Investigation finds inmates built computers and hid them in prison ceiling
newschannel9.com
newschannel9.com
You're welcome :)
edit: well started anyway
Bonus points if you hook it up to a battery and SSH into it during transit. Probably not the best idea to have something inside of you that occasionally catches fire, though.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/03/27/18/329808C00000057...
It appears the program provided an effective education.
This isn't an "education", its just slave labour.
Computer skills are not only JavaScript.
I pick and choose. I read maybe 10% of what's on here.
But hey, go ahead and try to turn HN into Reddit if you guys feel that's where it needs to go.
I feel we've already seen how useful a Reddit is to the world.
Either this thread (every time it comes up) needs to be curbed or the FAQ needs to be edited
No matter how simple you try and keep a point, there will still always be someone who misses it.
I used to think this was just an extension of the "trying to idiotproof/universe builds a better idiot" law, but at this point it could probably be a law of its own.
I hope HN never goes there.
Maybe it's just me ?
It's ok, there is place for all of us on HN. As long as comments are not mostly filled by either behavior, we can all enjoy the benefit of the intelligent and knowledgeable HN community.
I don't think there's a limit (at least not at this point), just that at a certain depth there's a delay before the reply link appears.
Alternative answer: maybe they should carry heavily nested comments on to another page, like they do on- ah, never mind.
No.
Now, you or someone else could had explained why it was relevant or... oh wonder! point to it, so we can learn on our own. Or even enlighten us with the reason why some half assed misterious joke is mixed with what appears to be a denounce on slave labour.
But don't worry, I absolutely love these flippant conversations if I'm allowed to bring my own non-sequiturs to the table. I just can't think of any right now :)
I know if I was in jail I'd like to partake in such a program, I could use more hands-on skills with electronics, and recycling is always a good cause :)
Some jail programs can be really good, like the program for helping inmates adopt and care for a rescue dog. There was also a program at a jail here for repairing and donating broken toys.
I think these kinds of wholesome efforts are very important to look for and support.
If an ex-con manages to learn enough in prison to be a decent dev and land a job I hope they get paid the same as everyone else at their level.
People in computing don't care that much about your background if you are skilled. You can even work remotely for/from companies in another country.
And the good news is, good devs are rare, but the demand for them keep increasing. So if you become productive and reliable with a pinch of people skills, you are pretty much guarantied to have a job in the next 20 years. And probably a good one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6750805
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6245316
This is all the data I've got on the state of industry; genuinely interested to hear tidbits from anybody that things aren't this ugly nowadays.
I'm not in the demographic of people dealing with problematic pasts (and very thankfully so; I don't envy those who are, at all) but I think that reasonable analysis of situations like what is described in those links is not at all too much to ask (?!), and I wouldn't want to touch an employer who deals with such situations in the way that is described in those links.
(Also, if you go through the user profiles of the usernames who wrote those two comments - based on the fact that the first comment links to the second I presume they're the same person - I must note that I observe a general pattern of cynicism which I think has an obvious cause and is sad because of its trivial avoidability.)
But the world is still running because of millions of not-so-big companies. They have IT needs too.
Actually the majority of IT jobs are NOT at IT companies, but in regular companies that need IT like anybody.
I've been working in porn during my first 5 years and nobody cared. Actually most companies didn't even checked.
Thing is, you better start teaching them how to read and write!
60% More than 60 percent of all prison inmates are functionally illiterate. Over 70% of inmates in America's prisons cannot read above a fourth grade level. They are many years away from grasping Closures and Curry.
Source: http://www.begintoread.com/research/literacystatistics.html
What measures of literacy do you think are useful for comparing developed countries?
The United States does not report their rate but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States is when compared with http://world.bymap.org/LiteracyRates.html and various other sources not something to be happy about.
Newly arrived immigrants from parts of the world where basic education is 'optional' is a problem as well but the fact that so many people native to a region do not have basic reading and writing skills is a real source of worry in a world that relies on reading and writing for almost all interaction.
Other things that require reading ability are and that are important to a functioning society are voting and the ability to use medication.
It's been a really long time since reading/writing were optional and with the increased reliance on technology to function in society that is only getting more important.
Your implication is that France would simply lack an equivalent to the "Below Basic" group. I doubt this.
I'm sure France has an equivalent group, but I'm also sure that that group would be substantially smaller based on plenty of exposure to French citizens and American citizens.
France has one of the best education systems in Europe and if you've gone to school there it is almost un-thinkable that you would not have achieved at least basic reading and writing skills.
There are people that fall through the cracks of the education system, but even children of illegal immigrants are required to go to school (and it's free).
Marine Le Pen wants to change this by the way, that's double stupid because (1) the chances they will end up staying are fairly large and (2) if they can't read/write they will end up in crime in larger proportions than otherwise.
(People aren't taking their kids out of schools because they want them to stay uneducated...they are doing it because they disagree with what the school considers education. But they don't disagree about things like knowing the alphabet or how to read or whatever)
Anyway, my guess was that you were probably making forceful claims about anecdata and here we are.
Well, that anecdata is based on having spent a lot of time on both sides of the Atlantic and I really can't remember anybody ever in Europe that wasn't literate past the age of 10 and I've met enough people in the USA that were extremely nice but could barely write their own name that I don't feel the need to turn every comment about this subject into a paper complete with citations.
The US does not bother to report their literacy figures to the various global bodies so that makes comparing them a little bit harder than it normally would be but I'm fine to let me personal experience guide me in this, let's be happy this was about literacy and not about world history or geography.
You seem to get a lot of pleasure from these sniping sessions so consider me happy to oblige you as a target.
There was a thread linked a while back that may be of some relevance to you, let me dig it up.
edit: here you go:
" Amendment XIII Section 1.
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, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. "
But a bit of research showed that prisons were not exactly bastions of human rights in the good old days.
Netflix produced a great documentary about all of this - 13th - and it's well worth the watch.
Simply because private prisons hold a small portion of the people incarcerated at a state or federal level.
My point was that the use of prison labor is not limited to private prisons.
Some reform on this front would be good but I think it will be many decades before the US is ready to confront these things, if it doesn't fall apart beforehand due to the ever increasing divide, both geographically and ideologically.
I always find the retributionist theory unconfortable. I'd rather understand incarceration as a protection for potential new victims and a warning to others. Also it should be a way to "fix" the inmates, but unfortunately that's often wishful thinking.
I personally think that if a person has been convicted for battery or something worse more than once, the protection of others needs to be prioritized.
But it's also worth considering that the prisons in US (or pretty much anywhere) are probably not the best rehabilitating environments, so there seems to be room for improvement...
In games where there is common good, one way to avoid tragedy of commons is by punishment.
Retribution is in the neighbourhood of religion. Nobody but gods can really know what happened and what was the exact intention.
At the time eye for an eye appeared (Hammurabi) it was a way to limit vengeance, that used to snowball very quickly.
I call it BS. Why should ordinary people work and pay for criminals?
By forcing criminals to work for free society is paying in another way: that work would have been done by someone on the outside, but you can't compete with slave labor.
So this is bad both for the inmates and for society from an economic point of view, and then we're side-stepping the moral issue.
What you're talking about is really a disproportion between amount of work they make (and value they produce) and the total amount of pay they receive for delivering that value.
Their freedom to negotiate has been taken away, therefore they do not have any choices.
> What you're talking about is really a disproportion between amount of work they make (and value they produce) and the total amount of pay they receive for delivering that value.
That depends on the situation but is ultimately un-important.
"Basic rules of economics" have no place inside prison walls.
It actually is very important because this is exactly what distinguishes between labour slavery and ordinary paid work.
Economic rules is not something that one can decide whether it applies or not. It's like telling that mathematical axioms don't apply in prison - sure, you can make people believe that 2 + 2 = 5 but this is nothing more than just rejecting the reality.
That leaves 'forced labor' as the only other option if you feel that letting people starve to death is a viable alternative (as you did in your earlier comment).
The rest of your comment is not applicable.
isn't it how this works in principle for folks that are not imprisoned? (And no, I don't think this a viable alternative, although - nice job what you did here - well played).
No, it isn't that's when you go on welfare.
> (And no, I don't think this a viable alternative, although - nice job what you did here - well played).
I didn't 'play', you basically made a bunch of statements that are un-supportable.
"Ordinary paid work" that pays less than a dollar an hour. And if you don't go you are put in solitary, instead of just being fired. That means you don't see any other people. Ever. If they really don't like you they can put you on the loaf, too. Look that up. And that "opportunity" for "ordinary paid work" only exists in prison: you also aren't handling jail, where the Thirteenth doesn't apply because the inmate has not yet been convicted. So now everybody in jail starves under your final solution, before they can be convicted by their peers, all in the name of economic purity.
I have to say, as a former inmate, watching ostensibly well-off people who've never seen the inside of a drunk tank talk about "reality" like this just bugs me. It's just such a lack of perspective, which is fine, but there's also a lack of awareness that it's there and it's dehumanizing to see people speak about inmates like this. You're arguing basic economics and applying it to the incarcerated human condition as if inmates are a line item of cattle in Excel. (Ask me what comes out of the hole when someone gets repeatedly stabbed with a sharpened toothbrush and what color it is. Hint: not red. That's reality.)
Remember Economics studies human behavior and humans have long used slavery for example.
Do you believe the work prisoners do pay for their incarceration costs?
Are you jealous that people whose freedom and agency are taken away are fed and housed by the state?
the society pays money to the government and in return have prisons. Society benefits from said prisons.
If you're going to tackle unfairness in society, you should be aiming for the massive imbalance of wealth. Anything else is premature optimization
Yeah, because feeding and housing drug dealers for the money taken forcibly from an average Joe who works 12h a day to provide to his family is totally fair.
> the society pays money to the government and in return have prisons. Society benefits from said prisons.
This is very naive way of looking at it.
> you should be aiming for the massive imbalance of wealth
Wow, it didn't take much time before someone had to drag this into discussion about penitentiary system.
Why? The concept of prison is literally society funding a project to keep undesirable crime out of said society. That's fundamentally and exactly what it is. Calling that naive is like saying water being able to drown you is a naive position to hold.
I suggest visiting a lawless nation to observe what paying for prison does.
> Yeah, because feeding and housing drug dealers for the money taken forcibly from an average Joe who works 12h a day to provide to his family is totally fair.
You seem to not grasp (a) how many "drug dealers" (ooo scary, want to get a beer and find out what a former one is like?) are, themselves, average joes working twelves to provide money for their family, (b) that arguing about fairness is laughable when you're taking the positions that you are (fair for who?), and (c) how many "average joes" comprise the population of, especially minimum security, corrections for crimes you'd roll your eyes at. I was in with a guy who waived his trial timeframe completion rights -- different states call this by different names, and NEVER waive it -- and was in the middle of year three of being held, pretrial, for passing a single $600 bad check. Yes, really. His name was Isaiah and he was a black electrician. Nobody gave a shit, and I'm going to assume you don't either based on how you're arguing this.
(Blah blah, bleeding heart, I know.)
That you've indicted a whole group of real people because they've ended up in corrections is the lack of perspective I was warning you about elsewhere. They are humans. Just like you. People make mistakes. You should avoid speaking about them like they're cattle and are inferior to you or "average joes." Until you truly understand that, you're way on the wrong side of this. I promise.
> They are humans
I've never said that they aren't.
But hey, if expecting someone to work in exchange for food and housing is "dehumanizing" and "laughable" then I've got nothing else to add here.
Do you believe the work prisoners do pay for their incarceration costs?
Keeping their cell and spaces they use voluntarily clean: not forced labor, just housekeeping. Keeping common spaces clean: forced labor, the operating of the prison itself is at the expense of the state.
If prisoners are allowed to do any of that work they should be compensated at market rates to make sure there is no unfair competition.
Obviously you couldn't apply a similar definition of "forced labor" to non-prisoners. So you and I are in agreement that you need some special case handling of prisoners in constitutional prohibitions against slavery, as the US and German constitutions recognize. My point simply is that the Constitution is fine as written and these sorts of distinctions should be made in statutory law where stuff like the meaning of "normal housekeeping routine" can be litigated and refined in ordinary rather than constitutional litigation.
Their output should be priced at near or market rates. (There should be no incentive to using prison labor as a way to get cheap labor) The individual's earnings should be reflective of the local market. They're not able to purchase the same goods as the outside world, nor are the prices reflective of the outside world. (I'm not an expert on that but I have a hard time beliving cigs are $10 a pop in prision)
The consequences of prisoners contributing to unfair competition is one of the major plot lines in Shawshank Redemption.
clearly they learned how to assemble computer hardware, sounds like education to me...
Probably not a reason to be proud of him.
1% of Americans have been through the incarceration system. That's insane.
These guys are probably just going to be reprimanded and be given more time in prison, when really they should encourage their education and effort to push them to legit computer work when they leave.
..but once you have that criminal record, and are labelled as such, good luck getting anyone to hire you. The prison system in the US creates a lower class. Facilities where prisoners can earn below minimum wage is literally slave labour.
That's not quite correct. 1% of American adults are currently incarcerated. There's nearly 2.5M current prisoners, and the US total population is about 310M, so once you remove kids from that 'total pop' count...
Unfortunately, it's 4 in the morning, and I'd spend a good hour or so looking up better stats and figuring out the math, but I think my point stands.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-arrest-records-rise-american...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WISPr
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captive_portalI mean come on, it's not rocket science to build a computer out of parts, and nobody should be pardoned for that kinda skill without considering why they were put in jail in the first place.
He killed a man during a robbery.
http://odrc.drc.ohio.gov/OffenderSearch/details.aspx?id=A414...
Aaaand... immediately use it for tax fraud. facepalm
I think the prison needs to get someone to look at the security of their network and applications.
>When they checked the login being used, they discovered an employee's credentials were being used on days he wasn't scheduled to work.
The Ohio Inspector General says investigators found
an inmate used the computers to steal the identity
of another inmate, and then submit credit card
applications, and commit tax fraud.
One inmate, Adam Johnston, reportedly admitted to
applying for the credit cards, saying he just looked
through the ODRC system for a young inmate with a long
sentence, then used his information to get the cards.
Though how I wish it wasn't so.
I'm sure you would be happy to participate. Problem solved.
Anyway, you invented a whole solution which had nothing at all to do with what I said; I never advocated against jails or anything to the effect, please improve your reading comprehension and construct better strawmen to sidetrack me with.
With my comment, I only wanted to point out this exact hypocrisy. So thank you for confirming that my cynicism is justified. I feel better about myself now :)
There's.. a lot of bad people in prison, and for good reason -they've done empirically terrible things, and many without remorse - no matter the "POV"
Sorry but there's no such thing. Justice is relative. In many countries you can be considered justified in murder while simply kissing a person of the same sex or protesting can make you be locked up. In fact, If you want to argue that killing someone is empirically terrible, people avoid jail for it all the time if they're on the winning side of a war, in self-defense (in many countries even for defending their honor), or if they're of a high enough status (rich people and cops/politicians). Assuming that only bad people go to jail is naive and assuming jails are only full of bad people is generalizing.
Once we get people in the system, it is likely they will be in and out of it their entire lives. And what is even worse, it doesn't have to be this way (We refuse to take more compassionate measures like countries with a lower recidivism rate, for example). We choose this. Maybe it is partially our own fault that some folks wind up "bad".
it makes two big assumptions that leaves it open:
1. only state prisons are considered 2. only people in prison for a year or more are considered
there's nothing in the comment showing that shorter term inmates are a smaller population, nor that they aren't mostly non violent offenders, nor that federal prisons aren't mostly non violent offenders.
In total, the comment just shows that there are violent and nonviolent felons in prison
In general, people with sentences longer than a year go to prison, and sentences shorter than a year go to jail. Roughly 57% of incarcerated people in the US are in state prisons, 9% in federal prisons, and 33% in jails [0]. In my earlier comment I noted that 52% of state prisoners are in for violent crimes, 18% for property crimes, and 18% for drug crimes. For jails, based on this source [1] I estimate 18% of the jail population is in for violent or weapons offenses; 3% for weapons; 30% for property crimes; and 31% for drug crimes. This source [2] suggests around 18% of federal prisoners are in for violent crimes; 17% for weapons/explosives/arson offenses; 11% for property crimes; 46% for drug crimes; and 8% for immigration reasons.
In my original comment, for state prisons, I counted violent crimes, property crimes, and 1/2 of other non-drug crimes to estimate that 76% of the prison population did something genuinely bad. For jails the number will be lower, both because there are fewer violent offenders and because the non-violent offenses tend to be less severe; if we count violent crimes, 1/2 of property crimes, and 1/2 of other non-drug crimes, we get 44%. For federal prisons, if we count violent crimes, property crimes, and weapons/explosives/arson offenses we get 46%. We can weight those three numbers by the sizes of the different groups to arrive at an overall figure of 61% for all incarcerated people in the US. (Of course, these numbers depend heavily on what you consider a "bad" crime.)
So of the entire incarcerated population of the US, about 1/2 to 2/3 are incarcerated for something genuinely bad. While you're correct to point out that this is lower than the 3/4 figure for state prisons, Broken_Hippo is still wrong to claim that "most" prisoners are in for things like non-violent drug offenses.
[0] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus13.pdf
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Felony_S...
[2] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
The shittiest of people have friends/family who will vouch to journalists "he loved his family"(awesome achievement), "he was always up for a laugh" (or such euphemisms)... they've grown up talking self-serving bullshit and opposing the system in any situation.
The only inmate named in the story was a white guy who who murdered someone during a robbery.
http://odrc.drc.ohio.gov/OffenderSearch/details.aspx?id=A414...
Many times it's because one of the things above happened, they got out, wanted to go straight, and no one would hire them for anything because they had a criminal record. They tried to live straight, get some job training, but were low on money, could barely feed themselves with foodstamps and ended up stealing and back in prison. Or maybe it as something stupid like being caught begging with an open container not in a little brown bag.
America has 1% of its population in the system (either incarcerate or on parole at some point in their lives). That's insane.
Yea they end up there for a reason, but it's not the reason you think.
The people who should be in jail (most congressmen and women, most senators, all the CEOs that ran banks during the 2008 financial collapse) aren't because they have power and money, which buys them a different level of justice than you or I.
Now obviously it's bad that 1/4 of prisoners are there for trivial reasons. In particular, we need to end the drug war. But you seem to think that the prisons are full of people who were caught with a speck of weed or who stole a loaf of bread to feed themselves, and that really isn't true. Minor crimes usually result in a fine, community service, or at most a few months in jail (which is not the same thing as prison). For the most part, people in prison are there because they did something genuinely bad. The original article mentioned one specific prisoner by name, an Adam Johnston; I found what I think is his record [3], and he's serving twenty years for murder.
[0] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p09.pdf
[1] "Public order crimes" means "weapons, drunk driving, court offenses, commercialized vice, morals and decency offenses, liquor law violations, and other public-order offenses".
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Felony_S...
[3] http://www.drc.state.oh.us/OffenderSearch/details.aspx?id=A4...
In terms of number of people sent to prison, they're less prominent: again from the BJS article, admissions to state prisons in 2009 with sentences >= 1 year broke down like this: 27% violent; 30% property; 29% drug; 14% public order; 1% other.
> People end up in prison for a reason.
- banthum, in grandparent of your previous comment.
> Ye[s] they end up there for a reason, but it's not the reason you think.
- djsumdog, in immediate parent of your previous comment,
In this case, it was because he killed a man during a robbery.
http://odrc.drc.ohio.gov/OffenderSearch/details.aspx?id=A414...
Slow news day...