I'm glad to hear accounts of people in the prison system who are given the opportunity to do some good. While I am admittedly less sympathetic of dealers, the fact that the author recognises that they were in a bad situation and have been able to make positive progress since being given the opportunity to is really nice to hear
I don't know the circumstances of this case, but in many states, e.g. Texas my home state, simply having above an arbitrarily defined amount of a given controlled substance automatically gets you tagged with "intent to sell." An overloaded court system combined with a pay-to-win "justice" system means a lot of people take the charge in their plea deal even if they aren't dealers.
In the part 1 article, the author mentions "making tens of thousands of dollars a week" in relation to drugs, which is why I talked about dealing. Obviously I've got no proof of that or anything, so I'm happy to be proven wrong.
Drug charges are difficult. In my opinion, if you are using drugs personally, I don't really see a problem. If you commit some crime while under the influence which could harm another person, eg driving while drugged, obviously that's a different story, and coercing other people into it isn't great either, but if you're just smoking in your own home, its your body that you're altering. If you're selling to other people, that feels a bit more iffy to me because you're affecting other people with that... though I do realise that preventing the sale is effectively the same as preventing the usage...
When it comes to selling, the nature of the drug also matters IMO. I don't have a problem with people selling stuff like cannabis or LSD to consenting able-minded adults, but given the nature of opioids, there's no responsible way to consume them outside of medical necessity.
Without judging this guy's current state, he makes it clear in his first blog post that he was a dealer.
"So instead of coming back home broke and apologetic, I ended up pretty deep into this and soon was making tens of thousands of dollars a week, very much unapologetically."
Then, after his first sentence:
"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: and obviously, was back in prison after a short 14 months of addiction and misery."
Yes unfortunately for a long time my whole life revolved around 'drug culture', and so did of all my 'friends' and my entire social circle.
I certainly cannot act like I did not deserve to come to prison, and it's definitely the only reason I am even alive right now. Coming to prison, specifically in Maine, was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Well, yeah, selling drugs is bad, but it keeps happening and nothing we're trying is stopping it. Clearly, the fact that people end up in prison isn't disincentivizing people from choosing the 10-15k in their pocket option. Humans aren't good at understanding risk or connecting long term consequences to short term actions, in aggregate. We should design our society around this fact.
Hence why I typically argue for legalization and regulation. You have a pretty unique perspective though. I suppose in your position you're incentivized to always say you did the wrong thing, drugs are bad, etc etc, but to the extent you're able to discuss it, what's your take on arguments for legalization and regulation?
Yeah, the really interesting thing there for me wasn't what you did, it's the clarity with which you presented your options as you saw them at the time. I am firmly pro-rehabilitation and that means I've got to be aware of the obstacles to getting out of that culture.
How does the compensation work? The US prison system has a bit of a nasty reputation when it comes to exploiting prison labor, so I hope those practices aren’t carrying over into these more forward-looking types of initiative… but at the same time, surely Turso isn’t paying full SWE salary?
Just curious, why would you expect him to be paid less? I know historically pay is bad for prisoners, but if he's working the same hours and is just as productive as any other employee, shouldn't he be paid the same? I could potentially see paying someone less if they were coming in with much less experience than what's usually hired for in the role, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
Well that’s basically what I’m wondering. Is this a normal employment arrangement - subject to same state payroll tax, labor laws, employee rights, etc - with the additional detail that he resides in prison? Or does the employer need to go through some gateway enforced by the prison with maximum compensation or other restrictions?
But otherwise, in terms of why he’d default to being paid less… yes, what the other commenter said: supply and demand, aka leverage. Turso could choose to be a good citizen and pay him the same as any other employee, but that’s subject to all the questions I posed above, regarding the structural requirements placed on them as the employer.
I am the CEO of Turso.
We are free to negotiate any salary we want with him, the prison system doesn't put any caps, up or down. We are paying him well, and certainly not trying to enslave him or anything. There are some restrictions on how the payments are made but not the amount.
We also don't pay him healthcare, because he wouldn't be able to use it.
I assume he doesn't have to pay rent while in prison and gets free meals, so unless they take some of his income, he might actually be doing pretty good.
The 13th amendment specifically allows slavery of prisoners.
Edit: I don’t mean to imply the author isn’t paid fairly by Turso. A few posts down, the CEO of Turso asserts that they do pay fairly. The OP in this thread might reasonably wonder about this because several states do in fact use prisoners as unpaid slave labor.
If we pay people 40 cents an hour just to say they aren't slaves, they they are slaves for all intents and purposes. They are put in poor working conditions working for for-profit companies, making much less than minimum wage. How is it legal for the State to not provide sunscreen or shade for inmates doing outdoor manual labor?
I don't disagree that 40 cents an hour is ludicrous and is only one notch above slavery, but I do think it worth pointing out that the work for 40 cents per hour is voluntary (i.e. they can quit or choose not to accept the work), whereas "slavery" is very much not.
In many cases the work is not really voluntary, there are sanctions for not taking it. Prisoners in some states are regularly put into solitary confinement for not "volunteering" to work these jobs (a punishment that some areas deem torture). With that amount of coercion I can't see them as voluntary, and so the slavery label is awfully close to the mark.
In those situations, I would agree that is pretty damn close to the slavery mark.
I've worked with a lot of prison facilities though in many states across the US and a few international, and have never seen that. That's not to say it doesn't happen of course, but out of curiosity do you (or anyone else) know of any facilities/jurisdictions that do that?
That cost should be taken by our government and the tax payer, as a disincentive to locking people up.
If you can lock someone up and get close to free labor for it, then we're going to start locking a lot of people up. I mean, it's free labor. Which is why we used to give people 20 years for possession of marijuana. What, you think it's just a coincidence we were throwing primarily black Americans away in prison for ludicrous amounts of time where they'll spend their days picking cotton?
That's what happens when imprisoning people is cheap.
If a prisoner costs $50k a year, and "if" he would work a job where he would make $50k a year and if he didn't receive a dime from it, does it look to you like a free labor? He merely makes up for what he costs the system, not taking into consideration the likely damage that he has done that made him end up in prison in the first place. And I don't expect prisoners to have anywhere close to $50k salary jobs.
The problem here is you’re really asking for abuse with this mentality.
Prisoners should cost money, lots and lots of money. Otherwise we might just decide to imprison you and extract your labor. And that is exactly why we used to see 20 years for possession.
What, did you think we were just burning money for kicks?
That's what I tried to refute in my previous comment. So in case I miss something, explain to me how is it economical for someone to enslave you, if it costs him $50k/year and he will almost certainly extract less value from your work (from data i found $20-$25k/year jobs are common for prisoners). That's the exact opposite of free labor. It is very expensive labor. I would agree if the cost was like $10k and you would extract considerably more from the job done. But it is not the case. Maybe in countries where they don't spend much on prisons what you say works. I don't think it does in US or in any other developed country
Government is not a business, nor is it 0-sum. Well-functioning societies with low rates of recidivism invest much more in their prisoners. We should be investing money into prisoners, so that they can re-integrate into society and become successful tax-paying citizens, just like the premise of the blog post we are commenting on. As the co-founder said, the Department of Corrections in Maine takes a cut of the inmate's salary.
Cheap labor is still valuable, I don't know what to tell you. 20k salary net is very cheap. I don't know why you think it's expensive, because it's not. What you're maybe missing is the job needs to be done regardless - it's not like if we stop using prisoners for labor that need for labor just - poof - disappears.
Do you mean that the benefit of cheap labor goes to private companies, but the cost stays with the taxpayers? If so, I see the logic. If we are talking about imprisoning someone, because we get cheaper labor for example inside the prison, than that doesn't make sense. Of course I count that the job needs to be done.
You can make the exact same argument about employers paying different rates depending on the country the employee is based in, and for all the same reasons.
Is there a good reason why a developer in Thailand or India should be paid less than their colleague who works on the same team, but is based in the US? Many companies believe so - there's a significant difference in the cost of living between those two employees, and employers believe it is fair to adjust the salary to provide a similar quality of life to both.
Equally, a person incarcerated in New York City doesn't have the same living costs as a person who has to live in New York City, so you could reasonably argue that any "Cost of living premium" that a company offers to NYC based employees doesn't need to apply to a person who doesn't experience those higher costs.
Is that true still? I don't go searching prices in foreign markets, but something like the RPi being a UK piece of kit seems like it would now be more expensive in the US compared to UK simply based on recent tariffs being applied.
Sure, but how much of your wage do you spend buying electronics? The vast majority of my salary goes to fixed expenses like housing, food, healthcare, energy, and transport. Those are all highly location-dependent.
In location A you might spend 80% of your salary on fixed expenses, whereas in location B you only need to spend 20% of that same salary to pay for those expenses - leaving you with far more money for discretionary spending.
For sure, but that doesn't justify doing that per country. If you live in SF you could be spending 80% on fixed expenses, but I'm sure that in the US there are places where you could be spending 20%. This applies to other countries as well.
Most companies doing cost-of-living adjustment do it on a finer scale than just country. Someone in SF will indeed be paid more than someone in Dustbowl, USA.
Except prison has some very key differences from living freely in another state or country. You cannot leave and so don't have a choice about where you work. Even if cost of living is low in prison, you often still have to pay for being there and wages are far less than the cost. A prisoner will be released one day and their cost of living will skyrocket overnight. Do we want motivated hard working people leaving prison with nothing so they end up back in the same environment that got them there in the first place?
> Is there a good reason why a developer in Thailand or India should be paid less than their colleague who works on the same team, but is based in the US?
Yes, and that reason is that people in most of the developed world are free to say yes or no to job offers based on their individual preferences. And, it just so happens, in Thailand and India there are many people who will happily say yes to offers that people in the US would say no to. The cost of living explanation that companies give is illusory; the reality is that they have to pay enough to get people to say yes.
Now, you might ask why people in different countries say yes to offers at different compensation levels. But I think the answer is self evident: people will say yes to offers when they believe that there are lots of other people who will say yes to it. Under those circumstances, saying no won't earn a higher offer but cause the company to give the job to someone else.
Ultimately, then, regional prices are set by what the locals are generally willing to say yes to.
>Many companies believe so - there's a significant difference in the cost of living between those two employees, and employers believe it is fair to adjust the salary to provide a similar quality of life to both.
What a complete bs. If anything, in India it costs MORE to achieve a similar standard of living than in the USA. In India you can spend 3 times what a US worker gets paid - and you'll barely have enough money to get the same level of security that that worker gets.
Companies don't care, they pay the minimum amount that they think will interest the worker for long-term employment. And since in India or Thailand the workers don't have such a wide choice in work - they will be paid less, just enough to get them. And they pay the Americans just enough to get them, it is just happening that for Americans this amount are several times bigger. That's all here is.
I guess if you look at pay as solely a result of 'work done' you'd come to this conclusion, and it should work this way, but really its got more to do with the relationship between employer and employee. A person in prison has a very different legal status than someone who doesnt and they do tend to get paid less.
> but if he's working the same hours and is just as productive as any other employee, shouldn't he be paid the same?
He should, but the median salary of engineers in Taiwan is like, 40,000 USD, vs SF which is 160,000 USD. Or London, if one wants to argue something about English language ability or whatever, is 80,000 USD. Literally half that of SF.
Salaries aren't determined by labor value, they're determined by how well employers can collude in a region to get the lowest possible rate while still being able to hire people. Thus they somewhat tend to correlate with cost of living, but not really, e.g. see London vs SF vs NYC. All correlations are used as excuses, when the core, real, reason always comes down to, employers will pay as little as they can get away with.
This annoyed me enough that I started a co-op about it, and we're doing pretty well. I'm still annoyed though. Apparently glommer, the CEO, pays him "full salary" (market rate?), which makes them a good person, but a bad capitalist. They could easily pay basically a slave wage and leverage this dude's ingrained passion for programming to get huge output for almost nothing - that's what the rest of the industry merrily does.
In a free market, very little is determined by its "value". Clean drinking water costs pennies, but its value is far higher. People in developing countries routinely spend hours a day getting clean water, which works out to a price far higher than even bottled water from for-profit companies.
>they're determined by how well employers can collude in a region to get the lowest possible rate while still being able to hire people. Thus they somewhat tend to correlate with cost of living, but not really, e.g. see London vs SF vs NYC.
Is there any evidence there's more collusion happening in London?
>employers will pay as little as they can get away with.
You're making it sound like this is some sort of profound insight, or that companies are being extra dishonorable by doing this, but literally everyone in an economy is trying to pay "pay as little as they can get away with". When was the last time you tipped a gas station?
> they're determined by how well employers can collude in a region to get the lowest possible rate
Colluding is only one of the factors that influencing the demand for labor. Moreover, in most regions it is a rather insignificant factor. Typically, this is the degree of economic freedom, protection of investments and capitals, the level of regulation and the tax burden in the region, not the degree of colluding.
> good person, but a bad capitalist.
Capitalism is not about evaluative characteristics, but about descriptive ones. It is not "bad capitalists pay a lot, good ones pay the minimum", but about "people tend to pay minimum, so to pay the minimum is expected behavior of capitalists"
>but if he's working the same hours and is just as productive as any other employee, shouldn't he be paid the same?
Why would the salaries all bump up to big American city salaries instead of resting somewhere in the lowest range worldwide? If we purely judge work completed.
If you're a remote worker your competition is the world not people in the major city the company is based in.
Because the level of payment almost always depends on the level of competition for a particular person's work. When you're in prison, there's practically no competition for your work. So it's expected that he'll be paid much less.
Even if you just paid him the state minimum wage, it would stop him from having a giant employment gap.
The next step would be background check reform. A DUI record isn't relevant to anything not involving driving.
Excluding a very small handful of SVU level crimes everything should be wiped clean after 5 years or so.
I had an experience with a co worker who would brag about robbing people, selling substances and when he got caught his family money made it go away. He's a CTO at a mid sized tech company now. Had he been poor he'd have a record and be lucky to work as a Walgreens clerk.
Was the biggest "tough on crime" person I've ever met. I think people with means don't understand if you don't have money you can't afford bail.
Can't afford bail you'll just be indefinitely detained without trial for months if not years.
Everything about the criminal justice system is about exploitation. Get house arrest, that's a daily monitoring fee. States like Florida are forcing released inmates to repay the state for the cost of incarceration.
It's past fixing tbh, I'm personally hopping to immigrate to a functional country soon.
I don't read this as he thinks all Atheists are militant, but that his own behaviour was obnoxious? If so, many of us have met those.
It's nice to hear about someone who can change their mind so completely; the trick is not to swing to the other end of the spectrum, trading one absolute for another.
Militant atheists tend to embody anti-theism. It typically manifests as active desire to dissuade anybody from holding religious beliefs or performing religious practices.
Any clergy, whether faithful or secular, has the capacity to act in a militant fashion.
This is well said. I enjoy reading Ryan Burge's articles about religion. He delves into the stark differences between, as you say, "anti-theism" and the "nones" who are not a member of any religious group whatsoever.
> Excluding a very small handful of SVU level crimes everything should be wiped clean after 5 years or so.
My understanding, is that's what the UK does, with an exemption for certain jobs, like teachers and creche hosts. In the US, I think some states have the ability to expunge convictions. Not sure about federal crimes, though.
The "scarlet letter" of a past conviction is a very real issue, and keeps some folks down. People can get past it, though. I know folks that served time for murder, that have very good careers, and people that have misdemeanor records, that have always struggled.
My state will automatically expunge non violent misdemeanors after 2010, so if it happened before you have to jump through hoops.
I know people who dropped out of college because they had a very small drug charge, no use in finishing if you will have a scarlet letter over your head forever.
That's really unfortunate. I work with people who were formally justice-involved every day and their educations have been an aid to them personally and professionally. A felony or a "bad" misdemeanor (e.g. domestic violence) isn't the end of the world, even in the modern US. People can and do overcome the consequences of their mistakes and thrive.
Different states have rules about expungement, as far as what happens automatically, what can be done if an offender convinces a judge, and how much it all costs.
Federal crimes (and I don't think that applies in this person's case since they're in a Maine DOC prison, although drug crimes of this kind easily could be charged by the feds) aren't usually expunged. Even if you receive a pardon, the original crime (and a note of the pardon) will exist on the record.
It's a really strange system. You're meant to lie and say "no" during interviews after your conviction is expunged if you are asked "have you ever been convicted of a crime," although I believe in many states it's now illegal to ask such a question.
> The next step would be background check reform. A DUI record isn't relevant to anything not involving driving.
This is already the case in some countries, including The Netherlands. A background check is done for a specific "profile", and convictions which aren't relevant for your job-to-be don't show up. Someone with a DUI can't become a taxi driver, but they should have no trouble getting a job as a lawyer. Got convicted of running a crypto pump&dump? Probably can't get a job as a banker, but highschool teacher or taxi driver is totally fine.
A surprising number of US states also drop crimes from your background checks or legally forbid them from being used against you after so many years, 5-10 on average, as long as they aren't directly related to the job.
>Excluding a very small handful of SVU level crimes everything should be wiped clean after 5 years or so.
It's nice to think that people should be able to fully pay back their debt to society but (a) criminal court proceedings need to be public in a free society and if they are public, people should be able to record and distribute the results as private citizens if we believe in upholding the principle of freedom of speech.
Even if it were possible to prevent this, (b) this does a small but not entirely negligible harm to people that never committed a crime by casting some doubt upon them. This is most apparent for minority groups that are associated with criminality; they experience worse employment prospects when the state makes criminal records unavailable.
Criminal records should be available, but in a controlled way.
Where I live (Poland), only the person itself can request their criminal record from the state. This is a routine procedure required by some employers, you can even do it online these days.
Most if not all criminal offenses "expire" after some years, how long depends on the offense. If there's something you've been charged with but not convicted of, it doesn't appear on the record.
This is easier to implement for us because there are limitations on how media can report on criminals (no last names for example). Even in the US, I think that system could be workable. Instead of attacking distributions of "unedited" criminal records, you'd have to target employers and require them to only acquire the state-approved versions.
Excellent marketing. They get a remote worker who is (in HN headhunter speak) a great and passionate talent. Of course they have no risks on their side. And they get praised for it on the very grassroots YC Combinator forum.
Because that's what a social community would do. But where you probably are, such an approach is falsely labeled as “communism” by MAGA anti-social assholes.
Someone can both work towards rehabilitation and pay their 'debt to society'. If they earn over what it costs to house them in a Maine prison then, by all means, let them keep the excess earnings. If they earn $100k/year and the state pays them $1.35/hr then there are deeper institutional issues around prison labor exploitation which should be addressed.
I used to have an uncle who was constantly in and out of prison over drug-related issues and he would do all sorts of work programs just to break up the monotony. Ironically, none of these rehabilitation efforts did any good and what finally 'set him straight' was the Three Strikes Law.
> The US prison system has a bit of a nasty reputation when it comes to exploiting prison labor
Do you mean for private interest? If so, I would agree that prison labor should only be used for public benefit. And this labor should be part of the sentence.
No, it's related. In programming, the only employment options are working for a government, for some corporation, or trying to sell directly to individuals?
Somebody who had worked for a recognizable tech company is far more hireable than somebody who is Self Employed or who has worked for the government.
But that's not prison labor. Prison labor specifically refers to penal labor. You receive no pay, because the labor is part of the punishment for the crime. It is the prisoner who is paying off his debt. In those cases, I don't think it is moral for private companies to make use of that labor for private gain. Penal labor should only be used for public benefit.
Here, we're talking about preparing someone for the job market when they leave. Hence, these are two separate concerns. You cannot substitute the former with the latter.
What is your ethical concern in this particular case. The remote work privileges seem to be setting him up for success after he leaves. The company he's working for doesn't seem to be unfairly exploiting his labor. This seems like a great success story for the Maine department of corrections. Who is being harmed here?
To me, it looks like a net benefit for the public, the department of corrections, and the inmate.
If you are worried about the inmate being allowed to build up savings that they can use when they are released, then that's on the judge. If the inmate has met their restitution obligations, then I don't have a problem with them being allowed to leave prison with savings that will enable them to get back on their feet again.
Somewhat relieved to see that this is the drugs prison guy, and not one of the two pedo prison guys who sometimes post on HN with their fake sob stories pretending to be hard done to while concealing their depravity.
In contrast I'm glad to see this guy has been open and honest, owning up to his mistakes and starting to turn his life around and make amends for the harm he's caused others. Well done.
Edit: Please disregard that last paragraph. Just saw the document @bjorkandkd linked.
I tried to hire someone with a drug-related felony conviction to work on a Rust project with me. The guy was awesome, and he was super excited about the work we were doing.
Unfortunately, due to the circumstances of our world today, he was understandably too anxious to move from his current job. He worried he'd never be able to find employment as an ex-felon if the runway ran out.
Please see my nested reply to his comment, which shows that @bjorkandkd is not only making assumptions, but that his allegation is unsupported by even by the document that he linked.
> I quickly outgrew the curriculum, preferring instead to spend ~15+ hours a day on projects and open source contributions.
TIL from 15-20yrs old I was a prisoner
But seriously, programs like these need to be made available to more people, incarcerated or not. There's millions of people in this country who have basically no access to employment. Remote work could not only be a lifeline to those communities, it's advantageous to employers and good for the economy.
My take on RTO is that its a soft layoff. You can get rid of a ton of people, reduce headcount, next quarters numbers look good. The other reason? Managers just like the office. Its a spot of manager power, they like that.
There's also a difference of being guilty of doing something but never having charges brought against you. Many times in domestic violence cases we see the victim not press charges. It doesn't mean the victim was not the recipient of violence.
Whatever speculations you want to make, the person was not convicted of assault.
It's not the place of random hacker news commenters to try to and hold assault against him because you think, after reading 2 minutes about the case, that he should have been convicted.
I never said anything about this specific case. Everything I said was generic differences between actually doing something and not having charges brought vs given the presumption of innocence while defense against charges.
Which doesn't seem to be wrong? At least from the linked document, he went to prison for non-violent drug crimes, unless I misunderstand what the document says?
Him claiming he's in prison for non-violent crimes (like he's your local herb dealer) takes gumption...Authorities linked his Carfentanil escapades to several deaths.
> The defendant, Preston Thorpe, appeals his conviction for possession of a
controlled drug with intent to sell
He may have done other things, but his conviction was for possession with intent, and that seems to be why he's locked up. It doesn't make anything else he's done acceptable, but in America he's innocent until proven guilty, and it doesn't seem he was found guilty of assault.
>Innocent until proven guilty doesn't extend to internet comments.
That's not a good thing.
Edit: I cannot really believe that this, of all comments, is controversial. Living life treating everyone as guilty until they prove themselves innocent is... just shitty, let alone exhausting. Do people forget about how many times reddit and other ruined innocent people's lives?
Sometimes HN amazes me with new technology, interesting conversations, etc. Sometimes it amazes me when people are arguing that we should go through life treating people as guilty first, until they are proven innocent. I think I'll go back to not participating for awhile.
Yes, it is. The courts are flawed, the courts get things wrong all the time. Many innocent people are found guilty. If we must apply the legal standard to internet comments, must we condemn people we believe to be innocent? The legal standards exist for the system, not for people. Saying that the standard of "innocent until proven guilty" should apply outside of the legal system is lazy and avoiding making decisions for yourself about how you treat people.
People proven guilty are not necessarily guilty. People proven not guilty are not necessarily innocent. The legal standard exists because a system needs standards.
My assertion is that "innocent until proven guilty" is a legal standard that applies to the courts because a system needs standards. People have the luxury of being able to use their judgement. My assertion is that choosing to defer to a legal standard (not proven guilty therefore innocent) is choosing to opt-out of your wonderful human ability to form a judgement based on a lot more than just one single data point.
The person you love comes to you and tells you that they've been attacked by your shady friend. Do you defend your friend from the accusation because "they're innocent until proven guilty" or do you use your judgement and decide that the person you love is telling the truth because you have a lifetime of trust in them?
"People proven guilty are not necessarily guilty. People proven not guilty are not necessarily innocent. The legal standard exists because a system needs standards."
so you saying that court is useless because its not perfet????
its easy to complaint about something but give NOTHING to improve it
You would not do better than people in charge because EASY to say something is wrong but you dont have ANSWER that improve this current standards
I'm saying that the judgement of a court is useless when making a personal judgement because what a court sets out to do is different to what a human sets out to do. The court system is a collection of complicated and convoluted standards and rules and regulations designed specifically to support a system responsible for depriving people of their rights. A court judgement is not "better" than a human judgement, quite the opposite, a court judgement is often worse, because court judgements are formed without access to all information. A jury for example will often have very important information withheld from them because it doesn't satisfy some esoteric court standard. A person would use that information to form a judgement.
> Saying that the standard of "innocent until proven guilty" should apply outside of the legal system is lazy and avoiding making decisions for yourself about how you treat people.
Then how do you explain laws against slander and libel?
You can't label someone guilty of a crime just because you feel it to be true.
Why? Different fora have different standards of proof. For example, in civil cases (even in America) the standard of proof is 'preponderance of evidence', not 'innocent until proven guilty'.
Why should internet comments follow criminal law, and not eg civil law, or some other standard?
The options are you assume people are innocent unless proven guilty, or guilty unless proven innocent.
Going through life treating everyone as guilty until proven innocent sounds like an exhausting and negative way to treat everyone, and harms more people overall.
Those are not the only options, those are the two extremes of a spectrum. Most people fall in the middle with something like "assume people are innocent unless you see convincing evidence of guilt". This is a reasonable philosophy unless you have power over someone, in which case proof is much more important.
Just get some background rates, and assume that people are guilty with eg 0.1% probability. (Just a made a up number. Real priors should depend on a lot more context.)
Ok, I think you may have misinterpreted some other comments then. The argument was that "proven" in "innocent until proven guilt" is too high a bar for a low-stakes internet discussion.
Because the report only contains statements of fact related to the police report and the police interaction.
There's no actual confirmation in that report that her arm was actually broken or that she was actually beaten. There's no medical examination that happened here that is cited.
That would still be required in a civil trial with preponderance of evidence. What if she was on drugs and did it to herself? (Not saying that's what happened). We don't know what happened from this document and that has nothing to do with this charge or his appeal.
The point is that people should be able to use their own judgement on a wide variety of issues and not be forced to delegate their decision making power to the courts/third parties.
There's a difference between "we want to lock this person up and take away their liberty, so we should be basically certain" versus "look man he's been done for drugs and she ended up with a broken arm, I don't trust this person".
>Living life treating everyone as guilty until they prove themselves innocent is... just shitty
There's no scenario here where this guy is innocent. The distinction here is whether he's a wife-beating drug dealer or just a drug dealer. There's some evidence to suggest the former but not really enough that you can definitely state it.
Personally, I'd give a convicted drug dealer less benefit of the doubt than the average person.
On one hand, I agree that internet comments tend to judge people unfairly, and “treating people as guilty first” probably leads to an unhealthy society (considered “unhealthy” by its own members).
On the other hand, GP is objectively right ("innocent until proven guilty doesn't extend to internet comments"). I also think that it’s better for random people to be able to post their terrible judgements than any feasible alternative, because such an alternative probably leads to good judgements also censored. We can mitigate (not eliminate) bad judgements, e.g. by educating people better and shaming those who shame others more; and we can minimize mob justice’s effect on critical government functions like welfare and prison sentencing, e.g. by running them on mostly objective procedures and with staff who aren’t influenced by mob opinion.
Targeted harassment and doxxing (and swatting, getting people fired/divorced/ruined when they don’t deserve to be, etc.) is different (and to be clear, IMO very bad). People posting opinions in a way that the target can block (which they can usually do with blocklists and word filters) is fine. The main point I’m trying to make is: if opinions in random internet comments lead to targeted harassment and real-world consequences even when the opinions are “bad” (e.g. bigoted, hypocritical), it's less effective to try and prevent the internet comments' existence, than to reduce the factors causing them to influence the real world and create factors preventing influence.
We're allowed to form judgments about people based on evidence that wouldn't be sufficient to convict them of a crime. The consequences of me forming the opinion that this guy is a domestic abuser are far lower than the consequences of a court doing so. And of course, even courts use a much lower evidential standard than 'innocent until proven guilty' when deciding civil cases. Making a derogatory comment about someone on the internet is much more analogous to a civil court finding against the plaintiff than it is to a criminal court giving someone a jail sentence.
In any case, HN is very selective about this high evidential standard. People will make a lot of effort to give probable domestic abusers the benefit of the doubt, but pick one of HN's official enemies and suddenly any little scrap of evidence is considered quite sufficient!
I agree with this sentiment but I'm also willing to explore/consider the possibility that "innocent until proven guilty" isn't strictly only useful as an esoteric legal construct, but a philosophy that could potentially have applicability to an individual's worldview.
That being said I wouldn't have much patience for a "merely" accused murderer or child predator in my personal life, just as I also don't have much patience for a doctor who refuses to prescribe me antibiotics because the chance they could help me is "only" 1%. I don't really care that it's socially irresponsible when it comes to my personal assessment of risk.
I agree that it is nice to keep in mind as a general philosophy, however I also think it's important to keep in mind that the people who originally wrote "innocent until proven guilty" were all treasonous sepratists, and their philosophy may or may not always align with my own.
Yes, violent insurrection against the lawful authority of the Crown is no laughing matter. (And many of them were slaveowners, so they did not have moral authority neither by the standards of their day nor by ours.)
It's ambiguous. The concept of slavery being bad was quite novel and mostly comes from English philosophy/legal theory which America has a direct lineage from.
Not sure if that's supposed to be a reference to the Founding Fathers, but it's erroneous if so. The presumption of innocence long predates the American Revolution.
"Prosecutors said Thorpe was on parole for other drug convictions when he was arrested last year and also had two suspended sentences for drug offenses over his head."
"Innocent until proven guilty" is only for the justice system. You are deliberately avoiding the fact that the entire reason the cops showed up was to respond to a domestic violence call. People do not need an entire court trial to determine that the woman's arm was swollen and her face was bruised because her partner hit her.
He’s not just saying he was locked up due to drugs. He’s saying that “all” his “poor decisions and lifestyle choices” in his twenties were related to drugs.
In a generalized sense, sure. There's both a strong correlation and a proven causation that drugs and domestic abuse go hand in hand across the prison population.
However, on any individual case the same is not true, because that moves from talking about averages and general cases into specifics, and the burden of proof changes significantly. While there is a connection on average, that isn't enough to say any specific drug abuser commits domestic abuse. For that, ideally, you need criminal charges proven in court. That's missing here.
I feel ok that there's a distinction between legal rulings and other circumstances of the case that I as an internet person can use my judgement to understand.
Just because someone is guilty or not doesn't separate other facts of the case.
In an extreme example: I'm ok with the court letting someone off who murdered someone, because the police didn't follow proper procedure wrt evidence/confessions/witness testimony. Our legal system should be held to the highest standard when convicting someone of a crime. That doesn't stop me from believing that the defendant actually did the crime or not.
Sure, but bjorkandkd unpromptedly accused Preston of being a liar, which is just incorrect as far as I can tell.
Everyone is of course free to make up their own mind, but when making public accusations I would at least expect an honest effort to keep those accusations factually correct.
There was no crime reported by the girlfriend. The allegation of abuse was made by the girlfriend's mother, who was not present. As far as I can tell, there were no charges of assault or battery, even after the police interviewed the girlfriend for their report. There's really no basis for forming any kind of judgement here, legal or otherwise.
The original link does not say that the girlfriend reported the broken arm to the police. The police were called by her mother, who made the allegation against Thorpe. The article above says:
> According to [Thorpe's lawyer]’s appeal, Abogast told police she had fallen three days before Thorpe’s arrest and doctors at Elliot Hospital said her arm was broken in three places.
The original link says that she had scars and scabbing on her face, but this link says that Thorpe also had scars and scabbing, which the police noted in their report as consistent with drug abuse.
I'm not one to disbelieve women when they report abuse. In this case, the alleged victim didn't report any abuse, a third party who was not witness to any alleged crimes did. It's also very unusual to have your arm broken in three places, call your mom to say what happened, and then not seek any kind of treatment. I feel sad for everyone involved, because it's clear to me at least that the drug issues were the crux of the matter (which is corroborated by the actions and findings of the state). Without a statement from the girlfriend or a finding by the state, any suggestion of domestic abuse is unwarranted speculation.
He wasn't charged with injuring his girlfriend, and notably fled with her after that confrontation, setting off a national manhunt that led the TV news in the area.
I'd like to see him get life in prison with no chance at parole. He's responsible for at least three deaths (probably more) but because he's proficient at social engineering and feeding people lines he's weaseled his way into the tech industry (from prison!). Over 78k people died in 2023 of fentanyl alone and this twerp was trafficking a substance far more lethal, he literally left a trail of bodies in his wake.
While tragic, those people (or at least the vast majority) weren't forced to use drugs. They made that decision and faced the consequences. Shifting the blame for their poor decisions onto the drug dealer is unwarranted imo.
I agree it’s not black and white, but let’s be reasonable. When you sell to an addict the drug they crave, knowing full well that they will take it, and you switch it with deadly poison, just because it’s cheaper? I mean, it is hard to argue that it is not an act of both fraud and premeditated murder, at the very least gross negligence. Is the addict responsible for the risk they were obviously taking? Well sure, not that they have much of a choice at that point, but there’s always a choice, and mostly they got themselves into that situation, and they are committing a crime too. Still that doesn’t take much blame away from the dealer.
It’s like saying: it’s your fault that you got shot for being in the wrong neighborhood at night. Were they knowingly taking a risk? Sure, but the murderer is still a murderer.
And we long got rid of the concept of “outlaw” where if you commit a crime any subsequent crime on you is fair game. That’s rather barbaric.
EDIT: I was assuming that it is obvious that no one takes such synthetic opioids on purpose. They are known not to be much fun and very dangerous. They are mostly used as a cheap filler in other more mainstream drugs, most notably in fake branded prescription drugs.
If someone breaks the law by jaywalking, and a driver of a car runs him over when he could have avoiding hitting him (by braking) is it likewise unwarranted to shift the blame for the poor decisions of the jaywalker onto the driver?
If not, what is the reason you decide the two situations differently?
I don't think the analogy holds. A drug user wants to buy from the dealer. The dealer is providing a service that the drug user can voluntarily turn down.
I don't see how that's similar to a driver running into a jaywalker. Just because he's jaywalking doesn't mean he wants a driver to hit him.
In the law, the jaywalker and the driver will share responsibility. If you knowingly sell carfentanil, the mechanism by which the law apportions blame onto the "victim" won't exist: there is no set plausible of circumstances in which you could reasonably believe it was OK to sell someone carfentanil, where in the jaywalking case there are dueling factors of pedestrial negligence and driver duty of care.
The Russians tried using a carfentanil aerosol to sedate hostages and it killed over 120 people. It's 100x more potent than fentanyl and 10,000 times more potent than morphine. He put the lives of god knows how many people at risk and could have easily cross contaminated the weed we also know he was dealing (probably to kids). And peer-pressure is an immense force, even with adults (https://news.utdallas.edu/health-medicine/peer-pressure-adul...). If he had the humility and self-reflection to post that his actions were ruthless and killed people than I'd be feel better about his mindset, but his insistence on being classified as a (non-violent) drug offender is clearly an attempt on his part to manipulate.
Yes, I believe Preston is responsible for those deaths.
He paid for them for 10 years, and will still be met with the judgement of the Lord when his time comes.
But he will also be met with His mercy, and I am happy to extend him some mercy for his repentance here on Earth before his day comes.
I am the one who hired Preston.
Whatever he has done in the past, I have all the evidence in the world in front of me to assure me that he has a transformed heart. It is not a common thing to see, but here the fruits are clear.
If you're going to extend kindness to Preston then perhaps a little kindness towards others wouldn't go a miss either. Preston isn't rare, the prison system is filled with normal kind hearted people who were unfortunate in life and things went awry. Everyone deserves a chance, not just someone who can provide economic value to you.
Purporting that to be a "claim" would be - in my opinion - an incredibly disingenuous reading of the poster's comment. Remember the HN commenting guidelines: "Assume good faith."
That is the good faith reading. The comment isn't open to interpretation. What could the meaning be if not that Preston is an uncommon example of a prisoner?
"I am the one who hired Preston. Whatever he has done in the past, I have all the evidence in the world in front of me to assure me that he has a transformed heart."
Instead, you had to drag down others, the people who you haven't blessed with your benevolence.
"It is not a common thing to see."
You are being praised for showing kindness to one of us (a nerd, a programmer) while disparaging the others. You can show kindness to Preston without condemning the others. Ask ChatGPT to explain exceptionalism to you if you still do not understand. Every person in prison is a person who can change given the opportunity.
Preston isn't uncommon, Preston isn't rare or exceptional, Preston is the average prisoner: someone who, when given an opportunity, has been able to reform. You can celebrate Preston without disparaging his less fortunate cellmates.
The only rare thing here is that he was given an opportunity (and for that you should be praised).
The vast vast majority of DV complaints are unsubstantiated, so speaking to the wife is generally a poor predictor of whether the presumption of innocence will be overcome.
DV ex parte granted (no chance for defendant to defend him(her)self): ~5100
DV final order granted after defendant able to defend him(her)self): ~3200
So for example in CT on just a civil standard, only 2/3 of the accusers were able to get even a temporary order when the defendant had zero chance to tell their side of the story. Once the defendant was able to come to court and defend themselves, only about 1/3 of them made it to a final order. And that was by the much weaker civil rather than criminal standard.
Some notes: in Connecticut, restraining orders can be granted for a variety of reasons, not restricted to domestic violence alone. Fairly close correlation but it does include, for example, stalking.
It seems unwise to assume that restraining orders alone represent the entire count of domestic violence complaints that reach the legal system. For example, surely domestic violence arrests should be counted? Which seem to be a much higher count than restraining order applications -- 24,850 DV arrests in 2011 vs. 9033 DV applications. I'm not sure how to count the 32,111 "Family Violence Protective Orders" in 2011; are they the result of arrests? Are they yet another possible outcome of law enforcement involvement, separate from either a requested restraining order or an arrest?
There are way more reasons a restraining order might not make it to a final order besides "the requestor was proven wrong." I'd want more detailed data here before reaching a conclusion. Otherwise, this assumes that failure to grant a restraining order proves lack of DV. I am not sure that it would change the percentages you've shown significantly -- we're all aware of cases where restraining orders weren't granted with very bad results, but there's always a tendency to report on the most clickbaity outcomes. Still, worth digging into that one a bit more.
Yes I'm sure we could keep digging up more. I've been down this rabbit hole before so I know how it always ends: I provide a data driven take backed by source after source which ends in endless nitpicking and scrutiny and rejection of the sources, meanwhile unsourced hot takes go completely unchallenged without the demand sources, as seen in your sister comment.
This is the key of this two-pronged approach, one commenter can bury the data driven comment in source rejection (without being beheld to prove a counter point, since the asserter has the burden of proof) while the sister comment can drive the more approved comment unchallenged. Of course we really know, in many cases, the two separate commenters are advancing the same line of opinion, but using this split strategy both are compartmentalized in their burdens.
Although, the truth is, the scrutinizer is rarely offering counter sources of their own, which they of course are under no obligation to provide. But barring that, we're left at worst with "I don't know" which is a terrible standard under which to assume the word of the wife is predictive of guilt, thus even if all the sources are rejected you leave from a practical perspective no off no better than you started in predictive guilt.
Oh, I have no interest in going around and around about it -- that's not a good use of anyone's time. I think it's a somewhat understudied field, and was legitimately interested in your cites. Your material is way better than surveys about how many people feel like they've been falsely accused; relying on self-reporting like that is clearly flawed.
I also, for what it's worth, think that "did you talk to the wife" is too high a standard in this case. For one thing, the wife didn't bring a complaint, as I understand it.
My hot take is the majority of complaints made by people who otherwise had planned on staying together are probably valid.
The divorce industry and divorce lawyers request these orders like candy, as leverage for proceedings and to take away custody briefly during the temporary order while the custody hearing is going on so that during custody hearings it can be argued the child already is only with the mom or dad and they should get full custody. It also lets you eject the partner from the home without a legal eviction process, so they are at their weakest and homeless when fighting in court. They produce a massive number of weak DV claims, the point was never to take them final but to provide enough of a discontinuity in their life to crush them.
Note that it's not trivial to demonstrate that a restraining order is necessary, even in cases where domestic violence has occurred and has a reasonable risk of recurring.
I understand that you're simply using this as a proxy for the actual unknowable data, but I think it's worth pointing out that the map is not the territory.
It is trivial in many states and jurisdictions to get a temporary order. One was obtained against David Lettermen just by a woman in a different state claiming he was sending her secret messages through the TV.
The final order is more difficult, but quite often (i.e. in divorce / custody court) the only goal was to evict them from the home and disrupt custody to get the upper hand in hearings, so temporary is all that's needed to do the job and then no need to actually defend the claim made 14+ days later when they're already homeless and with the baseline of out of the kid's life.
DV is a very complex legal minefield. I have years of working with defendants. I would say that a majority of DV complaints are valid in some way, and that many times the DV goes both ways (but it's rarer for the woman to get charged, even if the instigator).
The biggest issue is that once the perpetrator is removed and/or charged the victim often petitions the prosecutor and police to drop the charges. The prosecutors I know will generally not do this and will push for a guilty plea or trial. It's hard for the prosecutor to know whether the victim is being manipulated into asking for the charges to be dropped, and regardless, a crime has probably been committed, and in the justice system the plaintiff is the state, not the person who was battered. This can lead to a stand-off where the victim refuses to come to trial to testify, and where the prosecutor has a Hobson's Choice of whether to arrest the victim and jail them until trial to get them on the stand or let the case drop.
Some say that prosecutors in your jurisdiction are so reluctant to drop charges, that they may keep a man in jail for nearly a decade without trial, isn't that right 'years of working with defendants' jailhouse lawyer charles? I hope someday you receive compensation for this tyranny that was imposed upon you.
It's obvious from the comments in the thread that the internet hate mob still wants its pound of flesh and for Preston to be judged for life regardless of current circumstances.
They don't realize how damaging their posts are to people who have done wrong in the past and want to change their lives. Once again I am ashamed to be part of the Hacker News community, but thank you for your fairness and goodheartedness.
I don't know what to make of this document and claim, is that a report, an actual conviction? I don't understand it. It definitely sounds horrible in any case.
However, the point of a program of hiring or educating people who are in prison isn't to judge them. They are already in prison. 10years is a long time, so it's likely they did something bad and have been judged for it.
This is to give people who are capable and willing a chance to grow and integrate. From the little knowledge I have about this, it seems like this is very effective.
You assert that there was domestic violence unrelated to drugs, but you present no evidence for this, and substance abuse is strongly correlated with domestic violence.
In my experience "drug-related" can definitely include serious violent crimes (some that can result in execution, or life without parole). Through my extracurricular work, I personally know a lot of drug offenders, and breaking their spouse's arm easily fits. I also know women that have drained their husband's retirement, people that have snorted their kids' college funds, mothers that have pimped their kids, and other stuff that would have a lot of folks horrified.
There's a reason people don't like drug addicts, and there's a pretty significant portion of the population that wants them all dead (except for my little Muffy, who was corrupted by her boyfriend, of course).
The Second Chance stuff is important. Surprisingly enough, Jaime Dimon is a big supporter of it[0].
I wish this chap well. The proof will come, when he leaves the structure of prison.
Yes, places like Koch Industries, heck even JP Morgan. General rule in most countries is that if you're a bank, you can't hire ex-convicts (for the lack of a better word).
Oh that's disappointing. I take back what I said in my other comment then, about him being open and honest. Thought he might have been one of the relatively decent ones. Seems not.
So now you're openly condemning a person that you've never met about things you don't really know about other than just some random comments on an internet forum.
For fucks sake, have some human decency. If your name was the one involved, how would something like this make you feel?
That's not what your report says. Your report says there's evidence she may have been beaten and that her arm may have been broken. There's a likelihood of both and that he did it but there's no evidence in that report that he did it.
There is no actual confirmation in that document that her arm was broken, just that that was what was reported to the officer and that it was injured/swolen.
You're free to say "allegedly", just like the standards the media has to go by.
The jealousy must be strong, does it really hurt that much that someone in the prison system reformed their life and is probably doing better than you for you to create a new account and try to drag them down? I don't know what hurt you are going through, but you can definitely do better if you are willing to be more positive in life.
The most common reason violent offenders escape charges
or conviction or domestic abuse is that the victim(s) are
too afraid to press charges, and/or they feel guilty about
it happening or even the feeling that they brought it on
themselves and deserved it.
This then combined with the fact that the abuser is going to jail for on unrelated convictions. This is a huge relief to any abuse survivor.
The person is going away, and I will be safe.
The other component is all the steps involved with filing charges which will often feel invasive and have to bring it all up again.
I have seen this up close and personal on a few occasions,
I have begged the victim to go to the police but they would not do it.
The worst outcome of this is when the abuser is let out, the abuser may seek out the victim again, or the abuser will find new victims.
In this case the police had a call from a close family member accusing the person of domestic abuse.
They had suspicious behavior from the accused person.
They also witnessed that the possible victim had multiple injuries consistent with domestic abuse.
As well as the arm injury the call from the family member had initially reported.
But probably no charges or at least no convictions.
and hear i am browsing hacknews at work on monday morning, wishing I was still asleep. Really gives you perspective, I hope you get out safe and sound and soon and things work out for you.
what if prison ends up becoming the most distraction-free dev environment. no meetings, no slack pings, no linkedin recruiters, just you, a terminal, and 10 years of uninterrupted focus. kinda terrifying how productive that sounds
Something like prison probably is the most productive environment one could be in. It almost completely eliminates the need for self discipline because it's all enforced.
When I had a <3 year old demanding child I often thought about how relaxing prison would be, with relatively normal set sleeping, work patterns, and in some prisons guaranteed personal space at night with at worst an adult roomate.
Just the thought of maybe being able to peacefully read a book for 30 minutes, at times I almost wished to be imprisoned...
You never go on vacation. Your family gets sick. Your friends need your help. You want to travel. You want to go to funerals for people who aren't in your direct family. You want to explore hobbies.
You're essentially designated a human of lesser value, which means nobody really cares about you. If guards harm or sexually assault you, nobody cares. If other prisoners harm or sexually assault you, nobody cares. If you get sick, nobody cares. You will not receive good care in any sense of the word. If you have mental health issues, may God have mercy on your soul.
You can have that now on the outside if that’s what you want. Start with one room in your house. Remove everything but a dedicated cheap computer and a table and a bed and a bottle of water. Strictly limit the apps you can use or the sites you can access.
Maine's remote work program is an incredibly promising development to prevent recidivism. The amazing thing about it is that it gives real jobs to prisoners that they can seamlessly continue after they get out of prison. Normally when you get out, it's impossible to get a job, and the clock is ticking. This leads to desperation, which leads to bad behavior.
There is a real risk of exploitation, but if it's properly managed, remote work for prisoners is one of the most hopeful things I've heard about the prison system. It gives people purpose while there and an avenue to success once they're out.
This sounds good. It is important that we recognize all of the purposes of punishment instead of overemphasizing one or neglecting the other.
Punishment has three ends: retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice; it is charitable and prudent to rehabilitate the criminal, satisfying the corrective end of punishment; and would-be criminals must be given tangible evidence of what awaits them if they choose to indulge an evil temptation, thus acting as a deterrent.
In our systems today, we either neglect correction, leaving people to rot in prison or endanger them with recidivism by throwing them back onto the streets with no correction, or we take an attitude of false compassion toward the perp by failing to inflict adequate justice, incidentally failing the deterrent end in the process.
One of the most baffling elements of the justice system is how little the victim is involved in the justice. 'Society' should not lord the lion's share of the justice decisions over the victims. Quite often the victim would prefer compensation and release over getting fuck all while the perpetrator languages in prison at the tax dollar of the victim.
Much of 'justice' has been usurped from the victim into a jobs campaign for the state.
I think you're confusing or conflating civil and criminal courts. If someone breaks a law, that's generally a matter for the state to decide in a criminal court. If someone was damaged (i.e. if the victim feels the perpetrator owes them compensation), that's a matter for them to bring up themselves in the civil courts. These are separate functions; one situation could be tried in both courts. A famous example off the top of my head is that even though OJ Simpson wasn't criminally convicted of murder of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, a civil court found him liable, awarding tens of millions of dollars in damages, to be paid to their families.
There's no element of the civil trial I'm aware of that allows the prisoner to be released to perform activity to compensate the victim. In practice imprisoning the perp against the wishes of the victim robs them of their civil awards, either by delay or denial.
No, I don't think they are confusing those things. I think they are critiquing the system at large and are alluding towards alternatives such as restorative justice.
> A famous example off the top of my head is that even though OJ Simpson wasn't criminally convicted of murder of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, a civil court found him liable, awarding tens of millions of dollars in damages, to be paid to their families.
The trick here is to be fortunate enough to have a biiiiig monthly retirement pension that the courts can barely touch, or enough wealth to have already bought your mother a nice house (though I now read OJ screwed that up by not transferring her the title).
Distancing the victim from the outcome of sentencing is by design and, arguably, for the better in a democracy. Crimes violate the social order,
not just the victim. It behooves us all to have a system wherein (in theory) the system, not the victim, applies a set of rules to determine punishment, as contrary as that might seem to one’s sense of self, morals, etc. It’s a part of why “justice is blind.”
Also victims are nearly always emotionally involved, and emotional-based decisions aren't generally good. Punishments would be much more severe if it were up to the victims.
If victims determined the sentences, I expect people would spend a lot more time in prison, way more than a non-emotionally involved and wronged person would think fair.
IMHO letting victims set the sentence would be the worst way to do it.
It'd be such a mixed bag it wouldn't resemble anything 'fair'. I know some people who are against capital punishment even for obviously guilty serial killers. I know some people would think capital punishment is called for if you accidentally dinged their car door.
Very well said. Here's a concrete example. After the Charleston church shooting, some members of victims' families forgave their murderer. Should that mean the shooter should have gone free? Certainly not, he was still prosecuted because that is what is good for society.
Most criminals aren't in a financial position to pay compensation. And even if you get a judgment, good luck ever collecting. When a drunk driver damaged some of my property I didn't bother sueing him because he was obviously a worthless deadbeat.
In most US jurisdictions the victim of a crime is allowed to make a statement during the sentencing phase of the trial. So the victim can certainly request release if they want it although the judge isn't obligated to adhere.
You are baffled by the western concept of justice.
In western philosophy an offender is considered to have offended against society even if their crime is of a personal nature. As such, they are tried, condemned, and punished by society according to codified rules. A victim, if there is one, is not really a part of this process.
There is a fundamentally sound basis for this philosophy, including equity (different justice for different people is no justice for anyone), impartiality, and respect for human rights.
There are other philosophies of justice: for example, the traditional "I'm strongest I get the best stuff" or "you dissed me ima kill you." Some are codified similarly to western justice ("killing a man is requires you pay his heirs 100 she-camels of which 40 must be pregnant, killing a woman is half that, killing a Jew one-third, and so on"). Others involve negotiation between victim (or their families) and offender -- which often works out well, since the offender is often is a position of power to start with and is very likely come out on top.
The simple "an eye for an eye" is just the beginning of a very very deep rabbit hole you can go down on the road to enlightenment.
I strongly disagree. The victim is generally deeply incapable of being objective about the situation. How many perpetrators of domestic violence would go free because their spouse is too scared to ask for proper punishment? This is already a big problem with securing cooperation for prosecution, and I'd aim to make that better, not worse. You'd have enormous disparities in sentencing based on the personality of the victim. Should mugging a vindictive asshole carry a harsher sentence than mugging a nice person who believes in second chances no matter what?
The justice system is pretty far from actual justice in many cases, but this wouldn't get it closer.
There are (institutional, complicated, well-ordered) civil and criminal systems elsewhere in the world where victims are much more directly involved in sentencing and punishment, and you probably wouldn't want to live in one.
There are certainly differing personal opinions on what they'd like to live under. For instance, Dutch lawyer Michael van Notten moved from the western to to the xeer system in the horn of Africa, and found it superior in his personal estimation from the perspective of serving victims, as documented in his book.
A clan-based blood-money system? I reiterate the claim I made previously: while you might enjoy reading about them, you wouldn't want to live under one.
I don't see it as a binary option. Why can't we learn from one another? I'm more interested in some of the elements found in for instance that system, where the victim can elect to prioritize restitution over retribution when it leads to a higher likelihood they will be made whole. I don't see any requirement that one has to embrace everything about a societies' system to find advantages in elements of it.
Well, I'll just say, when I referred earlier to institutionalized systems wherein victims are given principal roles in meting out justice, I was specifically using that word to contrast with things like xeer clan law --- a system you just implied might be superior to our common law system (it is not). There are "modern" legal systems descended from that kind of oral tradition honor law. You would not want to live under them.
Happy to keep nerding out on comparative legal stuff from around the world! Just keeping this grounded in "you probably wouldn't enjoy living somewhere where your landlord can have you imprisoned for unpaid rent".
I'll be honest, I have not seen a single implemented legal system I would like to live under, although that's not to dismiss all systems as equally bad. I was imprisoned in the USA once because an officer claimed a dog alerted, resulted in being stripped naked and cavity searched -- but that doesn't mean the entirety of our justice system is bad. Which isn't implied to be as bad as, say, a rapist getting away with it via a forced marriage as might happen under Shariah or xeer law.
The fact that someone can be temporarily jailed without any evidence or a change to challenge the charges is a painful compromise that the Founding Fathers made to balance justice (they themselves were at risk of arbitrary imprisonment by the Crown) with order (sometimes you see someone running with a bloody knife and you should arrest him before you trace his steps to find a corpse). Police departments try really hard to push what they can get away with, and there are certainly areas where I wish the courts would constrain them.
You're missing a function: Removal. Locking up criminals prevents them committing additional crimes that impact the general public. Data from the last few years shows that there's definitely a Pareto aspect to criminal populations, and absent an ability to rehabilitate, removal is the next best option for society at large.
I would argue that removal can be analyzed into the other categories, or into something that isn't the province of punishment.
1. the deprivation of freedom is retributive
2. the prevention of additional crimes can be said to be deterrence of an active sort
3. the protection of society isn't part of punishment per se, but a separate end
This becomes clear when we consider imprisonment in relation to various crimes. Violent criminals are imprisoned in part because they are a threat to the physical safety of others. However, is an embezzler or a mayor embroiled in shady accounting a threat to anyone's physical safety? Probably not. So the purpose of their removal is less about crime prevention and more about retribution.
The idea is that if they are making a rational choice to embezzle or not (and have other viable options for living), then knowing jail time is a possible outcome changes the expected payout equation. In that way it can be preventative, but only in those specific sorts of cases.
> Punishment has three ends: retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence.
One might argue a fourth end as well: removal.
When people talk about "cleaning up the streets" they don't mean causing ruffians to clean up their act, what they refer to is removing the ruffians entirely. To "someplace else". To "Not in my backyard". Out of sight, out of mind as is often said.
For profit prisons may view prisoners as cheap labor or levy bait, but for the voting public who gets no cut of that action the real inducement starts and ends with "make the problem go away". Sweep human beings we do not know how to cohabitate with under a rug.
Retribution may appeal to those directly wronged, or to the minority of sadists in a population. Deterrence is oft admired, but few honestly believe it's really possible given that harsh sentences never seem to cause crime to go to zero (sensationalism-driven media that magnifies every mole-hill notwithstanding) and that repeat offenses outnumber first offenses. Rehabilitation appeals to those with compassion, though nobody has a clear bead on how to actually land that plane with more than the lowest hanging fruit of only-slightly-off-course offenders.
So I think the real elephant in the room is that people want/demand/rely upon removal.
>harsh sentences never seem to cause crime to go to zero
Harsh sentences work great when used with the inevitability of punishment. It is obvious that a harsh sentence does not discourage a criminal to commit a crime if they expect to avoid any responsibility
Yeah, and part of the problem is that punishment cannot be made inevitable (any more than crime can be made "zero" as I'd inferred, despite what public expectation might look like xD).
First of all you have criminals who are low-functioning enough for whatever reason to fail to understand how actions connect to consequences in reality. Be it due to mental illness, or overestimation of their abilities. No amount of certainty is enough to dispel the "That won't happen to me" presumption from a pretty big chunk of the population.
Next you have desperate people: either due to "risking punishment may actually be safer than risking privation while obeying the law" and/or due to presumptions of having nothing left to lose.
And finally you have cartels, where folks organize so well that their internal governance and capacity to levy violence actually stands toe to toe against the civil governments that they operate within the jurisdictions of. This is the civil equivalent of a tumor, with all of the oncological complications that that often implies.
So I would caution that "inevitability of punishment" is an unreasonable goal to try to justify harsh sentences, and I would estimate that any historical accounts of governments who have achieved that feat were probably also totalitarian enough to be able to lie about their resulting crime statistics along the path.
I think there's also a fourth "end" to prison punishment, but I don't know the proper name for it.
It's when you remove the dangerous person from a society for a while, so they can't commit crimes for that while. This is very important part of prison punishment with people with criminal tendencies, and this is why recidivists get longer prison sentences for each subsequent repetition of a similar crime.
Unfortunately we have to admit that some (small) percentage of criminals cannot be rehabilitated, so they must be isolated from society.
The technical term is incapacitation. (Other commenters in this thread are also referring to it as “removal”.)
For criminals that act alone, variations in the severity of the sentence doesn’t seem to have the impact you might expect it to have on how much it actually deters people. (And there is the issue that people in prison can share strategies between themselves for how to more effectively commit crime, which is not an ideal outcome.) So indeed, incapacitation is a very important factor. When it’s studied, you often see numbers like “increasing the sentence by 10 years prevents 0.2 crimes due to deterrence and 0.9 crimes due to incapacitation”.
I say this applies to people acting alone because, although I have no proof, I suspect that organized crime is a bit more “rational” in their response to changes in sentencing. If sentencing were set up so that engaging in a category of crime was not profitable for the criminal organization, I’m pretty sure they would realize this and stop. This logic doesn’t apply to individual people, because the average person committing a crime has no idea what the sentence is or their odds of getting caught, and they obviously don’t do it often enough that the random variation is amortized out.
>"It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice"
Oh dang, there's that pesky religious mechanic again! Why can't we build on pragmatism rather than ensuring the Justice God has enough blood-years drained from criminal-victims? Two crimes don't make a justice!
Irrelevant addendum: I think I will mix atheism and anarchism as they are very compatible concepts, in that they stand in skepticism of essentially the same species of entity with two masks: church and state.
I've read the Bible. Especially as you get towards the end, the books don't seem to have an especially lofty view of the criminal justice system.
I will agree with you that a criminal justice system built "on pragmatism" would certainly conflict with the tenants of many world religions. I recently read Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal, which outlines why pure pragmatism needs to be tempered by a respect for, and indeed love of, every person accused or convicted of a crime.
I think it's reasonable to assume an additional risk for people in prison.
Even though the enrolled people are completely trustworthy, doing this prevents untrustworthy people to simulate interest in the program just to be able to contact the external world for illegal activities.
Not really, contraband includes many things that are completely legal for non prisoners to have like currency, phones, knives, or alcohol. Sending that stuff to prisoners is illegal https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1791
You can agree to pay for them at a given prices via email or slack. It’s more or less guaranteed that contraband will get into prisons if someone is willing to pay for it. Thus the rules around no cash or phones for prisoners.
Inmates are treated very differently by the legal system than regular people. Thirteenth Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States”
Good point, in that case, let’s open it up and let it be a free for all. May as well let them take the drugs in through the front door, while we’re at it.
“Sealioning is a form of online trolling where someone persistently asks insincere questions to provoke frustration, all while pretending to engage in a civil debate.“
I agree that a prison should not be a business (aka a different model than the US-model). I also think that many prisoners are currently treated unfairly.
However, ideally, I don’t think that it makes sense for someone to go to prison, which costs tax money, and meanwhile earn the same amount of money by remote working from prison as someone in the outside world, who actually has living expenses to pay for (which get taxed also).
So, I think, when it comes to fairness, it wouldn’t be unreasonable if a partial cut goes to the TCOO of holding that prisoner.
Now again, American prisons have their whole incentive model messed up, so I don’t even want to get in an argument about America’s implementation of this system and how it would lead to more problems— because it’s well-known and more than expected.
If my employer payed for my housing and food I would not consider it unreasonable that my paycheck reflected that.
> Why are they paid
Because people have expenses other than food and lodging. Prisoners do to, some save money for after they leave prison others spend it at the commissary.
It isn't different from any other prisoner. In many states you leave prison owing them back rent. Maine at least charges as a percentage of the prisoners income, rather than having them build debt.
Maine: https://www.corrections1.com/finance-and-budgets/maine-lawma...
"the state can deduct up to 20% of their income — 10% for room and board, which is sent to the state’s general fund, not the Department of Corrections , and up to 10% to cover transportation provided by the department. Since 2020, the state fund has collected a total of $2.4 million.
"No cut" is reasonable, but also "Some cut" is reasonable. However while arguing that "no cut" should be mandatory is reasonable, given that "no cut" would itself be reasonable, it is probably not pragmatic. Therefore in order to best support this kind of thing one should determine exactly how much "some cut" should be.
Isn't this largely just a one off situation that happened to work out? I doubt there will be legions of prisoners working remotely. If that future did come to be, it would be rather dystopian imo.
if, right now, it is not dystopian, then there is no reason to say it would inevitably be dystopian if there were multiple occurrences, although sure, I expect it probably would be considering what the world is like. Of course I am the last person who one would expect to say it but - there is always hope.
To be honest, if he didn't pay a cut of his earnings while living off government allocated funds, wouldn't that put him in a better position than those who haven't been found guilty and sentenced for breaking the laws of the land in which they reside? I can't see a much resistance to the argument that they one really ought to pay the full cost back to the state, as with community service... no?
No, for the simple fact that he'd still be stuck in an American prison where people are brutalized, sexually assaulted, denied access to medical care, abused by guards, etc. regularly. He deserves everything he is able to earn under those conditions, and truthfully it's a miracle he can work at all.
Americans have become too comfortable with their everyday sadism.
No. Prisons should cost society money. If you are taking away someone’s freedoms, there should be a high cost so you don’t do it flippantly when another solution will work.
No, they forfeited their freedoms and we're put away by due process, but if that's your point of view then we've nothing further to discuss. Incredible stuff on HN these days.
Incredible for sure. To start with, it sounds like you think due process means that any kind or amount of punishment must be correct and reasonable, which. wow.
For starters this is just a complete non-comment. I mean there's no substance here.
And secondly, he has a good point. We don't want to make locking people up easy or cheap. It should be high-friction, it should take a long time, and it should cost the government lots and lots of money.
Why? Incentives. The government has no reason to prevent crime if locking people up is cheap. It's made even worse by the promise of cheap or free labor. Then, you run into issues where the government actually wants people to fail and do crime, so they can extract labor from them. We see this quite aggressively in some southern states like Georgia. A remnant of Jim Crow era America.
But, if prison is expensive, the government will be incentivized to put some of that money into crime prevention programs. Things like homeless shelters, food banks, job programs.
Are you concerned that if you make prison too expensive society might resort to capital punishment to reduce prison costs? Or we end up releasing prisoners who are legitimate dangers to society.
And to be clear, I'm opposed to capital punishment and dangerous conditions in prisons. I'm just pointing out that I don't think your argument is very good. If you think we as a society are willing to flippantly put people in prison because it's cheap I don't see how you can trust us to no resort to other flippant measures if the cost was high.
I disagree. The cut should support the program itself and then further offset taxpayer expenses related to housing, feeding, and caring for the prisoner. I could even see a case for taking it as a way of ensuring it was saved and returned at release.
Fuck no! Lowering the cost of keeping people in prison would make it even easier for the government to lock people up for smaller crimes and with bigger sentences. It's even worse with the privatised prison system that the US has. They already know the "market price" (what the government is willing to spend) so adding "free money" into the equation just makes it easier for them to raise prices and end up pocketing even more money than they already do.
Framing it as offsetting the cost would also make it very easy to increase the cut, bit by bit, until it gets to a truly unreasonable level. And since the person is already in prison and we have to pay for them no matter what, why would they choose to work if the deal is so bad?
It's even worse with the privatised prison system that the US has.
This is a state by state thing. FWIW in this case, ME doesn't have private prisons. I don't bring this up to imply everything related to their cut is on the up and up, however, I believe Maine is very much incentivized to make this a useful program in terms of keeping people from returning to jail (as opposed to squeezing every dollar from the prisoners).
Fix the problem then, don't perpetuate it. If you think the problem is corrupt and profiteering prisons that will turn to this type of shenanigans, there's a bigger problem to fix.
Oh absolutely. Voters always favor harsher punishments or making things worse for those already convicted of crimes. You never get any more votes by pushing for lower punishments for any crime or by doing anything to reduce recidivism. I suspect that a pretty solid litmus test for "politician who is actually trying to make the world a better place" based just on how they vote for lowering recidivism.
Justification to abolish democracy, and because everything else is worse I guess we're going to have to go to a voluntarist ancap NAP-respecting society!
"Non-violent drug crimes" brings to mind hippies selling weed or mushrooms. But this guy was selling carfentanil. I'm not saying he's to blame for the opioid crisis turning street people into shambling zombies, clogging emergency services with overdoses, and causing death, but he certainly played a part.
He played a lot smaller part than the Sackler family, who ran Purdue Pharma and pushed their drugs into communities. They killed a lot more people than this guy, and yet none of them are in jail.
Selling drugs isn't evil. Not selling drug doesn't make you good. People take drugs for various reasons. If a doctor sells them they are good but if someone else sells them they are evil?
The person buying could have been fired and can't afford Doctors prescription so the person selling could be an angel.
A doctor that over-prescribes them would be arrested, too. Or one that prescribed it to someone for a non-medical reason. (There are many of those latter docs.)
People that sell fentanyl (or similar) are very bad for society, to avoid the triggering "evil". Look how many people have died in the last 10 years. It's insane.
EDIT: I personally know a young man that died from a fent overdose and it's likely he didn't know what he took had fent in it. 22 years old and the whole world ahead him. Completely destroyed his family.
Evil is a moral concept, which is less tied to religion these days.
Drugs are an anti-social drain on society, that sickens its buyers, turning them into zombies or criminals, and turns the sellers into greedy, violent people who corrupt law enforcement.
Your edge case of an angel doesn't translate to the actual realities of drug trafficking and addiction.
> Evil is a threshold, it's not a competition with limited spots
No, but our enforcement has limited resources. We can't arrest and jail every offender of every crime, so we pick and choose where to spend our enforcement resources. All the money spent pursuing, arresting, trying, and imprisoning this guy could have been spent going after people like the Sacklers.
Bush and his cronies resulted in the death of far more innocent people than your typical murderer. But we don't stop sending murderers to prison just because Bush/Cheney are not in prison.
I've voted for drug legalization (including possession). However, that doesn't mean that I condone all drug dealing behavior.
It took something like a decade to put Capone away. We still locked up murderers during that period.
The whole thread is silly. I don't think a lot of people here are going to stick up for a 15 year stretch for a 24 year old for selling opiates. Probably don't need to pull the Sacklers into it.
I was caught with MDMA coming in the mail from Vancouver, and some marijuana coming from california (the latter of which is what I am currently serving my time for right now)
April 2017 the police find traces of carfentanil while executing a search warrant at his place - plausibly but not provably linked to some recent carfentanil deaths - and police announce they are searching for him. https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/man-wanted-suspected-let...
The articles aren't clear on this, but given his own recounting I assume that a suspended sentence for Marijuana was un-suspended as a result of the new charges and he is serving that sentence first, or concurrently.
I find it somewhat amusing that I woke up to this post at ~9 AM, and was surprised at the crowding-out of discussion about the article, by people sort of half-groping at a straw or two they picked up, trying to make a definitive case on his...goodness? morality?...based off the straw they're holding.
It is now 4 PM, about to clock out for the day because I gotta wait for CI run thats >30m. I come back here and it's still going on. This is #3 comment I see when I open HN, ensuing thread takes up two pages scrolls on 16" MBP.
It's bad of me to write this because, well, who cares? Additionally, am I trying to litigate what other people comment?
The root feeling driving me to express myself is a form of frustrated boredom -- rolling with that and verbalizing concretely, a bunch of people writing comments with the one thing they're hyperfocusing on their record to drive a conclusion on their value as a person/morality, and then people pointing out that's not some moral absolute, asking for links, discussing the links...
...well, it's all just clutter.
Or YouTube comment-level discussion, unless we're planning on relitigating every case he's been involved in.
This all would be better if it the kangaroo court stuff was confined to a thread with all of the evidence against him, so we didn't have a bunch of weak cases, or if people didn't treat this as an opportunity to be a drive by judge. Article def. ain't about his crimes, and he ain't saying he's innocent or an angel.
(and the idea that "drug crimes" implies "hippie selling weed or psychedelics" so calling them "drug crimes" is hiding the ball...where does that come from? Its especially dissonant b/c you indicate the mere fact he sold an opiod is so bad that this guy is...bad? irredeemable? not worth discussing?...so presumably you care a lot about opiods, so presumably you know that's whats driven drug crime the last, uh, decade or two?)
> trying to make a definitive case on his...goodness? morality?
Speaking for myself, I'm actually just discussing the idea that a non-violent crime like drug dealing necessarily deserves a light sentence in general.
> Sounds like a you thing
It is a me thing. That's why I said "brings to mind".
I'm a product of my time. I remember when weed and psychedelics meant demonization and heavy sentences, and it was absurd because those substances aren't that dangerous.
This is the context in which I'm accustomed to calling drug dealing a "non-violent crime". So, I feel like I need to point out that things are not quite the same with deadly drugs like carfentanil.
They are largely the same though. Small-time dealing of any drug is often just being the guy in your circle of users that does the group buying, maybe it was just your turn. Or your dealer says you can pay for your purchase by driving this package across town. Now you've been caught with enough pills to kill 30 people and the intent to distribute - is that an action that hits your threshold for heavy sentences and bad people?
No but this whole discussion hits my threshold on what the extent of government should be, and people need a lot more sovereignty from police/court harrassment than they get now. We live in a totalitarian police state and have for about a century now.
The state needs to get out of domestic warfare, war on drugs, war on poverty, war on crime, quit abusing its customers (aka "criminals"), and stick only to killing and oppressing foreign tribes! Put a 12 year cap on sentences, the state should have no right to take the life of its customer even if the taking is placing in a box. Also I would like to see UBI go to released felons first as well as the vote, as they have seen significant economic sequelae and injustice at the hands of the state!
Many dealers and addicts who are involved in extremely violent crimes are plead down to drug crimes after having been charged with both drug and violent crimes.
>"On December 24, 2016, three Manchester police officers responded to an apartment following a report of a domestic dispute. The report was made by the mother of Ashley Arbogast, who advised that her daughter had called her Stating that her boyfriend had broken her arm during an argument."
He is being punished for what he was convicted of; whether you agree with the penalty or not. If we do change the penalties, the convictions will change too.
I just wanted to point out that there is clear evidence that this individual was involved in at least one violent act, as is often the case with ‘non-violent drug convicts’.
Any yet there are coke-cola machines everywhere including inside police stations which kills more people each year.
And only one company is allowed to import the specific leaves/material (coca leafs). The government restricts everyone from importing them unless it's one of the biggest companies in the world.
He didn't kill anyone, unless he misrepresented the product and the customer used the product incorrectly and died as a result. Even then there's argument for tainted product and considering the persecution around the industry, I as a juror would acquit any charge reliant on that as the underlying logic. Even then, if I foresaw more than 12 years sentence for anyone I would acquit and jury nullify on human rights grounds. Humans must be free. The big moral failure of modern states is their lack of unmolested opt-out.
People like big strong dominating government until it gets replaced with the Mormon church, or a Caliphate, then nooo it's not statesmanship but just religion. (Hint: all states are religions, and codes are religious texts. What do freedom of religion and freedom of association mean in this context, instead of the toothless safe-for-government one you're used to thinking of it in?)
And you take personal responsibility if someone innocent is convicted? Once you have executed someone there is no coming back. Or are you saying you're OK with some innocents being killed so you can save some money (taxes)?
>Once you have executed someone there is no coming back.
Once you've taken 10 years of someone's life there is no giving that back either. As technology progresses the cost of recording evidence will go down which will help convict and prove the innocence of people.
> As technology progresses the cost of recording evidence will go down which will help convict and prove the innocence of people.
Minority Report is a counterfactual to this claim. The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Technology is a tool to extend one’s grasp to meet one’s reach, and vice versa, and is a tool that serves power. Those with power are best able to bend tools to their ends, just or unjust.
> It is the duty of the poor to support and sustain the rich in their power and idleness. In doing so, they have to work before the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
One of the biggest problems with the prison system in the US is that prisoners are often saddled with the debt related to or imposed on them by their incarceration which they can't pay back.
The inability to find a job coupled with the crushing interest is what leads to desperation, and then repeat criminal behavior.
> There is a real risk of exploitation
Centralized systems always have a risk of corruption when power is concentrated in few people. Those job roles also many times attract the corrupt; and even when you have people who go in with a good moral caliber, the regular dynamics of the interactions may also twist them into being corrupt.
Its a rare person with sufficient moral caliber that can survive such a job (as a guard or other prison staff) unscathed and still be a good person afterwards.
Many avenues of education also do not prepare them appropriately for work in the private sector, and some careers are simply prohibited. For example becoming a chemist or engineer when they have a conviction related to ethics violations in such fields.
Wonder if they acquire the skills to break into systems, why would they choose not to do it in this crazy world out there? Particularly if somebody spends long time, or has spent so far.
How do they make sure the prison isn't just employing people already experienced in the field to make the prison money? How do they ensure people are treated fairly (normally prisoners aren't really even allowed sick days, they can't chose not to work overtime if required, etc)? Do they audit to ensure number of sick hours are comparable to non-prison work? Do they ensure prison guards bonus' aren't based on inmate performance (UNICOR does all of the above bad practices resulting in sick people being forced to work overtime in order to get the guards their bonus)?
UNICOR/the Federal system 'strongly encourages' people with CAD experience, etc do the McDonalds remodel contracts, the World Trade Center work, etc. These are people that worked in the industry prior to prison and that are not traditionally been hired back after release, so it's simply being used to make UNICOR money on big contracts based on incarcerated individuals pre-existing training being exploited. In addition having structural CAD work done by people with zero say in their job, their deliverables/quality, their hours, etc seems like a bad idea. I don't know why outside engineers are using this work. The UNICOR McDonalds remodels are probably fine (though you can tell by the current feel of McDonalds that the remodels were literally done by prison inmates), but the UNICOR World Trade Center stuff seems super sketchy.
Yep - turns out the Nordic countries had it right all along. When you focus on rehabilitation and not just punishment you get lower redicivism rates. Who would have thought it?
> When you focus on rehabilitation and not just punishment
From a book I recently read on the subject they seem not just to focus on rehab and lack of punishment. If there are disputes with others within the facilities the ones in the dispute must sit down and talk through their issues and find a resolution. This helps ingrain proper anger management & helps re-acclimate them to normal society where violence is rarely the best option. And it makes a ton of sense, if they never are taught how to talk out their issues they will go back to how they have handled those issues all along.
To be honest, that could certainly be filed under "rehabilitation". Giving people the skills they need to be productive members of society is definitely in that wheelhouse.
They were likely in a homogeneous population when they committed the crime that got them there in the first place, so that confounder might not matter much at all.
> From the study, they determined that because the groups were created to be approximately equal, individual differences are not necessary or responsible for intergroup conflict to occur.
> Lutfy Diab repeated the experiment with 18 boys from Beirut. The 'Blue Ghost' and 'Red Genies' groups each contained 5 Christians and 4 Muslims. Fighting soon broke out, not between the Christians and Muslims but between the Red and Blue groups.
… No, it's not the continuum fallacy: I'm saying that "the fixation index", and other such metrics, are irrelevant, except as far as people are racist. The sociological theory of "homogeneous population" is false, to the extent it was ever even meaningful.
More broadly, scientific racism is bunk. (This is a generalisation: I didn't establish it in my previous comment, but it's true nonetheless.)
Then again if you look at the continium as something multidimensional. It is easy to make everything either a very specific hetrogenity or a big homogenic pile. The greatest fallacy is the group think, you can always create groups of people and that was the point. Given a bit of encourgement the dividing lines will shift. I have personal experience from work about this and I think some of these meaningless work things we do are there for a reason.
Yes, in the sense that higher social trust, enabled by homogeneity is helpful in many ways. Robert Putnam among others wrote about it; Putnam wrote “Bowling Alone”.
Ugh, homogeneous population is overrated. When you remove axis of discrimination from humans they just go down a level or too and use that as the basis for prejudice.
I don't have evidence to say that it is irrelevant, but people love using homogeneity as a cope for being unwilling to try things to improve the status quo. Hate this argument.
Nordic countries have essentially exactly the same 1/3 two year recidivism rate as the US, the one exception being Norway at 1/5, and mostly not for rehabilitation policy reasons.
Reading this, I think it's a crime that this guy is not out on early release. The majority of his sentence was for marijuana, which is now widely decriminalized and in some places legalized.
I do not believe this is true. Looking at the record, marijuana is one of a few drugs. The specific incident that led to his current sentence is related to a powerful opioid. This is corroborated by Preston's own personal website.
If police can determine there is probable cause they can immediately search without a warrant. It contains strong evidence of him committing harm directly to his gf at the time. It does not contain a legal decision or conviction, but that's not a lack of evidence - the report's existence itself is by definition evidence.
That’s false. PC needs to be taken to a judge for a search warrant.
What you are probably thinking of is what is called the “exigent circumstances” warrant exception, and it was misapplied here by over-zealous police who violated his rights.
There is no evidence to support that the injuries sustained by the woman in his apartment were caused by him, according to that document.
I’m so glad this is possible. Kudos to Turso for giving this man a new chance. We often criticize people for past bad behavior, but in many cases (not all, of course), they deserve a second chance in life, since most of us can change.
The key delineation here is the work is voluntary. I was uneasy reading the article and weighing it up, realised that the author could choose not to work whilst he serves time.
If he was being coerced into labour however, which the for-profit prison undoubtedly makes profit from, it’s simply unacceptable; indentured servitude, slavery, call it what you will, it’s bad for society in every way because it allows the ruling class to steal labour from the working class under the guise of “rehabilitation”.
This place is an absolute rarity. Almost zero jails or prisons have any access to the Internet at all. Many of the places I know won't even allow a print-out of any information from the Internet (e.g. Wikipedia, Facebook etc) and won't allow any books about computers for security reasons.
Commissary is generally "gas station" prices in jails and prisons.
Some of the inmates I work with right now have tablets that allow music streaming from a small catalog, but I think it is $3/hour to listen to it.
Obviously the families and friends of the loved are the ones burdened with paying for all of these, unless you can get an in-prison job that pays, e.g. dealing drugs is probably the highest paid, sadly.
I've got a lot of experience working with prisoners. I've almost never seen any rehabilitative programs of any value at all. Mostly the programs I see are "learn to mop floors."
I just helped someone to complete a year-long paralegal course and qualification while inside. The Illinois prison system has now banned this since (a) it came with the option of facilities awarding a 6 month reduction in the length of a non-violent sentence, (b) required the facility to allow someone to proctor the final exam.
The place I was at you weren't even allowed a book about computers, lest you might gain enough knowledge to somehow access a facility computer and hack your way to freedom.
They had a computer lab, but it was only for Mavis Beacon. I found the C# compiler that's hidden away in the Windows directory and started teaching programming on the sly. Luckily one of the nuns at the facility took pity on me and bought C# Weekend Crash Course on Amazon (with the CD) and sneaked it through the security checks for me so I'd have a good reference to teach from.
For those who might be wondering, facilities/counties/states vary a huge amount on what is and isn't allowed.
In California they teach inmates coding, while in other states all computer-related technical books are banned as security risks. Same with basic electrical work — Promising People has an interesting VR program for teaching electrical helper skills, but in some correctional systems that would be considered unacceptably risky. Tablet and similar system operators/vendors have to shape the material available to the inmates to suit the local restrictions.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] threadWe emailed, back when the post about your circumstances was shared here in Nov. 2023. I knew you'd see success.
Huge shoutout to Jessica and UL for all the work they do, and here's to a bright future ahead for you =)
Drug charges are difficult. In my opinion, if you are using drugs personally, I don't really see a problem. If you commit some crime while under the influence which could harm another person, eg driving while drugged, obviously that's a different story, and coercing other people into it isn't great either, but if you're just smoking in your own home, its your body that you're altering. If you're selling to other people, that feels a bit more iffy to me because you're affecting other people with that... though I do realise that preventing the sale is effectively the same as preventing the usage...
"So instead of coming back home broke and apologetic, I ended up pretty deep into this and soon was making tens of thousands of dollars a week, very much unapologetically."
Then, after his first sentence:
"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: and obviously, was back in prison after a short 14 months of addiction and misery."
I certainly cannot act like I did not deserve to come to prison, and it's definitely the only reason I am even alive right now. Coming to prison, specifically in Maine, was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Hence why I typically argue for legalization and regulation. You have a pretty unique perspective though. I suppose in your position you're incentivized to always say you did the wrong thing, drugs are bad, etc etc, but to the extent you're able to discuss it, what's your take on arguments for legalization and regulation?
But otherwise, in terms of why he’d default to being paid less… yes, what the other commenter said: supply and demand, aka leverage. Turso could choose to be a good citizen and pay him the same as any other employee, but that’s subject to all the questions I posed above, regarding the structural requirements placed on them as the employer.
We also don't pay him healthcare, because he wouldn't be able to use it.
Edit: I don’t mean to imply the author isn’t paid fairly by Turso. A few posts down, the CEO of Turso asserts that they do pay fairly. The OP in this thread might reasonably wonder about this because several states do in fact use prisoners as unpaid slave labor.
In practice, only "involuntary servitude" has been used. "Community service" - unpaid - is a very common low level sentence.
The eighth and fourteenth amendments almost certainly forbid enslavement - permanently becoming human property - as a criminal sentence.
Even before the 13th amendment, enslavement as a punishment not common, if it happened at all.
There is almost no case law on the 13th amendment. There are no legal slaves in the US today, and there have not been since the 19th century.
https://theappeal.org/louisiana-prisoners-demand-an-end-to-m...
I've worked with a lot of prison facilities though in many states across the US and a few international, and have never seen that. That's not to say it doesn't happen of course, but out of curiosity do you (or anyone else) know of any facilities/jurisdictions that do that?
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/13/1210564359/slavery-prison-for...
If you can lock someone up and get close to free labor for it, then we're going to start locking a lot of people up. I mean, it's free labor. Which is why we used to give people 20 years for possession of marijuana. What, you think it's just a coincidence we were throwing primarily black Americans away in prison for ludicrous amounts of time where they'll spend their days picking cotton?
That's what happens when imprisoning people is cheap.
Prisoners should cost money, lots and lots of money. Otherwise we might just decide to imprison you and extract your labor. And that is exactly why we used to see 20 years for possession.
What, did you think we were just burning money for kicks?
NPR did a great article on the prison system in Norway: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/31/410532066/.... They are quoted as spending $90,000 per prisoner with a recidivism rate at half the US rate.
Scenario A (person not imprisoned):
- Prison cost: $0
- Labor cost: $25k (hire someone)
- Total cost: $25k
Scenario B (person imprisoned):
- Prison cost: $50k
- Labor cost: $0 (prisoner does it)
- Total cost: $50k
Is there a good reason why a developer in Thailand or India should be paid less than their colleague who works on the same team, but is based in the US? Many companies believe so - there's a significant difference in the cost of living between those two employees, and employers believe it is fair to adjust the salary to provide a similar quality of life to both.
Equally, a person incarcerated in New York City doesn't have the same living costs as a person who has to live in New York City, so you could reasonably argue that any "Cost of living premium" that a company offers to NYC based employees doesn't need to apply to a person who doesn't experience those higher costs.
That's bullshit. E.g. electronics cost the same in all countries.
There are definitely countries with more expensive electronics.
In location A you might spend 80% of your salary on fixed expenses, whereas in location B you only need to spend 20% of that same salary to pay for those expenses - leaving you with far more money for discretionary spending.
Yes, and that reason is that people in most of the developed world are free to say yes or no to job offers based on their individual preferences. And, it just so happens, in Thailand and India there are many people who will happily say yes to offers that people in the US would say no to. The cost of living explanation that companies give is illusory; the reality is that they have to pay enough to get people to say yes.
Now, you might ask why people in different countries say yes to offers at different compensation levels. But I think the answer is self evident: people will say yes to offers when they believe that there are lots of other people who will say yes to it. Under those circumstances, saying no won't earn a higher offer but cause the company to give the job to someone else.
Ultimately, then, regional prices are set by what the locals are generally willing to say yes to.
Mediocre talent ... maybe not so much, but these are also the folks that could be replaced by AI.
Indeed. Top talent can say no to lower offers because they are confident that companies are unlikely to find other top candidates who will say yes.
What a complete bs. If anything, in India it costs MORE to achieve a similar standard of living than in the USA. In India you can spend 3 times what a US worker gets paid - and you'll barely have enough money to get the same level of security that that worker gets.
Companies don't care, they pay the minimum amount that they think will interest the worker for long-term employment. And since in India or Thailand the workers don't have such a wide choice in work - they will be paid less, just enough to get them. And they pay the Americans just enough to get them, it is just happening that for Americans this amount are several times bigger. That's all here is.
He should, but the median salary of engineers in Taiwan is like, 40,000 USD, vs SF which is 160,000 USD. Or London, if one wants to argue something about English language ability or whatever, is 80,000 USD. Literally half that of SF.
Salaries aren't determined by labor value, they're determined by how well employers can collude in a region to get the lowest possible rate while still being able to hire people. Thus they somewhat tend to correlate with cost of living, but not really, e.g. see London vs SF vs NYC. All correlations are used as excuses, when the core, real, reason always comes down to, employers will pay as little as they can get away with.
This annoyed me enough that I started a co-op about it, and we're doing pretty well. I'm still annoyed though. Apparently glommer, the CEO, pays him "full salary" (market rate?), which makes them a good person, but a bad capitalist. They could easily pay basically a slave wage and leverage this dude's ingrained passion for programming to get huge output for almost nothing - that's what the rest of the industry merrily does.
In a free market, very little is determined by its "value". Clean drinking water costs pennies, but its value is far higher. People in developing countries routinely spend hours a day getting clean water, which works out to a price far higher than even bottled water from for-profit companies.
>they're determined by how well employers can collude in a region to get the lowest possible rate while still being able to hire people. Thus they somewhat tend to correlate with cost of living, but not really, e.g. see London vs SF vs NYC.
Is there any evidence there's more collusion happening in London?
>employers will pay as little as they can get away with.
You're making it sound like this is some sort of profound insight, or that companies are being extra dishonorable by doing this, but literally everyone in an economy is trying to pay "pay as little as they can get away with". When was the last time you tipped a gas station?
Colluding is only one of the factors that influencing the demand for labor. Moreover, in most regions it is a rather insignificant factor. Typically, this is the degree of economic freedom, protection of investments and capitals, the level of regulation and the tax burden in the region, not the degree of colluding.
> good person, but a bad capitalist.
Capitalism is not about evaluative characteristics, but about descriptive ones. It is not "bad capitalists pay a lot, good ones pay the minimum", but about "people tend to pay minimum, so to pay the minimum is expected behavior of capitalists"
Why would the salaries all bump up to big American city salaries instead of resting somewhere in the lowest range worldwide? If we purely judge work completed.
If you're a remote worker your competition is the world not people in the major city the company is based in.
I've done nothing.
Even if you just paid him the state minimum wage, it would stop him from having a giant employment gap.
The next step would be background check reform. A DUI record isn't relevant to anything not involving driving.
Excluding a very small handful of SVU level crimes everything should be wiped clean after 5 years or so.
I had an experience with a co worker who would brag about robbing people, selling substances and when he got caught his family money made it go away. He's a CTO at a mid sized tech company now. Had he been poor he'd have a record and be lucky to work as a Walgreens clerk.
Was the biggest "tough on crime" person I've ever met. I think people with means don't understand if you don't have money you can't afford bail.
Can't afford bail you'll just be indefinitely detained without trial for months if not years.
Everything about the criminal justice system is about exploitation. Get house arrest, that's a daily monitoring fee. States like Florida are forcing released inmates to repay the state for the cost of incarceration.
It's past fixing tbh, I'm personally hopping to immigrate to a functional country soon.
It's nice to hear about someone who can change their mind so completely; the trick is not to swing to the other end of the spectrum, trading one absolute for another.
Any clergy, whether faithful or secular, has the capacity to act in a militant fashion.
My understanding, is that's what the UK does, with an exemption for certain jobs, like teachers and creche hosts. In the US, I think some states have the ability to expunge convictions. Not sure about federal crimes, though.
The "scarlet letter" of a past conviction is a very real issue, and keeps some folks down. People can get past it, though. I know folks that served time for murder, that have very good careers, and people that have misdemeanor records, that have always struggled.
I know people who dropped out of college because they had a very small drug charge, no use in finishing if you will have a scarlet letter over your head forever.
Federal crimes (and I don't think that applies in this person's case since they're in a Maine DOC prison, although drug crimes of this kind easily could be charged by the feds) aren't usually expunged. Even if you receive a pardon, the original crime (and a note of the pardon) will exist on the record.
It's a really strange system. You're meant to lie and say "no" during interviews after your conviction is expunged if you are asked "have you ever been convicted of a crime," although I believe in many states it's now illegal to ask such a question.
Or maybe they do understand. This kind of politics ensures the privileged stay privileged.
This is already the case in some countries, including The Netherlands. A background check is done for a specific "profile", and convictions which aren't relevant for your job-to-be don't show up. Someone with a DUI can't become a taxi driver, but they should have no trouble getting a job as a lawyer. Got convicted of running a crypto pump&dump? Probably can't get a job as a banker, but highschool teacher or taxi driver is totally fine.
https://ccresourcecenter.org/state-restoration-profiles/50-s...
It's nice to think that people should be able to fully pay back their debt to society but (a) criminal court proceedings need to be public in a free society and if they are public, people should be able to record and distribute the results as private citizens if we believe in upholding the principle of freedom of speech.
Even if it were possible to prevent this, (b) this does a small but not entirely negligible harm to people that never committed a crime by casting some doubt upon them. This is most apparent for minority groups that are associated with criminality; they experience worse employment prospects when the state makes criminal records unavailable.
Where I live (Poland), only the person itself can request their criminal record from the state. This is a routine procedure required by some employers, you can even do it online these days.
Most if not all criminal offenses "expire" after some years, how long depends on the offense. If there's something you've been charged with but not convicted of, it doesn't appear on the record.
This is easier to implement for us because there are limitations on how media can report on criminals (no last names for example). Even in the US, I think that system could be workable. Instead of attacking distributions of "unedited" criminal records, you'd have to target employers and require them to only acquire the state-approved versions.
Excellent marketing. They get a remote worker who is (in HN headhunter speak) a great and passionate talent. Of course they have no risks on their side. And they get praised for it on the very grassroots YC Combinator forum.
Why should the taxpayers be burdened by the results of his bad decisions?
/me takes off hat
Someone can both work towards rehabilitation and pay their 'debt to society'. If they earn over what it costs to house them in a Maine prison then, by all means, let them keep the excess earnings. If they earn $100k/year and the state pays them $1.35/hr then there are deeper institutional issues around prison labor exploitation which should be addressed.
I used to have an uncle who was constantly in and out of prison over drug-related issues and he would do all sorts of work programs just to break up the monotony. Ironically, none of these rehabilitation efforts did any good and what finally 'set him straight' was the Three Strikes Law.
Sounds like he gets out in 10 months, and an incredible amount of money gets spent keeping him there.
Do you mean for private interest? If so, I would agree that prison labor should only be used for public benefit. And this labor should be part of the sentence.
Somebody who had worked for a recognizable tech company is far more hireable than somebody who is Self Employed or who has worked for the government.
Here, we're talking about preparing someone for the job market when they leave. Hence, these are two separate concerns. You cannot substitute the former with the latter.
To me, it looks like a net benefit for the public, the department of corrections, and the inmate.
If you are worried about the inmate being allowed to build up savings that they can use when they are released, then that's on the judge. If the inmate has met their restitution obligations, then I don't have a problem with them being allowed to leave prison with savings that will enable them to get back on their feet again.
In contrast I'm glad to see this guy has been open and honest, owning up to his mistakes and starting to turn his life around and make amends for the harm he's caused others. Well done.
Edit: Please disregard that last paragraph. Just saw the document @bjorkandkd linked.
Unfortunately, due to the circumstances of our world today, he was understandably too anxious to move from his current job. He worried he'd never be able to find employment as an ex-felon if the runway ran out.
I felt really bad for the guy.
I wish things worked differently.
TIL from 15-20yrs old I was a prisoner
But seriously, programs like these need to be made available to more people, incarcerated or not. There's millions of people in this country who have basically no access to employment. Remote work could not only be a lifeline to those communities, it's advantageous to employers and good for the economy.
My take on RTO is that its a soft layoff. You can get rid of a ton of people, reduce headcount, next quarters numbers look good. The other reason? Managers just like the office. Its a spot of manager power, they like that.
> A brief summary is that I'm currently serving prison time for poor decisions and lifestyle choices I made in my twenties, all related to drugs.
Is that their poor decisions were related to drugs.
>My name is Preston Thorpe, I'm 31 years old and I've spent just under 10 years of my life in Prison (all for non-violent drug crimes.)
https://pthorpe92.dev/intro/my-story/
People are real quick to forget about innocent until proven guilty for some reason.
It's not the place of random hacker news commenters to try to and hold assault against him because you think, after reading 2 minutes about the case, that he should have been convicted.
> I've spent just under 10 years of my life in Prison (all for non-violent drug crimes.)
> The defendant, Preston Thorpe, appeals his conviction for possession of a controlled drug with intent to sell
He may have done other things, but his conviction was for possession with intent, and that seems to be why he's locked up. It doesn't make anything else he's done acceptable, but in America he's innocent until proven guilty, and it doesn't seem he was found guilty of assault.
...in a court of law. Innocent until proven guilty doesn't extend to internet comments.
That's not a good thing.
Edit: I cannot really believe that this, of all comments, is controversial. Living life treating everyone as guilty until they prove themselves innocent is... just shitty, let alone exhausting. Do people forget about how many times reddit and other ruined innocent people's lives?
Sometimes HN amazes me with new technology, interesting conversations, etc. Sometimes it amazes me when people are arguing that we should go through life treating people as guilty first, until they are proven innocent. I think I'll go back to not participating for awhile.
People proven guilty are not necessarily guilty. People proven not guilty are not necessarily innocent. The legal standard exists because a system needs standards.
Is your assertion that random internet commenters get it right more than the courts...?
>"innocent until proven guilty" should apply outside of the legal system is lazy
How is guilty until proven innocent less "lazy"?
The person you love comes to you and tells you that they've been attacked by your shady friend. Do you defend your friend from the accusation because "they're innocent until proven guilty" or do you use your judgement and decide that the person you love is telling the truth because you have a lifetime of trust in them?
so you saying that court is useless because its not perfet???? its easy to complaint about something but give NOTHING to improve it
You would not do better than people in charge because EASY to say something is wrong but you dont have ANSWER that improve this current standards
Then how do you explain laws against slander and libel?
You can't label someone guilty of a crime just because you feel it to be true.
Why should internet comments follow criminal law, and not eg civil law, or some other standard?
Going through life treating everyone as guilty until proven innocent sounds like an exhausting and negative way to treat everyone, and harms more people overall.
So... base assumption is innocent.
That's all I was saying.
Just get some background rates, and assume that people are guilty with eg 0.1% probability. (Just a made a up number. Real priors should depend on a lot more context.)
There's no actual confirmation in that report that her arm was actually broken or that she was actually beaten. There's no medical examination that happened here that is cited.
That would still be required in a civil trial with preponderance of evidence. What if she was on drugs and did it to herself? (Not saying that's what happened). We don't know what happened from this document and that has nothing to do with this charge or his appeal.
There's a difference between "we want to lock this person up and take away their liberty, so we should be basically certain" versus "look man he's been done for drugs and she ended up with a broken arm, I don't trust this person".
That's not close to what I was saying, and I don't know how people are interpreting it this way.
There's no scenario here where this guy is innocent. The distinction here is whether he's a wife-beating drug dealer or just a drug dealer. There's some evidence to suggest the former but not really enough that you can definitely state it.
Personally, I'd give a convicted drug dealer less benefit of the doubt than the average person.
The conservation expanded past this specific case when we started talking generally about internet comments.
On the other hand, GP is objectively right ("innocent until proven guilty doesn't extend to internet comments"). I also think that it’s better for random people to be able to post their terrible judgements than any feasible alternative, because such an alternative probably leads to good judgements also censored. We can mitigate (not eliminate) bad judgements, e.g. by educating people better and shaming those who shame others more; and we can minimize mob justice’s effect on critical government functions like welfare and prison sentencing, e.g. by running them on mostly objective procedures and with staff who aren’t influenced by mob opinion.
Targeted harassment and doxxing (and swatting, getting people fired/divorced/ruined when they don’t deserve to be, etc.) is different (and to be clear, IMO very bad). People posting opinions in a way that the target can block (which they can usually do with blocklists and word filters) is fine. The main point I’m trying to make is: if opinions in random internet comments lead to targeted harassment and real-world consequences even when the opinions are “bad” (e.g. bigoted, hypocritical), it's less effective to try and prevent the internet comments' existence, than to reduce the factors causing them to influence the real world and create factors preventing influence.
In any case, HN is very selective about this high evidential standard. People will make a lot of effort to give probable domestic abusers the benefit of the doubt, but pick one of HN's official enemies and suddenly any little scrap of evidence is considered quite sufficient!
That being said I wouldn't have much patience for a "merely" accused murderer or child predator in my personal life, just as I also don't have much patience for a doctor who refuses to prescribe me antibiotics because the chance they could help me is "only" 1%. I don't really care that it's socially irresponsible when it comes to my personal assessment of risk.
Civil cases are probably the best (counter) example to bring up, because they also involve a judge and lawyers etc.
https://www.wmur.com/article/man-facing-carfentanil-charge-r...
However, on any individual case the same is not true, because that moves from talking about averages and general cases into specifics, and the burden of proof changes significantly. While there is a connection on average, that isn't enough to say any specific drug abuser commits domestic abuse. For that, ideally, you need criminal charges proven in court. That's missing here.
Just because someone is guilty or not doesn't separate other facts of the case.
In an extreme example: I'm ok with the court letting someone off who murdered someone, because the police didn't follow proper procedure wrt evidence/confessions/witness testimony. Our legal system should be held to the highest standard when convicting someone of a crime. That doesn't stop me from believing that the defendant actually did the crime or not.
Everyone is of course free to make up their own mind, but when making public accusations I would at least expect an honest effort to keep those accusations factually correct.
https://archive.is/yiiBF
The original link does not say that the girlfriend reported the broken arm to the police. The police were called by her mother, who made the allegation against Thorpe. The article above says:
> According to [Thorpe's lawyer]’s appeal, Abogast told police she had fallen three days before Thorpe’s arrest and doctors at Elliot Hospital said her arm was broken in three places.
The original link says that she had scars and scabbing on her face, but this link says that Thorpe also had scars and scabbing, which the police noted in their report as consistent with drug abuse.
I'm not one to disbelieve women when they report abuse. In this case, the alleged victim didn't report any abuse, a third party who was not witness to any alleged crimes did. It's also very unusual to have your arm broken in three places, call your mom to say what happened, and then not seek any kind of treatment. I feel sad for everyone involved, because it's clear to me at least that the drug issues were the crux of the matter (which is corroborated by the actions and findings of the state). Without a statement from the girlfriend or a finding by the state, any suggestion of domestic abuse is unwarranted speculation.
https://apnews.com/general-news-d68dca63e95946fbb9cc82f38540...
> 15 to 30 years in prison for possessing a synthetic drug with the intent to distribute it
> like many synthetic opioids, the exact effects of U-47700 are little understood and a small amount could be fatal
> charged with possessing carfentanil, a powerful synthetic drug much more powerful then fentanyl
https://www.wbay.com/content/news/New-Hampshire-man-suspecte...
It’s like saying: it’s your fault that you got shot for being in the wrong neighborhood at night. Were they knowingly taking a risk? Sure, but the murderer is still a murderer.
And we long got rid of the concept of “outlaw” where if you commit a crime any subsequent crime on you is fair game. That’s rather barbaric.
EDIT: I was assuming that it is obvious that no one takes such synthetic opioids on purpose. They are known not to be much fun and very dangerous. They are mostly used as a cheap filler in other more mainstream drugs, most notably in fake branded prescription drugs.
If not, what is the reason you decide the two situations differently?
I don't see how that's similar to a driver running into a jaywalker. Just because he's jaywalking doesn't mean he wants a driver to hit him.
But he will also be met with His mercy, and I am happy to extend him some mercy for his repentance here on Earth before his day comes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We are happy to have him with us.
"I am the one who hired Preston. Whatever he has done in the past, I have all the evidence in the world in front of me to assure me that he has a transformed heart."
Instead, you had to drag down others, the people who you haven't blessed with your benevolence.
"It is not a common thing to see."
You are being praised for showing kindness to one of us (a nerd, a programmer) while disparaging the others. You can show kindness to Preston without condemning the others. Ask ChatGPT to explain exceptionalism to you if you still do not understand. Every person in prison is a person who can change given the opportunity.
Preston isn't uncommon, Preston isn't rare or exceptional, Preston is the average prisoner: someone who, when given an opportunity, has been able to reform. You can celebrate Preston without disparaging his less fortunate cellmates.
The only rare thing here is that he was given an opportunity (and for that you should be praised).
DV applications: ~8800
DV ex parte granted (no chance for defendant to defend him(her)self): ~5100
DV final order granted after defendant able to defend him(her)self): ~3200
So for example in CT on just a civil standard, only 2/3 of the accusers were able to get even a temporary order when the defendant had zero chance to tell their side of the story. Once the defendant was able to come to court and defend themselves, only about 1/3 of them made it to a final order. And that was by the much weaker civil rather than criminal standard.
[] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tYBTsF7-px-3lCnBFOol...
Some notes: in Connecticut, restraining orders can be granted for a variety of reasons, not restricted to domestic violence alone. Fairly close correlation but it does include, for example, stalking.
It seems unwise to assume that restraining orders alone represent the entire count of domestic violence complaints that reach the legal system. For example, surely domestic violence arrests should be counted? Which seem to be a much higher count than restraining order applications -- 24,850 DV arrests in 2011 vs. 9033 DV applications. I'm not sure how to count the 32,111 "Family Violence Protective Orders" in 2011; are they the result of arrests? Are they yet another possible outcome of law enforcement involvement, separate from either a requested restraining order or an arrest?
There are way more reasons a restraining order might not make it to a final order besides "the requestor was proven wrong." I'd want more detailed data here before reaching a conclusion. Otherwise, this assumes that failure to grant a restraining order proves lack of DV. I am not sure that it would change the percentages you've shown significantly -- we're all aware of cases where restraining orders weren't granted with very bad results, but there's always a tendency to report on the most clickbaity outcomes. Still, worth digging into that one a bit more.
Again, appreciate the cite.
This is the key of this two-pronged approach, one commenter can bury the data driven comment in source rejection (without being beheld to prove a counter point, since the asserter has the burden of proof) while the sister comment can drive the more approved comment unchallenged. Of course we really know, in many cases, the two separate commenters are advancing the same line of opinion, but using this split strategy both are compartmentalized in their burdens.
Although, the truth is, the scrutinizer is rarely offering counter sources of their own, which they of course are under no obligation to provide. But barring that, we're left at worst with "I don't know" which is a terrible standard under which to assume the word of the wife is predictive of guilt, thus even if all the sources are rejected you leave from a practical perspective no off no better than you started in predictive guilt.
I also, for what it's worth, think that "did you talk to the wife" is too high a standard in this case. For one thing, the wife didn't bring a complaint, as I understand it.
The divorce industry and divorce lawyers request these orders like candy, as leverage for proceedings and to take away custody briefly during the temporary order while the custody hearing is going on so that during custody hearings it can be argued the child already is only with the mom or dad and they should get full custody. It also lets you eject the partner from the home without a legal eviction process, so they are at their weakest and homeless when fighting in court. They produce a massive number of weak DV claims, the point was never to take them final but to provide enough of a discontinuity in their life to crush them.
I understand that you're simply using this as a proxy for the actual unknowable data, but I think it's worth pointing out that the map is not the territory.
The final order is more difficult, but quite often (i.e. in divorce / custody court) the only goal was to evict them from the home and disrupt custody to get the upper hand in hearings, so temporary is all that's needed to do the job and then no need to actually defend the claim made 14+ days later when they're already homeless and with the baseline of out of the kid's life.
http://www.ejfi.org/PDF/Nestler_Letterman_TRO.pdf
The biggest issue is that once the perpetrator is removed and/or charged the victim often petitions the prosecutor and police to drop the charges. The prosecutors I know will generally not do this and will push for a guilty plea or trial. It's hard for the prosecutor to know whether the victim is being manipulated into asking for the charges to be dropped, and regardless, a crime has probably been committed, and in the justice system the plaintiff is the state, not the person who was battered. This can lead to a stand-off where the victim refuses to come to trial to testify, and where the prosecutor has a Hobson's Choice of whether to arrest the victim and jail them until trial to get them on the stand or let the case drop.
DV cases are hard.
He has had more than enough time to pay for all of it, and he clearly has a transformed heart.
Thank you for making society a better place.
I knew the person, and whatever was done in the past. Is the past. He's done his time. It is not mine to add penalties over what the state imposed.
It's obvious from the comments in the thread that the internet hate mob still wants its pound of flesh and for Preston to be judged for life regardless of current circumstances.
They don't realize how damaging their posts are to people who have done wrong in the past and want to change their lives. Once again I am ashamed to be part of the Hacker News community, but thank you for your fairness and goodheartedness.
However, the point of a program of hiring or educating people who are in prison isn't to judge them. They are already in prison. 10years is a long time, so it's likely they did something bad and have been judged for it.
This is to give people who are capable and willing a chance to grow and integrate. From the little knowledge I have about this, it seems like this is very effective.
You assert that there was domestic violence unrelated to drugs, but you present no evidence for this, and substance abuse is strongly correlated with domestic violence.
There's a reason people don't like drug addicts, and there's a pretty significant portion of the population that wants them all dead (except for my little Muffy, who was corrupted by her boyfriend, of course).
The Second Chance stuff is important. Surprisingly enough, Jaime Dimon is a big supporter of it[0].
I wish this chap well. The proof will come, when he leaves the structure of prison.
[0] https://www.jpmorganchase.com/impact/careers-and-skills/seco...
Lists other companies which are part of the coalition.
Some surprise me, others, don't.
For fucks sake, have some human decency. If your name was the one involved, how would something like this make you feel?
There is no actual confirmation in that document that her arm was broken, just that that was what was reported to the officer and that it was injured/swolen.
You're free to say "allegedly", just like the standards the media has to go by.
This then combined with the fact that the abuser is going to jail for on unrelated convictions. This is a huge relief to any abuse survivor. The person is going away, and I will be safe.
The other component is all the steps involved with filing charges which will often feel invasive and have to bring it all up again.
I have seen this up close and personal on a few occasions, I have begged the victim to go to the police but they would not do it.
The worst outcome of this is when the abuser is let out, the abuser may seek out the victim again, or the abuser will find new victims.
In this case the police had a call from a close family member accusing the person of domestic abuse. They had suspicious behavior from the accused person. They also witnessed that the possible victim had multiple injuries consistent with domestic abuse. As well as the arm injury the call from the family member had initially reported. But probably no charges or at least no convictions.
No need to worry about rent, no need to worry about healthcare, no need deal with all this social crap.
Just the thought of maybe being able to peacefully read a book for 30 minutes, at times I almost wished to be imprisoned...
Idk, a few?
There is a real risk of exploitation, but if it's properly managed, remote work for prisoners is one of the most hopeful things I've heard about the prison system. It gives people purpose while there and an avenue to success once they're out.
Punishment has three ends: retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice; it is charitable and prudent to rehabilitate the criminal, satisfying the corrective end of punishment; and would-be criminals must be given tangible evidence of what awaits them if they choose to indulge an evil temptation, thus acting as a deterrent.
In our systems today, we either neglect correction, leaving people to rot in prison or endanger them with recidivism by throwing them back onto the streets with no correction, or we take an attitude of false compassion toward the perp by failing to inflict adequate justice, incidentally failing the deterrent end in the process.
So many things can never have full repatriation. The best we can do is have society acknowledge, forcefully, the wrongs done via prison sentencing.
But then many countries go wrong on policy - punitive imprisonment leads to worse individual and social outcomes than a rehabilitation focus.
Much of 'justice' has been usurped from the victim into a jobs campaign for the state.
The trick here is to be fortunate enough to have a biiiiig monthly retirement pension that the courts can barely touch, or enough wealth to have already bought your mother a nice house (though I now read OJ screwed that up by not transferring her the title).
https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/nation-world/1997...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-01-me-59847...
If victims determined the sentences, I expect people would spend a lot more time in prison, way more than a non-emotionally involved and wronged person would think fair.
IMHO letting victims set the sentence would be the worst way to do it.
https://www.wbtv.com/2025/06/17/what-forgiveness-charleston-...
In most US jurisdictions the victim of a crime is allowed to make a statement during the sentencing phase of the trial. So the victim can certainly request release if they want it although the judge isn't obligated to adhere.
In western philosophy an offender is considered to have offended against society even if their crime is of a personal nature. As such, they are tried, condemned, and punished by society according to codified rules. A victim, if there is one, is not really a part of this process.
There is a fundamentally sound basis for this philosophy, including equity (different justice for different people is no justice for anyone), impartiality, and respect for human rights.
There are other philosophies of justice: for example, the traditional "I'm strongest I get the best stuff" or "you dissed me ima kill you." Some are codified similarly to western justice ("killing a man is requires you pay his heirs 100 she-camels of which 40 must be pregnant, killing a woman is half that, killing a Jew one-third, and so on"). Others involve negotiation between victim (or their families) and offender -- which often works out well, since the offender is often is a position of power to start with and is very likely come out on top.
The simple "an eye for an eye" is just the beginning of a very very deep rabbit hole you can go down on the road to enlightenment.
The justice system is pretty far from actual justice in many cases, but this wouldn't get it closer.
Happy to keep nerding out on comparative legal stuff from around the world! Just keeping this grounded in "you probably wouldn't enjoy living somewhere where your landlord can have you imprisoned for unpaid rent".
1. the deprivation of freedom is retributive
2. the prevention of additional crimes can be said to be deterrence of an active sort
3. the protection of society isn't part of punishment per se, but a separate end
This becomes clear when we consider imprisonment in relation to various crimes. Violent criminals are imprisoned in part because they are a threat to the physical safety of others. However, is an embezzler or a mayor embroiled in shady accounting a threat to anyone's physical safety? Probably not. So the purpose of their removal is less about crime prevention and more about retribution.
One might argue a fourth end as well: removal.
When people talk about "cleaning up the streets" they don't mean causing ruffians to clean up their act, what they refer to is removing the ruffians entirely. To "someplace else". To "Not in my backyard". Out of sight, out of mind as is often said.
For profit prisons may view prisoners as cheap labor or levy bait, but for the voting public who gets no cut of that action the real inducement starts and ends with "make the problem go away". Sweep human beings we do not know how to cohabitate with under a rug.
Retribution may appeal to those directly wronged, or to the minority of sadists in a population. Deterrence is oft admired, but few honestly believe it's really possible given that harsh sentences never seem to cause crime to go to zero (sensationalism-driven media that magnifies every mole-hill notwithstanding) and that repeat offenses outnumber first offenses. Rehabilitation appeals to those with compassion, though nobody has a clear bead on how to actually land that plane with more than the lowest hanging fruit of only-slightly-off-course offenders.
So I think the real elephant in the room is that people want/demand/rely upon removal.
Harsh sentences work great when used with the inevitability of punishment. It is obvious that a harsh sentence does not discourage a criminal to commit a crime if they expect to avoid any responsibility
First of all you have criminals who are low-functioning enough for whatever reason to fail to understand how actions connect to consequences in reality. Be it due to mental illness, or overestimation of their abilities. No amount of certainty is enough to dispel the "That won't happen to me" presumption from a pretty big chunk of the population.
Next you have desperate people: either due to "risking punishment may actually be safer than risking privation while obeying the law" and/or due to presumptions of having nothing left to lose.
And finally you have cartels, where folks organize so well that their internal governance and capacity to levy violence actually stands toe to toe against the civil governments that they operate within the jurisdictions of. This is the civil equivalent of a tumor, with all of the oncological complications that that often implies.
So I would caution that "inevitability of punishment" is an unreasonable goal to try to justify harsh sentences, and I would estimate that any historical accounts of governments who have achieved that feat were probably also totalitarian enough to be able to lie about their resulting crime statistics along the path.
It's when you remove the dangerous person from a society for a while, so they can't commit crimes for that while. This is very important part of prison punishment with people with criminal tendencies, and this is why recidivists get longer prison sentences for each subsequent repetition of a similar crime.
Unfortunately we have to admit that some (small) percentage of criminals cannot be rehabilitated, so they must be isolated from society.
For criminals that act alone, variations in the severity of the sentence doesn’t seem to have the impact you might expect it to have on how much it actually deters people. (And there is the issue that people in prison can share strategies between themselves for how to more effectively commit crime, which is not an ideal outcome.) So indeed, incapacitation is a very important factor. When it’s studied, you often see numbers like “increasing the sentence by 10 years prevents 0.2 crimes due to deterrence and 0.9 crimes due to incapacitation”.
I say this applies to people acting alone because, although I have no proof, I suspect that organized crime is a bit more “rational” in their response to changes in sentencing. If sentencing were set up so that engaging in a category of crime was not profitable for the criminal organization, I’m pretty sure they would realize this and stop. This logic doesn’t apply to individual people, because the average person committing a crime has no idea what the sentence is or their odds of getting caught, and they obviously don’t do it often enough that the random variation is amortized out.
Oh dang, there's that pesky religious mechanic again! Why can't we build on pragmatism rather than ensuring the Justice God has enough blood-years drained from criminal-victims? Two crimes don't make a justice!
Irrelevant addendum: I think I will mix atheism and anarchism as they are very compatible concepts, in that they stand in skepticism of essentially the same species of entity with two masks: church and state.
I will agree with you that a criminal justice system built "on pragmatism" would certainly conflict with the tenants of many world religions. I recently read Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal, which outlines why pure pragmatism needs to be tempered by a respect for, and indeed love of, every person accused or convicted of a crime.
damn…
Even though the enrolled people are completely trustworthy, doing this prevents untrustworthy people to simulate interest in the program just to be able to contact the external world for illegal activities.
List of prohibited items: https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...
Inmates are treated very differently by the legal system than regular people. Thirteenth Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States”
That’s about as direct an accusation as it gets.
However, ideally, I don’t think that it makes sense for someone to go to prison, which costs tax money, and meanwhile earn the same amount of money by remote working from prison as someone in the outside world, who actually has living expenses to pay for (which get taxed also).
So, I think, when it comes to fairness, it wouldn’t be unreasonable if a partial cut goes to the TCOO of holding that prisoner.
Now again, American prisons have their whole incentive model messed up, so I don’t even want to get in an argument about America’s implementation of this system and how it would lead to more problems— because it’s well-known and more than expected.
> Why are they paid
Because people have expenses other than food and lodging. Prisoners do to, some save money for after they leave prison others spend it at the commissary.
2) They wouldn't have to if they didn't insist on locking him up
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/04/1084452251/the-vast-majority-...
Maine: https://www.corrections1.com/finance-and-budgets/maine-lawma... "the state can deduct up to 20% of their income — 10% for room and board, which is sent to the state’s general fund, not the Department of Corrections , and up to 10% to cover transportation provided by the department. Since 2020, the state fund has collected a total of $2.4 million.
Perhaps it'd be an interesting SFF novel.
Americans have become too comfortable with their everyday sadism.
No, they forfeited their freedoms and we're put away by due process, but if that's your point of view then we've nothing further to discuss. Incredible stuff on HN these days.
And secondly, he has a good point. We don't want to make locking people up easy or cheap. It should be high-friction, it should take a long time, and it should cost the government lots and lots of money.
Why? Incentives. The government has no reason to prevent crime if locking people up is cheap. It's made even worse by the promise of cheap or free labor. Then, you run into issues where the government actually wants people to fail and do crime, so they can extract labor from them. We see this quite aggressively in some southern states like Georgia. A remnant of Jim Crow era America.
But, if prison is expensive, the government will be incentivized to put some of that money into crime prevention programs. Things like homeless shelters, food banks, job programs.
And to be clear, I'm opposed to capital punishment and dangerous conditions in prisons. I'm just pointing out that I don't think your argument is very good. If you think we as a society are willing to flippantly put people in prison because it's cheap I don't see how you can trust us to no resort to other flippant measures if the cost was high.
Framing it as offsetting the cost would also make it very easy to increase the cut, bit by bit, until it gets to a truly unreasonable level. And since the person is already in prison and we have to pay for them no matter what, why would they choose to work if the deal is so bad?
This is a state by state thing. FWIW in this case, ME doesn't have private prisons. I don't bring this up to imply everything related to their cut is on the up and up, however, I believe Maine is very much incentivized to make this a useful program in terms of keeping people from returning to jail (as opposed to squeezing every dollar from the prisoners).
The dude is is prison, slave like conditions are ridiculous, but there should be a healthy overhead.
Turso also looks really neat for small Payload sites.
Evil is a threshold, it's not a competition with limited spots
Sometimes big crime families or notorious serial killers get away with it, but it doesn't lower the threshold for anyone else
It doesn't make it any better that someone else is doing even worse. You don't get to do a little crime, as a treat
Why not? I much prefer a society in which I can get away with some crimes to one where every crime is prosecuted.
Perhaps our laws would be fairer and simpler if enforcement were draconian and uniform
Punishing is always a recipe for they punishment going back to society
Selling drugs isn't evil. Not selling drug doesn't make you good. People take drugs for various reasons. If a doctor sells them they are good but if someone else sells them they are evil?
The person buying could have been fired and can't afford Doctors prescription so the person selling could be an angel.
People that sell fentanyl (or similar) are very bad for society, to avoid the triggering "evil". Look how many people have died in the last 10 years. It's insane.
EDIT: I personally know a young man that died from a fent overdose and it's likely he didn't know what he took had fent in it. 22 years old and the whole world ahead him. Completely destroyed his family.
Drugs are an anti-social drain on society, that sickens its buyers, turning them into zombies or criminals, and turns the sellers into greedy, violent people who corrupt law enforcement.
Your edge case of an angel doesn't translate to the actual realities of drug trafficking and addiction.
It cannot be understated how harmful fentanyl is and how low quality of a drug it is. Low quality as in the high sucks.
(I've never taken drugs and I don't drink)
No, but our enforcement has limited resources. We can't arrest and jail every offender of every crime, so we pick and choose where to spend our enforcement resources. All the money spent pursuing, arresting, trying, and imprisoning this guy could have been spent going after people like the Sacklers.
I've voted for drug legalization (including possession). However, that doesn't mean that I condone all drug dealing behavior.
EDIT: another commentor found that it was MDMA and weed, so this discussion is purely theoretical and doesn’t apply to OP.
The whole thread is silly. I don't think a lot of people here are going to stick up for a 15 year stretch for a 24 year old for selling opiates. Probably don't need to pull the Sacklers into it.
Do you have a source? It seems that guy was selling MDMA and marijuana. Here's the relevant quote from https://pthorpe92.dev/intro/my-story/
I was caught with MDMA coming in the mail from Vancouver, and some marijuana coming from california (the latter of which is what I am currently serving my time for right now)
* https://apnews.com/general-news-d68dca63e95946fbb9cc82f38540...
* https://www.doj.nh.gov/news-and-media/preston-thorpe-sentenc...
~2012 he was caught selling MDMA and marijuana, and went to prison
~end or 2015 or start of 2016 he was released on probation
[Edit: Added entry] December 2016 police responding to a domestic violence call enter his apartment to make contact with the alleged victim, and discover U-47700 (a synthetic opioid) https://www.courts.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt471/files/docu...
April 2017 the police find traces of carfentanil while executing a search warrant at his place - plausibly but not provably linked to some recent carfentanil deaths - and police announce they are searching for him. https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/man-wanted-suspected-let...
May 2017 he ends up back in prison.
Aug 2017 he pleads guilty to possession of U47700 (a synthetic opioid) with intent to distribute https://www.wmur.com/article/defense-plans-appeal-of-search-...
Oct 2017 he's sentenced to 15-30 years on the above charge, he has not been charged with possessing the carfentanil (yet) despite the apparent evidence https://www.wmur.com/article/man-facing-carfentanil-charge-r...
The articles aren't clear on this, but given his own recounting I assume that a suspended sentence for Marijuana was un-suspended as a result of the new charges and he is serving that sentence first, or concurrently.
It is now 4 PM, about to clock out for the day because I gotta wait for CI run thats >30m. I come back here and it's still going on. This is #3 comment I see when I open HN, ensuing thread takes up two pages scrolls on 16" MBP.
It's bad of me to write this because, well, who cares? Additionally, am I trying to litigate what other people comment?
The root feeling driving me to express myself is a form of frustrated boredom -- rolling with that and verbalizing concretely, a bunch of people writing comments with the one thing they're hyperfocusing on their record to drive a conclusion on their value as a person/morality, and then people pointing out that's not some moral absolute, asking for links, discussing the links...
...well, it's all just clutter.
Or YouTube comment-level discussion, unless we're planning on relitigating every case he's been involved in.
This all would be better if it the kangaroo court stuff was confined to a thread with all of the evidence against him, so we didn't have a bunch of weak cases, or if people didn't treat this as an opportunity to be a drive by judge. Article def. ain't about his crimes, and he ain't saying he's innocent or an angel.
(and the idea that "drug crimes" implies "hippie selling weed or psychedelics" so calling them "drug crimes" is hiding the ball...where does that come from? Its especially dissonant b/c you indicate the mere fact he sold an opiod is so bad that this guy is...bad? irredeemable? not worth discussing?...so presumably you care a lot about opiods, so presumably you know that's whats driven drug crime the last, uh, decade or two?)
Speaking for myself, I'm actually just discussing the idea that a non-violent crime like drug dealing necessarily deserves a light sentence in general.
> Sounds like a you thing
It is a me thing. That's why I said "brings to mind".
I'm a product of my time. I remember when weed and psychedelics meant demonization and heavy sentences, and it was absurd because those substances aren't that dangerous.
This is the context in which I'm accustomed to calling drug dealing a "non-violent crime". So, I feel like I need to point out that things are not quite the same with deadly drugs like carfentanil.
The state needs to get out of domestic warfare, war on drugs, war on poverty, war on crime, quit abusing its customers (aka "criminals"), and stick only to killing and oppressing foreign tribes! Put a 12 year cap on sentences, the state should have no right to take the life of its customer even if the taking is placing in a box. Also I would like to see UBI go to released felons first as well as the vote, as they have seen significant economic sequelae and injustice at the hands of the state!
https://www.courts.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt471/files/docu...
>"On December 24, 2016, three Manchester police officers responded to an apartment following a report of a domestic dispute. The report was made by the mother of Ashley Arbogast, who advised that her daughter had called her Stating that her boyfriend had broken her arm during an argument."
I just wanted to point out that there is clear evidence that this individual was involved in at least one violent act, as is often the case with ‘non-violent drug convicts’.
And only one company is allowed to import the specific leaves/material (coca leafs). The government restricts everyone from importing them unless it's one of the biggest companies in the world.
i can't even, and it sounds made up.
People like big strong dominating government until it gets replaced with the Mormon church, or a Caliphate, then nooo it's not statesmanship but just religion. (Hint: all states are religions, and codes are religious texts. What do freedom of religion and freedom of association mean in this context, instead of the toothless safe-for-government one you're used to thinking of it in?)
Once you've taken 10 years of someone's life there is no giving that back either. As technology progresses the cost of recording evidence will go down which will help convict and prove the innocence of people.
Minority Report is a counterfactual to this claim. The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Technology is a tool to extend one’s grasp to meet one’s reach, and vice versa, and is a tool that serves power. Those with power are best able to bend tools to their ends, just or unjust.
> It is the duty of the poor to support and sustain the rich in their power and idleness. In doing so, they have to work before the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anatole_France
The inability to find a job coupled with the crushing interest is what leads to desperation, and then repeat criminal behavior.
> There is a real risk of exploitation
Centralized systems always have a risk of corruption when power is concentrated in few people. Those job roles also many times attract the corrupt; and even when you have people who go in with a good moral caliber, the regular dynamics of the interactions may also twist them into being corrupt.
Its a rare person with sufficient moral caliber that can survive such a job (as a guard or other prison staff) unscathed and still be a good person afterwards.
Many avenues of education also do not prepare them appropriately for work in the private sector, and some careers are simply prohibited. For example becoming a chemist or engineer when they have a conviction related to ethics violations in such fields.
UNICOR/the Federal system 'strongly encourages' people with CAD experience, etc do the McDonalds remodel contracts, the World Trade Center work, etc. These are people that worked in the industry prior to prison and that are not traditionally been hired back after release, so it's simply being used to make UNICOR money on big contracts based on incarcerated individuals pre-existing training being exploited. In addition having structural CAD work done by people with zero say in their job, their deliverables/quality, their hours, etc seems like a bad idea. I don't know why outside engineers are using this work. The UNICOR McDonalds remodels are probably fine (though you can tell by the current feel of McDonalds that the remodels were literally done by prison inmates), but the UNICOR World Trade Center stuff seems super sketchy.
From a book I recently read on the subject they seem not just to focus on rehab and lack of punishment. If there are disputes with others within the facilities the ones in the dispute must sit down and talk through their issues and find a resolution. This helps ingrain proper anger management & helps re-acclimate them to normal society where violence is rarely the best option. And it makes a ton of sense, if they never are taught how to talk out their issues they will go back to how they have handled those issues all along.
> From the study, they determined that because the groups were created to be approximately equal, individual differences are not necessary or responsible for intergroup conflict to occur.
> Lutfy Diab repeated the experiment with 18 boys from Beirut. The 'Blue Ghost' and 'Red Genies' groups each contained 5 Christians and 4 Muslims. Fighting soon broke out, not between the Christians and Muslims but between the Red and Blue groups.
Also you can establish homogeneity using genetic analysis such as the fixation index. Unsurprisingly, Swedes and Finns are extremely closely related.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_index#Autosomal_genet...
There are many possible metrics to measure heterogeneity, such as linguistic and religious diversity, variations in value systems, etc.
More broadly, scientific racism is bunk. (This is a generalisation: I didn't establish it in my previous comment, but it's true nonetheless.)
Understanding that we are hetreogenic is hard.
https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-myth-of-the-nordic-rehabil...
I live in Sweden and now the gangs are recruiting children because they don't get sentenced even for murder (maybe 2 years max).
The other side of prison is keeping the public safe - you also have zero recidivism with the Bukele approach.
If you're allowed/able to watch YouTube in American prisons, I would definitely check him out!
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Sam_Bent/videos
I mean it would be sad if he was lying - but i don’t see any of that.
Saying that he got his time for marijuana seems to be a big stretch.
Where did you learn this?
What you are probably thinking of is what is called the “exigent circumstances” warrant exception, and it was misapplied here by over-zealous police who violated his rights.
There is no evidence to support that the injuries sustained by the woman in his apartment were caused by him, according to that document.
If he was being coerced into labour however, which the for-profit prison undoubtedly makes profit from, it’s simply unacceptable; indentured servitude, slavery, call it what you will, it’s bad for society in every way because it allows the ruling class to steal labour from the working class under the guise of “rehabilitation”.
I have some basic questions if anyone knows:
a. do all inmates get computer & internet access? (or only some, dependent upon the crime you committed)
b. do the inmates have to pay to use the computer & internet? I ask because I hear commissary is prohibitively expensive in prison.
c. how much time per week do inmate get to use the computer with internet access? (and is that time guaranteed they will get)
d. are there job boards specific to helping inmates find remote friendly jobs that are accepting of incarcerated individuals?
Commissary is generally "gas station" prices in jails and prisons.
Some of the inmates I work with right now have tablets that allow music streaming from a small catalog, but I think it is $3/hour to listen to it.
Obviously the families and friends of the loved are the ones burdened with paying for all of these, unless you can get an in-prison job that pays, e.g. dealing drugs is probably the highest paid, sadly.
I just helped someone to complete a year-long paralegal course and qualification while inside. The Illinois prison system has now banned this since (a) it came with the option of facilities awarding a 6 month reduction in the length of a non-violent sentence, (b) required the facility to allow someone to proctor the final exam.
On a serious note, I think inmates should have 24/7 laptop computer access with (at least) limited sessions of internet connectivity.
They had a computer lab, but it was only for Mavis Beacon. I found the C# compiler that's hidden away in the Windows directory and started teaching programming on the sly. Luckily one of the nuns at the facility took pity on me and bought C# Weekend Crash Course on Amazon (with the CD) and sneaked it through the security checks for me so I'd have a good reference to teach from.
In California they teach inmates coding, while in other states all computer-related technical books are banned as security risks. Same with basic electrical work — Promising People has an interesting VR program for teaching electrical helper skills, but in some correctional systems that would be considered unacceptably risky. Tablet and similar system operators/vendors have to shape the material available to the inmates to suit the local restrictions.