My Decade as a Fugitive
story.californiasunday.com
story.californiasunday.com
But stories like this always make me wonder how society is ever going to find a path forward. The young idealist who saw a black man as a victim of the system ended up fleeing from him and living in hiding to protect herself and their child. But on the opposite end, some comments here feel this guy deserves no break at all.
How do we make a better world when it clearly doesn't work to say "You were just a victim and you deserve better!" but it also doesn't work to err on the side of "The beatings shall continue until morale improves."
I'm kind of glad to see he found some sort of path out, against very long odds. We seem to do such a poor job of that at the societal level.
Maybe the mere fact that you are thinking this way is a good sign.
In a sense we are the products of our time, in relation to our environment. It seems to me that people appreciate both the empathic and rational more and more.
Any more information on your comment?
I'm no expert whatsoever, but I think that the key to all of this stuff is nuance. Nuance, nuance, nuance. Nobody's totally good or totally bad, and you just need to dig deep enough to see the details. A jury can see all the nuance (if there's enough lawyer time/money to dig it up). A judge can (eg in contintenal European courts).
Here in NL there's a popular narrative that judges are old rich white dudes who are disconnected from reality (they're actually mostly middle-age white women, but OK). I never understood that narrative - these are people who get confronted with all the nasty parts of society in their full nuance, all day every day. They see that somebody commits wellfare fraud, but they do it out of desparation to keep their family afloat. They see that someone beats up their wife, but it's driven by harsh inescapable alcoholism. These are tragedies plain and simple, and it's extremely hard to just say either "you were just a victim!" or "lock you up forever!".
Personally I think mob outrage (eg on Twitter), or justice processes with too little money for proper lawyering, are a serious threat to society precisely because of this. If there's no time or space for nuance, everything becomes black&white and tragedies deepen.
Giving people a chance at a fresh start only works if it involves a "tough love" approach with an explicit expectation that future behavior must be better. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior and it is notoriously hard to get people to actually change, often even in cases where they want to change.
People who get told "It's not your fault. You were the victim of a broken system." tend to not conclude that their behavior still needs to change going forward. That message tends to actively hinder the reform process.
They tend to want to justify their past behavior as okay because they had a good reason and it wasn't their fault. This tends to result in monsters, not reformed lives.
Even if you supposedly "do everything right," extremely warped people tend to be talented at running things through their warped minds and coming up with creative interpretations that just keep justifying their horrifying behavior.
Alcohol is an absolutely brain-warping drug and can create behaviors and new personalities which are light-years from how somebody was originally. I know this from personal experience seeing two close friends pass into alcoholic territory and become completely different people.
Battle Of The Personal Anecdotes never settles any internet arguments ever.
Leaving aside reliability concerns of anecdote in associating cause and effect, an anecdote could can suffice to say that alcohol does induce violence by means other than disinhibition (since if does so even once, this is true) but it could suffice (even, again, leaving aside reliability concerns) to say that it does not, because it not doing so in one particular case (or even a larger number of particular cases) does not support the argument that it cannot do so. All you can get from "it didn't happen this time" is "it doesn't always happen", not "it doesn't happen at all".
I've had personal experience with thinking X caused Y and only realizing years later that there was some unaccounted for variable that I had been unaware of at the time.
Yes, that is a source of reliability errors in associating cause with effect in anecdote, which is why I was discussing what was possible even in the semi-ideal case that such reliability errors were not a concern. Obviously, realistically, neither case can be made by anecdote, but anecdote can't even contradict one side of that discussion, because something not occurring in one case isn't inconsistent with it occurring sometimes, while something occurring even once is inconsistent with it never occurring.
Even if lowering inhibitions was the only mechanism by which alcohol induced violence (it's not, despite the popularity of the myth that disinhibition is the only mechanism by which alcohol affects behavior; for instance, various forms of alcohol- or alcohol-withdrawal induced psychoses exist that have nothing to do with disinhibition), alcohol would still be a drug that induced violence.
> If drunkards are violent, the violence can't reasonably blamed on the alcohol per se.
On the one hand, nothing can be blamed on alcohol because alcohol isn't a moral agent. On the other hand, there's nothing special about disinhibition as a mechanism of inducing behavioral change that makes the disinhibitor any less the cause of the resulting behavioral change than it would be if it induced the change by some other mechanism.
You can claim there's no distinction, but there is. Drinking doesn't cause people to suddenly and uncharacteristically lust after children. Lowering your inhibitions to facilitate some impetus already inside you is different in important ways from instilling something in you that wasn't previously there.
I'm not sure who "they" are, but this is changing the subject. Alcohol absolutely does cause violence, including by mechanisms other than disinhibition.
> Pedophiles drink to intentionally lower their inhibitions when planning to abuse.
People who are able to form a plan to abuse don't need to lower inhibitions; if its done with a conscious plan, then having something to point to (even to onesself) to evade responsibility is more likely than lowering inhibitions as the motive. There are also absolutely cases of people who abuse under the influence of alcohol without a conscious plan prior to becoming intoxicated (which may still be a matter of disinhibition, but very different in character--if not ultimate moral culpability--from when alcohol is part of a plan of abuse, and in any case this is all besides the point on the question of violence generally, which alcohol, through various induced psychoses, among other means, absolutely does cause by means other than disinhibition.)
> Drinking doesn't cause people to suddenly and uncharacterustifally lust after children.
I don't really care if people have un-acted-upon socially-unacceptable impulses (pretty much everyone does, even if it isn't pedophilia, which I have no idea why you have decided to shift the conversation to from violence.) Alcohol absolutely does induce people to act on such impulses when they otherwise would not choose to, even when they become intoxicated without any intent to act on any such impulse--that's disinhibition--and absolutely does also lead to dangerous socially-unacceptable action not related to disinhibition, as well.
> Lowering your inhibitions to facilitate some impetus already inside you is different in important ways from instilling something in you that wasn't previously there.
There are certainly contexts in which the difference is important, but its absolutely not important when discussing the social costs associated with the drug in question and, in any case, the mechanisms by which alcohol leads to violence are not limited to disinhibition in any case, no matter how popular that myth is. Psychosis induced by alcohol intoxication is real. Psychosis associated with alcohol withdrawal is also real. Both can produce violence, and neither has anything to do with disinhibition.
Assuming the cash economy will be greatly reduced in the year 2029, and tech deeply entrenched in nearly everything we do, how will it be possible to live "underground," either out of necessity or a desire to stay anonymous?
Maybe, like you say, living as a 1919 homesteader in the middle of nowhere is possible, but that's not an option for people who need access to employment, family members, etc.
There's a lot more luck involved than the people selling the dragnets would have you believe. That said, I still am not a fan of all this surveillance.
One major problem is that all your transactions with that debit card are now linked together. If you buy a cell phone with that card, all your calls, texts, and Internet activity get linked. If you buy a cab ride or bus ticket or subway pass, your travel is now linked. It would be extremely inconvenient and expensive to buy separate debit cards for every transaction. (Expensive because (a) there might be a card purchase fee and (b) you'll end up leaving residual amounts on each card after a single purchase per card.)
Furthermore, how would you pay for the pre-paid debit card? With cash of course. But as cash is becoming rarer, it's likely that the only way to buy a pre-paid card will be with a transaction from another card or account, linking it to other digital accounts. So you'll have a small degree of privacy with a pre-paid card, but nothing close to true anonymity.
There seems no way out of the surveillance universe as cash is marginalized.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18422422
"I'm a Norwegian who went to a Swedish music festival last summer.
I couldn't pay for a lot of things there, since the booths only accepted Swish (the only relevant Swedish mobile payment solution, it's a de facto monopoly). I couldn't sign up and use Swish on my phone, since it only accepts Swedish bank accounts. I couldn't borrow money from my Swedish friends either, since they didn't have cash (and it mostly wasn't accepted at the festival anyway).
When I could get someone to pay for me directly, transferring the money back to them was hard (since the festival didn't have any ATMs), so I had to go through the whole burdensome SWIFT procedure with getting their bank account number, their full name and address, their bank info, IBAN number of their bank etc, so I could send the money back when I got home to Norway.
Utopia my ass."
The ones that aren't, I'm starting to feel bullish on.
Even if they break the Monero encryption, and the tumbling, it's a dead end at the point of purchase.
You need to spend a few nights in lock up. I did once in NYC during a holiday weekend. I wasn't scared because I can defend myself --really well... ridiculously well actually. But I asked one fellow what he was in for (Never Ever Do That btw), and he said casually "I offded some nigger".
Maybe it was self defense like he said, IDK. But people who live on the fringes Are different then those who don't, and if they feel violence or the threat of violence is a solution to the problem, then that's the path they take. Typically I don't get fucked with--something in my gaze cuts off that shit 99.99% of the time, but not always, and I count myself as lucky the few times serious shit went down in my life, I didn't lose.
Sounds like you carry a gun or are also strong, can read patterns at a glance and are really good with your hands. Most people aren't like us though.
Or are you advocating for lesser sentences for all crime in general? That's something I think should be decided by measuring its effectiveness not people feeling sorry for/angry at criminals, which is more a function of what the TV shows them than reality. I'd like to see ongoing measurement of the effects of sentence durations so they naturally adjust to suit changes in society. Maybe that could be done by applying a random delta to each sentence duration then measuring recidivism rates and continually adjusting the mean sentences duration to minimize recidivism. Just at a guess.
Nobody can alter fate. Cause & effect starts at birth and is metaphorically chained to the present outcome.
> Or are you advocating for lesser sentences for all crime in general?
One thing I'm certain on. The justice system shouldn't label a person a criminal after the rehabilitation. Typically, I think crime needs to be thought of like catching the flu. The outcome is more severe than the flu but the process for treatment should be similar ideology. We have someone that ended up in a bad situation without fault and even though people are socially conditioned to think otherwise. That's something I believe should be changed as well. People should be educated of how they didn't have "real" control over the outcome of their life. Although I think the average person finds it hard to grasp at first.
You mention undiagnosed brain defect and there has been a case where a tumour resulted in a married man having sexual feelings for an underage girl. The feelings were gone once the tumour was removed. The feelings did come back though but same as the tumour and in the same exact spot on the brain. Thought you might find that interesting if you haven't read about it.
Except it doesn't usually provide rehabilitation. If it did, that would be great. But as it is, somebody released from prison really is at high risk of reoffending so people do need to be warned of their danger and protected from them. If you could find a way to actually rehabilitate criminals, then I'd agree, they'd become like normal people afterwards.
If it turns out that crime rates are unaffected by the reduced deterrent, then good. But it does have to actually keep crime down, not allow it to increase and I think that effectiveness of the justice system needs to be measured all the time not just set at the height of public frenzy then forgotten about like it is.
> somebody released from prison really is at high risk of reoffending
is rather dependent on the country, among other factors.
Which suggests the method of rehabilitation is important, and that some juristictions are more interested in finding good methods than others are.
I think you've reiterated the OC's comment that you're replying to, without realising it.
Let's assume someone gets arrested for a felony and does their time (e.g.: pays their debt to society). At the point of release, in theory, they should have no hindrances to reintegrating into society; yet, we know that this is not the case for people in the states because things like a felony record can keep you getting employed.
So, we've released a person from prison, who can't find a place to live (depending on jurisdictions) and can't find gainful or meaningful employment enough to survive on their own.
Is it any wonder, then, that the resultant might be that they commit more crime? At the very least, if they get caught, they have a guaranteed bed and meals; which is a really shitty alternative, if you think about it.
Let's not forget that the system is incentivised for them re-offend because putting bodies in the cells is what keeps the for-profit prison-industrial complex running.
I don't pretend to have an answer, to be sure, but I think that a plausible avenue of probing might be to truly treat an individual as if they've actually paid their dues to society, once they've left the system. For example, a person with a felony 10 years ago shouldn't still be disbarred from employment, as if it happened yesterday.
To continue to punish them, indirectly, is - obviously - not going to work in anyone's favour, not the person who committed the crime and not society - who should be as concerned with their re-integration with society as much as they're concerned with the offender being "punished to maximum extent of the law".
To follow this line of thinking—is not then sentencing predetermined?
To answer your question, yes and I think society needs to change for the better from awareness to what you wrote. Similar how we used to think the world was flat, acknowledgement brings progress and advancement for humanity.
I take the view that it isn't double predestined, and society, and ourselves, need to better ourselves. But to better ourselves, means giving criminals second chances, while protecting other people. After all, what you said about birth conditions and so on has some (i.e. nuanced) truth to it.
You're making an assumption regarding "meaningless" and that's arguable but off-topic. People can think everything is predestined and even use it as an awful excuse. Although, a difference exists from being educated about determinism and continuing to think everything is okay with unjust punishment compared to the current today of what's happening now with the incorrect assumption of choice exists. So I theorize there is the possibility for change because people live with the assumption of fault existing from making choice. Lastly, whether everything is predestined doesn't take away from right or wrong in the sense of people wanting to do the right thing compared to doing the wrong thing when knowing the truth.
I don't believe in double predestination either, in the religious sense. Some people just get a bad deal from the shuffle. You thinking what I say has "some" nuanced truth to it makes me think you're naive and deluded.
By "some", I mean that I do not think you are correct to assert predetermination or double predestination, and those are both parts of your assertion, so whatever truth ought to be taken from it by your reader, it's partial and nuanced.
Since you say you don't believe in double predestination either, it appears you agree with me on that.
If you believe in "simply put everything is predetermined", while not believing in double predestination and wanting people to choose a different future, I would say that is an extremely subtle and nuanced view you have there, that many would call contradictory.
Boiled down, I think you are saying it's wrong to believe anyone had a choice, and you want people to make a choice. Which really sounds contradictory on the face of it.
I'm not judging your ideas, and my intuition says I agree with your underlying thinking, and with your moral/ethical compass on this point, although the communication is pretty screwy.
My first impression is to agree with you (and I'd cite Abbie Hoffman as a similar case), but the article notes that Waymond's partner Ben spent only 7 months in jail for the same crime. However, the article says that Waymond had 13 felony counts against him, so maybe he had pending charges from different crimes as well?
Abbie Hoffman[1] did indeed benefit from going underground for 7 years. The 1960's activist was charged with conspiracy to sell cocaine in 1973, fled and stayed hidden until 1980, and served only 4 months in jail after he turned himself in.
It only says that he served a 7 month sentence, not necessarily for that crime.I think there's a good chance "Ben" got away with the armed robbery entirely.
Even though it is fictional, "The Godfather" is a very good illustrative example of this phenomenon.
I think that's highly unlikely. He was not even arrested, let alone judged. And conviction itself is extremely contingent on many factors that have little to do with the actual crime itself. When someone says that a crime gets "40 years to life", they have no idea what the actual sentence will be (assuming there's a even a conviction for any/all of the charges from the crime).
I'd give him a big break on sentencing for those reasons, too.
Even though he would have lived his life the same most people would probably feel uneasy about a completely suspended prison sentence even if the man and his actions afterwards might have been exactly the same and that he would be no smaller risk to society after going to prison, possibly the opposite.
But we (or I at least) would not feel it was not fair unless he was punished by prison.
For one, his ability to evade justice for 10 years should not allow him to get off easier.
Nor should things like having a family. Why should I go to prison for longer just because I decided not to have kids?
As for working: that's what you're supposed to do. You don't get extra credit for that.
Everyone is willing to discuss racial disparities in sentencing. But what about family structure disparities? What about people who want to go live in the woods Unabomber style? Sentencing should not be a popularity contest. When someone is pointing a gun at you, you probably would not care either.
If you were the caretaker for an elderly parent, or you foster animals, or you mentored other at risk kids, I think it would also cast you in a similar light.
The words ‘sorry’, ‘regret’, ‘remorse’ or ‘responsibility’ appear no where in this piece. This man is practically drowning in his own self-regard and self-pity.
He and he alone is the author of his misfortune.
He robbed a bunch of drug dealers. Should he go apologize to them? It's quite likely that they have turned out worse than him.
He was also given a great opportunity in life, and threw it away by choosing to get drunk and getting into fights, enough times that he had a police record. Society can’t afford to let everyone go through a “get drunk and fight people, commit armed robbery, go on the run, come to senses” moment.
Also, I wouldn’t be spending my time associating with my dad if I knew he had been beating my mom and she had to run and hide from him with her children.
It is better for society (AFAICT from this one piece) that this guy got the outcome he got. It has a better chance of breaking the generational cycle of poverty and criminality.
Regarding associating with his Dad -- there are many reasonable reactions. Kids need fathers. When trying to understand other people's behaviour, as frustrating as it might be, it's generally a mistake to think "well, I wouldn't do that." It's often more productive to ask "why would someone do that?".
EDIT> Regarding the nature of the robbery victims ... from a punitive stance hey they were drug-dealers. Outlaws shouldn't expected to be protected by the law. From a societal harm-reduction stance ... well, they got scared and robbed, not physically injured or killed. That should factor into the reaction. Depriving the subject's child of a father who seems to have reformed is probably worse than incarcerating him because even unharmed drug dealers need the protection of the law.
Mindless application of the law is not a good thing.
Mine was the grandparent post, and nowhere do I claim that he deserves more punishment or to know what is best for society.
My only claim is that this man has very little regard for others and that his situation is the foreseeable consequence of bad choices.
Criminal cases have HIGH levels of subjectivity.
Is murder in self defense the same as shooting a person for their watch?
Is robbery to take care of your family or for survival the same as robbery for wealth?
Life is not black and white there are many shades of grey, it's not a simple this/that alogorithm in my opinion.
How many people make stupid mistakes when young and their brains aren't even fully formed and pay for it their entire lives?
To me this was probably the most reckless part of the story.
Why would a person facing the rest of his life in prison bring a child into the world, knowing he'd likely abandon her as painfully as his dad abandoned him?
Do you believe that people are descended from ancestors in the Garden of Eden?
If not, the most rational explanation is that we are descended from ancient organisms on primordial Earth. Perhaps not even Earth (i.e. panspermia).
How many billions of generations of asexual reproduction as single celled organisms? How many millions of generations of multi celled animals? How many thousands of generations of Homo Sapiens?
Each and every one of your ancestors reproduced. They survived long enough to reproduce. Probability 1. Not probability 0.9999999999. Probability 1.
That is such an astonishing thing that it is literally inconceivable (not capable of being imagined or grasped mentally; unbelievable) by me, at least not fully.
And yet, here we are. All of us. We've all won the lottery of life. We, each and every one of us, are here because each and every one of our ancestors brought a child into the world.
That's why he had a child. Because each and every one of his ancestors had a child. And many of those children survived in a far far more difficult environment than what we find ourselves in today.
That biological imperative outweighs everything else. This isn't usually conscious. This doesn't have to be rational. It's hardwired deeply into our DNA. Because we wouldn't be here unless it was.
This is not how it works.
It's only recently that new life can be created by other means. E.g. nowadays it is possible to remove the nuclear DNA from an egg and transfer it to another egg.
How much gene editing (e.g. CRISPR[1]) before the resulting life is "artificial"?
A few edits to fix a genetic flaw such as cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia? What happens when it's possible to edit out 100 such genetic flaws?
And do we go beyond obvious flaws? What if we figure out how to give everyone the visual acuity of Chuck Yeager? How many more "improvements" before the result is something akin to Frankenstein's monster?
Biotechnology will probably be the biggest growth area of the 21st century.
Very few people are able to escape that.
Some that don't want to escape it are forced into that by circumstance.
Nowdays, many people don't want kids.
Psychological pain per se doesn't seem like a good enough reason to decide that a child should not exist - because that pain takes all sorts of forms. And it's so npredictable. Children of parents who don't abandon them are often painfully hurt for many reasons. And some children whose parents cannot be with them are not particularly wounded by it. Otherwise think of all the children of military personnel, who only see their parent occasionally. Many grow up fine. Is it reckless to allow military personnel to breed?
Here's another counterargument:
Perhaps it would be ultimately reckless to reduce diversity in the gene pool (or meme pool) by only allowing people who are a good fit for current society's ever-varying codes to pass on their genes.
(That's a variation on the "are you sure it's healthy for humans if only rich people breed" argument.)
I tend to think the attraction-and-breeding instinct is best treated with great respect and allowed to proceed if the people involved want to do it, as though it carries some kind of evolutionary wisdom greater than our small-minded culture. Like one of those "meta" rules of the game; if they're in love, let them be, even if they're judged criminals. I suspect that the enormous variation in how children turn out confirms this, especially when outcomes over multiple generations are tracked, but I'm no sociologist so I don't know.
See: https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/criminal/criminal-law-bas...
California says six years even for murder..
"In some cases, tolling of the statute of limitations may take place. This means that the statute of limitations is temporarily suspended, similar to pausing a timer. This generally occurs when a person who has committed a crime attempts to go into hiding."
> California statutes of limitations are a little different and less complex. Felonies like murder and other offenses that are punishable by life imprisonment or death have no statute of limitations nor does the embezzlement of public money. If the punishment for a crime is eight years or more in prison, the statute of limitations runs out in six years, and other offenses punishable by prison time have a statute that expires in three years.
So I suppose the limitation of 6 years is for lesser degrees of murder? But more severe murder charges (that could result in a life sentence or worse) carry no limitation?
The Golden State Killer is one example where crimes committed over 30 years ago are still fair game for prosecution (and he never went into hiding nor did he leave the state, so no tolling)
That said there are always ways to cook up new charges.
Also if the accused is not careful they could wave statue of limitations as a defense. So just let your lawyer do things or take the 5th till one is appointed.