Program teaches prisoners coding so they can land tech jobs once released
thedenverchannel.com
thedenverchannel.com
In my humble opinion, we have a vengeance and retribution mentality towards prisons in this country, when we should have a rehabilitation and re-integration focus.
That is not to say that prisons should be blind to the fact that inmates will eventually be released. There are plenty of people who have committed no crime, but go hungry. Where is their free lunch?
Justice is a deep concept - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice/ is an overview, and it's not short - but on plain sight, I'd say that since it is the public, through the medium of government, that enforces justice, it should do so with a utilitarian view.
Society has a vital interest in reintegrating people who have been punished, so that they don't fall back into a life of crime as the only life available to them. If justice is mostly retribution, then society is not well served. Even further, society can profit from the valuable contributions of people who've learned the error of their ways.
It seems right to me. In my opinion, justice comes from the concept of reciprocity. In other words, if someone does bad, it is just that bad is done to them (retribution). The reverse is also true: it is just that good things occur to people who do good deeds.
> Justice is a deep concept - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice/ is an overview, and it's not short - but on plain sight, I'd say that the fact that it is the public, through the medium of government, that enforces justice, it should do so with a utilitarian view.
It's wrong to write as if this is a closed question. There are plenty of philosophers who aren't utilitarians and who see justice grounded elsewhere than "whatever I think will be good for society".
Retribution had a place - in Babylonian times, when eye for an eye was the rule. Things have moved on.
If you're interested in a defense of retributive justice, read Kant:
> Punishment by a court can never be inflicted merely as a means to promote some other good for the criminal himself or for civil society. Punishment can only be inflicted in response to a crime committed, i.e., retributive justice only. A human being ought never to be treated merely as a means to an end as all human beings have an innate personality even thought they may be condemned to lose their civil personality. The law of punishment is a categorical imperative, and woe to him who crawls through the windings of eudaemonism in order to discover something that releases the criminal from punishment or even reduces its amount by the advantage it promises, in accordance with the pharisaical saying, “It is better for one man to die than for an entire people to perish.” For if justice goes, then so does the value of human beings. However, what if a proposal comes forwards to preserve the life of a criminal sentenced to death in exchange for allowing dangerous experiments to be performed, so that physicians can learn something of benefit to the commonwealth? A court would reject with contempt such a proposal form a medical college, for justice ceases to be justice if it can be bought for any price whatsoever.
An anecdote that frames my thinking: the most recent crime I've suffered was when I've been assaulted on the street - bikejacked, in fact, pulled off my motorcycle at a stop light by one hoodlum, kicked in the head (though helmeted), while another rode off on my bike. In the moment, there's anger at the perpetrators. But more than that, I feel pity; pity that their lives are so empty that the only way they see to get their kicks is to do this kind of thing.
They should suffer consequences (i.e. a deterrent), sure, but I don't really want retribution. Revenge wouldn't have brought back my bike (I'd put months of work into that bike, getting it back on the road, but when the bike was recovered it had been crashed into a parked car). It certainly wouldn't have made me feel safer on the road; if anything, it would have made the us (well paid) vs them (aimless, hopeless poor youth) dichotomy worse, not better.
As it turned out, the London police are much worse than the hoodlums. Didn't get a line-up of faces until more than 4 months after the fact, long after any hope of remembering anything. I have a lot more anger at the police than I do at those hoodlums.
I want that kind of crime to no longer be a risk. That requires a systematic solution, not a point fix of retribution, which I don't want - I don't and didn't want those kids' lives ruined. They'll just do even worse things.
I can imagine different crimes where retribution and revenge might play a larger part in the emotions of the victim. I think those crimes are a small minority of total crime, and even then justice is and needs to be rational, not emotional. Revenge, as a reaction, overreacts. Justice needs to be balanced. So I'm not sure it can be a principal component even for that minority of crime.
Turn the other cheek; violence begets violence; etc. But some people seem to use the word "justice" and mean "revenge".
So I wouldn't call them dark.
The concept of retribution as justice goes far back beyond medieval, to at least the Bronze Age (see Hammurabi).
In addition, it seems a common component across cultures. The utilitarian view is by no means nearly as universal.
Here is a modern example: every few years you hear about some former Nazi Concentration Camp guard that was arrested. From a utilitarian point of view it is completely useless. The old guard is never ever going to take part in anything like that again. However, from a justice as retribution for misdeeds, it make perfect sense.
Punishment achieves fairness and deterrence.
Food for thought, but this is only true if we release them. For most of history, we simply executed criminals.
In most of the world, that's still the case (thieves without hands etc).
Without making a moral judgment on what's right or wrong, if most societies evolved that way, it probably means it's conducive to the long-term health and survival of societies. Survivorship bias and all that.
Um... what? This is borderline advocating for all sentences be for life.
If a sentence is given and served, the convicted deserve a chance at living. The US has a terrifying and awful fetish for punishing lower/middle-class folks who commit some of the pettiest of crimes, many of which struggle to re-integrate with society if/when they're released and therefore continue to serve a sentence long after they're no longer in prison. Compared with, for example, a vast majority of white-collar crime that often has victims an order of magnitude or two greater than most petty crime.
> Should the assaulted be happy with the fact that the inmate will get a job?
YES, everyone should be happy if ex-felons are able to find work after leaving prison. Otherwise, they just go back their previous behaviors (eg ~80% recidivism). If they can't get work, that's effectively a "life sentence".
I do not think you understood my original comment, since you keep quoting that sentence only. Where is the restitution to the aggrieved party? The assaulted, the robbed, the beaten, the raped? You pay for what you do, and if your enterprise is criminal, you pay in time behind bars. Personal responsibility. Why would anyone want to hire a wife-beater? There are millions of upstanding citizens out of work ...
Punishing those who commit crime demonstrably does little to nothing to dissuade them from future crime. Given an understanding of the reasons why many people commit crimes makes this obvious: by taking angry people without hope, and giving them more reasons to be angry and even less hope, we end up with an incredibly high recidivism rate. Meanwhile, harshly punishing those who've committed crimes usually doesn't make the victims of those crimes feel better, either.
So if it's not benefitting victims, and making re-offense more likely, why do we do it? So third parties can feel a sense of self-righteousness that they call "justice?" That seems to be the primary reason!
Sometimes people in dire straits do bad things, and hurt others. Punishment is reasonable, but objectively, rehabilitation is also needed. Restitution to victims, and victim statements, also help. We can look around the world and see objectively that there are many ways to do this better than we're doing, by any measure. It's both more humane, and more effective.
Criminal law is about wrongs against the state. In regards to payment for restitution, how is the state being restored by somebody rotting in jail?
What sort of payment is this that the state may end up even poorer than before? In fact, if serving in prison is payment, then I'd say it's the state that's paying for the prison and all the harms which follow.
If the state should find itself awfully harmed from its own criminal justice policy, from where shall the state seek remedy?
This would be without even touching any “wife-beater,” rapist or murderer.
There are a lot of people unnecessarily locked up for absurd sentences compared to the crime who absolutely deserve another chance at society. We should actively want that. It’s a net good for society and it happens to be a lot less expensive, too.
That ain't necessarily so, and not every penal system has that philosophy. If prisons turn out people who are unemployable, they will simply keep doing whatever they can do to make a living. If lawful society doesn't take them, someone else will. Justice has to work at the societal level.
Heck yeah! If civil penalties have been assessed, how else are they going to get paid?
Crazy how most Americans think even the smallest crime should mean life in prison plus anal rape
It was not until now that I came to realize that everyone in American prisons are actually there for assault. The mind reels.
I assumed that you did not actually believe that all criminals in America had assaulted someone, but if you did not believe it then arguing for the punishment of people who did not commit violent acts (by making it more difficult for them to get jobs when released) seems far worse than if you just did believe a ridiculous thing.
And really by using in your argument an emotional hypothetical about the assaulted to argue for denying something to people who have not committed assault it becomes difficult to know exactly how to take it.
The argument is hard to take seriously if you don't really believe it is true for all criminals, and it is difficult to believe you think it is true for all criminals.
Perhaps to nuance the discussion a bit, the majority of people in state prisons in the US are there for violent offenses, and state prisons hold a majority of all prisoners. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html
I said that punishment is a necessary part of prison, it is the main thing of justice. You may or may not agree with that position, but unless you are willing to reply to me on a good faith basis maybe you just shouldn't. The HN guidelines say >Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
It is not sort of reasonable that you think "some part of me"(what do you mean by that?) argues for it, because I never wrote it. If you or other people did not understand some part of my original comment, ask for a clarification instead of what has happened in these comment chains.
(I think prison probably is fucking people up more, but a mere citation of high recidivism rate isn’t evidence of that to me, given the prior.)
One way to see whether 87% is high or low might be to compare it to the rate in other countries. We seems to be near the top of that list, but not alone there.
Jail or prison itself may or may not drive people toward more crime, but the difficult in finding housing or a job with a criminal record certainly does a lot to kill hope.
One of the arguments that Foucault makes in Discipline and Punish is that prisons, by virtue of hiding the retribution from public view, can perform nearly arbitrarily heinous retributions on people. When we tore people apart in the street as punishment it was public and could provoke outrage. Now basically nobody knows what happens inside prisons.
> I think that retribution, which is of course the principal component of justice, is a key part of prisons.
No amount of retribution will ever be enough. The concept of making things right is a delusion that parents infect their children with.
However, the most effective way to inflict retribution is to teach an individual the meaning of their actions and have them live with the guilt of those actions. Another word for that is rehabilitation.
American prisons are based on childish like-for-like retribution (your limited someone's rights, you get your rights limited). It didn't work when I was 8, so why would it work for an adult? All that we achieve is sending people to crime college, where fellow inmates further numb moral fiber and empathy, then release graduated criminals back into the wild. That's certainly one way to make sure that there is always demand for retribution.
Yes.
Would the assaulted be happier having to work to support the attacker for the rest of their life?
(I’m not claiming that it’s as many as we have incarcerated now, but it’s patently not “zero people”.)
Yes, nobody should go hungry. Not in prison, not out of prison, nowhere.
And by a free lunch, I meant the idiomatic expression.
Idiomatically, I'm also in favor of every person, inside or outside of prison, getting the education they need in a trade that suits them.
Our society would benefit enormously, far beyond the cost of providing the education. So again, free lunches for all! Literally and metaphorically!
When people are in prison and school becomes something that can be taken away, it looks more like a privilege.
Human brains are weird.
I don't think it's that weird: it just means that the judgement is relative.
I think it's fine to "teach prisoners coding" as along as the people involved are aware that to even get to that point, how much BASIC education has to be re-done or done for the first time. Moreover, things like resumes, job hunting, and relating to people in a work environment is something that these folks need to learn and practice. Most have never done that. I've not taught in prisons, but have done ABE (Adult Basic Ed, which is all but required for folks to get through before they can even start a GRE program, and which many parolees are required to enroll in).
In other words, "learning to code" is great, but instruction for literacy, numeracy, and socialization HAVE TO OCCUR before that's even considered, otherwise it's just a cruel pipe-dream.
We so lucky, most of us, to have grown up in an environment where learning achievement is expected and supported by responsible adults. Most of the incarcerated folks have lived a level of depravation that we can't even imagine.
Who? Twitter idiots?
If you're going to take the weakest of strawman arguments for the opposing side, you're not going to get very far in your thinking.
There are plenty of ideas that aren't politically risky that don't get implemented, that would positively affect criminals and non-criminals alike - what's your explanation of such phenomena?
Blaming voters for the deeds of politicians has got to be one of the weakest strawmans I've heard in a while. It is the job of the politicians, domain experts and the media to present viable options for the populace to choose from. If the option chosen is shit, it isn't the person working 9-5 and raising a family that was asked to choose who is at fault, I hope that much is obvious.
In my humble opinion, we have a magical wishful thinking (should this, should that) mentality towards the way the world works, when we should have an evidence based, rational approach instead.
They have no issue spending your money on this stuff with your manufactured consent.
I know there are caveats and counter-anecdotes but this has been my set of observations over the last 10 years.
How can you say that with such confidence?
Maybe the issue is your workplace is using staffing agency, primarily?
At the same time they can use their coding skills to make non-tech office jobs more automated.
We hire dozens of entry level roles per year. That's our bar (of course, coupled with "is authorized to work where the role is").
Many, many more than "top 10 highest-paying." But yes, generally for six figure entry level roles.
But to the point of your question, no. It’s Boston-area typical entry-level SWE, whether self-taught, boot-camp, or college grad. We’re not even top-15 CS program competitive at that rate.
I think discussions around "entry level" jobs are often muddied by the dual meanings of the term.
Companies want to hire experienced people as "entry level" to their company. As in, the position we are hiring you for does not have any kind of seniority.
Fresh Grads want to find an "entry level" position to the entire industry.
This confusion is part of why you see "entry level" job postings asking for years of experience, essentially asking for an intermediate skill level, not a junior skill level.
Some recruiters are more circumspect, but a lot of them will give a salary range if you ask.
That information can also be found on places like Glassdoor or by talking to acquaintances about the offers they got or getting second-hand accounts of offers that people got. That information can be pretty inaccurate, but people still make decisions based on it.
Entry level jobs are available everywhere - contributing to open source programs. Of course, nobody is going to immediately write you a check for that. But once you build a track record of competent contributions, people will be willing to pay you for more, and may even hire you.
I'm proud that many contributors to the D language have leveraged that into very well paying jobs.
> But once you build a track record of competent contributions
how hard is this? especially for the population who is in need of actual employment.
I am a cs student and has worked professionally but even then making any meaningful contribution to any decent language is beyond what I can afford (time/energy/financial-wise).
More often than not, there is a lack of documentation (yes, I know this can be something I can contribute), very strict requirements for any pull requests, etc.
Dunno, I never kept track. But I also know that a big motivator for D Conference sponsors is recruiting, and a big reason people attend is to get recruited. It's a win all around.
> how hard is this?
It's as hard as you can handle. Of course, competently doing the harder things gets you more leet cred.
> beyond what I can afford (time/energy/financial-wise).
If you're out of work, you have the time, and it costs nothing to contribute.
> very strict requirements for any pull requests
That's right. We're only interested in quality professional work, as any business would. Sub-par work just causes the rest of us problems.
I basically got the job by bothering to write a nice email asking to do it as far as I can tell - I like to think I know what I'm doing (!) but realistically this is a sociopolitical thing not magic.
We have a few more people also working for the foundation who are paid more than me, you could live off that.
The D community is small but very efficient in places, there are a bunch of companies hiring D developers for quite a bit of money, just no where near as many as there are (say) C++ shops. For example, the company funding my position at the foundation manages about 6 Billion dollars raised to the power of D - we're lucky to have them.
We do need some fresh blood, but we can change that now we have people working on it.
Edit: Forgot my birthday was 2 days ago (too much programming rots the brain)
Like carpentry, electrician, construction, plumbing?
Maybe it's prejudiced, but all the people I know that 'got in trouble' eventually made their way to construction crews. It worked well.
White Collar jobs come along with a ton of other social baggage and expectations (and prejudices) whereas highly skilled labour tends not to.
And there are construction jobs literally everywhere.
Finally, they can pay very well. Everyone is in need of a good carpenter.
This may not be a popular opinion on HN, but it is much harder to learn how to be a passible electrician or plumber than it is to learn how to be a passible programer.
I worked plenty of construction jobs when I was younger. Electricians and plumbers are blue-collar jobs, but they tend to be pretty smart people.
Perhaps another unpopular opinion, but you don’t even have to be a good programmer to make what most people would consider decent money. Is this the same for any trades?
However, an unskilled or sloppy electrician will have a pretty low life expectancy.
Edit:
Sorry. That might have seemed snarky.
Most of these jobs have pretty strict licensing and certification requirements. An improperly wired or plumbed house is pretty dangerous, so a lot of effort is put into making sure that does not happen. I think the unskilled electricians would be filtered out earlier in their training.
Especially carpentry, which is the most varied.
You can work on a construction site, framing and drywalling and never pick up any real skills outside of that narrow set.
Carpentry skills generally only come by doing. So find one who's older, or who came from a family of carpenters.
Yes, there should be more of an emphasis on the skilled trades but I don’t think it’s an either/or. I think most of the objections to one approach over the other are answered by having a range of options for inmates based on interest and aptitude. Tech would just be one option. There is enormous human potential for good going to waste in our prisons. There is no silver bullet, including efforts like this, but every ex-con given a real chance is a victory.
Damn, that's, um, a lot. And here I am, with a degree in CS and over 2 years of experience, earning less than one-third of it in my third world country.
State prisons in the US are hell holes. The facilities are terrible, the people (many) are legitimately terrible, and the staff are terrible too.
First you have to find a place where you can have computers at all, no googling for answers because they won’t be allowed internet access.
Then you have to select from the general population, people who won’t destroy the machines, have the social and study skills required to complete the training. It’ll be very few.
Then there’s the absolutely dipshit power tripping staff. Do you know of any good teachers who want to drive out to a Texas prison in the middle of nowhere each day to teach programming?
I have a brother in state prison who would love a program like this. He’s also far more intelligent than me. But to hear him describe the people and conditions, it’s really bad.
I want this to be a thing for inmates but it’s going to require a lot of work.
Good the last mile, I hope these prisoners find some solace in these opportunities and can channel their time and energy into a skill like this. I'm not sure how many tech firms will take ex-cons, but maybe this changes things as so many tech firms will turn a blind eye to drug related matters now.
And for those who haven't had any interest on those topics and don't want to try won't be able to.
Almost anyone can learn to do it and to enjoy it. But to be really good takes years of effort and probably some natural talent as well.
A background check produces information not a decision.
> California Fair Chance Act, which assists Californians with conviction histories to re-enter society by prohibiting employers from asking about conviction history before making a job offer.
So, i'm not a big supporter of these things because I think it trivializes the amount of effort it actually takes to be a useful team member. The people I work with are doing the logical equivalent of rebuilding the flight control surfaces of a helicopter while its flying in formation. These aren't the kinds of skills you learn in 6 weeks. Many of us have years of formal schooling combined with 10x that in personal learning hours before we even landed our first jobs. Add on a decade+ of professional work experience/etc. I'm not trying to sound arrogant, but I suspect that if someone tried to measure the knowledge required for some of these jobs people on this board hold, it would dwarf pretty much all but a few other professions. Its also not to say, that its not possible to be productive with a couple years of HS/AP level comp-sci classes and a year or two of toy programs (I landed my first programming job in HS, making barely more than minimum wage). Only that those jobs are the floor, and much harder to come by now that everyone and their brother is learning coding.
So frankly, some people have the interest/drive/aptitude into making software engineering their life, and some peoples strengths lie elsewhere. I think its doing everyone a disservice not to provide other options to prisoners, be that AC repair, or law degrees.
They come in pretty junior, of course, and they're not making $200k either, but I'd say that anyone with the right mindset can learn what they need to learn at a bootcamp as easily as they can in an undergrad program, and anyone without the right mindset is going to struggle with either.
There is MUCH more pure memorization required for doctors and lawyers, and it's not even close.
That said, I agree overall: software development shouldn't be the only thing taught in prison--or any other similar program.
Anyway, everyone starts at entry-level before they get 10 years of experience.
Those numbers tell you everything you need to know. They're not "solving mass incarceration" any time soon.
Holy shizz, that's a lot. It's as if US laws and prisons aren't there to rehabilitate an individual but to turn him against society for good, making him a returning "customer" so that certain interest groups can keep profiting. But that's just probably my imagination running wild.
The gist of it was that in many (all?) places in the US, a landlord can be sued if they rent to someone who has a criminal record who then went on commit another crime. As a result, few landlords will rent to them. I hang out on real estate forums and have never met anyone who would rent to someone with a criminal record.
Getting a job is a whole other problem.
That's just one example of the challenges they face.
https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/01/the-afterlife-of-mass...
I can't find it right now, but there's also a TED talk by a former state official (state senator?) who committed a crime and spent a very brief time in prison. It was eye opening to him how he was denied pretty much everything once he got out, and only through his connections was he able to get employment.
Couple that with the fact that the US is the country that imprisons the highest proportion of its own citizens, and it's terrifying.
How does society expect ex-cons to become functioning members again if they're denied housing and employment?
But if you don't hire them, they may be forced to commit other felonies... tragedy of the commons I suppose, just like shopping at Walmart is bad for the community but good for the individual.
It's hard to overcome these effects without legislation, but noone (sane) wants to be in the community that starts it.
> Holy shizz, that's a lot.
As far as I can tell that’s the rearrest rate, and possibly only the rearrest rate for state offenders, which is higher than for federal (it doesn't exactly match any of the sources I've found, but that's what it seems closest to.)
Reconviction (including determination of a parole violation) rates are much lower (somewhere between 50-60% im various sources.
And both are heavily tied to other demographic, offense type, and criminal history factors that I'm going to guess are also very influential in selection for the program, so the the expected recidivism rate for those entering the program—whether measured by rearrest, reconviction, or any other standard—would probably be much lower than the overall criminal population.
> It's as if US laws and prisons aren't there to rehabilitate an individual but to turn him against society for good,
To the extent something like that is a factor, it's almost backwards: US criminal laws are very disproportionately used against people that society has turned against for reasons other than criminality. Now, it's true that the criminal “justice” system isn't rehabilitative, but it's targets not being turned against society further by it wouldn't protect them from being retargeted.
However, is is bloody obvious that if a person cant survive/earn money legally, they will do so illegally - so the system of 'justice' is just an offence to the senses cause it causes more crime.
The Last Mile's website (https://thelastmile.org/about/) lists not 100 graduates, but 240 "returned citizens" who have successfully rejoined society, still with a 0% recidivism rate. This article said they only have 100 or so graduates, and the article was published in January of last year.
Assuming the article's graduates are the same thing as the website's returned citizens, that means that The Last Mile has managed to produce about 1.4 times more graduates in the past year than in the entire previous 10 years combined.
Healthy skepticism is healthy, but to dismiss this program's meteoric rise, huge potential, and noble cause without even a cursory attempt to understand them is being intentionally obtuse.
For instance, anyone who might be critical of a US historical policy typically has "no business" here because politics cause ideological flame wars, or some other half baked reasoning.
While it is very encouraging at fostering dialogue on tech, once the dialogue goes against Hacker News's ultimate purpose, to make money, that's where you start to see weird accounts and strangely offensive comments questioning the act of questioning.
you realize that because they're in prison there's this other thing that prevents them from graduating to a job... namely their prison terms. just so we're clear: that there have only been 100 grads that successfully didn't return to prison doesn't tell you anything about how many finished the program and haven't been released yet.
moreover, a small program with limited funding running in a few prisons not solving mass incarceration isn't anymore surprising than a thumb in a dyke not preventing a flood.
instead you should be saying/asking/imagining: what would the completion and recidivism rate be if this program ran in all prisons. or even better: what would the incarceration rate be if this kind of vocational training were available for free in all poor neighborhoods.