Punishment is almost always gratuitous. Aside from the handful of people whom society needs to be protected from, prison is always counter-productive. One of the recent stories linked here talks about how the brain doesn't really finish developing until the mid-20's, and that 20-something "kids" frequently get locked up for impulsiveness...

I had a passenger who got fined $1000 for letting his medical marijuana card expire. In the future, this fellow has it on his record that he is a political criminal who didn't hurt anyone, and a zealous brain-dead prosecutor might use this prior conviction to advocate for prison.

Another passenger had recently been released from a 2-year prison sentence. Her crime was sharing a single opiate pill with a friend. The cop was chuckling as he wrote her up. This one had gotten fat on prison food, which is not very nutritious. Several of her fellow inmates died from the neglect. (I guess police officers have to be rather disconnected from the consequences of their job. "I don't make the rules, I just enforce them" is a cop-out.)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, etc) recently had this to say:

  Being nice counts the most when 
  you are nice to people ignored 
  by others, deprived of attention, 
  or devoid of friends. The rest is 
  largely theater.

I tried to be nice to all my passengers, especially those who were having a rough day. One day I got a person going to the drive-through liquor store. I spent a few extra minutes talking to this person. After her taxi ride, I called back a time or two. There was a bit of hope in her voice - 'someone cares'. But on the third day she didn't answer, and I got distracted. Apparently she sobered up, but I didn't know that until later. After about two months this one started drinking again, found my card, and she called me because she just wanted someone nice to talk to.

This one had tried (really hard) to stay sober after almost 2-years in prison for her 3rd DUI. But life happened, and she hadn't learned how to cope in minimum-security prison.

I worked with her regularly over the course of about two years. She'd sober up, get a job, have a bad day at work, relapse... Finally I turned her over to her family (who previously had tried the "maybe mom will stop drinking if we ignore her" strategy), and she has really turned the corner now that she knows her kids are there to support her. Her son recently trusted her to watch her grandkids overnight. Prison didn't enable this transformation. (she originally fell into the alcoholic's pit when she found that vodka helped her anxiety better than the Xanax prescription. Benzodiazepines only work for about 4 weeks, before the patient's anxiety levels become worse than before.)

I'm still thinking about whether I should say more about this passenger. The Difference Between Boys and Girls [1] is about another passenger who did quite well after meeting me.

[1] http://www.taxiwars.org/2016/02/the-difference-between-boys-...