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Comment by annoyingnoob | Hacker News Reader

I recently had someone in a restroom ask me how to flush the toilet. The toilets had IR sensors and flushed automatically. This person had been in prison for many years and had never seen that before.

I think part of the social reform that people are protesting for recently needs to extend to people in prison. Our system does nothing to rehabilitate people or to prepare them to re-enter society. We need to treat prisoners like humans and provide them with something, anything, to help them on the outside. Our system really tries to keep you in the system.

The OP got a harsh sentence but I don't particularly feel much empathy. I could have gone the black hat route too, but I didn't.

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One of my coworkers met a guy on the bus the other morning who had been imprisoned in the mid 90s and was just released. (Assault charge plus drugs.) He hadn’t seen a smart phone in person yet and was astounded that you could look up bus schedules on it.

Besides the tech astonishment and the sheer length of the 25 year prison sentence (that’s tangential), it was a bit inhumane how they treated released prisoners. This guy had been released in downtown Austin at 3 in the morning after being bussed from Huntsville, Texas and processed at the courthouse. He had been given a Greyhound ticket to a El Paso Texas, and in order to not violate his probation he had to check in to a halfway house within 48 hours.

What he wasn’t given was any money for taxi, any information about where the greyhound stations were, any money for a cab ride, or any way of actually staying within the bounds of his probation, which involved avoiding being cited for minor misdemeanors like laying on a park bench to catch a nap after being thrown out into a city at 3am.

The guy was lucky he ran into some folks willing to buy him a transit ticket and tell him how to get to the greyhound station half a city away. Imagine how few people are that lucky.

How sure are you that this wasn't a practiced sob story designed to extract money from passerby?

I've heard many such stories just like this. Criminal beggars will A/B test and refine their story over years to optimize results.

I would think a "criminal beggar" as you call it could come up with an equally convincing sob story which doesn't involve revealing a "criminal" background. In my anecdotal experiences, random strangers asking for money almost always give the excuse that their church bus full of children broke down 10 blocks away in the bad part of town, etc.

I’ve seen people reward “honesty” too, like a beggar asking money for alcohol. I would be more inclined to help an ex convict thrown in the streets than a childrens bus or something

Isn't that exactly why claiming you're a recently released criminal would work? Who would use that as a fake story, in our society?

It's people who beg for money that have a story that makes them sounds like they're down on their luck that I think most people are wary of.

(I was bit by the 'thought I had more cash in my wallet, trying to get to a city 40-50 miles away but don't have gas' story. And heard the bus ticket story quite a bit. But if someone told me they had gotten out of jail on a long stint and the world changed on them while they were inside, and the system doesn't care ...)

You are released from Texas prison with $100, and any money you may have had on your prison commissary account. The downtown Austin bit sounds a little strange. You typically are released from the Huntsville Unit directly, unless you have additional charges somewhere (they wouldn't wait until you finish a 25 year sentence however to do that; transfers from prison to places for additional trials are common). You also don't typically receive a 25 years sentence for assault+drugs - I know people who only received 15 years for murder. I suspect there's much more to the story, or this was someone who had been to prison, and knew how to sound convincing.

(former Texas inmate)

FWIW, the rest of the world considers prison sentences in the US to be absurdly long. This guy apparently got 10 years for hacking; in much of Europe, you'd get less than that for murder.

Not arguing, the US system needs a lot of work. The recent protest have been about what happens on the street but that is only half of the story. Once you are in the system here its very hard to get out. Our recidivism rates are crazy.

It is as if someone makes runs a company at a profit...

Couple of guys in Israel just got 6 months of probation for running the world's largest Botnet for Hire.

And they'll probably get some juicy government contracts for their trouble. Six months is just long enough to show them who's in charge here (the Israeli government), but not long enough for their skills to atrophy so much that they are useless.

Israel is soft on crime if the victims are outside Israel. The "binary options" industry depended on this.[1] At one point, 40% of the Israeli financial sector was binary options scams. Only after heavy foreign pressure and arrests in the US and EU was there a weak crackdown. The Times of Israel ran a long series of articles and finally broke up that racket. Their first story, "The Wolves of Tel Aviv"[2], blew open the scale of the scams. Amazingly, it was legal at the time to scam people outside Israel.

Times of Israel:

"The binary options industry, which is estimated to have employed more than 10,000 people, was outlawed by the Knesset in October 2017 largely as a result of The Times of Israel’s reporting, beginning with a March 2016 article entitled “The Wolves of Tel Aviv.”"

"But the industry has not gone away. Many of its operatives have reinvented themselves as “blockchain,” “fintech,” or “cannabis” entrepreneurs, while some of the call centers offering fraudulent investments have moved abroad and now offer fraudulent forex, cryptocurrencies or other investments from such cities as Kyiv, Sofia and Tbilisi."

"The binary options industry operated in Israel with impunity for a decade, stealing billions of dollars from millions of people around the world. While US law enforcement continues to tackle the fraud, and has convicted several Israelis and indicted others, Israel has yet to prosecute any of its orchestrators or operatives."

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/dont-let-israel-become-the-pro...

[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels...

> This guy apparently got 10 years for hacking; in much of Europe, you'd get less than that for murder.

Both of those things are problematic, IMHO.

As for US sentences being absurdly long, I attribute that to the privatized (profit-incentivized) prison system here. Abolishing that concept would be a good starting point, I think, because it would eliminate a very large chunk of the humanitarian problems in one fell swoop. Then we can work on the rest, starting with the perverse incentives of the legal system itself.

Sentencing is decided by a judge not by a prison warden. Beyond vague conspiracy theories I don’t see the connection.

Conspiracy, yes. Theory, no:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

I don't generally consider myself a conspiracy theorist, but I agree with the previous comment. For-profit prisons not only make money by having more prisoners staying for longer, but in many cases have actually been required to maintain a minimum number of prisoners. That creates a huge incentive to the operators of private prisons to make sure that people are sentenced to terms that are as long as possible, and to make sure that as many people as possible are given sentences that get them into those prisons vs. alternatives like house arrest, community service, court-ordered rehabilitation meeting attendance, etc.

I think it would be pretty naive to assume that private actors can have no influence over an unelected/appointed judiciary anyway, but don't forget that many places in the United States have an elected judiciary that needs to campaign every few years to maintain their status, which clearly opens them up to influence by those prisons.

> have actually been required to maintain a minimum number of prisoners.

All prisons are required to maintain a certain minimum population to justify their operating budget.

At any rate the entire debate of public versus private prisons is laughably flawed because even public prisons are reliant upon commercial service vendors that cater specifically to the prison industry at ludicrously inflated rates to both inmates and tax payers. And both prison types are known to make use of inmates as cheap commercial labor which undervalues the inmates and robs the local economy of manual labor jobs.

>Beyond vague conspiracy theories I don’t see the connection.

It's not vague at all. Private prisons lobby for mandatory minimums. Mandatory minimums remove sentencing power from the judge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_sentencing

The older system you describe is called discretionary sentencing, it is a dissipating vestige of the era before private prisons.

Important correction - the significant political power in the US comes from the prison guards union, not a "private prisons lobby".

The prison guards union is an incredibly powerful lobbying force, which has successfully increased prison sentences for many crimes, blocked efforts to decriminalize marijuana, made more mandatory sentences, etc. Whether those guards work in the 92% of prisons which are government run or the 8% which are privately run makes no difference.

Only like 10% of the prisons in America are private, no?

Yes, but even state and federally owned prisons use an army of specialized contractors for much of their staffing and supplies. Since many of those companies were established specifically to service prisons it creates the same incentives to spend large amount of money lobbying for harsher sentences and other policies that grow the prison industry in general. It's not much of a concern for, say, Tyson, which is so big that prisons are a tiny part of their revenue but it's a bigger issue with other services.

The fully privatized prisons are on a whole other level of messed up.

> in much of Europe, you'd get less than that for murder

Citation needed.

Colloquially Americans like to call "murder" any time someone kills someone else.

In Germany the translation of murder has VERY specific legal requirements, like detailed planning beforhand, and evil action (cannibalism, sexual intent, terrorism, type stuff). You pretty much have to be a stereotypical serial killer or terrorist in Germany to commit the legal definition of murder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_German_law#Penalties

In the USA, colloquially speaking, not legally speaking, George Floyd was murdered. But in Germany what happened would seem to meet the equivalent of what Americans would call involuntary manslaughter. Clearly, the cops killed that dude while trying to do something vaguely reminiscent of their job, but also clearly, they did not stalk him with evil intent with an intentional plan for a long time and then cannibalize or sexually molest his body as would be required by the legal definition in Germany. Probably.

Historically, in Germany, involuntary manslaughter such as two idiot soldiers who don't know each other getting into a drunken bar fight over nothing while one had an undiagnosed brain anuresm that burst during or shortly after the fight will only get like three year sentence and who knows how early of a release. In America that event would colloquially be called "murder", because one person killed another person, but not so much from a strictly legal perspective in Germany.

> In the USA, colloquially speaking, not legally speaking, George Floyd was murdered.

It occurred in Minnesota, which is one of the handful of states with "third-degree murder", which this does appear to fall under.

One of the things that separates third-degree murder from manslaughter is the use of inherently dangerous acts, such as kneeling on his neck.

As a fellow European, I can confirm. If you don’t take our word for it then feel free to look it up. We follow cases in our home countries and are used to what sort of sentences get passed.

> in much of Europe, you'd get less than that for murder.

That very much depends on what kind of murder.

Plea bargaining, for better or worse, is a uniquely American invention the rest of the world does not share.

Committing naughtiness level 5 on a scale of 1 to 10 crime in "EU" and in "USA" and you'll get a punishment of X years for a level 5 conviction in EU. In the USA you'll get a plea bargain offer of X years for agreeing to be guilty of a level 3 crime, or you can take your chances at a trial for a level 5 crime (with admittedly draconian punishment). About 90% to 98% of criminals take the plea.

The widely advertised injustice is that on paper, a level 5 crime in EU has the same punishment as a level 3 crime in the USA so the USA is draconian.

The actual real world injustice is if you're innocent and demand your right to trial, we give level 8 punishments for level 5 crimes to encourage guilty pleas and "save money". Because we value saving money over justice and fairness. Or maybe we take a weird statistical approach to injustice; yeah it would suck to do time for a level 5 crime but a level 1 punishment might not be worth the 10% odds of success.

This has a weird and horrible interaction with mandatory minimum sentences. Without mandatory mins, "yeah he probably didn't do it but he's pleading out to a lessor charge" can result in a very fair punishment like mere probation. But with mandatory mins you have to throw the guy in the slammer for decades or let him walk and thats kinda messy. OR being messy, does it encourage higher levels of care and research?

If you commit involuntary manslaughter in Germany, like in a fight in a bar off an army base like a case I know of (I'm not even tangentially involved in other than being in the Army at the same time), yeah, you'll get like 3 years at most. And if you get convicted of manslaughter in the USA you'll get like 8 or so years. That seems terrible.

The difference is you get convicted of manslaughter in the USA by doing actual first degree intentional homicide and its plea'd down to involuntary manslaughter. In Germany the laws are different but vaguely comparable to first degree would get you 15 years minimum, which is actually more draconian than the punishment you'd likely get in the USA due to overcrowding.

> About 90% to 98% of criminals take the plea.

Shouldn't that be 90 to 98% of charged suspects? The incentive to take the plea deal exists whether the suspect is actually guilty or not.

I totally agree. If you want to reduce crime, it is paramount that convicted criminals become honest citizens. Excluding them from society does not accomplish that. Guidance on how to function normally in society might.

Criminal organisations would probably gladly welcome someone with proven criminal experience. If we make it too hard for criminals to rehabilitate, they are very likely to return to crime, because that's always an option for them. Help them out of that world, and help them build a normal life with normal responsibilities, where they can use their skills and talents to make an honest living.

The other way is to just keep criminals in prison until they age enough that their hormones change and they no longer feel the urge to violence.

The good thing about this is that it works very consistently and predictably. If he's in prison, he can't rape, murder, or brutalize anyone else (prison crime notwithstanding).

Human males naturally enter their criminal phase around age 16 and exit it around 30-35. The factors governing this are biological and can literally be measured in the bloodstream. The stuff you're talking about can help some people, but for many... you can't train someone into lower testosterone levels.

Do you have a source for this? It makes sense to me intuitively, but I haven't read anything about this.

I still doubt that's going to help if they don't get opportunities to make an honest living. And it might not be necessary if they can rehabilitate sooner than that.

Nowhere in the article does he ask for empathy, just describes what he is experiencing.

Just describing what I am experiencing too.

He doesn't have to explicitly ask for it. That's what the whole piece is about.

Exactly but I knew when reading it that your average American would complain. It is an ugly American trait that as soon as somebody commit a crime they become subhuman. All their actions must from then on be viewed as being deceptive or villainous in some way.

I just read the article as an interesting description of the US prison system and technological development.

The thing that stuck me is that this person never seems to admit that his acts were wrong. He gets internet access taken away in prison and then figures out a scheme to work around it, then he blames the work-around for additional punishment. I will say that the punishments did not fit the crime, but this person sort of doubled down by working around the system. Did this person do anything to help or improve himself? That is where I find a lack of empathy. And that isn't a 'complaint', just saying how I feel.

There is a non-profit called Defy Ventures[1], that aims to rehabilitate prisoner personnel who are pre-release and equip them with skills and a technical/tactical overview for entrepreneurial-minded prisoners to help them adjust and better reintegrate back into society.

[1] https://www.defyventures.org/

In my experience you just take out a toilet seat cover (aka, ass gasket), place it on the seat, and as you turn around to sit, it flushes automatically. Voila!

So what is it that determines whether you end up on the black hat route? Is it an inherent flaw within or external circumstances?

For me, I had a job. For me, it wasn't worth it to risk my income. I made a conscious choice to learn certain tools and techniques but to only use those skills to protect against their use. I could see how I could catch myself and how nothing good could come from that. If I could catch myself then someone else could catch me too.

A very long time ago I was working as a network administrator for university dorms. We had a kid get caught multiple times for network violations, and each time part of the punishment was having network access disabled for some amount of time.

What struck me the most was that he was more concerned about losing network access than any impact on his university standing. He was a courier for some warez group and was really angry and distraught that he'd not be able to keep up with his responsibilities there.

The point being, I think that people who need social interaction or a sense of belonging, and get it from the 'wrong' place, are liable to do 'wrong' stuff to stay in the group.

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