Even the article's headline says his life wasn't ruined, but you have him on the brink of suicide?
Can we oppose drug laws without surrendering our critical thinking faculties? I'd like to think we can.
Can we oppose drug laws without surrendering our critical thinking faculties? I'd like to think we can.
For an otherwise lawful person to lose their career and most of the prospects for their near future, their schooling, a decent place to live, and be subjected to idiotic and hypocritical drug classes twice a week for a year, and then in turn to be given bad advice by their probation officer which leads to further punishments ... well, yes, despondency to the point of suicidal desires depends then entirely on the individual's emotional constitution. (Before you object to that, you should know that merely losing her job led to a downward spiral which has resulted in my mother attempting suicide three or four times -- that I know of -- and my father then attempting suicide just so that he wouldn't have to deal with her anymore.)
His record may have been expunged, but as he says in the article, that didn't matter once the various private background check organizations had gotten ahold of it.
I think the article did a pretty damn good job of a case study which should make "the system" look ridiculous and over-punitive in this instance. I think that the subject of the article made a good point when he said that it makes sense that many otherwise-lawful citizens might turn to illegal sources of income during a situation like this.
So I find him to be quite a sympathetic character. In what way am I surrendering my critical thinking faculties?
This person, on the other hand, "had his life almost ruined" because he went from stock broker to exactly that same kind of job after committing a felony. Note well: the rest of his punishment was "watching movies twice a week at Narcotics Anonymous for a year" and "9PM curfew for a year". The criminal record itself was expunged.
I think that you're understating the rest of his situation because it better suits your argument that his life wasn't ruined. For instance, yes, his record was expunged, however, as noted in the article, his record is still showing up in private background checks -- thanks in part to getting an extra year of probation after being charged with violating his probation because his PO told him it was OK to work late.
Had I not been as fortunate as I have been, that trashed credit report easily could have cost me the most lucrative tier of jobs available to me, because employers routinely screen applicants based on credit history.
Being screwed over by Sprint is not a felony. Similar screwups have no doubt cost thousands of people jobs.
I'm not sure what the appropriate public policy response to this situation is. We benefit enormously from employment- at- will. There are people on HN who will also convincingly argue that we benefit enormously from credit reports and credit scoring (among other things, the system we had before credit scores was overtly racist). It's a complicated issue and I have no glib answers to provide.