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Comment by Braggadocious | Hacker News Reader

I love how inmates get a better education and more support from tech companies than the adults who live in the bay area. The bay area has the worst income inequality of anywhere in any developed country. Bootcamps are a scam and cost tens of thousands of dollars and yet inmates, people convicted of severe crimes, are treated to free education. From a business standpoint this makes more sense because inmates have no bargaining power and can flood the coding labor pool, thus lowering wages for businesses. How is a boot camp graduate supposed to compete with modern-day slaves?

By the way the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is a eugenics group. What are they doing here? This program is so fishy.

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Would you please stop taking HN threads into flamewar?

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I'm a bit unclear on your perspective here. Are you saying teaching inmates is wrong because they've apparently lost their chance at success in life because of their "severe crimes"?

Regardless of that perspective, here's a truth: most inmates will be released at some point. As a matter of fact, alot of the inequality you reference is a result of those with criminal backgrounds and the socioeconomic conditions that got them those backgrounds. We have a rich set of statistics about what happens to people in that situation: desperation -> crime -> prison -> repeat. Personally I don't like that world. I want to feel safe in my world, and anything we can do to short-circuit that recidivism cycle makes us all safer.

The "but our jobs! but our pay!" refrain is a common one, but our industry has WAY too many job openings for this to be a legit worry (the very presence of the h1b visa proves this). As for salary, as those jobs get filled, whether by bootcamp grads, or journeymen, or trained individuals with a criminal record - it will push income down for some. Some incomes are a product of scarcity, and you only need to look at a supply/demand curve to know what will happen to prices. In the late 90s, you'd spend tens of thousands of dollars to get a basic website. Now you can get one for a few hundred.

The entire point of prison is to remove them from society. Why are we spending more resources on prisoners than people who've never commited a crime?

The point of prisons is to remove them from society until they can be sociable again. But I see your point, we should be putting more spending towards those who have never been convicted than we are now.

> The entire point of prison is to remove them from society.

That is the immediate effect, for sure. But that isn't the issue.

Unless someone is convicted for life without parole, or a death penalty, then they likely will be released into the general population at some point.

Do you want them to have skills that might allow them to support themselves, or do you think a near term investment in education might be cheaper for society and more humane than releasing them with a situation where they have fewer opportunities to make a living?

Like it or not, most inmates will be released. Patterns of recidivism are well established. If they reoffend, we will spend more resources on those prisoners. (To say nothing of the costs on society when they do reoffend) It seem reasonable to not want to spend money on someone who has already messed up, but the practical reality is there's a real cost to not making those investments.

Put a different way, this is about those who haven't committed crimes: those affected by future crime, and those who haven't yet committed crime but statistically are likely to (think children of the chronically incarcerated)

I'm unclear whether you're OK with spending other people's money but not your own. The fund supporting this initiative accepts donations. Have you donated? Have you volunteered? No, you haven't and you won't.

Why do you say that? I have supported educational efforts in prison, but not this specific one. I have personally hired at least 3 people who have been in prison.

Hi. I was a cofounder at Hack Reactor, an SF-based coding bootcamp that also provided the first set of curriculum and instructors for The Last Mile. I personally taught many bootcamp students in SF as well as inmates in San Quentin. Everything you're saying about bootcamps and the motives of people running programs like The Last Mile is total malarkey FYI.

Yeah your motives are so pure. You're a real WK Kellogg. A real Lewis Terman.

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>>>Bootcamps are a scam and cost tens of thousands of dollars and yet

Can you please avoid taking cheap potshots like this? They make it sound like you have an axe to grind, and undermine any point you're trying to make.

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