolving the insurer of having to pay claims because of the hire. The city and state decided to try it out, and it's helped a lot of people over the past eight years.
You could just make criminal background checks unlawful, which is the case in Ireland. There is police vetting for people who work with the vulnerable and certain key jobs, but the average person will never face vetting for a job.
> This does not solve the problem that many of us do not want to hire convicted criminals.
I'd wager that if people with convictions on their record, had even a 10-20% chance of being hired at a decent establishment, we'd see recidivism go down by a statistically significant amount.
I know the justice system. The grand majority of folks coming in and out of prison genuinely do not want better for themselves, it's a lifestyle choice that they've accepted (or resigned themselves to, depending on how you look at it).
But for the fractional percentage of incarcerated individuals that DO decide "Okay, I've had enough, I'm done with this and I want better for myself" andmean it, they aren't afforded such a luxurious opportunity for a bland life in suburbia.
I recently read a book about experiences in the UK prison system: 'A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner' by Chris Atkins (there is an associated podcast, which is also excellent). It is a fascinating, but rather depressing read about his experiences being incarcerated for tax fraud and how broken the UK prison system is. It is no wonder the re-offending rates are so high.
I'm guessing much of the US system (where I understand a lot more for-profit private companies are involved) is at least as broken.
As a Brit prisoner in the USA I understand the that USA systems are far, far worse than the UK systems.
Are you in contact with your family at all?
I apologise if that comment made it seem like I was currently incarcerated. I've been out for a few months now.
Yes, in contact with my brother. No other family interested in contact any longer. Mother died while I was locked up :(
I'm sorry to hear about your mom. I'm glad there is at least one family member there for you.
I'd like to make a couple of points to think about:
I'd been addicted to opioids for a couple of years. And I was very happy that I was able to get original non-counterfeit pills on the dark net, from vendors that had thousands of positives reviews. Being a nerd, and successful when it comes to business, risk-free supply had never been an issue. Luckily I bought Bitcoin when they did cost $0.20...
Fighting the dark net has always been a stupid idea. It's the cleanest way for people to get the substances they need, with the lowest amount of risk in every single regard. Lowest risk to get your substance cut with something unhealthy, lowest risk of getting ripped off, lowest risk of getting into criminal circles.
Fighting the dark net means pushing people to street dealers, increasing suffering, violent crime and deaths.
So, why did I get addicted? Depressions, anxiousness, and finally: Being on the autistic spectrum, which now seems absolutely obvious from earliest childhood memories, but my parents never took me to a neurologist to get that diagnosed. I just lived with being "different". Until I could not take it anymore, and tried to help myself with substances.
How did I get off the addiction? Did a search for the best-rated neurologist in the region, made an appointment, got treatment. It took a while, but in the end a combination of substances was found that worked out better than opiates.
But that being said: Those substances are the same that I can get as prescription medication, or as "drugs" on the street. It's just that now I no longer have to spend Bitcoin on it, but get them for free from the health care system. Yay!
Please remind yourself: Nearly everything that is taken and sold as "drugs" on the streets is used to treat some problem, just in a very dangerous way, without proper education, without proper risk management.
Whatever that scary drug that your parents and your school are warning you about to be evil: It's just medication. The poor people die on the street trying to get their supply, the rich guys get a subscription to get it for free.
If your country has a problem with drugs on the street, and with crime due to people trying to get those substances, your country SIMPLY HAS A PROBLEM PROVIDING HEALTH CARE to its citizens!
So please stop demonizing substances, demonizing substance "abuse", demonizing people providing those substances in a clean and safe way via the dark net, and demonizing people who sadly did not have the luck of their health care system helping them.
And go fix your health care systems.
I resonate with this comment strongly. I have never been diagnosed, but I strongly suspect I am neurodivergent. My extreme social isolation/anxiety in my college years and twenties led me to dependency on alcohol and cannabis. I never tried hard drugs, but my life back then was just one tiny twist of fate away from me becoming an opioid addict.
I did manage to become sober, and a lot of social challenges have become more manageable now that I have a better framework for understanding my mind.
You might want to try Ketamine. In some countries it's now available legally from neurologists as nose spray. If not, get it from the dark net or a friend in the rave community. Or ask as friend who is a veterinarian. You get mix your own nose spray with that.
Before Ketamine, I never in my life had been able to get into a group of people with them being closer than about 50cm to me. Which means: I could never join a dancefloor.
With Ketamine, thatpoofwent away, and I could.
The same happened for a couple of my neurodiverse friends. One girl her hole life could not be in the same room as others while eating. Now she can.
A single dose also has anti-depressant effects for five days.
Interestingly, it's now in some countries allowed to be used as treatment for social anxiety after positives studies on that. On the other hand, there is now a clinical study that say it's not better than a placebo. Weird.
However, for me (and my nerd friends) the before/after effect is so drastic, I can rule out a placebo effect. My neurologist agrees. I trust clinical studies and always consult them, but something must have gone wrong there.
And yes, this is a good example of a substance that in many countries can get you into jail, while in other countries it can make a most DRAMATIC positive change in your life.
Thank you for the recommendation. I worry about developing a dependency to ketamine, but in NY state where I live, it is legal for therapeutic purposes. I might consider it. I prefer microdoses of psilocybin, since I have a bias towards plant medicine, and I know exactly where the fungus came from :)
And just a funny note re: dancing -- part of my healing journey has been through ecstatic dance. It is a completely sober practice of dancing intuitively and freely with others. While I love ecstatic dance and can easily dance with no fear or anxiety, even in non-ecstatic spaces, I cannot actuallyspeakto strangers or express my desire to become friends with someone.
It's easier for me to dance with complete strangers than it is to converse with them :) One of my most recent social struggles has been the discrepancy between intensely beautiful and intimate bonds formed with people while practicing ecstatic dance, and then finding myself completely unable bond with them via conversation after the dance is over.
I sometimes wish I lived in a world where no one knew my language and it was ok to have a partnership that relied only on body language. Relying on speech to bond with others has failed me for decades and I don't understand why.
I guess I should add this disclaimer:
Not medical advise. I am not suggesting you to something that is illegal in the country you are living in.
Do your own research AND consult someone who is competent on this when wishing to try Ketamine. Buy from a trusted seller. When trying a new substance, always do it sober - no other substance, especially no alcohol. Never try a new drug when alone. Ketamine is a drug that at different doses has very different effects. For social anxiety only a very low dose is needed, muss less than your raver friends would take to have fun. So start low, and slowly level up. Ketamine is pretty safe, but bad for your bladder long-term. Drinking green tea fixes that.
I guess I read this blog post very differently from many other commenters. I don't see this as being entitled or avoiding responsibility for his actions. He's just telling his story. He knows he fucked up. But he also knows the system is fucked.
If you can't possibly understand how growing up without positive influences can lead someone to a life of crime, you're probably too privileged to be the target audience of this article. Just move on.
I don't see this as being entitled or avoiding responsibility for his actions
Did others commented that? If they read this post like that, then they are part of the problem.
If they read this post like that, then they are part of the problem.
On the other hand, they aren't. One part of the problem is in jail as he should be, and another part of the problem is you.
He's just telling his story. He knows he fucked up. But he also knows the system is fucked.
Here in the UK we have something called Joint Enterprise [1] which is controversial for a numnber of reasons, I've read this chaps blog, I can relate to his circumstances in a number of ways having grown up with the rave culture in the 90's, I've seen many people turn a blind eye and escape prosecution, mainly because its too hard to prosecute, demonstrating the laziness of the police as evidence gathers and the judicary.
What annoys me is how these so called law abiding people manage to remain in their job. People claim to live in a democracy, none more so that many in the US, and yet AFAIK noone gets taught law as a mandatory subject when growing up. If you are not taught something how can the public even debate it? Is this the legal system applying a form of Darwinism on the population in a dictatorial fashion? Is this a form of intellectual torture being applied on some who want to enjoy themselves in non-alcoholic ways?
If I had the money I'd get a Judicial Review to find the reasons why judges dont want people to be taught the law as a mandatory subject for a number of reasons, and for adults to be kept up to date with legal changes in a TLDR fashion, that doesnt rely on the opinion of the state broadcaster and other news outlets. Some people are too busy to watch/read the news, which is the only en-masse way to keep up to date currently, and there is also the issue of why is legal conformity pushed on people if they are doing no harm? Just what exactly is a democracy and do you really have a say?
If Roe v. Wade (1973) can mandate a change across a country like the US, are these judges who shy away from making a countrywide decision to keep people abreast of legal changes, not only undermining the idea of democracy, but also just keeping themselves in a stealth sado masochistic schadenfruede-like position of authority with accompanying lucrative income?
Has any scientific study measured the dopamine receptors of judges or serotonin receptors or testostorone levels when they pass a judgement? Has the scientific community shown they derive pleasure from controlling other peoples lives in non scientific ways, because I see the reoffending rate is quite high, and the system is clearly not fit for purpose.
To the original poster, just remember there are some people who agree with your actions, enjoy the mental mind games of programming, it can keep you occupied even when not in front of the computer. :)
The Law of 'Joint Enterprise': Graham Virgo Cambridge Law Faculty [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjBwCmwpvMI
> the success of the Maine model of corrections should highlight the absolutely embarrassing lack of opportunities in the rest of the system
Very well said. And I am glad we have a model now, if one was ever needed. I hope other prison systems take note.
Seems like a good idea, but from the article it sounds like a lot of the difference between Maine and his earlier prisons was the culture that existed amongst the prisoners themselves. Obviously prison officials can try to influence this (indeed, it sounds like the authors transfer to Maine was an attempt to do that), but it seems like the kind of thing that's hard to do with just, like, correspondence college degree programs and the like.
None of the places I was housed at had any opportunities, really.
One place had computers to learn typing. You weren't allowed computer books in that facility in case you used them to figure out how to hack out of the jail. So, bless the elderly nuns, they smuggled in "C# in a Weekend" for me, with the CD-ROM, so I could teach programming classes when the guards weren't paying attention.
As someone actively working in this space, I can tell you they are. Maine is following the so-called Scandinavian Model. It essentially comes down to giving incarcerated people a chance to practice normal daily activities and social interactions. The facilities feel more like highly secure dorms than jails. The way a head of a different DoC said still sticks with me:
We send people away for years, tell them exactly what to do every day and they get to make exacrly one choice every day: do you obey or not? That's the only choice you get to make. Then, after 3, 5, 10 years, we send them out into society and tell them, "Make better choices." But we haven't prepared them for that at all. We have given them almost no chances to make decisions and learn how to make good ones. We just tell them the decision to make and they do it. There's no space for practicing good decisions in traditional prison settings.
Multiple other states are pointing to Maine as proof that the Scandinavian model can work in the US and are incorporating their learnings into their plans and trainings.
What blew my mind is that ~667/100000 or ~.67% of Americans are incarcerated according to the numbers in this post and the population according to the German Wiki page for the US. Wikipedia says it's .531% on the English language website, .629% on the German site. (Don't know which year for either or if juvenile detention is counted on German site.) That is A LOT! A LOT!
The last time this topic came up on HN (not that long ago, a matter of weeks), I dove into the rabbit hole a bit. Turns out that the lion's share of the difference in incarceration rates between the US and other countries comes down to sentencing. Crime-for-crime, the US doles out a lot more time than e.g. Western European nations.
A lot of people think it's drug crimes. Not really. Just the same old crimes as everywhere else, punished with 2-3x the amount of time.
This is basically what US voters have asked for up until recently. Being tough on crime is a feature for a politician. Three-strikes laws, etc.
It's largely a function of the much higher rate of violent crime in the United States
particularly those affected by the war on drugs, like myself, who has spent 1/3 of his life imprisoned for non-violent drug crimes
Still not quite ready to take responsibility for his actions... You weren't magically "affected" by the war on drugs. You went into crime for the easy money, but found out you weren't very good at avoiding getting caught.
It's not like they've scammed others with crypto or tried to overtake markets with price dumping tactics or bribed the governments to use their software or spied on billions for profit.
They've just lorried stuff other poor people wanted. That should not be illegal. The above should.
Meanwhile working class people have lesser and lesser purchasing power to the point were renting and homeownership are out of their reach; subemployment / "gig" employment ("innovating" by removing without workers rights) is rampant.
Nothing like a system that produces a high amount of marginalized / vulnerable people and then blames them for going for "easy" money like drugs or prostitution.
I would expect the tech crowd here to be more inclined towards blameless postmortems / systemic safety.
I'm always amazed at this country in which incarcerating someone for 10 years (!!) for non violent drug dealing is economical, but public healthcare and education aren't.
This comment is everything.
Not to mention that due to understaffed and over budget facilities, rehabilitation programs are generally the first things to get cut.
It's a little late, so this will get buried, but I had a similar experience. I caught two felonies (both from the same incident) Luckily, I had a good job at the time and it was my first offense, so I was able to get house arrest. After seeing what could have been my life, I completed my BS in CS, online part-time and convinced the state of California to let me move there. I received five years of probation, so even though I was off house arrest, I had to convince the state of California to take me as a probationer. I don't think this is usually offered, even though I had gainful employment waiting for me. I feel very fortunate. Since then, I've worked for various startups and Fortune 50 companies as a software engineer. I was lucky enough that the tech industry valued me more for my skills than punished me for my past. I will be forever grateful to the state of California and the tech industry for this. I've looked into, and tried to volunteer for various programs that try to teach inmates or felons technical/engineering skills. All have fallen through. I'd love to hear what you're working on OP, and if you want to brainstorm a way we can try and help more inmates turn their life around through software development.
Thank you for sharing your story. It's wonderful that you want to pay your fortunes forward.
I don't think they work directly in prisons and jails, buthttps://www.underdogdevs.org/is a group that works to train formerly incarcerated people in software and tech. They built mentee/mentor relationships between professional development and those wanting to learn.
If I get locked up maybe I would finally get to doing the exercises from the art of computer programming.
It isn't the worst deal because you don't have to worry about paying rent, so you can just focus 100% on getting good at whatever skillset you choose to pursue.
Today he reached a personal goal -https://pthorpe92.github.io/humor/How-to-get-on-hackernews-f...
The site doesn't show the date, but I emailed him and he says he posted it yesterday. Ain't that just the way!
Well, it looks like he finally did it!
https://pthorpe92.github.io/humor/How-to-get-on-hackernews-f...
Edit: He says he posted this literally yesterday. LOL
Whether you feel sympathy for Preston or not, the fact of the matter is that 95% of the incarcerated individuals in the US will one day love next to you and me. Wouldn't you rather they be prepared to live there, to have a job and resources? To be self-sufficient (Preston will not need welfare resources when he returns because of this opportunity)? (Disclosure, I am Preston's employer and formerly incarcerated myself)
you're a mentally ill tr4nny who murdered someone during a meth deal.
amazing how the few "sweetheart articles" online fail to mention this.
Wait, do they have computer and internet access in prison?? And free meals, healthcare and lodging? I might have taken that deal when I was young, busting my ass at shit jobs and renting shit places with crazy roommates.
I don't know what to tell you, but the quality of the roommates doesn't get better in prison.
Amazing read
This lays in a similar domain with a french startup named Vainu that back in 2019 started to use incarcerated people for data labelling.
Look it up.
The is incredibly inspirational. It’s a light we can potentially use to guide our prison system out of the dark ages.
this was a cool read. i hope you get out soon and be a software dev somewhere
MDMA either puts me to sleep or makes me talk faster than freaking Busta Rhymes raps, without effort. I recorded it once and it's crystal clear. Fun stuff.
Need to get to the science of that mechanism.
Great post
Awesome and amazing.
It is incredible story. I wish you all all the good luck you can get and happy life after you get out of prison. I also wish that prison systems in the US and Canada will adopt this "Scandinavian" model. So much better to put people back on right track instead of being vengeful fucks who would chase person the end of their days,
I’m really happy that you found a way out of the trafficking life. That was a really nice thing to read and I think a lot of people will resonate with it. (Computer nerds that had tough times in life). I’m wishing you all the best in your fight against addiction and I’m definitely adding Unlocked Labs to my list of donations. Thanks for sharing your story.
I hate to quote so much of the post—it's well worth a read—but I think it's bookended by two very different experiences that conveyso muchabout the U.S. prison system.
...and later: