Frank Smith was locked up for 8 decades. At 98, what would it mean to be free? | Hacker News Reader

Frank Smith was locked up for 8 decades. At 98, what would it mean to be free?

bostonglobe.com

83 pointsthunderbong70 comments

there is a real problem with the elderly in american prisons, they sentenced so many people to absurdly high sentences in the 80s/90s that they basically ended up with nursing homes for the elderly except they are prisoners.

https://www.aclu.org/report/americas-expense-mass-incarcerat...

Its just the punitive culture that is deeply rooted in american society. Its one of the more depressing subjects in sociology when you learn about the culture of Scandinavian people and their emphasis on rehabilitation, reintegration, and addressing the root causes of criminal behavior.

Let me tell you that it can go much too far in that direction too. We have repulsing examples of especially young criminals that get off very serious crimes with not much more than a slap on the wrist.

I've seen that too. IMO, neither "direction" is what matters here. Both cases are failures to apply justice appropriately. It's tiring that efforts to reform always seem to be led by people who are either "tough" or "soft" on crime.

Exactly. There is a balance, and when you suggest society should go in a certain direction, some are quick to assume that you mean to take it to the extreme.

Oh I'd imagine especially the rise of tabloid news has driven a lot of resentment towards the rehabilitation-based judiciary system in Scandinavian countries, but its still the job of a functioning government to protect its rehabilitation/evidence-based justice system. After all there are conservatives everywhere, attempting to cash in on law and order politics, doesn't help that with the rise of neoliberalism there comes an inability to address the aforementioned root causes of increases in crime (like a failure to address the causes of gang-related violence and failures in integration of immigrants in the case of Sweden) so the only answer is more punitive justice across the board and down the drain the evidence-based justice system goes.

What I'm saying is its not the evidence-based justice system to blame, its the root causes of crime that need to be addressed, if that fails, changing the justice system is addressing the symptom not the cause. That is what the united states is doing, resulting in inhumane treatment of prisoners and the highest prison population in the world, not something you really want to advocate for (at least in theory if you aren't conservative of course).

It is interesting how you put an equal sign between rehabilitation and evidence based justice.

In Sweden we have people getting out of prison after running people down with their cars and killing them after having already committed dozens of violent crimes, only to continue committing crimes as soon as they get out.

After a while there’s not much else that can be done but lock certain people up for good.

> What I'm saying is its not the evidence-based justice system to blame, its the root causes of crime that need to be addressed, if that fails, changing the justice system is addressing the symptom not the cause.

What about crime that's on the rise because of a relatively lenient rehabilitation oriented criminal policy? Most of the crime I've seen perpetuated in Germany and Scandinavia, especially the more gruesome ones, are often perpetuated by second-generation immigrants "left out" of a system where they don't even want to actively take part in - many of them want the benefits of being part of a welfare state, but it's only a minority of those who want to contribute to it. Case in point, migrants specifically from Africa and the Middle East are a net negative to the Danish welfare state, according to the government's own stats.

Before rushing to downvote me, note that I used to be one suc migrant to Germany yet I could see that the system in place isn't sustainable. Most governments such as the Scandinavian and German ones have resorted to hiding their numbers to conceal the failures of their policies (all in an effort to bring cheap labour).

Source for above assertion: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-017-0636-1

Your comments are so far from the reality as it evolves in Sweden in recent years that it is pointless to respond. It is obvious you have no idea what is going on here. You can't apply US liberal glasses to fix a situation caused by more left-leaning liberalism than the US have ever seen.

Guy sounds like a high functional schizophrenic. Would be incredibly interesting to see him "wake" up with medication. But at 90? It would be pure torture..

>In fact, he could technically leave — to go get lunch, or visit one of the nearby towns — but someone would have to request permission and sign him out, which no one appears to have ever done.

Wonder how many person are in the same situation. I guess you also have to take responsibility for the person while they are outside so no randoms (like a charity or volunteers) can do it

That was a long read, but a sad one. Apparently he was paroled couple times, but was sent back to prison. By all accounts, he should've been freed decades ago, but he became too paranoid and distrustful of the system.

The author also laments how the systems favors inmates who are more likeable and are good storytellers for parole eligibility, vs Frank Smith who was anti-social, grumy, and kept it to himself.

> In conversations over the course of a year, the only person I hear him express something like friendship for is Tucker Carlson, the recently deposed Fox News host. “He’s my type of guy. We’re the same type,” he says, though he won’t say more.

(...)

> He begins to unspool a series of conspiracy theories, threaded with racial slurs: The United Nations was plotting to take away America’s weapons. He writes, “The Jew has been poluting the country with moral filth through the movies radio and TV” in a campaign to push Black men “next to the white woman.” People like them needed to band together to protect the country, he concluded. “Every person in this country who is white and Christian has a job to do.”

Classic Shizo facist, justice still should apply. Also kind of funny that proof against systemic racism like this guy exists.

Seems that once you discount the input filter laws, the machine gives little about your views and skin color. Of course a for profit prison system needs to dump the unprofitable old folks, so I guess we will see mass paroles.. After crack epidemic +50 years. Reformed I swear, all those worked to the bones slaves, reformed, finger cross the purse and hope to die.

Obvious chatgpt

this is just awful. fucked up country

what it means is less important than the real questions it raises.

- if in the united states we refer to our prisons as 'correctional' facilities, what quantitative correction could require nearly a century of internment?

- if by any study it costs nearly 40,000 dollars to house a prisoner for one (1) year, was the night watchmans life truly worth 3.2 million dollars of Connecticut taxpayers money?

- what meaningful value was extracted from his slave labor? was it enough to offset even a fraction of the internment cost?

- Can the state identify how or if a nearly 100 year old man has been rehabilitated in their correctional facility? has the process improved?

Some countries limit the time you can spend in prison for this very reason, no matter what you did. For instance, Brazil sets it to 40 years total even if you killed 100 people.

I’m a fan of the death penalty for really egregious cases, given a hypothetical perfect Justice system. Some people are not worth trying to rehabilitate. However, the Justice system is flawed and a decent percentage of people who get the death penalty are innocent. So what do you do? I’d rather they be locked up for the rest of their natural lives, barring a change in evidence or technology that leads to a change in sentence. But I don’t want some remorseless psychopath back in society because they’ve reached the limit on how long we can hold them.

I'm against it as I do believe that we are not just the result of our own free will free of anything but a result of our environment, luck etc.

I'm lucky that I had parents which gave me behavior patterns which do not make me kill or rape others.

And even if someone believes they are right, they are actually right just no in the moral and ethical sphere of a majority.

I don't like rape and in my world it's wrong. But that doesn't change their world view. And I don't kill him due to this because why would I be allowed to end the life of someone else?

The best I can do is to remove this person from the society.

It's easy to kill and hard not to.

And in the worst case scenario I would kill someone who hurts or killed a close person (perhaps) but I would need to accept the consequences of it.

I wonder if something productive could be done by expanding the options beyond "guilty" and "not guilty" because someone can be found guilty by a jury for almost any reason. Perhaps if there was a further status of "guilty by egregious evidence" that required a higher standard of evidence such as direct recording of the commission of the crime by the perpetrator and the death penalty was only applicable in those cases. I'm not ok with a one percent chance of executing the wrong person for any crime no matter how horrific, and our justice system trends at least 4% wrongful conviction. I'm fully ok with a 0.001% chance of executing the wrong person for even second-degree murder.

Isn't "beyond reasonable doubt" already a high standard? I've watched cases on youtube where it was really obvious from all the circumstances that the defendant did it. But it wasn't beyond reasonable doubt, so the jury had no choice but to declare them innocent.

Croatia is the same, our serial killer that started killing when he was 16 is being released soon, killed someone on a free weekend while serving time, got married in prison. Not sure what to say of such a system, I'm not really in favor.

And 40 years is like the max, for raping and killing it's more like 15-20, eg a deranged man who chopped of a tourist's head is released in a few years after serving 15, another man that raped and killed a minor is soon to be out as well after 22 years in prison.

That sucks. That guy will 100% guaranteed kill someone again. Portugal is the same except instead of 40 it's 25 if I remember correctly. Egregious.

Prison has multiple purposes: retribution, incapacitance, deterrence, and rehabilitation.

- retribution: gives victims and families of the victim retribution. This one doesn't seem important in the modern day, but if you ignore it you get vigilante revenge, blood feuds, honor culture etc. Having the state take on "revenge" kills these cycles.

- incapacitance: straight up preventing dangerous people from being out and being dangerous.

- deterrence: long prison sentences deter other people from committing crimes because they don't want to get a long prison sentence. Also deters the prisoners themselves from committing another crime (if their sentence is short enough)

- rehabilitation: here's finally the "corrections" part, and honestly our system in the US isn't great at rehabilitating anyone. In principle this is a prudent idea, but we'd have to spend a lot more tax dollars on prisoners to actually rehabilitate anything. That's politically pretty unappealing

> rehabilitation ... That's politically pretty unappealing

Here in the USA, yes. Some EU countries take this quite a bit more seriously, to good effect.

> but we'd have to spend a lot more tax dollars on prisoners to actually rehabilitate anything. That's politically pretty unappealing

I don't have a source for this but I thought the opposite was true? That the general consensus was we'd end up spending less because the recidivism rate would go down?

I think they mean more per prisoner per year, which is immediately measurable. It'd be done in the hope that total costs would go down over decades, but in our current political climate it's hard to sell improvements that take decades to manifest.

> we'd have to spend a lot more tax dollars on prisoners to actually rehabilitate anything

Not necessarily. Recidivism costs a lot, too. Norway spends over $100k/inmate, to the US's $25k/inmate (https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2022/10/25/what-can-we-learn-from-t...), but only 20% reoffend versus 2/3 of American inmates. (Resulting in 70/100k incarcerated versus the US's 700/100k; that $100k/year starts to look like $10k/year now.)

Here in NY, there was a big political fuss over free community college for prisoners a few years back (pre-pandemic); Cuomo wound up killing it. I suspect helping inmates get associates degrees to use when they got out would've wound up saving money, but that's not how it played in the PR realm.

> recidivism costs a lot too

Right, but it's all indirect costs, paid in diffuse ways by various entities (insurance companies, often), whereas a politician suggesting raising taxes to help prisoners is a direct cost that taxpayers are loathe to pay.

Which isn't to say you're wrong, but it'd be a long campaign to change the cultural framing in a way that allowed these kinds of reforms to take place. Until then, people will be looking at that top-line Norway $100K per prisoner and shaking their heads.

I'm not against spending more per prisoner on actual rehabilitation efforts but I am very skeptical the US would see anywhere near that improvement. The circumstances that lead to crime in the two countries are quite different and those US prisoners end up right back in those situations when they are released.

I don't doubt that the Norwegian system has other aspects / safety nets that help here, but the article says they had a 70% rate as recently as the 1990s. It would be silly not to look at that 70% -> 20% drop and at least try and learn some of the lessons from it.

"Officers are trained for 2 to 3 years before being sent to work" seems like a good one to start with, as does the skills building to prepare them for the outside.

Agreed but I have no idea if those aspects/safety nets existed in the 90s.

It perks my ears up a bit when I never see that mentioned because it would likely balloon the 4x price difference between the two prison systems.

Deterrence? I don't think that long sentences deter any crime. If the ultimate sentence (DP) doesn't deter murder, then why would lesser sentences deter lesser crimes?

It's always weird for me to hear arguments about death penalty not deterring crime, then in the same breath they favor life in prison over death penalty. Not even aware of their double standard.

You'll find a wide spectrum of beliefs within that "same breath".

Personally, I think life in prison is necessary in some cases - that there are people who will never be able to function safely in society - but that it is simultaneously overused (case in point: stealing four cookies; https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jun-19-me-12244...).

There's also the "you can release someone from life in prison" aspect if there was a mistake, malicious prosecution, or they've shown signs of genuine rehabilitation.

My opposition to the DP is based on my distrust in our justice system and the fact that a wrongly applied DP is irrevocable. Life w/o Parole lets you amend failures in our legal system.

It's a common opinion. I find this stance a bit weak, since it doesn't hold the justice system to the highest standards and expectations. I know, death seems so immediate and there is no taking it back, but things aren't usually that trivial in reality, a life in prison can also mean the person dies in prison without reparation, or even if revoked, the person might spend most their life in prison and has a few years to live free. A person on death row might have many years to prove their innocence. I guess we could also apply a statistical analysis and determine if the error margin is tolerable, sort like how we handle hundreds of deaths in traffic.

> Deterrence? I don't think that long sentences deter any crime.

So you think if there was no punishment for any crime, the crime rates wouldn't skyrocket? Not sure what to say to you if you think that's true.

> If the ultimate sentence (DP) doesn't deter murder...

Who says it doesn't?

Deter doesn't mean prevent entirely. You can't just say "well murders still happen", that doesn't prove that there wouldn't be more murders if it had no prospective punishment.

Reductio ad absurdum, and a straw man as well. Of course if you eliminated all punishment for crimes, crime would skyrocket.

I think that long sentences are counterproductive and expensive, both in terms of societal expense and in how we treat people. The US would be wise to wean itself off the nipple of hatred and revenge that feeds our punitive "correctional system."

And it doesn't take much googling to find the answer to your final question. The majority of murders are committed in anger, because of mental illness, under the influence of drugs/alcohol etc. Few murders are committed by people planning rationally in cold blood, weighing the pros and cons.

Do I think some people deserve to be locked up for life? Yup. The man who murdered my niece and two others in a fit of drunken rage should never be allowed to walk freely in society. In the state where he committed his crimes, the DP was an option, but I'm glad it wasn't imposed. Having the DP on the books sure didn't deter him. And it hasn't deterred proven to be a deterrent in states that have it as law; homicide rates are higher in states with the DP than those without.

I have family in LE. In the justice system. Colleagues who work in the FBI and DoJ. Coworkers who were COs in prison. None of them think what we're doing is effective, either for less serious offenders or the most heinous prisoners. We either put them in a SHU, give them the needle or throw them to the wolves in Gen Pop. Prisons have become our toxic waste dumps.

So where's the math in that? It makes absolutely no sense that entirely quantitative prison sentencing is at best qualitatively determined and completely devoid of metric tracking, everywhere on Earth. wtf is this.

> if in the united states we refer to our prisons as 'correctional' facilities, what quantitative correction could require nearly a century of internment?

It's only punishment, there is no correction at all.

> if by any study it costs nearly 40,000 dollars to house a prisoner for one (1) year, was the night watchmans life truly worth 3.2 million dollars of Connecticut taxpayers money?

Can we please not value people's life in money? Because if we can then slavery would be justified.

> what meaningful value was extracted from his slave labor? was it enough to offset even a fraction of the internment cost?

Ditto.

> Can we please not value people's life in money?

It feels quite icky to do this, but it is necessary when making policy decisions.

Every day, governments and corporations decide to spend (or not spend) X amount of dollars to save Y number of lives. Does it make sense to spend some money on infant mortality prevention, vs research on cancer types that only really old people get? What about seatbelt laws? Or pollution prevention?

Ideally, we would rationally spend our limited money on providing the best life for the most people. Not that this actually happens for a variety of reasons.

If we are to get the best value for our money, then we need to assign a value to human life in terms similar to disability-adjusted life years (DALY):

https://www.who.int/data/gho/indicator-metadata-registry/imr...

That's distasteful but necessary. It's when we start making policy by valuing peoples live based on economic output that things get bad. Otherwise you end up killing a healthy young person to harvest their organs for old people at the top of their career.

Notice the comment being objected to was "is the night watchman's life worth 3.2 million"

No, measuring loss of income due to premature death is very different from saying "was the night watchmans life truly worth 3.2 million dollars".

On top of that, making healthcare decisions based on future income goes straight against ethical guidelines. By your logic people unable to work due to disability, age or serving a life sentence would be denied any healthcare.

> Can we please not value people's life in money? Because if we can then slavery would be justified.

That isn't a logical statement, one does not follow from the other.

98. In prison. I imagine there is some theme about how luck and genetics still play a much larger role in health than stuff like sleep, diet, and fitness that I comfort myself with. No idea who this guy is btw, but back to the basics. 98. In prison - pretty amazing.

"he has spent closer to 85 years in the justice system. He is very likely the longest-serving prisoner, ever, in the United States. .... He seems to believe he is still in prison, though he was paroled to the nursing home in 2020. In fact, he could technically leave — to go get lunch, or visit one of the nearby towns — but someone would have to request permission and sign him out, which no one appears to have ever done ... Almost everyone he knew before he went away is dead."

The Cracked article says he escaped in 1967, was recaptured and briefly paroled in 1975 for 10 months.

He could have been paroled in 2012, but was either paranoid or in a mental state where he didn't understand what they were asking and refused to sign the papers.

And it seems he was innocent.

https://www.cracked.com/article_34310_connecticut-put-a-prob...

I feel like there must be a better source for this information

Because you are offended by Cracked's font? They have a long reputation of good research.

Literally just look at their homepage - it's entirely bottom-of-the barrel top 10 lists about celebrities.

I miss old Cracked.com when they had a consistent set of good writers but even in the good ol' days they were making comedy articles and not serious journalism.

I would be very interested in how you define them as having a "long reputation of good research", given that they don't do research so much as pointing to various links without checking their quality and make sure to specify may/could/potentially/... All over their long form articles specifically to not be making any claim since they don't research them enough.

I'm not blaming them at all for it by the way, they're a comedic publication not investigative, I'm just weirded out by your perception of them when they themselves go out of their way to not purport themselves as any kind of authoritative source.

>They have a long reputation of good research.

They had good writers at one time, but that time has long passed.

https://www.greenwichtime.com/news/article/Francis-Smith-lon...

They’re listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_prison_sentenc..., but I’m unable to find a Wikipedia page for them (Francis Clifford Smith).

Read the article linked by the post, it discusses it as well

Caloric restriction is one longevity-enhancing technique that prison supports.

Also, activity restrictions means exercise is one of the few available hobbies.

Caloric restrictions was my first thought as well.

Also, the fact that we’re talking about this person means he’s an extreme outlier. I’d expect reaching 98 is much more common outside of prison.

Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet are also one of those outliers in terms of diet, exercising and work rate.

Granted they receive the best medical support money can buy, but they are on record saying how much they binge on fast food, and Munger in particular mentioned on several occasions how he never intentionally did any exercise (no cardio or weightlifting) since he was a teenager. They are both also crazy workaholics working a rigorous 9-5, very little holiday for the last 7 decades.

About the one burger a day I think from Buffet, I always wondered if it was something they said to be more relatable, or if it true.

From what I remember in Snowball, it's true. He really doesn't like unusual food and sticks to the familiar, which generally means burgers and soda.

Anecdotally, I have seen stress be a major factor. I know businessmen who are under a lot of stress, and even in their 40s they had major health problems.

Others who seemed naturally inclined to be a bit carefree (not careless) seemes to only start having problems in their late 70s.

All anecdotal of course, so we'd need lot of data to come to a conclusion.

The system is designed to “rehabilitate” you. That is, to make it so you’re dependent on the system to live. Most offenders, repeat, sending them back to jail. Some have argued because it’s easier than out on the streets trying to survive. In prison you have a bed, food, shelter (though not from others). On the outside, you had to provide that.

Shawshank redemption talked about this a bit when Brooks (the librarian and old man) was released to a halfway house. He monologues “On the inside, I was the man you would come to if you needed something brought in. I was somebody. On the outside, I’m an old ex-con. A nobody.”

I always considered it an issue with the usually longer sentence in the US (compared to where I'm from in France), particularly when taking into account the stacking of sentences (where we instead have "the longest one apply and trump others). Each year, well each day really, passed behind bars makes rehabilitation harder and it feels a bit counter productive to put people for (often several) decades behind bars, at this point they have a very very small chance to be able to reintegrate properly.

Not that I consider my country a paragon of virtue on that front mind you, since we're still struggling with the concept of rehabilitation instead of punishment.

Yeah. I think having a system where society is responsible would be best. Instead of private institutions that charge the tax payers. Systems where through hard work and service to the community they can learn to survive. Those that are a threat to the community can be given their own. This was the original idea behind these prisons. Only wall of the ones who would physically harm others until deemed they are no longer a threat. It’s a mental health issue and not a criminal vs non-criminal black & white situation as the layman to the law would have you believe.

It’s not about what is right or just, it’s about what you can prove. And us Americans love a good outlier to form stereotypes about a peoples.

Think of it this way. The world is PvE. Inside a prison it’s PvP. That should give you the clarity.

Some people like pvp. Some thrive on it. Others like PvE (maybe with agreeable refereed PvP) and don’t like PvP. They want their game to follow the same rules each time they play it. Predictable. Safe.

Others thrive on the chaos that each new day brings new victims and spoils. As well as threats to their own. (Hi Eve-Online players!)

It’s a mindset, a choice, probably something to do with childhood. Most definitely trauma based.

Shawshank redemption is a movie, a fiction. It never happened and characters are made up.

That being said USA have rather high reoffending rates while Norway has a low one. And Norway has more pleasant prisons (and makes it easier to find a job after you have been in prison).

Yeah no sh*t it’s a movie. There’s inspiration taken from real life. The reentry is the most important part and I’m glad to hear that Norway takes that seriously. We are all still humans. Not dogs or animals (though in some rare cases here… not so sure).

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