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Comment by superswordfish | Hacker News Reader

Just pray you don't end up on the wrong side of the law (to be fair, the same could be said of CA).

> the same could be said of CA

I don't think anyone would want to spend time in a typical CA prison or jail. Overcrowding, violence, gangs, insufficient medical care, etc.

LA County has had some well publicized problems with sheriff's department guards severely beating handcuffed inmates. It's probably not a place you want to visit.

Definitely. CA prisons are some of the worst in the nation, which is why the state was ordered to release prisoners to reduce crowding. But Texas has a death penalty with teeth, hard labor, corporal punishment, and equally poor prison conditions (less crowded and less of a gang problem, but way worse weather which you're mostly not sheltered from). The south in general is a terrible place to fall afoul of the law, and probably either Texas or Louisiana claims the trophy.

How do you mean?

The death penalty, and heavy incarceration with atrocious conditions.

Most Texans, let alone Californians fleeing high prices, don't have to worry about such things. Besides, the death penalty isn't exactly a negative if the alternative is life in (a Texas) prison.

Perhaps I'm alone in deriving small comfort in the knowledge that even if I were framed or otherwise unjustly convicted for the most atrocious of crimes, this would not be my fate (though the federal government showed in MA, for instance, with the Boston Marathon bomber, that they will override humane state law; you're never truly safe in the US). The knowledge that a gross miscarriage of justice could land me in "hell on earth" was troubling in CA (death row in TX and CA are quite different beasts on the other hand).

While our death row is an issue, you are something like ten to twenty thousand times more likely to die at the hands of our idiot drivers here in Texas. So keeping a sense of perspective is important.

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