The underground economy of solitary confinement | Hacker News Reader

The underground economy of solitary confinement

themarshallproject.org

161 pointsmeanie157 comments

I spent 3 years in US prisons for drug charges picked up when I was an addict and did a 90-day stint in solitary for breaking up a fight between two acquaintances.

AMA.

I'll start with: Yes, "fishing" is one of the first things you learn. It's not just for solitary, you use it to get stuff under other people doors when you're not out of your cells on a regular unit too, or when you don't want guards to suspect something.

Another interesting thing fact -- where I was at, in solitary you could trade your 1-hour of your cell a day for an extra tray of food at either lunch or dinner. Because the guards had to let each person in the solitary block out, one-at-a-time, for an hour, they were lazy and would let you forfeit your one hour out to shower/make a paid phone call/walk around the cell block for extra food. Most people took the extra tray.

---

Edit: While this is on the front page, want to raise a bit of awareness about US criminal "justice system" and prisons:

I saw things like this regularly:

https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/c567d688cc89f084...

Guards would beat the shit out of you, strip you mostly naked, strap you to a restraint chair and cover your head with a hood, and then wheel you into a back room somewhere and "accidentally forget" about you for +8 hours until you pissed yourself, and then they'd come and laugh at you.

Lots of things I can't unsee from being in there.

Can you summarize the experience in thirds? For example, what was the first 30 days like versus the last 30?

The first two weeks were very difficult. You have to sort of mentally come to peace with the fact that you're shut in this tiny room and you can't leave. It feels very claustrophobic and if you're the type that has anxiety disorders you will probably have to ward off panic attacks.

After the first two weeks, time started to slowly speed up, and the days all sort of blurred together. Thankfully I was able to get a newspaper every day, and a book every now and then, and so I just read every word of the newspaper (even the ads) for something to do, and slept a lot.

I think I handled it better than a lot of people would have, as I'm sort of introverted by nature. There's research on solitary confinement permanently harming mental health, but I think I got lucky on that one.

Also, at least where I was, this was EVERYONE's life (no just solitary) for a year due to COVID. Only with no legal protections, all constitutional requirements waived, because, you know, emergency, and totally not just because the staff were lazy and this allowed them to do zero work.

Edit: My reading comprehension is very, very poor.

I think that parent was describing life inside a prison, but out of solitary confinement, not life in general, this sentence of their post suggests it: "and totally not just because the staff were lazy and this allowed them to do zero work."

I'm pretty sure you cannot just "go walking outside for as long as you wanted" when you are in jail.

> you live an incredibly sheltered, out-of-touch life

This describes solitary confinement, in a sadly ironic way.

Are you describing conditions in a prison in the USA outside of solitary confinement? (That's the only way I can make sense of the reply).

the mention of "staff" in the last sentence of the post suggests that it's about a prison

Yes. During COVID everyone locked down to their range/tier (constitutional violation because space is so small not allowed to be permanently confined in it). Minimum laundry (constitutional violation, must keep sanitation). No chow hall all food brought to the cells. No rec time/outdoor time (constitutional violation, everyone must be allowed 1 hour of recreation time). Only let out to make phone calls during a short window that didn't necessarily line up with your family could take your call. No law library access (constitutional violation, denying access to the courts adn remember inmates challenges are time bared, you only have 14 days to challenge an illegal sentence and something like a year to challenge unconstitutional from the time of discovery, and these are jurisdictional, I.E. can not be waived). No certified mail access (constitutional violation, denying access to the courts as all motions must be mailed). No family visitation (some of the guys family relationship especially with wives and kids were holding on by a thread, they needed those visits). While it might make sense because of COVID, a year of it was very wearing.

Do solitary confinement help in correcting illegal/bad/wrong behaviour among prisoners in your opinion?

Seems to me that it can only breed resentment and detachment.

No, not at all.

The thing I think most law-abiding/normal people don't understand about the types of people in prisons is that they are almost exclusively habitual offenders.

Even in the US, which is heavily punitive instead of rehabilitative, you have to have run-ins with the law a number of times before you are sentenced to serve time, rather than probation or a halfway-house etc.

From my experiences, ~90% of people I saw during my time in jail and prison were coming in and out, constantly being arrested. There's no desire on their part to change, they're a lost cause.

For the tiny handful of people that genuinely do want to have a normal life and not go back to prison, our justice system is awful. No, solitary is not good for that.

You need supportive + rehabilitative programs. They won't solve everything, but for the small number of people who want to get out of the system, they need an honest-to-god out and chance at living.

I don't think that's as true anymore with the fentanyl stuff. I saw a lot of ex-marines that got hooked on pain pills because their bodies were beat up, moved on to fentanyl, started dealing to support habit, and hatch a 17 year bit because someone ODd. Lots of first time in trouble people caught up in fentanyl.

The thing I think most law-abiding/normal people don't understand about the types of people in prisons is that they are almost exclusively habitual offenders.

While that is true, there are classes of crime that are automatic felonies with mandatory prison time. Things like assaulting a police officer. Which doesn't have to be throwing a punch - simply resisting handcuffs is sufficient for the felony assault charge if the officer is mad enough and friendly with the prosecutor.

How do you balance punitive with rehabilitative? I have little experience in this but it seems like for a non-violent offender or a victimless crime the experience should be almost entirely rehabilitative, whereas for violent offenders there should be some kind of punishment. Both to discourage the behavior and as therapy for the victims.

The justice system doesn't really offer me any protection other than vengeance on someone who hurts or kills me or a loved one. There is some comfort knowing that someone might at least hesitate due to fear of consequences.

LOL. No. I did time in solitary. It literally makes everyone worse.

Most people are in solitary for fighting or disobeying instructions. Putting them in solitary does not change their behavior.

One thing - I was scared of solitary before I went there the first time. After the first time you realize there is nothing more (legally) the authorities can do to you once you're in solitary. You're in jail, in jail. Jail is boring as fuck. Solitary is super boring. But it's still jail. When you go there the second time you are prepared for everything and know how to run the system.

A lot of people also end up doing a long time in there because they misbehave in solitary, which is expected. You do it because (i) you're pissed off; (ii) there is nothing more they can do to you; (iii) it's fun to be finally be able to tell a certain guard that he is a piece of shit and his wife is ugly.

Thank you for sharing your experience and bringing these things to light. As Dostoevsky said, you can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners. We are not a free people when we live under the threat of being out into a prison system as barbaric as the one we have.

I did have one positive interaction with a guard that stood out to me from my time in there

I was being transported to a hospital for a medical procedure, and I was talking to the guard who taking me, to pass the time. I asked him why on earth he would want to be a prison guard -- after all, they are in there with us for 10 hour shifts, and prisons are some of the most bleak/depressing places on earth. That has to take a toll on their mental wellbeing too.

He said that he originally was a regular police officer, but after seeing how much corruption there was in the police force and the things that happened, he felt like a hypocrite, so he said the better alternative was for him to be a guard.

That conversation has stuck with me for a long time now.

I taught a semester in a max security prison. It was described to me as a controlled movement facility. It was an interesting experience and one that stuck with me. That prison was a bad place. Thanks for your anecdote about the former police officer.

Thank you for doing that, it's an important job. I learned spanish by taking an hour-long spanish class every weekday while I was in there.

If your class wasn't mandatory, then I'm sure you know that most people were just there probably to get extra time out of their cell or to break the monotony. And I assume most of them were complete assholes to you.

After I am financially independent, I want to try to get state/federal funding so that I can go back to prisons and teach programming AND partner with companies to have jobs/interviews lined up for release dates.

The worst part about being incarcerated isn't even always the time you serve, it's that our justice system means that you usually can never get a good job again, regardless of what your charge was (in my case it was one of the lowest class of felonies). It's like a ghost that haunts you forever.

I quickly figured out they were mostly there to break the monotony. I threw out the curriculum and did basic graph theory and some logic stuff. I only had one run in with someone. The prisoners treated me decently. I gave them all passing grades and just wanted them to get out of the experience whatever they wanted to get out of it.

How did you get into that? It's something I would love to do but I never knew how or if you could volunteer to just do a single course, if you'd have any sort of support, etc.

The college I worked at had a few classes at the prison. I was an adjunct and agreed to do it. None of the tenured faculty would do it. Didn’t really have any support. Did wear a body alarm. One way the body alarm would be activated was if it was horizontal for more than 3 seconds.

Not the poster, but I taught a computer science class in prison. I did it through a college which operates a degree granting program in the state prisons (in addition to normal college operations).

Most of the professors were paid, I did it as volunteer work.

|After I am financially independent, I want to try to get state/federal funding so that I can go back to prisons and teach programming AND partner with companies to have jobs/interviews lined up for release dates.

There are certainly NGOs who will help you with this mission. Do some research and let us know.

I put myself through community college working overnight shifts cleaning restrooms in a theme park and was briefly homeless a few times. Several of those times happened to coincide with finals week and resulted in missing exams and failing a few classes. It ended up that, by the time I graduated, the only major I could successfully complete was in Philosophy, with a minor in Biology. I was the first person in my family to ever go to college and didn't exactly have much in the way of advice or help to go on. It turns out those aren't particularly lucrative fields and don't really point you in any specific direction when it comes time to look for jobs.

Well, back then, the state of California guaranteed a minimum starting salary of $79,000, and paid overtime, to prison guards, which was roughly double what I was looking at making from doing anything else. So I applied. The only reason I didn't end up ever actually working in the prison system is that the background check and psych eval process took over a year to complete, and by the time they gave me an offer, I'd already joined the Army.

Almost 18 years later, after going back to school again while in the Army for Applied Math and Computer Science, here I am, but in another timeline, I'm a prison guard.

I had a conversation with a police sergeant because of a car accident we had. He said that we seemed to be right, but some lawyers will likely try to sue us because it's in the gray area that they usually "farm". The thing I remember was he said something along the lines of, "These lawyers are even worse than police."

I didn't think police were bad, but that made me reconsider it.

What did/do you do for a living, tech related? How did it affect your career to have a felony drug charge?

I was on computers a lot as a kid and sort of taught myself programming (very poorly) in my early years.

When I caught this charge, I had just turned 18. It really ruined my life.

Currently, I work in tech. For a very long time I was barely making ends meet, working in a fast food restaurant for minimum wage while trying to interview to get a developer job.

I went through 8 interview processes, and received offers from all but one. Each one of them was rescinded when HR learned that I had a felony, as a matter of company policy.

It was really heartbreaking and a lot of times, it made me want to give up on life and just stop trying. I kept interviewing and going to events/networking, and eventually found a very low-paying job at a local place and sort of slowly worked my way back up from there.

If anyone here has some degree of power at a company and wants to make a difference in the world, convince your company to hire felons with non-violent/non-finance related offenses.

Had to go search for it, but YC funded a company - https://www.70millionjobs.com - that focuses on felon-friendly companies hiring.

I won't sling mud, but the jobs are the same you can already get as a felon (construction, kitchen, hospitality, factory, etc) and I had a negative experience with my interaction there

Thank you for looking though. I think it's important to offer felons the chance to get a decent job in a proper career field too.

There's one organization doing this called "Underdog Devs":

https://www.underdogdevs.org

https://twitter.com/underdogdevs

I did see 'tech' jobs there, but... perhaps they're just 'general recruiter' posts that are mixed in? I search for 'php' and found a bunch of job links come back...

FElon friendly normally ends up meaning they know you have no other options and treat you about as good as you would imagine a company with complete knowledge that if you loose your job your PO could send you back to prison. Hello mandatory overtime, horrible pay, every shit task no one wants. It's way better to try and convince somewhere that isn't felon friendly to try and hire you.

So I just signed up for this site. It has Home Depot who won't hire you if you are on paper (supervised release) and other companies that will bring you on 'temp to hire' when they have need, but will seldom convert a felon to permanent. Shows a lack of understanding or communication with the people they are trying to 'help'. I got better support from the other guys my first 15 minutes in the half way house than this site gives. And that is in general how society is toward felons. A lot of half assed stuff to feel like, no look at all these services, they have a chance. But in reality not so much.

Sorry this previous post is pretty agressive, my frustration is definitely coming through there and they do not deserve that. I am sure they are well meaning. I wish I could delete it.

I never understood the whole felon thing, if that is allowed discrimination outside certain roles how can those people ever be expected back to society? Ofc, they are going to do more crime if it is their only realistic option for reasonable income.

  > "if that is allowed discrimination outside certain roles how can those people ever be expected back to society? Ofc, they are going to do more crime if it is their only realistic option for reasonable income."

And you've found the answer to why the American judicial/prison-complex is a revolving door system.

"Welcome to the Hotel California. You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave!"

It's a method to exercise control over a large slice of the population and rob them of the means to challenge their position. I don't think too may see it necessarily as a fair measure that must be imposed on those people for the protection of them or others.

On the other hand you have egregious cases where such a measure would completely make sense but is ignored because of larger interests. One of them is how EU public institutions screen all their employees and filter out felons. And then a public institution like the European Central Bank names Christine Lagarde president, just 3 years after she received a criminal conviction of negligence in allowing the misuse of public funds.

A freshly minted criminal can be named president of an institution in more or less the same general area as where she committed her crime. But a someone with a minor drug charge can't take a dev job... Both are a stain on modern society.

But, are felons discriminated from most jobs in Europe? As an employer I’ve never checked the backgrounds, and I would be actually happy of giving someone a path upwards.

It is not in any single employer’s interest to take on the risks of hiring a felon, as long as the supply of labor remains plentiful.

There are a lot of people with a felony record who pose zero additional risk to their employer. Of course it depends on the person and it depends on the job. It certainly doesn't make sense to have a strict policy against all felons regardless of individual circumstances.

It depends on labor supply and demand curves. If it did not make sense, there would be an arbitrage opportunity for an employer by employing felons, but I have not heard of that happening on a large scale, at least at a white collar firm.

I find it ironic, though, to want to seek shelter in BRK to avoid a too tech heavy SPY, when BRK itself has maintained relevancy only by investing disproportionately in AAPL. It would seem prudent to cut out the BRK middleman and just directly invest in AAPL if one wants to emulate BRK’s success.

It seems fair for felons to work minimum wage last resort jobs, because non-felons surely deserve the same or better. But why are minimum wage last resort jobs so bad in this country?

Why "outside certain roles"?

If the argument is that serving your time in jail rehabilitates you, then you shouldn't be limited in what roles you can take after you've served your time.

I assume the "certain roles" you are talking about is something like banking with someone with a history of felony fraud. I guess the argument is that maybe prison isn't 100% rehabilitative. But if that's the case, why should I, as a non-banker, hire a felon who, say assaulted a stranger with a baseball bat. Isn't there a similar chance that prison wasn't 100% rehabilitative?

That's the point. It gives the state a cudgel with which to keep people in line.

Hello friend, meet my life. Life, meet Ekaros.

Holy shit I didn't know that. Those guards belong in jail themselves, what they did is torture. Prison exists to remove from society people who are incompatible with it, nothing more and even that must be constantly questioned and re-evaluated. Nobody deserves to have their dignity stripped away like that.

> Those guards belong in jail themselves...

The guards are just the product of a system/culture.

As are most of the prisoners, but many of them belong there as well.

Don't make apologies for people who choose torture and who chose to participate in said system / culture. It's a job; if they had morals they would quit, whistleblow, or punish colleagues for this behaviour. I can't believe the pay would be THAT good. There's clearly no adequate chain of command or repercussions for this crime.

> they would quit

Most prisons exist in places that are economically depressed with few if any other jobs. In some cases, the entire existence of a town revolves around the prison. Quitting is hardly an option when it’s the only real option for putting food on your table and a shelter over your head.

They could leave town. There's always another option.

You need to be able to save up enough for a rent deposit (often 2-3 months of rent), afford moving costs, coordinate support for kids if you're moving away from existing support (other family/friend/etc), and deal with a lot of stress of moving out of town. If you have something better you're moving to, but that's often hard for people to coordinate. Spending all that to go get a similar pay job, perhaps in same industry, on the hope/chance that you'll be around more/better opportunities... it's a hard call for many folks to do, assuming they can even think that far ahead or strategically. Many folks are likely more consumed with day to day (especially if they've got kids).

> ... deal with a lot of stress ... have something better you're moving to ...

Thus the ethical argument. They'd rather keep doing what they're doing than pick the stress and uncertainty of moving.

I get the spirit of this; but if I can’t say that to people making poverty wages and being trapped, I can’t say they to prison guards, either.

Collectively and individually, the United States must “be better”, though.

> if I can’t say that to people making poverty wages and being trapped, I can’t say they to prison guards, either

Indeed. I think the same for everyone. Poverty is not an excuse for brutality.

Agreed. I wasn't trying to excuse brutality, I don't think. I definitely need to spend more time on this series of thought about what maybe I would do in the circumstance - or what I should expect myself to do to live up to my own standard.

I suspect humans are far more malleable than they realize, and personalities change quickly with different contexts. For example, I am sure many Ukrainians who are now enlisting would have said they'd never kill another human.

It's not about making apologies. It's the opposite. You can blame the "bad apples" all you want and you will see no improvement whatsoever. You can instead choose to blame structural, systematic failures and get a lot of improvement out of little effort.

I find it interesting when folks look at themselves as different than others. I don't have any first hand knowledge of what is going on with these guards, but I do know that I am not better than them. I am just as human and have all of the same frailties so I cannot say what I would do in their situation. At best I can say I hope I would do better.

Most people fail to understand the psychological impact of jobs continually interfacing with some of the worst people in society. I say this not as an apology or excuse, but simply as a statement of fact and a challenge that needs to be overcome. It happens to prison guards, Police, EMTs, and many others.

A portion of the people you work with want to kill you or each other given the chance. Over time this leads you to dehumanize and hate them. Over time, this view gets generalized to most of the people in your care.

It is more about power then about working with bad people.

Political prisoners tend to be treated as badly as others, if not worst.

I agree that power is a factor, I just don't think it is a self contained explanation.

People in position oc control and no supervision abuse those outside of prisons often enough.

What's your point?

Don't forget the thin blue line. The pressure to not snitch among them is huge, and comes from the top. During my time in I watched all of the decent COs become alcoholics/drug addicts and ultimately quit. We had one decent 'counselor' out of 5, and she was forced out for unauthorized use of government resources because she printed out a compassionate release request during COVID because inmates we illegally denied access to the law library, something she was quite clearly legally not only allowed to do but was supposed to do as part of her job (there is even a federal schedule of what they are to charge us per page if it is not a hardship case). If you complain, you will receive diesel therapy as the lightest of retribution from the Federal government. Your cell will definitely get tossed every day until your cellies tire of that and beat your ass.

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

It is way worse than that makes it out. Transfer times are designed to maximize prevention of sleep. You will be placed in very unsafe situations. You will go from small town jail to transfer station to detention center to small town jail via the longest route possible. You will be strip searched, a very invasive event, every time any movement is made. Your movement will happen to be right before/after meals are served, so you will "accidentally" be denied food. You will "accidentally" be placed with the opposite gang, the wrong custody classification, etc. so you will be in constant fear of your safety. You will be put in a single man cell with a big threaning guy, and they will kick him out of his bed and give in to you, and put him in a boat. Good luck not getting your getting you ass beat. You will be given no opportunity to use restrooms during movement. On conair you are shackled, hands in front, even when you use the bathroom. So no hygiene to clean up around back after going. Just a bit of the process.

The parent poster is not making an apology.

The unjust and cruel legal system and the behavior of people involved is all a product of society.

It's not just a couple of "bad apples".

And saying this does not give anybody a pass.

> The parent poster is not making an apology.

Downvotes from creating a plausibly deniable strawman and then tearing it down are less than the upvotes from doing a good job tearing down the strawman. This kind of crap discourse is incentivized in a "if lawsuits are cheaper than recall we don't do a recall" sort of way.

HN (and other social media) is rife with this behavior/feedback loop.

So we gonna apply this logic to all the other government workers working for toxic systems that hurt more than they help?

There are plenty of people who go into these jobs with the intention of being decent. The existing systems and culture suck that right out of them.

I knew an old bureaucrat. He got to make decisions that would or wouldn't financially screw families over. He said the worst part of his job was seeing all the younger employees in the cafeteria knowing they were being crushed by the system and turned into people like him and his other senior coworkers.

It also exists to make people compatible with society again. Or at least should be.

this has never been the case in US prisons

Not in the US. The US prison system is for punishment first. A system that focuses on rehabilitation does not treat people this poorly, in general.

With what we do in the US, it’s not “punishment”, it’s sadism. Justice ends when excessive punishment begins and is deep into sadism when torture begins.

No, no it does not.

I'm sure most people would want that, but I don't think that we know how to "make people" change. Much in the same way that we don't know how to have school "make children" more academic, we don't know how to make inmates less violent / impulsive / thrill-seeking (except by the inexorable passing of time). I'd be very happy to be corrected, tho.

OTOH, giving proper (i.e. often involuntary) treatment for violent mental illnesses would for sure improve the situation.

Once you fall into Prison Conditions Twitters, it's pretty eye opening.

Like the guy who was boiled to death with hot water for funsies:

https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/florida-wont-charge-priso...

Or where rat poison is regularly fed:

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/22-rikers-island-prisoners-sic...

> the guy who was boiled to death with hot water

Not only should the guards be up on charges, so should everyone else in the chain of command. 180F from a shower? That's insane, it shouldn't even be possible.

You're assuming the accounting in the article is correct. Maybe it isn't:

> “Nobody can condone someone being thrown into a hot shower and killed,” Rundle said. “We read the same thing everyone else did, but it wasn't until we really investigated that we learned that is not what happened.”

https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/katherine-fernandez-rundl...

I don't see how you can read that and take the word of that attorney general as anything but self-serving CYA bullshit.

Even ignoring for the moment the deferment of local news outlets to government officials' press releases, instead of actual journalism, the story simply doesn't line up.

Plus when your only defense is "you haven't proven it beyond a reasonable doubt (because of all of the attempts to make it impossible to recover evidence)", even though that holds up in the court of law, it is not very convincing to any layperson who knows how crime happens.

Bluntly put, this article and subsequent defense are textbook bootlicking.

Sorry, but I have a standard of not engaging with people who use the term "bootlicking" like this, because I've literally not once in my life seen someone use that term and also engage in an honest conversation.

I feel the same for those who assume as true statements by cops in their own interest, with no evidence, when they deliberately chose not to have any evidence.

You see one now. Open your eyes :)

Willing to have an honest conversation if you don't derail it with self-aggrandizing, pre-emptive character assassination based on incredibly tenuous associations.

Right wingers love to rail against cancel culture but have yet to fully recognize that they have employed the tactic forever with exactly the deflectionary style as above.

Ready to talk when you are but I won't hold my breath. If you decide to engage please bring something other than a parrot trained on police press releases.

I did three stints in solitary. First for writing to my wife and explaining how I traded coffee for stamped envelopes, which got me an extortion charge. On the last day of my "sentence" in solitary I had my trial and was found "not guilty" of the charge. Of course, it was like Alice in Wonderland, I did my time then got my trial.

(during this time in solitary though they went through all my property and figured out I'd hacked the commissary system to send emails through the jail and were mad about that)

Second time I was framed by a guard. It was an internal thing called "Operation Cleansweep". The idea was to frame all the jailhouse lawyers on false charges and send them to solitary and then get access to all the legal work in their cells to go through. They came and threw contraband in my cell in front of everyone, then cuffed me up and off to solitary again. [I found out about the operation because I fought for the details through FOIA and got all the "Intelligence Unit" reports. Idiots wrote this shit down. Usually the government isn't that dumb. For instance, this is a response I got to a request for documents concerning a big investigation in the prosecutor's office here in Chicago recently: "After speaking with SAO personnel most knowledgeable about your request including those active in the internal investigation, there is no written or electronic report of the internal investigation into the Adam Toledo bond proffer incident." LOL]

Third time in solitary was because I took two seconds too long trading some rice for a chicken nugget at lunch. Disobeying the guard who told me to "hurry up". Another stint in solitary!

You start with ZERO in solitary in most jails, and work your way up. I sued to get the rules changed, because on the first day you also spent it naked. They would strip search you on arrival and then leave you until you could persuade a guard the next day to get you clothes. [they remotely popped my cell on my first day once for a visit, so I ran out, sans clothing, all the way to the visit until the guards freaked out and were forced to get me clothes]

As the article says, even toilet paper can be a bitch to get. My first time I didn't know anything. My second time through I managed to snatch a book up off a table as I was being dragged to my cell, so I had something to read. Then I learned to "finesse" the guards into getting me things: toilet paper, soap, pencil.

You're not allowed commissary in most solitary. The first time I was in I requested my bin of legal work, which they have to provide. But dum-dums gave me my commissary bin instead. So I spent three days eating the whole lot before they realized their mistake and ran in and took my (now empty) bin and swapped it out.

You get lots of reading done in solitary. I read 800 books in jail.

AMA

How were the other prisoners? Did you feel physically threatened by them?

Very, very rarely. I got into one serious fight and lost (broken nose). I toughened up real quick. People are going to steal your shit from you, or you're going to lend someone something (say some coffee until commissary day) and they won't give it back. What will you do? If you don't fight then everyone will know they can take advantage of you. You have to at least have to intimidate the other person and make it seem you are willing to fight.

If you go to jail or prison it is relatively unlikely you will come to serious harm. Not many people in jail really want to fight. I did watch hundreds of fights and I came to the conclusion the human face is really not designed for fighting. It breaks very, very easily.

The question I was asked when I got in is men fight and women fuck, which are you? Like I said in another post, PREA has really cut down on prison rape in the Feds, but when you are fresh in, dude, that question does not help to calm you down.

Something has happened to vastly reduce prison rapes. I'm not sure how effective PREA is.. sometimes I would see PREA complaints taken seriously, sometimes not. PREA was vastly abused in the facilities I was in to get attention from the authorities for some other matter. And tons of false complaints against officers.

I never heard of a valid rape complaint. I was older (for a criminal) so I would be on "old man" decks, and that is where they put anyone deemed vulnerable, e.g. gay or trans. Most of the jail population is highly homophobic (at least, they play that role in the jail), as you probably found out, so they would scream and shout and file PREA complaints if any of them were housed with gay guys or trans folk. [also: it is very weird being in a men's jail and seeing transwomen walking around topless with DD breasts hanging out]

> jailhouse lawyers

What does this mean? Were you a regular lawyer before becoming a jailhouse lawyer? Are you a regular lawyer after being a jailhouse lawyer?

Jailhouse lawyers are normally self taught in prison and will help others out for a fee as their hustle. They help with things like stopping child support payments, filing for divorce, clearing up any outstanding tickets and detainers so guys can go to halfway house, all the way to challenging people's convictions.

(I'm sure you know this) They're also sometimes an official way for the prisons to meet their constitutional duty to let people challenge the terms of their imprisonment. If you're thinking "wait, they can't just declare a random person whose read some books enough of a lawyer to help people" you'd be wrong.

After such ongoing illegal torture, why don't former prisoners or their loved ones get together and execute serious reprisals?

The system is designed to isolate prisoners from their loved ones, if they have any to begin with. Once free it requires significant resources to execute legal reprisals.

https://www.occupy.com/article/jpay-scam-prison-bankers-cash...

He didn't say "legal reprisals".

Lot's of reasons. Read the court cases and see why the judges explain it's actually legal to do and see you have no chance of winning. Or read the Prosecution reply briefs where the Prosecutors point out that the convicted felon as part of his plea agreement agreed to not challenge his conviction in any way. If you take a plea (which cuts 20 years off your sentence because of the trial tax (https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/com... )) any challenge to your conviction invalidates your plea and puts you at risk of a longer sentence (which for example takes a 4 year bit to 20). I mean, yeah, you have a right to challenge, but it doesn't come without an implied threat and risk of high cost. And of course, going to court involves transport back to your sentencing court, which is basically you volunteering for the previously mentioned diesel therapy. Also, you can't sue the Feds unless you have 'actual damages'. This is a very high bar to overcome legally. Look at the cases of gross medical incompetence in prison. You also have to show actual malice and not just gross complacency or incompetence, again an very high legal bar to meet. Dude, you can only challenge an illegal sentence or one that is in error for 14 days (https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcrmp/rule_35). Go read that link and realize American justice is not what you think. And remember, during these 14 days you are being transferred from a detention center to your place of incarceration, so good luck putting together that Rule 35 motion with no access to legal resources, stability, writing materials.

This man speaks the truth and obviously has a lot of experience with the system. It is hard. Hard, hard, hard. You have to sue yourself, without counsel, unless you are rich. Almost no lawyers will take these cases up on contingency (what you see on TV where the lawyer puts up all the costs with the hopes of making his money back from the settlement) as they are mostly losing cases. The courts HATE prisoner rights cases and will find against you using any method possible.

Also a lawyer taking these cases is the kiss of death for future cases in a judges court room, which means no future clients will use that lawyer. The judge has all the power, and lawyers can not afford to alienate them. No one ever considers that power dynamic. All a judge has to do it let it be tacitly known a lawyer will not win in his court room and that lawyer is done.

I am getting really uncomfortable posting now.

Here's what happens: everyone who gets out of jail instantly forgets about everyone in jail. I'm exaggerating for effect, but it's mostly true. My brain has done some sort of self-preservation thing and I've only been out for 6 months and I can't remember most of what happened over the 8 years I did inside.

I sued while I was in there for dozens of things connected to solitary confinement. For instance, for detainees in county jails it has been ruled to be illegal to punish them before their in-jail trial for the infraction. I lost the court case, then I lost it again in the appeals court. They ruled the opposite - they said that detainees can be punished for any reason, any time, without trial. Remember - detainees have never been convicted of a crime. I've never been convicted of one myself, except a traffic ticket about 20 years ago.

Truth right here. Keep your head up brother!

This article reminded me of this economics paper from a former World Ware 2 prisoner of war describing the "market economy" that formed in the POW camps.

http://icm.clsbe.lisboa.ucp.pt/docentes/url/jcn/ie2/0POWCamp...

It's fascinating because it describes:

- Open outcry markets

- Exchange rates

- N dimensional preference spaces

- Collapsing money supplies

- Market shocks

All in plain English and using specific examples from the camps.

Highly recommend it especially if you (like me on both counts) have an Econ degree and/or work in finance.

Also interesting the Sarajevo Survival Guide [1]. Similar, but with a more tongue in cheek and modern bent. Made me want to stockpile cigarettes and pornography.

[1]: http://www.friends-partners.org/bosnia/surintro.html

This was excellent, thanks!

Did 20 months in federal for selling cannabis. Also spent time in solitary. Conditions are far worse than you could imagine. Also, many prisons are functionally solitary so the 4% number is way low.

The economic networks in prisons are wild, and of course there are incentives for guards to participate.

Not only are there massive number of cell phones in prisons, there are cell phones in solitary because the guards smuggle them in.

Capitalism, what a thing, eh?

AMA

> The economic networks in prisons are wild, and of course there are incentives for guards to participate.

maybe a naive question, but where does all the money come from? I can understand that prisoners would trade favors and artificially scarce items (eg cigarettes) amongst themselves. but what's in it for the guards? I wouldn't expect a bunch of people that aren't allowed to have jobs to have a ton of cash to throw around.

Where I was a single letter covered is K2, spice, whatever you want to call it is worth $1500 minimum.The inmate distributing it got $500 of that. Who knows where that $1000 went. And that was for K2, spice, a super crappy drug.

Money comes from outside family and friends.

THIS! Almost all inmates are illegally kept in functional solitary and/or unconstitutional conditions. 30% of my long term facility was classified 'short term housing' because they were not constitutionally allowed to keep people in those cells longer than 3 months due to the long term psychological damage of such small spaces. Dudes had been in their cells 10 years. One guy almost won a case about it, but they just moved him and boom, he no longer had standing for his court case, everything dropped, and no court following saying 'hey we found that this guy was in unconstitutional conditions maybe we should check things out'. Nope, just dropped. Another fun example, the US Courts have ruled that lights on all night preventing sleep is torture. They have a more recent finding that it isn't torture if it is determined it is needed for safety. All the effects of not sleeping for 4 years were totally undone once I learned it was for safety and it wasn't torture.

I assume they wouldn't put electronic outlets in solitary cells, so how did it work for phones? You'd get to use it for 3-5 hours before the battery runs out and then a guard swaps it for a charged one?

Oh no, it's super random what you do and don't have. You have power outlets in your cells. Inmates have CPap machines and oxygen condensers they need to keep them alive. You even have microUSB chargers to charge your MP3 player (https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-jailbreak-a-Sandisk-mp3-tha...). But in the Feds a phone is an automatic escape charge, so if you are caught your are guaranteed to go up one security level. Now I am getting really uncomfortable because can really be traced to me, but funny story I had a Russian girlfriend when I went in. On every call (which is monitored by the COs) she would say the limited calls (15 minute max, 250 minutes a month) and calls not on her time sucked, and that I needed to talk to the Russian inmates and get a cell phone. She never understood when I tried to get her to stop saying this on the calls.

Three things occur to me as I read this article: 1) Toilet paper seems like a necessity. 2) In America, we treat our prisoners horribly. We are going to look back on this in a 100 years with the same disdain we look back on slavery. 3) Though I have a hard day a head of me, my life could be far, far worse.

> We are going to look back on this in a 100 years with the same disdain we look back on slavery.

We can only hope, but why only in 100 years when 'we' - the people in this thread and a lot of others - already look at it with disdain.

But there's others - lawmakers, the private prison industry, etc - who think this is just fine and dandy, because it fills their pockets and is a legal avenue into a slave labor force (prison labor). It's in their interest to get people in jail.

> slave labor force

Remember kids, slavery is still constitutionally enshrined in the US as a form of punishment. No need to "look back" at slavery!

Slavery is allowed in prison as an exception in the US Constitution. https://www.history.com/news/13th-amendment-slavery-loophole... Do not support UNICOR or UNICOR products if you are not into slave labor. You can not have a fair working environment when your prison guard is your boss. https://www.unicor.gov/

BTW major US businesses use Unicor for backend support/logistics. There were guys denied going to lower level facilities (with better privileges, closer to family, etc) because their forced labor was too valuable.

In the Feds, stamps are the unit of money. On our yard a book of 'compound' stamps was worth $8 of 'value' but it took a lot of work to keep them at that price. For a book you could get one dip of chew. I think is was two books for a 'square' of spice, a tiny sliver of paper enough to get you high. You would also need to include the price of an AA battery to use as your lighter to get high. Don't do drugs, but especially don't do spice, I saw it make guys crazy and guys just dropped dead from it. A jalepeno pepper was 3 stamps if things were good. A five pound bag of cheese was 2 books to the store guy. The price fluctuated daily depending on how many people were getting them out of the kitchen. Dirty pictures were 3 stamps(no porn allowed in the Feds). Decent tattoes were three books. A haircut at the free prison barber shop was 5 stamps, or free if you wanted a poorly done buzz. For a book a month someone would clean your cell for you every day. Or someone would drop off and pick up your laundry. For 10% of your commissary bill you could get bumped to the front of the commissary line. A brand new uniform from laundry for visiting (you were issues used clothes) was a book, but then you needed to pay to have it tailored and pay to get inmate tags printed and sown on. New prison issue boots were a book to the laundry guys. A prison cheese cake (made from coffee creamer and lemon juice) was a book, or four stamps a slice. Minimum bet on a sports gambling ticket was 3 stamps. A book a month to the kitchen to get extra portions on your tray (say 2 slices of roast beef on roast beef day). I don't know alcohol prices but it was a lot and normally all sold before it was made, and if it got busted I think you were just out. Every section had a couple of store guys. You could the things from the commisary for their price + 1 stamp if you replaced them next time you shopped, or a couple stamp premium if paying in just stamps. A cold soda was 2 stamps. A candy bar 3 stamps. Home made taffy made from coffee creamer was 2 for a stamp.

This is a fascinating post, thank you for sharing your experiences!

That coffee creamer and lemon juice cheesecake sounds interesting.

Do you still crave and/or make at home any of the weird food items you described?

Where did you store 5 pounds of cheese?

Tamales made by crushing up Dorritos and pork rinds, soaking them and using them for the masa was delicious, but f@#k no I never crave prison food. Also, we had no microwave, so everything is cooked in a trash bag in a trash can filled with hot water. Also all our excercise during COVID was by using trash bags filled with water as weights. The guards would pop the bags and flood all your stuff.

Telling you where the cheese is kept would be considered snitching ;)

What would be really interesting would be for someone to look at all the behind the scenes to make this work. Like I said it took a coordinate effort to keep books at $8 a book and not say $6. This had to happen between the pissas, white boys, serenos, blacks, and natives. Almost like each prison has it's own interracial Federal Reserve Bank. It was in their interest to not let it move down because they are all sitting on tens of thousands of dollars worth of stamps.

More items. 5 stamps to have an artist make a card like a birthday or xmas card for you to send your family. A book (20 stamps, $8) for a month of someone elses phone time (during COVID I think we got 350 minutes a month to call family because no one was allowed family visits but normally it was 250 so people use all that time and need more) but a lot of times phone time was extorted (That was the most extorted thing I saw). 20 stamps for a pound of cooked roast beef delivered. Someone figured out how to reload photo copy cards for the copy machine, so instead of $12 at commissary a reload was 5 stamps. Craft work you can no longer send home unless you made it so that was harder and harder for guys to use as their hustle and sell.

> about 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the United States. On average, close to 4% of them are held in solitary confinement.

Almost 100K people in solitary confinement is insane. These are dehumanizing psychologically destabilizing conditions, with permanent psychological effects, that are among the worst thing you can do to someone.

I find it incredible that it has become so standardize and ordinary in the USA, instead of a rare last resort thing for extreme problems.

He never talked about the other type of fishing...in a lot of prisons they are in rooms with doors, not bars. Inmates will pump out the gas traps in their toilets and drop lines into the shared plumbing with things tied to help them get tangled. They can then pull the lines through and tie stuff to them.

Having read three comments here by people who spent time in solitary for drug crimes, I hope we can all realize the only way to fix our over-policed, over-imprisoned society is to legalize drugs.

We all watched and waited a long, long time for everyone to come around to the fact that the rights of LGBTQ people must be protected. A legion of cowards held us back for generations, and in the meantime immeasurable suffering was endured. Now, we're waiting for the cowards once again to acknowledge the painfully obvious (drugs can't be eliminated in a free society despite how many billions we spend or how many rights we abridge) and in the meantime we have to watch lives get ruined every single day for consensual acts with no victims.

Hurry up, cowards.

The US prison system is so brutal and things like solitary confinement, which is torture, totally normalised. We need to call attention to these things.

There's a video on YouTube of a prison warden who went into solitary for 48 hours. He said it was painful - but that, considering how violent some of the prisoners he had to hold were, he would still not rule out its use. It's not an ideal option in any way, but sometimes it's just the least-bad option.

In my opinion, we should focus on overuse and abuse of solitary confinement, but elimination is not possible for some prisoners.

I feel like there's probably a pretty big difference in how it feels between voluntarily going into solitary for 48 hours by your choice, only for 48 hours, and being in there for months (or years!!), with no known end.

There's also a big difference between "ruling out it's use entirely", and having hundreds of thousands of people in it every day.

It is not treated as a last resort in the current US incarceration system.

Solitary obviously seems very bad. Being locked in a congregate living setting with someone aggressive, brutal, much stronger than you, with all the time in the world and no better entertainment option than you, also seems very bad.

What will you do with someone who has beaten the shit out of another inmate?

I suppose they could be housed in individual cells that are open, so they can interact with other prisoners without physical interaction.

The guys that can't stop getting picked on have to 'check in' which means they are the ones who have to voluntarily go to the SHU (segregated housing unit or solitary) and do their entire sentence their until Obama passed a law limiting how long someone could be kept in the SHU, so now they get sent back to general population :( yay for good intentions.

Solitary confinement is far beyond physical separation of violent people.

Being able to see sunlight and other people isn't a risk of violence.

The overuse of solitary confinement is a symptom of a raging prison industrial complex that relies on political corruption/kickbacks and a national culture that thinks punishment is more valuable to society than rehabilitation.

One would need to alter both in order to resolve this. Given their interlocking/reinforcing nature, it seems infeasible without some kind of revolutionary change in US politics.

Call attention? It's already known and public information; clearly, awareness alone does nothing. No, this needs sweeping political reform. Elect better leaders. Make the police, prison guards, military, politicians and rich people accountable.

Which politician campaigns on prison reform?

This needs Freedom Protests in the street.

The knowledge and attention to the subject is there, the problem is that a large swath of the US is authoritarian and celebrates such brutal treatment.

You don't have to look much farther than the Facebook page a small town sheriff's department. In the rural midwest-usa county where I live, the sheriff posts mugshots on Facebook and then people just pile on with all kinds of comments celebrating the fact that these awful lowlife drug offenders will finally get the punishment that they deserve. Oh but they are innocent until proven guilty, don't forget.

Well one issue is that people who have been in prison often cannot ever vote again, so the only people left to make decisions about the prison system are those who have never experienced it firsthand

Just as a note, the majority of states give voting rights back right away or after awhile.

https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-...

The US prison-industrial complex is really disgusting and before anyone brings it up: private prisons aren't why. Those are still the minority of prison populations (but yes they're still bad).

Price gouging (ie commisary, cost of phone calls, charging for video vists in prison, copays to see a doctor, institutionalized rape as a form of punishment and control and yes, solitary confinement).

Prosecturos, legislators and juries seek extended prison sentences as a form of vengeance and being able to appear "tough on crime" yet the outcomes are very racially-based. You can see this in the lengths of sentences for similar circumstances that only vary on race, the likelihood of the death penalty and the fact that cases that are ultimately exonerated (eg by DNA evidence) are heavily slanted towards minorities (meaning they were wrongfully convicted to begin with).

Our current president was one of the key architects of the 1994 crime bill (signed into law by Bill Clinton) that was a massive contributor to mass incarceration for low-level drug possession crimes in particular.

And when people do get out we give them a scarlet letter for life in the form of the "are you a felon?" question that should be illegal. We throw people in prison who were out on probation or parole for merely being charged with a felony (note: CHARGED not CONVICTED).

It's really depressing how comfortable so many Americans are with this level of cruelty.

The Feds do not allow rape any longer. Once you reach your designated facility you are fairly safe from flat out rape. Pressures and coercion exist but just flat out rape as far as I saw was very rare. PREA is taken very seriously.

This is torture. Period.

Frontline did an episode on solitary. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/solitary-nation/ I agree, torture is the only word that accurately describes what these people go through.

I don't think anyone's arguing against that - at least not on here - the question is how to stop it from happening and undo the harm. That'll take big reforms, all the way up to the current political system in the US.

It sure is. And court sanctioned at that. My favorite is still the Court finding that continuous lighting preventing sleep is torture, but somehow stops being torture if it is 'needed' (as designated by the keepers) for security. Sure still felt like torture to me.

What is the alternative to solitary confinement?

There are some people who are a persistent threat and menace to others. There are 3 ways that society has dealt with them:

Execution

Banishment

Imprisonment

We are trying to do away with execution, so that is not a real alternative. Banishment really doesn't work in the modern, connected world. That leaves imprisonment. However, within prison, you also have a society, and then the question becomes, how do you deal with people who are a threat and menace to other prisoners and guards. Again you end up with the 3 options. Following through, you eventually end up with either solitary confinement or execution as the solution to people who are a persistent threat and menace to others.

Is solitary confinement over used? Yes. But I have not heard a really good alternative.

FWIW, I am not against the death penalty. It makes much more economic sense than life in prison (it costs ludicrous amounts of money to house prisoners per-annua) and as someone who has done prison time my personal opinion is I'd rather be killed than face the mental agony of living the rest of my days in there.

I'm not sure why so many people are against it or think it's inhumane. I think it's a bit silly considering most people who hold that opinion have never been to prison.

I'm not against the death penalty in principle; but in practice, at least the way our current system is set up, it just seems to lead to perverse problems. Since prosecutors are generally a political office, there's a strong incentive to be seen as "tough on crime" by getting lots of death penalty convictions. The result is innocent people convicted. If you're alive, there's always a chance your conviction will be overturned, even if 20 years down the road. But if you're dead, there's nothing you can do.

The argument, "Life in prison is a fate worse than death" is an argument to make prison more humane, not an argument to kill people instead.

A country that only allows 14 days to challenge the legality of a sentence (https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcrmp/rule_35) is not responsible enough nor does it provide robust enough legal protections to have a death penalty. Rule 35 is the only way a judge can alter a sentence other than compassionate release (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3582) or a 2255 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/2255) motion (that has a 1 year limit. Also note in 2255 you actually have to make your own 2255 or 2244 motion if your punishment has been found unconstitutional. Relief is not automatically granted in the US Justice system just because the Supreme Court finds your sentence or punishment unconstitutional) or a 2244 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/2244 again with a 1 year limit). A convict that accepted a plea can not make a 2255 or 2244 challenge because part of the plea is an agreement to a legal bar from challenging your sentence under it (called an attack on your sentence). If you do not accept a plea and give up your right to challenge your sentence for being illegal or unconstitutional, you face the trial tax (https://www.nacdl.org/Document/TrialPenaltySixthAmendmentRig...). The trial tax not only requires you to give up your constitutional right to a trial but also your right to be free from an illegal (say by gathering evidence in an illegal way) or unconstitutional (say sentence to 30 years for a petty drug offense) sentence. This plea is normally jurisdictional meaning a court can not over rule it. Some Prosecutors will also argue that this waiver applies to compassionate release motions as well.

And this is the point where I no longer feel comfortable commenting on this thread because I am a happy and positive guy looking forward to redeeming myself in society and this is not a constructive use of my energy.

It's not a dichotomy between life in prison and death penalty though. Wouldn't you have preferred a better alternative to a prison sentence? I don't know what you did to end up there, but what if the societal circumstances were different and you never ended up in touch with the legal system in the first place?

Side note: the death penalty is more expensive than prison in the way it is currently being used (because of the legal expenses + prison time before the execution takes place), so unless it is done faster (more prone to errors) it does not make financial sense: https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Is_the_death_penalty_more...

The problems with the death penalty is the trade off between cost and accuracy in applying the death penalty.

Currently, the death penalty costs more than life in prison due to legal costs. We still have a significant non-zero number of innocent people who are executed.

If you want to make the death penalty cost effective, you will have to lower the appeal costs and this means more innocent people will be executed.

So the question really becomes: "how many innocent people are we willing to murder to reduce our costs?

Many people accept the number of innocent people we murder as justified to save other innocents via disincentive. It seems much harder to justify killing purely on the basis of cost reduction.

You are correct that we don't seem nearly as bothered by all of the innocent people who are serving life sentences rather than death penalties and don't have the same appeal rights as those on death row.

> I'm not sure why so many people are against it or think it's inhumane.

1) There are endless cases of it being implemented on innocent people:

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/technical-errors-can-ki... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution

2) Ethical reasons believing its wrong to kill people

3) Its well documented the process of death penalty has regular mistakes causing slow and incredibly painful deaths.

E.g. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/botched-executions

One huge problem is it isn't applied fairly. Money and race shouldn't factor into sentencing, but they absolutely do.

"Economic sense" is a non-argument. Think how much money society would save if we tore down all the prisons and simply shot everyone found guilty of a crime.

Another argument in support of the death penalty is that is "brings closure" to the victims or the family of the victims. That is appalling to me. I completely understand why the victim('s family) would want to see the criminal die, but why stop there? What if the father of a rape/murder victim asked the court to allow him to strap down the criminal and let the father torture him for an afternoon. It would bring a lot of closure to the father, perhaps, but it doesn't mean society should allow it.

> But I have not heard a really good alternative.

Have not heard, or haven't given the issue a bit more thought? Why do people end up in prison and solitary confinement? And how can that be prevented?

The US has the highest incarceration rate of any country. Why is that? Are the people that bad? If so, why are they so bad? If not, why are they thrown into jail so much?

The issue I have with your comment is that you're tunnel visioned at the punishment part, without thinking of prevention and rehabilitation, or the systems in place (political, financial) that make it so that so many people end up in prison in the first place.

Have a closer look at subjects like the War on Drugs, the private prison system, and different ideologies behind punishment - rehabilitation vs retaliation. Look at other countries as well; how many people are in solitary confinement in Europe? How much violence is there between inmates there?

The problem is not solitary confinement.

Oddly enough, Western European countries don't have this problem, and have a significantly lower recidivism rate. Perhaps ask them how they do it?

I believe there are even documentaries now that explore justice systems in various countries.

This is not to attack you or anything, but rather to highlight a cultural divide. To European ears this kind of question feels like it's right up there with "What else can you do but behead a man who runs off with your daughter?" It's really jarring to hear, and makes one think that such a culture is incredibly backwards and barbaric...

American culture IS incredibly backward and barbaric. And that's really putting it mildly.

>" But I have not heard a really good alternative."

The solution is to enforce your own fucking laws when those are broken by prison stuff and higher ups

Reply on news.ycombinator.com