How I got here
pthorpe92.github.io
pthorpe92.github.io
When I was 19 I got caught selling a bunch of MDMA at a night club. Undercover police caught me, and by God's grace they chose to let me go.
MDMA had just begun to carry a minimum 10 yr prison sentence throughout the state.
I had no idea what I was doing in my life, like I was asleep and not awake, until I got caught that night.
About 15 minutes into the interrogation at the scene, Officer Garcia - I still remember him - knowing my mental state of panic and realization of reality, said to me "You know, when I was your age I did the same thing, and I was forgiven and let go. So what I'm going to do is forgive you and let you go this time. Go home, and don't ever do this again."
I drove home at about half the speed limit that night, trying to process what had happened. First time I had experienced such forgiveness and mercy.
The aim of my life now is to maximize the amount of good I can do for others. I'll never forget. I could still be in prison. Maybe as an open source computer programmer, but prison nonetheless.
It's a big risk to let someone go like that; will they actually repent, or continue causing harm?
MDMA should have been legal.
End of story.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02565-4 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34708874/ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/well/mind/mdma-ecstasy-ri... https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/07/03/australia-just-lega...
It's legal or decriminalized in Portugal, The Czech Republic, The Netherlands, and Switzerland, by the way. Surprise: Those are now the countries with the lowest number of drug deaths and drug related crimes in Europe.
a) when you are 16-18-20-22 you don't know sh*t about life - you are still a newbie. It doesn't mean that drug-trafficking is excused but when I look back at my 18yo self, I could have died 100 times between 18 and 22. And I could have 'taken some people with me' while doing so.
b) it's in the person. When given a second chance you can either turn your life around (and a Mr. Garcia will never see you again) or you can go back the very next day and maybe a Mr. Garcia will be finding your corpse in a back alley because a trade went sour.
As for Preston Thrope - hang in there. It's a long path to salvation - almost endless. As long as you keep your head up high and give the good fight, good things will (probably?) come. I've watched enough of John Oliver's Last Week Tonight shows to know that you got myriad of forces that want to see you fail so keep walking and dreaming!
In his case his whole life could have been ruined by selling a harmless (if clean!) drug to ravers who very clearly know what and why they are buying a substance from him.
Also, in my hypothetical "you should not have been arrested as it should be legal case" he might have ended poor and homeless in the street because everybody was just going to the pharmacy instead of buying from him. :)
Also, all the studies you linked are about using it in therapy vs using it at a rave?
there wasn’t a moral crime here - MDMA is widely regarded to be.. safe (please don’t bite on that, i mean to say that current research indicates that it’s probably less dangerous than alcohol). so why should that have been so traumatic?
And more importantly, what I was selling was presumably MDMA. I didn't have kits to check the batches for adulteration. What if people died? I was not ready for that responsibility.
I also agree that MDMA can be a dangerous substance of course. Far less toxic than alcohol, but still.
But compared to this, ending up in the US jail system carries FAR bigger risks. As you said: It could have ruined your life. It could also have ruined the life of people who bought from you, as they could also have ended up getting arrested.
I really can not imagine a drug available that will do worse things to your life than ending up inside the US jail system.
19 years kids could be selling even more knowing they would not be locked for 10+ years.
Alcohol is a drug, and it gets you drunk. Has side-effects, affects long-term health, etc, etc.
Weed is a drug, and in my personal experience it's WAY more "drug" than alcohol, especially how it's used nowadays. Also, across all cultures/races, studies show that the earlier a person starts consuming it, the higher the risk of developing some sort of psychosis later in life (I have my own theories as to "why").
Also, who smokes weed the most? When I did clinical rotations in New York it was the poor and the less educated that smoked weed all day. I would even see black mothers in ghetto areas who took their children to the park and just sit in the benches smoking weed, not paying attention to or interacting with their children, which to me is a very bad example and perpetuating a negative cycle.
The more educated did it occasionally, and with self control. So unrestricted access to weed for those with less self-control and goal-oriented behavior is more likely to ruin their lives; the very people who instead need to cultivate more self control and goal-oriented behavior.
I'm glad that weed is now available legally, because it guarantees users a clean product, as opposed to nowadays in KY where I'm at lots of illicit weed is laced with fentanyl-like compounds. I consume THC + CBD every once in a blue moon, and I don't dare touch street products for various reasons.
MDMA legal...well, I haven't seen anyone die from weed. But MDMA is quite dangerous. And who screens beforehand if that person has a cardiovascular issue they may not even be aware of? Alcohol and weed don't have much of a short-term effect on the heart. MDMA is an amphetamine-like compound.
These are my thoughts at the moment.
This is especially the case if you have a trauma hidden. I have seen people who got abused as a kid, and then in their early 20iers tried LSD, and absolutely weren't ready for their brain to suddenly bring up those memories.
OTOH: I'm going to large rave festivals often. There you see the ambulance cars mostly unused. If you go to Oktoberfest, there is constant activity and people getting hospitalized. And people look really fucked up, throwing up everywhere, etc. Overdosing alcohol is more common than with any other drug.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Rational...
As a teenager I encountered so many people who thought they were experts with drugs because nothing had yet happened to them.
Nowadays, finishing up med school, with tons of real pharmacology and clinical knowledge, having seen lots of things in the psych wards, the ER, and stories from my wife (a physician too), I've come to realize that most people who think they know about these substances and their dangers don't really know.
Anyone can educate themselves, but lots of "drug customers", especially the most susceptible (youth + less educated), don't even have a background to know HOW to educate themselves properly concerning these things. Their knowledge is tainted by "most comments online say..." plus "and my friends who know all about these drugs..." plus "and one study I read" = so all I have to do is X, Y, Z.
Over-dosing acid by a factor of 10 will be scary for a few hours. Doing it with mdma will likely be scary for your family in the hospital.
Part of the danger of a substance is how much distance there is between the substance doing something intended and something unintended by taking a higher dose.
Part of the problem of the opiod endemic in the US is that fentanyl is so potent that due to fluctuations in the incompetent black market on it, and/or due to incompetence by its users, things can turn deadly quickly.
The other thing is how long it takes for you to notice the effects of a substance. If you get a quick result it's far less dangerous to overdose, as you'll notice when it's enough.
Seems really strange that the government would have bothered decriminalizing consumption if the supply itself is illegal.
But it still helps. It removes the stigma, but most importantly: In many countries going after substance users is a low-hanging fruit to police. Instead of solving real crimes if you raid a club you can arrest a lot of "criminals", improving your statistics.
In the "war on drugs", in 99% police is going after the users, not the dealers, because the latter are far harder to catch.
Same way people acquire guns illegally in US states that prohibit gun ownership: involved parties choose to break the law.
> Seems really strange that the government would have bothered decriminalizing consumption if the supply itself is illegal.
These governments take the stance that drug dealers exploit the addictions/circumstances of their customers, exposing them to more harm. So they make selling (or possessing enough that an intent to sell seems probable) illegal.
Because the users are at worst harming themselves (assuming they aren’t doing something like driving while intoxicated, or parenting under the influence, but there are laws that already handle these scenarios), these governments don’t see the point in further harming the users of these drugs by locking them away in prison. So drug use is legal, and possessing a small amount (so small that it would be unlikely you’re selling) is legal. Also, because the use of drugs is not illegal, this makes users more likely to seek help, whether from their community or resources provided by their government.
There are legal avenues to buy guns in the US though, that's the confusion for me. Why bother saying I can own it if the law also says no one can legally sell it to me?
The government isn’t saying “we’re totally ok with you personally taking drugs,” it’s saying “we don’t think that arresting people who have small amounts of drugs for personal consumption is a valuable use of law enforcement resources, so we’re decriminalizing personal possession and use to focus those resources on larger criminal organizations.”
In the US, your life would be ruined forever.
But yeah, legal consumption without legal supply (with quality control!) does not fully solve the problem.
But how is it possible that his life was at risk at all? Why a 10 year sentence for taking drugs? The government should simply not have that power.
"Look at the cute cop who let me go with a warning after trafficking drugs" XOXO
It saved one life, but that person could later return to selling drugs and contribute to thousands OD's and many deaths.
The cops were undercover DEA with previous experience going underground in places like Colombia. They had been in rough places. Their focus was mainly hunting the big guys: suppliers. End-chain young people trying to make a quick buck is low yield, and if anything going after them distracts from the root of the problem and alerts the big guys.
I don’t think declining to be a villain warrants the same response as choosing to be a hero.
Judges and lawyers absolutely hate it, but juries aren't there just as a logical check on laws as written and facts as presented. Juries are a check on the legal system and laws themselves.
These kinds of laws remove the opportunity for juries (or judges where I live) to eg say “6 months of community service” when it’s more appropriate.
But that's not inconsistent with what GP said.
Well, defense lawyers love it, the only thing they hate is not being allowed to mention it to juries.
I say ruining people's brains because, in the world of raves I was involved in, most customers were teens, and I knew quite a bit who kept taking it excessively for self-medication, eventually just to get through the day, and I would see the decline in their cognitive functions over time. It was really sad. I denied selling to those people because they scared me. But...I was selling nonetheless. So unaware of the consequences of my actions...
Minimum sentences don't impact the juries say, which doesn't extend to sentencing in the first place, at all.
I didn't realize Unlocked was your organization.
> Sexual recidivism rates range from 5 percent after three years to 24 percent after 15 years.
Also, I wouldn't put murder and rape in the same sentence. There are some situations where murder reasoning might be debatable even if still wrong (self defense against and archenemy that promised to assassinate your family, for example).
But rape? There's no rationalizing rape other than mental illness.
I don't want to open a can of worms here, but I had to write this.
20 year old having sex with a 17 year old isn’t mental illness.
As an aside, I learned the other day that in Brazil the age of consent is 14:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_South_Ameri...
You can be convicted of the crime for a lot of reasons other than lack of consent. A common example of that is a 20 year old with a 17 year old in many states.
* I agree that what most of us generally mean in colloquial usage of the term "rape" is never justifiable
* However, in many jurisdictions, the legal definition of "rape" may be different and significantly broader than our colloquial usage. As an immediate example, a completely informed and consensual sexual experience between two teenagers may be considered "statutory rape", with all the prison, registered offender, difficulty getting a job and social stigma that follows a rape conviction. Whereas I personally don't think two teenagers having sex is indicative of mental illness.
It sucks, but the longer I live, the less immediately easily categorizable or black & white things are :<
So someone who is a murderer is more likely to commit crimes when released than a rapist.
In contrast, the American system aims for penance, which is why we call it penetentiary. You have to "pay for your actions" - which has absolutely nothing to do with rehabilitation and preventing recidivism. Paying for your actions is deeply ingrained is the American zeitgeist - making the concept of favoring rehabilitation appear immoral.
Regardless, it could be argued that rehabilitating a perpetrator of more severe crimes is a harsher form of punitive justice. Living with your (newly acquired) guilt and regret about your actions is more difficult than hanging out with, and learning from, your peers in crime university - prison.
Also, selling heroin is often manslaughter.
Almost 10 years inside here. Going on Monday to have all the charges dismissed.
I don't think they work directly in prisons and jails, but https://www.underdogdevs.org/ is a group that works to train formerly incarcerated people in software and tech. They built mentee/mentor relationships between professional development and those wanting to learn.
I'm curious: what led you to leave software engineering? SWE to corrections officer sounds like a rare journey.
Then I read that it's not far from the truth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32554517
Plus, you get the added bonus of making the lives of everyone around you as miserable as you desire.
If you can stop them from doing it again by locking them up in comfort for 10 years instead of discomfort for 20, then that is what we should do (assuming that doesn’t cause more people to do it in the first place).
You're never going to stop many of them from reoffending. Even the "best" rehabilitation programs have crime rates far above the general population.
The additional 10 years is 10 more years where they can't hurt innocent people. The justice system exists for the benefit of society and innocent citizens, not criminals.
> assuming that doesn’t cause more people to do it in the first place
Why would you ever assume that? Punishments absolutely have a deterrent effect.
By this logic we should just never release them. Should we keep the 80% that would not reoffend locked up to prevent the 20% that would from doing so?
Should we increase the sentence from 10 to 20 years to make that ratio 60% to 40%? Then we prevent more crime, and the would be criminals are off the street longer.
Maybe if we decrease the comfort of the cells and general state of the prisons, we can get the rate to 20% to 80%? Then we can practically say we’re justified to keep those 80% off the street.
> Why would you ever assume that? Punishments absolutely have a deterrent effect.
Because most people aren’t stopped by the deterrent effect. It’s perfectly possible the net negative effect of locking people up for a longer time is larger than the extra deterrent effect [1].
[1]: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...
The problem with that is it removes the deterrence effect—if you're going to get the same punishment for murder as for shoplifting, criminals will exercise no restraint.
> Should we keep the 80% that would not reoffend locked up to prevent the 20% that would from doing so?
Why are you just making up numbers? The majority of violent criminals reoffend after release, often very soon after. [0]
> Because most people aren’t stopped by the deterrent effect.
Sure, most people don't commit crime because they're not morally bankrupt criminals. The point of policies is not to prevent normal people from committing crime.
Deterrence absolutely has an impact on criminal behavior. Why do criminals brazenly rob and openly deal drugs in San Francisco, but not in Miami? They know they won't be published in SF.
[0] https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
I’m making a point. But numbers are more often around 20-40% in Europe.
> Deterrence absolutely has an impact on criminal behavior.
You just completely walked over the source I sent from the department of justice that said differently. Sentence length has no or minimal influence on criminal behavior.
> Why do criminals brazenly rob and openly deal drugs in San Francisco, but not in Miami?
You may notice that the same source indicates that the important factor is instead how likely you are to get caught, presumably SF police sucks at that?
Given our status as a massive outlier, could it be that our current system of mass incarceration is a driver of crime? I see signs that point to yes. Many people I have talked to have said the main thing being locked up taught them was how to be a better criminal. Prisons break families. Children grow up without parents. At one of the conferences for the heads of the Departments of Corrections for US states, a question was asked of all 50 heads: are prisons effective at making society safer? About 8 said yes. About 7 said they were unsure. The remaining 35 said no.
We've tried highly punitive mass incarceration for decades and it's failing horribly. I'm not smart enough to know the correct answer, but I can say that it seems obvious that the answer is not to lock more people up for longer.
Comparing between countries with massively different demographics is pointless. The US simply has far more criminality than other wealthy nations.
> We've tried highly punitive mass incarceration for decades and it's failing horribly.
That's not my take-away. We had a massive and growing crime problem in the US in the 60s and 70s and pursued a policy of mass incarceration as a solution.
It worked. Crime went down a lot since we started mass incarceration.
Over the last decade, and particularly since 2020, we've been reversing that policy and seeing the impact: spiking violent crime and unsafe cities.
I don't know how you can possibly look at this and think it "doesn't work." I'm sure criminals prefer a policy of catch and release, but I'd rather bring back mass incarceration.
Yes, that is exactly related to the point OP was trying to make? Where does this crime come from? Maybe instead of useless, if not counter-productive mass incarceration, we should focus on rehabilitation and more importantly improving social injustices that are the causes of the higher crime rate sin the US.
We are literally the only country that does it. It is a heinous and barbaric practice. And, like all of our mass incarceration system, is it vastly disproportionatly applied to Black children. We are a backwards country in many, many ways.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/policy-brief/juvenile-life...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_for_juvenil...
would seem to contradict:
> Punishments absolutely have a deterrent effect.
?
Even if punishment had no deterrent effect on recidivism it could still be effective at deterring youths from going down a criminal path.
> _Most_ violent criminals will commit another crime after release
But are _most_ criminals violent? I would guess not. We were talking about "many of them from reoffending" not a small subsection. If it is the case that "many of them from reoffending" then this condtrdicts the other premis.
> Punishments absolutely have a deterrent effect.
There is also no eveidence that "it could still be effective at deterring youths" which seems to be socio-political and not based on age bracket.
For future reference a good line of exploration is:
Denmark's recidivism rate is about 27 percent, roughly half the rate of the U.S., which ranges from 49 percent to 80 percent depending on the crime.
The US prison system has a big issue with not being a simple punishment for a crime, it's very much a destruction of a persons life for the accusation of crime, once marked as a "former convict" a person in the US has difficulty regaining employment which leads to few options otherthan more crime.
~60% of the state prison population (~600k of ~1m) are imprisoned for a violent crime. Much higher than I would have guessed.
"The fourth myth: By definition, “violent crime” involves physical harm
The distinction between “violent” and “nonviolent” crime means less than you might think; in fact, these terms are so widely misused that they are generally unhelpful in a policy context. In the public discourse about crime, people typically use “violent” and “nonviolent” as substitutes for serious versus nonserious criminal acts. That alone is a fallacy, but worse, these terms are also used as coded (often racialized) language to label individuals as inherently dangerous versus non-dangerous."
> Burglary is generally considered a property crime, but an array of state and federal laws classify burglary as a violent crime in certain situations, such as when it occurs at night, in a residence, or with a weapon present. So even if the building was unoccupied, someone convicted of burglary could be punished for a violent crime and end up with a long prison sentence and “violent” record.
The article does not state this explicitly, but it suggests that someone who burgles a residence at night with a weapon should not have a long prison sentence, if the residence turned out to be unoccupied. (Perhaps even if it was occupied but the occupants were not "physically harmed"?)
Very well said. And I am glad we have a model now, if one was ever needed. I hope other prison systems take note.
We send people away for years, tell them exactly what to do every day and they get to make exacrly one choice every day: do you obey or not? That's the only choice you get to make. Then, after 3, 5, 10 years, we send them out into society and tell them, "Make better choices." But we haven't prepared them for that at all. We have given them almost no chances to make decisions and learn how to make good ones. We just tell them the decision to make and they do it. There's no space for practicing good decisions in traditional prison settings.
Multiple other states are pointing to Maine as proof that the Scandinavian model can work in the US and are incorporating their learnings into their plans and trainings.
This really puts things in perspective. Thank you for sharing!
One place had computers to learn typing. You weren't allowed computer books in that facility in case you used them to figure out how to hack out of the jail. So, bless the elderly nuns, they smuggled in "C# in a Weekend" for me, with the CD-ROM, so I could teach programming classes when the guards weren't paying attention.
I wish I knew better how to help incarcerated people. Based on the Norway(?) model, I feel like help would reduce return rates, but I don't know how to go about it.
I’ve been a victim of violent crime at least a dozen times in my life. I wasn’t the first victim for any of my attackers. Far from it. And I wasn’t the last. Every single one of them escaped. They probably got caught on some other occasion, and maybe they spent some time in prison for that crime. And then they got out and continued robbing and assaulting innocent people. They’ll keep doing this as long as they are physically able.
I don’t really care what happens to them, because they’re basically constantly-exploding bombs that force the rest of us to pay more in taxes for police, invest in more security systems, avoid certain areas at certain times, and generally worry about safety much more than we otherwise would. Most criminals have been given countless chances to not commit crime, and they keep doing it. The sooner they’re separated from society, the better off we’ll all be.
I can't think of a way to say this without sounding insensitive, but have you considered moving?
When you're 5'6" and 120lbs, criminals will target you.
And you won't feel the need to carry a gun...
There's also the issue of employment and compensation. My skills are worth far less in other countries. I make over $250k/year in compensation, and my taxes are low enough that I've managed to accumulate "fuck you" money before the age of 40. I could retire, but I want to maximize my family's quality of life. It'd also be nice to have an aircraft and a cabin on some land in the middle of nowhere. My chances of accomplishing those goals in another country are much lower. (I'll probably have the cabin in a few years. The aircraft... well, we'll see.)
If I wanted to move to an area with low crime, I could choose from plenty of places in the US. I don't live in those places because, similar to other countries, I'd have to take a massive pay cut. As remote work becomes more commonplace, that could change.
I heard you can get a used Cessna for $15k. But maybe you want something fancy ;)
I'm open to the possibility that the situation may be different in other countries, but I strongly doubt it's a leading cause pretty much anywhere.
Without having lived the lives of others, you simply don't know if you would have committed the same (or worse) crimes in their situation. That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't punish crimes, but to imagine that you're a better person than most criminals is just self-flattery.
However, I wouldn’t murder anyone in anyone in a modern civilized society. Why not just use social services? And if that doesn’t exist, then steal. Even if you’re caught they’ll be obligated to give you food.
Society needs to devolve to far far below what is the US standard before murder becomes a reasonable solution to food problems.
So unless I know the core of your argument, I’m not sure how to respond to this digression.
Likewise until you're actually in a life and death situation, you don't know what you're truly capable of.
> The difference between the average criminal and you is a couple of meals.
This is an insane point of view! Most criminals aren't stealing food.
The biggest issue is that 95% of them will be returned within a few months. Drugs is the main cause. You get out, you have no ID, no job, no family, no friends. You're stuck in a halfway house that is just like being in prison (lots of rules, line up for meal service etc). All the other guys there have a ton of drugs and you swear you won't touch them, but then you do because you're bored and sad. And then you're addicted again. And now you need money to buy more drugs. So you go do something goofy to get money and you get caught and locked up for another 10 piece. Or your parole officer drug tests you and violates your parole and you go do another 3 piece. Or the halfway house owner gets sick of you coming in after 7pm smelling of alcohol so he calls your parole officer and you go do another 3 piece.
Cycle repeats until you die in prison.
If they can't verify your identity while you are in prison, then what are you even doing there?
All they did before I left prison was try to sign me up for Medicaid (I'm not elligible because I'm an illegal immigrant).
They did kindly let me keep my prison ID when I left which has my photo on it and says IN CUSTODY in giant letters. (they used to say INMATE but that word has gone out of fashion and they couldn't think of another word to use on the badges)
Is this due to some kind of “political correctness” thing coming from well meaning people outside the system that the system is pleased to accommodate for easy brownie points, or are there distinct-enough tiers of people inside the system that “inmate” isn’t useful?
I was mostly locked up in pre-trial detention and "inmate" has a serious connotation of conviction behind it, so it was considered especially ugly and demeaning there, where the acceptable term is "detainee."
Here are some quick reads on the issue:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/04/12/i-am-not-your-...
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/04/12/what-words-we-...
Not to mention that due to understaffed and over budget facilities, rehabilitation programs are generally the first things to get cut.
> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Private prisons are in the business of cheap labor, not rehabilitation. It would be extremely expensive to effectively change the lifestyles of millions of people and treat their addiction, not to mention those around them who become traumatized due to their mistakes and follow in their footprints.
We simply lack the necessary amount of political will to do an end run around this by decriminalizing harmful drugs and providing safer pathways of use that can lead to treatment for addiction. Partially because, again, cheap labor! But no doubt also due to moral puritanism.
I’m happy to see there is some movement in state constitutions to do away with this kind of punishment, and even house/senate resolutions proposed to amend the federal constitution, although I don’t know what’s become of that effort.
How so? From that post and a few others I've read touching on the topic, it didn't seem obvious that prisoners are being put to work.
If you're lucky, you've got a wife or parents that'll write to you or take your calls.
Nobody will take your call the second you step inside a jail. Best man at your wedding? He's not picking up, I promise you. Literally nobody will call you or write to you. You will get nothing except maybe from your mother. If you are married, forget it.
Humans only like to associate with success. Once you seem to be failing literally nobody will want to even speak to you.
[1] https://pthorpe92.github.io/humor/How-to-get-on-hackernews-f...
His email is preston@unlockedlabs.org
That's child abuse in my book. If you are a parent, you are responsible for your children. That's it. No age limit. Nothing. They need a place? You are responsible for providing them a place to live. This isn't to say you have to be responsible for their crimes, but you should never be allowed to force your child out of your house. YOU brought them into this world. They are your responsibility. Forcing a child out? You are a terrible parent. Yes, some children thrive, but others don't. I'm sorry, but it's on you.
If you aren't ready to take care of your children or make sure they are taken care of for the remainder of their life, you shouldn't have children. 18 and you force them out? You are in the wrong.
No, it's not. It's reality. And you only think it's harsh because you are ignorant. And that ignorance will not prepare you for reality.
> But this idea that you should be responsible for another adult for the rest of their life just because you created them...? That's silly.
No, it's reality. And if you think otherwise, you are not ready to be a parent. Or you'll have a rude awakening when it turns out you are wrong.
Maybe you get lucky and they are able to support themselves, but if you think you raising them to 18 means you are done, it just means you are ignorant.
> Children turn into adults,
No, they don't and that's your ignorance.
Not all children grow up to be adults mentally. Not all children grow up. There are numerous conditions that mean you are responsible for them for the rest of their life, ensuring they get the care they need.
And trying to wave that off as the exception, it just means that you are ignorant. You should go into being a parent understanding that this might happen.
I see way too many parents throwing their kids into the water and letting them sink or swim. Sorry, but if they drown, it's on you as the parent. You failed them. You are the failure.
And that's child abuse, and people that think like that are worthless.
Do better.
My parents are absolutely amazing people, and they are the only reason my life has any hope at this point. They were still figuring things out, and didn't understand why I was such a rebellious asshole. Having 4 kids and two of them teenagers isn't easy, and they have been incredibly supportive to my younger siblings when one went through some troubles, and have been supportive to me the entire time. I know this is something my mother feels terrible for, but I feel like I was going to do what I was going to do, and I put no blame on her for anything.
This was the only thing that was going to get me to comment, because i know it breaks my moms heart.
Don't take their growth away from them.
Open free dorms next to the campuses of community colleges. Anyone who is physically able to live on their own, but who can not afford to live on their own can move in and live there as long as they are working towards being economically self sufficient.
Working towards being economically self sufficient can mean passing academic classes, passing career and technical education classes, taking remedial classes, completing a high school equivalency degree, passing K-12 classes online, earning certifications, working in internships, working jobs at a training wage, or other things
I suggest we replace all other welfare programs with drom room welfare.
This does not solve the problem that many of us do not want to hire convicted criminals.
> This does not solve the problem that many of us do not want to hire convicted criminals.
I'd wager that if people with convictions on their record, had even a 10-20% chance of being hired at a decent establishment, we'd see recidivism go down by a statistically significant amount.
I know the justice system. The grand majority of folks coming in and out of prison genuinely do not want better for themselves, it's a lifestyle choice that they've accepted (or resigned themselves to, depending on how you look at it).
But for the fractional percentage of incarcerated individuals that DO decide "Okay, I've had enough, I'm done with this and I want better for myself" and mean it, they aren't afforded such a luxurious opportunity for a bland life in suburbia.
The issue that keeps people from hiring ex-offenders isn't hard to solve:
One part is social. This one requires a little leadership and a little bit of re-defining what is an acceptable attitude.
The other part is a financial issue and is EASY to solve politically: most business insurers will raise rates or not insure companies that hire ex-offenders.
In my home state we were able to get a law passed that shifted liability for a hired ex-offender who committed a crime on the job to the state so insurers could not make hiring ex-offenders ridiculously expensive.
We were able to sell the idea to our legislators and local city councilors with a simple trade: the Democrat-controlled city council wanted to pass laws making it illegal not to hire ex-offenders. The Republican-controlled legislature wanted to give tax credits to businesses that hire ex-offenders. I suggested instead of passing unconstitutional laws or handing out corporate welfare we could solve the problem by making it illegal to charge more to insure a business that hires an ex-offender, and at the same time, absolving the insurer of having to pay claims because of the hire. The city and state decided to try it out, and it's helped a lot of people over the past eight years.
I know a really nice guy who went to prison for "stealing" cable TV. He's an electrician and a convicted felon. He is exceptionally productive, and has a ton of sense, but he's also a thief. His time in prison (in Texas) may have been what changed him, but he will never stop stealing.
After knowing him, I would not hire a convicted criminal who spent time in prison / jail.
This is the attitude that needs to change. There is no proof that one act of theft results in a person having an uncontrollable urge to steal for the rest of their life.
That stuff killed a coworker's son a few years ago. Died right in his own recliner.
The victims here are the families and children of the people whose abuse he profited greatly off of.
As a severe opioid addict myself for over 10 years, I am absolutely ashamed of having any part in that life. It is a burden that I will have to continue dealing with every day for the rest of my life.
In no way am I trying to say that I did not deserve to go to prison. The focus of this post, was about the facilities made available to those people who do end up in prison, so that they do not return.
As to the references... yes I am a non-violent drug offender. That isn't a label I gave myself, that is a fact: there to let readers know that I am not here for murder or rape or something of that sort. Involvement in opioids and that lifestyle/culture is something that I did not have any contact with UNTIL I was sent to prison. Perhaps we should consider whether 1. Prison is making people worse (that is just an objective fact) 2. We want to be institutionalizing people that clearly are capable of much more, who turn to things like dealing out of their drug habits, or lack of resources/options.
Before anyone wants to go google'ing and coming up with immediate judgements, why don't you look into that there was absolutely zero prosecution of the case being referred to.. They said they found "residue" in my apartment, put out a nationwide manhunt for me, then immediately dropped the case as soon as I was judged by the media and the judge. They couldn't just destroy my apartment and all my stuff and say "we found nothing". Leaving them to prosecute me for 1oz of a synthetic opioid 8x stronger than morphine, that itself, had a potency of roughly 1%. It was almost completely inert. absolutely useless. and this was a completely unrelated case.
To the person who said I sold drugs to kids.. Where exactly do you get off making such horrible claims about me? Do you live in such a bubble that you think that every drug dealer sits around behind dumpsters at high-schools and asks kids if they want to try some 'pot', thats really laced with angel dust? Oh and they all put rainbow fentanyl in your kids halloween candy too right?
All of his defensive comments are fair game whenever he ends up eligible for probation, parole, or whatever. And they will be used against him.
Thanks for your great blog post.
To put the entire mantle on dealers would be a mistake, imo. Their choice to sell can come from a variety of incentives: sometimes from clout, sometimes their upbringing, sometimes lack of opportunity, sometimes lack of education, many times a mixture of the above. Often enough these people are users themselves; the pain the people they sell to endure they also typically endure.
I don't view this post as victim-seeking and I don't really view him as a victim. Instead, I view this as a critique of prison culture that reinforces its outcomes. I view him as someone that wants to change and has the capacity to change, but there is little if any pipeline or incentive to do so. If there is one, it seems frail. When people want to change we should have a stepped pipeline for reintroducing them to normality and finally society.
Like you, I'd like to see less opioid related deaths in the future but I think there's more than one way to get to that goal. If there's a way that can make productive citizens out of people rather than shutting them away forever then I'm all for it because, frankly, the threat of a felony or life imprisonment didn't stop people before. In fact, that's when the prison population and recidivism bloomed.
Speaking as someone who (barely) survived an unintentional acetyl-fentanyl overdose that hospitalized me with rhabdo and almost killed my then-fiance -- him dealing this stuff is not the end of the world.
I think a lot of people on HN don't know what it's like to be someone below the poverty line who is also entangled with the law. If you're looking for hell in a first-world country, that's about as close as you can get in the USA.
People do things they're not proud of in desperate situations
See that's the thing. Did you read one word in the post about him being remorseful or apologetic to the people he might've killed by selling them U-47700, a drug that's essentially unstudied in humans? I didn't.
Obviously, anyone who causes damage to another human being, if they aren't a sociopath, feels remorse.
Of the entire post, perhaps 3 sentences talk about the specifics of crimes committed. Every day that one wakes up inside of a prison/jail, is a reminder of exactly what choices you made to get there.
Can you blame him then, for wanting to write a post that isn't focused on the wrongs he did, and rather his hope for his future?
Having to get an office temp job for minimum wage at 24 isn't ideal but it's a stretch to call it "desperate" and somehow justifying pushing opiates.
> what it's like to be someone below the poverty line
Which he wouldn't have been with the job options he had available at the time.
https://www.doj.nh.gov/news/2017/20171011-preston-thorpe-sen...
I'm guessing much of the US system (where I understand a lot more for-profit private companies are involved) is at least as broken.
Yes, in contact with my brother. No other family interested in contact any longer. Mother died while I was locked up :(
I'd been addicted to opioids for a couple of years. And I was very happy that I was able to get original non-counterfeit pills on the dark net, from vendors that had thousands of positives reviews. Being a nerd, and successful when it comes to business, risk-free supply had never been an issue. Luckily I bought Bitcoin when they did cost $0.20...
Fighting the dark net has always been a stupid idea. It's the cleanest way for people to get the substances they need, with the lowest amount of risk in every single regard. Lowest risk to get your substance cut with something unhealthy, lowest risk of getting ripped off, lowest risk of getting into criminal circles.
Fighting the dark net means pushing people to street dealers, increasing suffering, violent crime and deaths.
So, why did I get addicted? Depressions, anxiousness, and finally: Being on the autistic spectrum, which now seems absolutely obvious from earliest childhood memories, but my parents never took me to a neurologist to get that diagnosed. I just lived with being "different". Until I could not take it anymore, and tried to help myself with substances.
How did I get off the addiction? Did a search for the best-rated neurologist in the region, made an appointment, got treatment. It took a while, but in the end a combination of substances was found that worked out better than opiates.
But that being said: Those substances are the same that I can get as prescription medication, or as "drugs" on the street. It's just that now I no longer have to spend Bitcoin on it, but get them for free from the health care system. Yay!
Please remind yourself: Nearly everything that is taken and sold as "drugs" on the streets is used to treat some problem, just in a very dangerous way, without proper education, without proper risk management.
Whatever that scary drug that your parents and your school are warning you about to be evil: It's just medication. The poor people die on the street trying to get their supply, the rich guys get a subscription to get it for free.
If your country has a problem with drugs on the street, and with crime due to people trying to get those substances, your country SIMPLY HAS A PROBLEM PROVIDING HEALTH CARE to its citizens!
So please stop demonizing substances, demonizing substance "abuse", demonizing people providing those substances in a clean and safe way via the dark net, and demonizing people who sadly did not have the luck of their health care system helping them.
And go fix your health care systems.
I did manage to become sober, and a lot of social challenges have become more manageable now that I have a better framework for understanding my mind.
Before Ketamine, I never in my life had been able to get into a group of people with them being closer than about 50cm to me. Which means: I could never join a dancefloor.
With Ketamine, that poof went away, and I could.
The same happened for a couple of my neurodiverse friends. One girl her hole life could not be in the same room as others while eating. Now she can.
A single dose also has anti-depressant effects for five days.
Interestingly, it's now in some countries allowed to be used as treatment for social anxiety after positives studies on that. On the other hand, there is now a clinical study that say it's not better than a placebo. Weird.
However, for me (and my nerd friends) the before/after effect is so drastic, I can rule out a placebo effect. My neurologist agrees. I trust clinical studies and always consult them, but something must have gone wrong there.
And yes, this is a good example of a substance that in many countries can get you into jail, while in other countries it can make a most DRAMATIC positive change in your life.
Not medical advise. I am not suggesting you to something that is illegal in the country you are living in.
Do your own research AND consult someone who is competent on this when wishing to try Ketamine. Buy from a trusted seller. When trying a new substance, always do it sober - no other substance, especially no alcohol. Never try a new drug when alone. Ketamine is a drug that at different doses has very different effects. For social anxiety only a very low dose is needed, muss less than your raver friends would take to have fun. So start low, and slowly level up. Ketamine is pretty safe, but bad for your bladder long-term. Drinking green tea fixes that.
And just a funny note re: dancing -- part of my healing journey has been through ecstatic dance. It is a completely sober practice of dancing intuitively and freely with others. While I love ecstatic dance and can easily dance with no fear or anxiety, even in non-ecstatic spaces, I cannot actually speak to strangers or express my desire to become friends with someone.
It's easier for me to dance with complete strangers than it is to converse with them :) One of my most recent social struggles has been the discrepancy between intensely beautiful and intimate bonds formed with people while practicing ecstatic dance, and then finding myself completely unable bond with them via conversation after the dance is over.
I sometimes wish I lived in a world where no one knew my language and it was ok to have a partnership that relied only on body language. Relying on speech to bond with others has failed me for decades and I don't understand why.
Ketamine OTOH is something that can help me in a situational way. I only take it in concrete situations of social anxiety.
By the way - I order it "illegally", but my neuroligst agrees it's a good idea. Right now the situation in Germany is still very stupid, as doctors are only allowed to prescribe it if you go to the doctor every time you want to take a pump from the nose spray. Which obviously is not practical at all helps for situational use...
I'm a person how very easily gets addicted. Anecdotically, but also from what I have read, ketamine is not very addictive.
I am aware that a lot of effects that you can get through medication can also achieved using things like ecstatic dance or breathing techniques or medititations. I'm not patient enough for this, also I prefer to dance to Techno ;)
A lot of people think it's drug crimes. Not really. Just the same old crimes as everywhere else, punished with 2-3x the amount of time.
This is basically what US voters have asked for up until recently. Being tough on crime is a feature for a politician. Three-strikes laws, etc.
https://pthorpe92.github.io/humor/How-to-get-on-hackernews-f...
> It was October 2018 and I had just completed a 3-month rehab program at a state addiction clinic in Sweden. I was unemployed, staying with family, and had basically nothing going on.
> With no drugs or other vices to pass the time, the days seemed impossibly long. I struggled to find activities to fill them. I enrolled in school for a while, but it wasn’t for me this time either. Eventually I turned to programming, since it’s always been my big interest in life.
> I was left with the difficult choice of either living there and walking to a temp agency with hopes of making $10.50/hour doing manual labor (without an ID or social security card at this point), or getting on a bus to NYC to see some associates, and coming back in a week or so with $15-25k in my pocket and living in comfy luxury hotels until I could rent an apartment I chose the latter, obviously, and was back in prison after 14mo.
That is not obvious. My father was left with nothing at some point in his life, living like a hobo in an abandoned, broken, leaking RV next to gypsies (heck, he'd even, for free, help the gypsies' kids with "homework").
And he was still proud --and still is-- of never having done anything illegal.
People choose to engage in crime, and there's nothing obvious about it.
Nobody needs the latest iPhone or the latest sneakers. They believe they "flex" with the latest iPhone and sneakers (I've got a whole different idea of flexing btw but that'd be another topic). They choose the easy path.
And that is not obvious at all. Most poor people and by very, very, very far, even most hobos, are not thieves and are not drug dealers. When you deal drugs you have on your conscience how miserable you make the lives of so many others: it's not even about legality here.
I had a friend and roommate at one point (and still friend to this day), we'd split rent and he'd barely make any money. Serving pitas at a tiny kebab/pita place three nights a week for hardly any money. And he was okay with that. He didn't care about clothes or cars or phones or fancy hotel rooms or whatever. He'd just be honest and survive.
What I'd like to know is why people believe it's "obvious" they choose a criminal life for $25 K a week instead of an honest life flipping burgers.
It's not obvious and that mindset of "fancy luxury hotel rooms" and "latest iPhone" should just die. Nobody is impressing anyone with these utterly pointless bullshit.
It doesn't offend me at all to see it highlighted as "obvious" to the author. For some high proportion of these individuals, it is obvious (and indeed seems like the only choice).
> For some high proportion of these individuals, it is obvious (and indeed seems like the only choice).
Then they can go back to prison. Society need not be blackmailed into giving ex-cons excessively lucrative jobs in hopes of luring them away from crime.
I remember one 19-year-old kid crying in the bullpens one day. They'd just offered him 34 years. His cousin persuaded him to come rob a 7-11 with him. When they get there cousin hands him an AK47 and says "point this at the cashier while I grab the money". Kid had never touched a gun before. Accidentally pulls the trigger and fires a shot past the cashier's head into the wall. I asked him how much him and his cousin got. $1800.
you don't need to have the 'absolute strongest constitution' to work a boring min-wage job in the United States of America. Ask any refugee who migrated to the country what a hard life looks like.
Smart people like this guy, who choose to go into the drug trade do it because they think a crappy 9-5 job to get back on their feet is beneath them.
It’s admirable that you’re father did what he did without resorting to becoming a negative influence on society, but I bet most people on HN have broken the law in some small way many times in their life. Breaking the law and hurting others are not always the same.
Need to get to the science of that mechanism.
Look it up.
Still not quite ready to take responsibility for his actions... You weren't magically "affected" by the war on drugs. You went into crime for the easy money, but found out you weren't very good at avoiding getting caught.
Nothing like a system that produces a high amount of marginalized / vulnerable people and then blames them for going for "easy" money like drugs or prostitution.
I would expect the tech crowd here to be more inclined towards blameless postmortems / systemic safety.
They've just lorried stuff other poor people wanted. That should not be illegal. The above should.
If you can't possibly understand how growing up without positive influences can lead someone to a life of crime, you're probably too privileged to be the target audience of this article. Just move on.
Did others commented that? If they read this post like that, then they are part of the problem.
On the other hand, they aren't. One part of the problem is in jail as he should be, and another part of the problem is you.
Let's keep that, as it's obviously working so well!
Here in the UK we have something called Joint Enterprise [1] which is controversial for a numnber of reasons, I've read this chaps blog, I can relate to his circumstances in a number of ways having grown up with the rave culture in the 90's, I've seen many people turn a blind eye and escape prosecution, mainly because its too hard to prosecute, demonstrating the laziness of the police as evidence gathers and the judicary.
What annoys me is how these so called law abiding people manage to remain in their job. People claim to live in a democracy, none more so that many in the US, and yet AFAIK noone gets taught law as a mandatory subject when growing up. If you are not taught something how can the public even debate it? Is this the legal system applying a form of Darwinism on the population in a dictatorial fashion? Is this a form of intellectual torture being applied on some who want to enjoy themselves in non-alcoholic ways?
If I had the money I'd get a Judicial Review to find the reasons why judges dont want people to be taught the law as a mandatory subject for a number of reasons, and for adults to be kept up to date with legal changes in a TLDR fashion, that doesnt rely on the opinion of the state broadcaster and other news outlets. Some people are too busy to watch/read the news, which is the only en-masse way to keep up to date currently, and there is also the issue of why is legal conformity pushed on people if they are doing no harm? Just what exactly is a democracy and do you really have a say?
If Roe v. Wade (1973) can mandate a change across a country like the US, are these judges who shy away from making a countrywide decision to keep people abreast of legal changes, not only undermining the idea of democracy, but also just keeping themselves in a stealth sado masochistic schadenfruede-like position of authority with accompanying lucrative income?
Has any scientific study measured the dopamine receptors of judges or serotonin receptors or testostorone levels when they pass a judgement? Has the scientific community shown they derive pleasure from controlling other peoples lives in non scientific ways, because I see the reoffending rate is quite high, and the system is clearly not fit for purpose.
To the original poster, just remember there are some people who agree with your actions, enjoy the mental mind games of programming, it can keep you occupied even when not in front of the computer. :)
The Law of 'Joint Enterprise': Graham Virgo Cambridge Law Faculty [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjBwCmwpvMI
> A few years later, I left prison with $0 in my pocket (lawyers and commissary are expensive, and nobody pays you what they owe you when you come in), to a rooming house with hallways that smelled like crack-smoke and were filled with parole officers and junkies. I was left with the difficult choice of either living there and walking to a temp agency with hopes of making $10.50/hour doing manual labor (without an ID or social security card at this point), or getting on a bus to NYC to see some associates, and coming back in a week or so with $15-25k in my pocket and living in comfy luxury hotels until I could rent an apartment… I chose the latter, obviously, and was back in prison after 14mo.
...and later:
> I am very grateful for the opportunity, but I recognize that this is very much the exception and not the rule, and the success of the Maine model of corrections should highlight the absolutely embarrassing lack of opportunities in the rest of the system, to do anything but become a bitter, broke criminal; deprived of not just your freedom, family, financial security and reputation, but also of your self-identity as someone worth investing in changing. We need to do better as a society, and understand that, yes, there are people in the system that deserve this kind of punishment, but a large majority of our prison population are just regular people… non-violent drug offenders like myself. There are plenty more, like me, that are capable of being responsible, productive, tax paying members of society if given the opportunity, but you cannot expect anyone to change when you just lock them up in a cage with a bunch of other criminals where there is a subculture of endless negativity.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in...
> The next year, 111 inmates continued to produce “decorated party balloons” for MINNCOR, according to NCIA’s database. Large contracts such as this, coupled with correctional industries wages of between $0.50 and $2.00 per hour, allowed MINNCOR to make a profit of over $13 million in 2019.
Also relevant: https://minncorprod.blob.core.windows.net/files/MINNCOR%20In...
I'm actually having trouble squaring the claim from corpaccountabilitylab.org of an average of $.50 - $2/hr and what MINNCOR claims which is an average of $14.20/hr. The leading value of MINNCOR industries is to have the industrial programs pay for the prison system, thereby not passing new taxes onto residents. The only way that I can think to measure whether that system is healthy or not is to determine if it can both scale down and scale up. If it can't scale down, then they will indeed be incentivized to incarcerate new people.
Also of note, MINNCOR continues to employ people on release. From the report: 172 released + 753 incarcerated = 925 total active participants. The low of self-reported wages is $10/hr, the high is $22.38.
It's not how many people they are in charge of that matters, but how much money they donate to politicians to be be "tough on crime", and how much other soft money influence they have to make citizens think that crime is a problem that politicians need to be tough on, and to demonise politicians who aren't (which right-wing media is all too happy to help with).
Even if private prisons only have a small slice of the prison pie, they still work hard to make the pie as big as possible.
My understanding is that about 8% of US prisons are privately owned. Perhaps that's not a good thing, but I don't think it is at all correct to say that "prisons in the USA are for-profit enterprise" when the actual number is so low.
I have also heard this narrative for a long time that the prisons were filled mostly with non-violent drug offenders, only to learn that this description only applies to about 3.5% of the prison population. Maybe that's not a good thing either, but again I feel like I have been intentionally deceived after reading supposedly high-minded journalism into believing a fundamentally false understanding of what is going on.
To be clear, I said "prisons...are for-profit enterprises", not "all prisons are privately owned". Even state-owned prisons are cash cows for the prison industry. I'm not interested in what narrative you identify with, I'm stating a fact.
Actually prisons and schools have quite a lot in common so maybe you're onto something.
The other issue is more in general about having incarceration rates that are "four to six times that of its high-income peers in Europe and Asia". So you might recognize that as an issue too and think perhaps its the privatized prison system, the root causes for crime like inequality, disenfranchisement, homelessness, the reasons for drug use in the first place, or even just perhaps switching to an evidence-based rehabilitation system.
But now imagine you are a liberal, you need a way to acknowledge and talk about these problems without ever actually having to change anything. So that's why liberal journalists are talking about non-violent drug offenders and the 8.41% private prison population and so Biden stopped the justice department from renewing contracts for federal private prisons and he pardoned all prisoners of federal non-violent marijuana possession charges. Of course it doesn't actually do anything, but that was the point. And that's what liberalism is.
I will leave you with this quote by John Erlichman:
"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, (...) We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Source: https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman
And, because everything is complicated, the family denies it all:
The 1994 alleged ‘quote’ we saw repeated in social media for the first time today does not square with what we know of our father. And collectively, that spans over 185 years of time with him,” the Ehrlichman family wrote. “We do not subscribe to the alleged racist point of view that this writer now implies 22 years following the so-called interview of John and 16 years following our father’s death, when dad can no longer respond. None of us have raised our kids that way, and that’s because we were not raised that way.”
Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...
Regarding Ehrlichman specifically, his Wikipedia page says he fought for the US during WWII, and his father died serving in the Canadian military in 1940 (when Canada was fighting, but the US was not).
So it seems pretty low to call him a Nazi.
Of where?
I, as a lawful citizen of the United States of America, am not embarrassed by the prison system.
I am embarrassed, however, by folks who use hyperbole without merit to try and appease the masses without having the courage to go against the grain for fear of getting "downvoted" and losing faked internet points.
The fact that you believe the USA has the worst prison system in the world, compared to somewhere like, I dunno, Venezuela, supports my prior point.
You chastise those that "appease the masses" but mention Venezuela's prison system. How much firsthand experience do you have with Venezuela's prison system? My wager is that your concept of their prison system is based on articles specifically designed to "appease the masses".
About 7-8% of US jail and prisoners inmates are in for-profit correctional institutions, most are in public institutions which are not operated for profit.
Private, for profit prisons are an issue, but they are very much not the norm in the US.
That’s an opinion, he wasn’t arrested for possession in reality he made a ton of money selling dangerous drugs to kids. Maybe they should be legal, some of that I agree with (I spent a lot of my late teens and early twenties in jail or on probation for simple possession and have a felony to this day for it) but that doesn’t mean you should be able to peddle chemicals you don’t understand in large quantities. Your upbringing being bad doesn’t make that okay either.
I absolutely agree that "non-violent drug offenses" is a cop-out when describing high-volume drug dealing. Maybe he wasn't directly violent, but dealers like him directly contribute to dragging many more people into addiction, violence, and even death. I don't think people should be jailed (or even punished) for simple possession, but dealing -- especially on a large scale -- well, that's a different matter.
But ultimately what I really care about is outcomes. The bottom line is that it doesn't matter what we want someone to choose when they get out of prison. If we don't provide a compelling path for an ex-con to go straight, that's just us shooting ourselves in our feet. If that means spending more time and money housing someone in actually good conditions, and providing them direct access to higher education and better job opportunities, so be it. Ultimately that ends up being a lot cheaper for taxpayers than what we're doing now. And we get a much healthier society in the bargain.
Acting punitive toward convicts and ex-cons doesn't help anyone. It doesn't help the person involved, and it especially doesn't help ourselves.
> that many, many non-criminal members of that public are doing the $10.50/h thing with no such support and very limited opportunity.
Yes, there must exist unskilled, low-paying labor -- but there also must exist ample opportunity for education and self-betterment for (almost) ALL individuals.
The most heinous of persons excepted, of course.
I’d also argue that the reason for the public to fund such opportunities is not primarily an act of humanity, but it’s rather a long-term “investment” into lowering overall recidivism rates. That being said, one way to look at it is that the public is not funding him, but it’s funding its own interests.
Of course there are people in prison who are a menace to public safety and must be dealt with. And there must be consequences for harmful behavior even when it is "nonviolent" (which is a word that diminishes non-physical harm). But I truly struggle to understand how it is a good idea to segregate all the people who have previously transgressed, deny them opportunities for betterment and fully initiate them into criminal life.
There's not a mention asking for sympathy in there. It's mostly factual, and explanatory of his experience. And the fact that giving opportunities to convicts to educate themselves and find their way seems a much better solution than just educating them to gang life.
Of course they expect inmates to change, but towards even more criminality, not towards rehabilitation. This will justify them for being inmates in the first place (and thus the existence of the model) and justify them to come back later. It's a very profitable business model.
The whole article is fantastic though.
Who is "they"?
1. https://www.doj.nh.gov/news/2017/20171011-preston-thorpe-sen...
Ah, I see from your link it was u-47700 he was arrested with. Certainly a potent and potentially lethal substance, but not exactly on the same scale as carfentanil. U-47700 is quoted as 7.5x the potency of morphine, fentanyl at 50-100x and carfentanil around 4000
I guess it was the next logical step in the "smaller quantities of more powerful stuff are easier to smuggle" race, but I'd expect to see more dealers turning up dead from accidental exposure if it became widespread.
Totally tangential, but this prison article reminded me of a short story by Cory Doctorow about a monastery for programmers. I imagined living in a room about the size of my home office, a bed, a desk, a decent MacBook Pro and a high-speed connection and just hanging out on the Internet all day reading articles and programming. Food and shelter taken care of, no obligations or responsibilities. Like the pictures of Norwegian prison cells.
That reminded me of a weird Internet streamer collective started by a Twitch streamer named Athene. He started a group called The Singularity Group [1] which allowed people to move into a house to volunteer work on philanthropic projects. They are responsible for the AI Jesus [2] channel on Twitch. There is some controversy since some see the streamer as having tried to start a cult [3]. They also created a few mobile games that run on their own crypto-currency.
At any rate, it is all quite interesting to me. It was very common in the past in almost all cultures for a certain number of men to just reject society and go off into hermitage. Sometimes those hermits would band together into brotherhoods. Often they would make beer, or honey or some other collective task to earn enough money for the members to spend the rest of their time in quiet contemplation. I can imagine such a life might be attractive to a lot of programmers who tend to be introverted and feel alien to normal society.
1. https://singularitygroup.net/
Haven't been following his latest projects much, and I can't speak to how the Singularity group has changed since back then. Though I have seen his AI channel sometimes. It's moderately entertaining.
What I found was a young idealistic kid who was playing a character online. He was optimizing for views and we all know what kind of behavior gets attention online. The character was overblown and narcissistic. There is zero argument from me that if you take selected clips of him from when he was at the height of his streaming fame he was a dumb-ass edge-lord playing the role of a prophet or spiritual leader. He even leaned into it when he was accused because he thought it was funny. But when you watch recent videos of him (he does a pretty good react to Asmongold's react of him), I think I saw a different side.
All that being said, he isn't a kind of character I trust. He seems to me to be very much the kind of person where the ends justify the means. He has some pretty high ideals, some of which I agree with and others which I am sympathetic towards. It's like Greenpeace or animal rights activists ... even if I agree with their overall goals I often disagree with their methods.
I once was talking to someone who wanted to financially support independent scientific research. He had started a successful business (you may have heard of it, though I won't name it) and he wanted to put his money to good use.
He wanted to find people he could write a check to, basically. I suggested that if he wanted to advance science as much as possible, it would be far more efficient to run a dormitory for scientists with free room and board, as long as they do scientific research. I'm sure he could find many people who would accept a minimalist lifestyle for the opportunity to do research the system wouldn't otherwise support. (I'd be interested.)
He declined, stating that one major factor was the tax write-off he got from the donation, and I guess giving people a place to live doesn't have that benefit.
A tenured professorship or position at a prestigious institution provides a lot of resources and status that the minimalist approach does not. I don't know a single professor who would accept living in the very modest setup I proposed.
Also, I don't know any research organization that provides room and board for long-term faculty/staff. IAS does not work that way. Surely there are universities that provide room and board for graduate students, and some summer research internships will provide room and board. But those cases are rare in my experience in the US, and are only be temporary at best.
I also highly recommend _Anathem_, by Neal Stephenson if the STEM monastery theme is interesting to you.
It's after that, I underwent a psychosis so vast that every word, every symbol, every story, every axiom, every fear, every thought, and all of human history amassed into a unified and perfect whole; only after would I come to recognize that what I saw was identical to the ascent in Merkabah literature, Thelema's visit to the City of the Pyramids, Samadhi, and several other analogies for such experiences. Myself had disappeared, and in its place was a sacrifice burning through time like a star. There were only really two forces in the universe, entropy and creation, and the two were yet an illusion still of a singular. Dark matter became simply matter not yet light, returned to the path of least resistance towards supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies, dark energy became simply the remnant left by matter past the edge of observability to continue the pulling, decimation, and return, breaking the laws of thermodynamics that were merely local phenomenon, and creating novel matter in the process, the early stages of which would expand in an accelerated manner that would appear as a bang, but be more akin to a snake eating its own tail and growing.
I wandered in a daze, searching for what I called my fellow "wizards" or fellow autists or fellow disciples, not fully knowing what I was doing or why. I researched Benedictine and Bhuddist monestaries to try to escape the world. So yes, US hermits are very real, we are very noble, and we are fucking livid regarding the state of adequate hermitages. I'm currently in a low-rent studio, searching for minimum wage jobs, so I can pay less taxes to the undemocratic State. "Fully-employed" I'd make 1/4 million a year.
> Sometimes those hermits would band together into brotherhoods. Often they would make beer, or honey or some other collective task to earn enough money for the members to spend the rest of their time in quiet contemplation. I can imagine such a life might be attractive to a lot of programmers who tend to be introverted and feel alien to normal society.
Lovely imagery & idea, thank you.
Rather than focus on the negative motivations (be introverted and feel alien), i think often there's hope optimism & drive; more modernly especially, some are marked out from others by being inspired people, seeking to be active forces. Caring deeply about enormous possibilities trying to spring forth. Finding capacity for the cause, finding support or even just peers for those folks is hard.
Programmers have such amazing leverage, but most day jobs are just work. The idea of sustainable no frills living among other Burton Klein type-1/Happy Warrior types, able to pursue the thing & tangle with it & ideally also have others enmeshed in their questing too: that has huge appeal. It'd be such a worthy investment to support, imo.
I wasn't trying to determine why any individual might choose such a path. I was thinking about the population of programmers and considering that the stereotypical traits associated with that population do seem to align with a set of traits that are conducive to hermit-like or even brotherhood-like lifestyles. I did choose negative-sounding stereotypical traits to highlight that fact (although introversion isn't necessarily negative).
I would even argue that my own experience is that the population of programmers on average tend towards self-reliance type mindsets (e.g. Henry David Thoreau) a little bit more than socially active mindsets. However, I personally know a few individuals who are social activist types and also programmers.
Even when you consider "brotherhoods" you can think of multiple reasons why someone might want to join up. Perhaps the person desires a community of like-minded activists. In fact, that is how many brotherhoods would grow after their establishment. Combating the "incursion" of these community building types in some traditions appears to be a feature (e.g. vows of silence). I remember watching a documentary on splits in these communities for this very reason. Some hermits felt that structured communities with explicit charters went against everything they were trying to do (usually some kind of mystic communion with God or similar). So you can imagine a bifurcation of such a community into those who wanted to be socially active communities and those who wanted just enough collaboration with others to allow them as much individual freedom as possible.
I don't believe that one of those groups was "positive" and the other "negative". But I do think it is worthwhile recognizing the difference in mindsets. You said "ideally also have others enmeshed in their questing too" - however, that is not a universal ideal. Be careful you aren't forcing yourself into spaces where that isn't the goal.
amazing how the few "sweetheart articles" online fail to mention this.