I took my family on the run for 19 years

The purpose of the justice system shouldn't be to exact retribution — it should be to rehabilitate. It's not about consequences, it's about putting people back on the right track.

I'm not arguing for abandoning security or crime investigation completely, am I? Please don't mischaracterize my argument.

True. However, they are not being actively pursued.

This is something I know a lot about. Such people are systematically excluded from advancement in society in almost every respect, and the 'workarounds' that would allow them to participate fully and freely in the economy are crimes that can, at the discretion of prosecutors, result in the threat of a very heavy prison sentence. The penalties imposed for administrative non-compliance are wildly disproportionate to the scale of the offense.

This is by design; for quite a few years there was a notion in sentencing policy (and similar areas like this) that the best deterrent effect was obtained my multiplying the social cost of the offense by inverse probability of detection; that is to say, there is a fairly low chance of being caught but the people who do get caught are punished for both their infraction and that of all the people other people who weren't caught.

Essentially criminal justice today uses the language of morality (very popular with conservatives (qua Jefferson Sessions, who as an elf^H^H^H attorney-general is apparently magically immune from punishment despite his perjurious habits), but uses the logic of economics and incentives. The administration of criminal justice is for all practical purposes a commercial enterprise built around slave labor which depends on a steady supply of incarcerable people to function profitably.

A full discussion of this is beyond the scope of a HN comment or even a single article or book; entire careers have been devoted to the study and analysis of this issue. This law review article offers a somewhat accessible introduction.

http://www.masonlec.org/site/rte_uploads/files/Hylton_crimec...

Any immigrant heavy country would be a good choice, and maybe you can find one where the government isn't quite so intent on tracking down "illegals". I think the US would be getting harder thanks to the RealID act, online citizenship checks, etc...

It might be easier to move to a country that's a little more corrupt so you can bribe your way into the system. Maybe Italy or Greece or a former Soviet country. You need to find a balance between cities big enough to disappear in and cities where the law enforcement doesn't give a shit as long as you grease the wheels a bit.

It seems like there's an awful lot of surveillance, though, with little in the way of wiggle room to bribe your way out of getting caught at a corner store.

Why not somewhere with a large expat community that you could also probably tap for information and experience? One of the megacities in East/Southeast Asia, India, Morocco, Turkey...you'd at least want the sort of place where you could easily buy a warning if the authorities are on to you. The US' pay-to-play system is too rich for most peoples' blood.

s/birth/death/

From your first link:

Nearly 200,000 Americans over age 18 were recorded missing by law enforcement in 2007, but they represent only a fraction of the intentional missing: Many aren’t reported unless they are believed to be in danger. And according to a 2003 British study, two-thirds of missing adults make a conscious decision to leave.

Edited to add:

A few years ago, an investigator named Philip Klein was hired by Dateline NBC to locate Patrick McDermott, a onetime Hollywood cameraman who also happened to be Olivia Newton-John’s former partner. McDermott had disappeared from a fishing boat in the Pacific, and the authorities presumed him dead. Early on, Klein likewise turned up only the vaguest hints that McDermott could be alive. “This was the ultimate walk-away,” Klein says.

Then Klein decided to set up a Web site about the disappearance. Purporting to be asking for tips, it was designed specifically to trap visitors’ IP addresses. Suspecting that McDermott was in contact with at least one confidant from his former life — and relying on the investigator’s maxim that people on the run always monitor the pursuit — Klein blocked search engine crawlers from cataloging the site. He gave the URL only to McDermott’s friends and family. Ninety-six hours later, it started registering multiple daily hits from an IP address in the beach town of Sayulita, Mexico. Klein says he eventually tracked McDermott around South America and contacted him through an intermediary. McDermott had a simple message for the investigator: His new life was “nobody’s business.”

So, I guess if the law isn't looking for you, it can be done.

If that were the case then were the money go? He ran out of cash pretty quick in that small Colorado town and the only extravagant purchase in the story was a $16k light aircraft.

I have to wonder how much he went "Why did I spend almost two decades looking over my shoulder for a mere 3 year jail term?"

I also have to wonder just how much he hated the fake ID guy after the millionth It joke.

> More probable is the idea that he was the one who kept the full 1.6 million.

The last quote in the article makes me think that...

As a someone in my late 20s I could sort of see it BUT not with a family and child. Seems insane. If you were broke and unmarried I could see it being enticing. Also, he potentially thought he would make more? If it was a 1.25M he could have thought he would have received more or that it was actually a smaller haul than imagined/