Working on databases from prison | Hacker News Reader

Working on databases from prison

turso.tech

849 pointsdvektor534 comments

Maine's remote work program is an incredibly promising development to prevent recidivism. The amazing thing about it is that it gives real jobs to prisoners that they can seamlessly continue after they get out of prison. Normally when you get out, it's impossible to get a job, and the clock is ticking. This leads to desperation, which leads to bad behavior.

There is a real risk of exploitation, but if it's properly managed, remote work for prisoners is one of the most hopeful things I've heard about the prison system. It gives people purpose while there and an avenue to success once they're out.

This sounds good. It is important that we recognize all of the purposes of punishment instead of overemphasizing one or neglecting the other.

Punishment has three ends: retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice; it is charitable and prudent to rehabilitate the criminal, satisfying the corrective end of punishment; and would-be criminals must be given tangible evidence of what awaits them if they choose to indulge an evil temptation, thus acting as a deterrent.

In our systems today, we either neglect correction, leaving people to rot in prison or endanger them with recidivism by throwing them back onto the streets with no correction, or we take an attitude of false compassion toward the perp by failing to inflict adequate justice, incidentally failing the deterrent end in the process.

Rehabilitation is retribution.

So many things can never have full repatriation. The best we can do is have society acknowledge, forcefully, the wrongs done via prison sentencing.

But then many countries go wrong on policy - punitive imprisonment leads to worse individual and social outcomes than a rehabilitation focus.

One of the most baffling elements of the justice system is how little the victim is involved in the justice. 'Society' should not lord the lion's share of the justice decisions over the victims. Quite often the victim would prefer compensation and release over getting fuck all while the perpetrator languages in prison at the tax dollar of the victim.

Much of 'justice' has been usurped from the victim into a jobs campaign for the state.

I think you're confusing or conflating civil and criminal courts. If someone breaks a law, that's generally a matter for the state to decide in a criminal court. If someone was damaged (i.e. if the victim feels the perpetrator owes them compensation), that's a matter for them to bring up themselves in the civil courts. These are separate functions; one situation could be tried in both courts. A famous example off the top of my head is that even though OJ Simpson wasn't criminally convicted of murder of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, a civil court found him liable, awarding tens of millions of dollars in damages, to be paid to their families.

There's no element of the civil trial I'm aware of that allows the prisoner to be released to perform activity to compensate the victim. In practice imprisoning the perp against the wishes of the victim robs them of their civil awards, either by delay or denial.

No, I don't think they are confusing those things. I think they are critiquing the system at large and are alluding towards alternatives such as restorative justice.

> A famous example off the top of my head is that even though OJ Simpson wasn't criminally convicted of murder of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman, a civil court found him liable, awarding tens of millions of dollars in damages, to be paid to their families.

The trick here is to be fortunate enough to have a biiiiig monthly retirement pension that the courts can barely touch, or enough wealth to have already bought your mother a nice house (though I now read OJ screwed that up by not transferring her the title).

https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/nation-world/1997...

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-dec-01-me-59847...

Distancing the victim from the outcome of sentencing is by design and, arguably, for the better in a democracy. Crimes violate the social order, not just the victim. It behooves us all to have a system wherein (in theory) the system, not the victim, applies a set of rules to determine punishment, as contrary as that might seem to one’s sense of self, morals, etc. It’s a part of why “justice is blind.”

Also victims are nearly always emotionally involved, and emotional-based decisions aren't generally good. Punishments would be much more severe if it were up to the victims.

If victims determined the sentences, I expect people would spend a lot more time in prison, way more than a non-emotionally involved and wronged person would think fair.

IMHO letting victims set the sentence would be the worst way to do it.

It'd be such a mixed bag it wouldn't resemble anything 'fair'. I know some people who are against capital punishment even for obviously guilty serial killers. I know some people would think capital punishment is called for if you accidentally dinged their car door.

Very well said. Here's a concrete example. After the Charleston church shooting, some members of victims' families forgave their murderer. Should that mean the shooter should have gone free? Certainly not, he was still prosecuted because that is what is good for society.

https://www.wbtv.com/2025/06/17/what-forgiveness-charleston-...

Most criminals aren't in a financial position to pay compensation. And even if you get a judgment, good luck ever collecting. When a drunk driver damaged some of my property I didn't bother sueing him because he was obviously a worthless deadbeat.

In most US jurisdictions the victim of a crime is allowed to make a statement during the sentencing phase of the trial. So the victim can certainly request release if they want it although the judge isn't obligated to adhere.

You are baffled by the western concept of justice.

In western philosophy an offender is considered to have offended against society even if their crime is of a personal nature. As such, they are tried, condemned, and punished by society according to codified rules. A victim, if there is one, is not really a part of this process.

There is a fundamentally sound basis for this philosophy, including equity (different justice for different people is no justice for anyone), impartiality, and respect for human rights.

There are other philosophies of justice: for example, the traditional "I'm strongest I get the best stuff" or "you dissed me ima kill you." Some are codified similarly to western justice ("killing a man is requires you pay his heirs 100 she-camels of which 40 must be pregnant, killing a woman is half that, killing a Jew one-third, and so on"). Others involve negotiation between victim (or their families) and offender -- which often works out well, since the offender is often is a position of power to start with and is very likely come out on top.

The simple "an eye for an eye" is just the beginning of a very very deep rabbit hole you can go down on the road to enlightenment.

I strongly disagree. The victim is generally deeply incapable of being objective about the situation. How many perpetrators of domestic violence would go free because their spouse is too scared to ask for proper punishment? This is already a big problem with securing cooperation for prosecution, and I'd aim to make that better, not worse. You'd have enormous disparities in sentencing based on the personality of the victim. Should mugging a vindictive asshole carry a harsher sentence than mugging a nice person who believes in second chances no matter what?

The justice system is pretty far from actual justice in many cases, but this wouldn't get it closer.

There are (institutional, complicated, well-ordered) civil and criminal systems elsewhere in the world where victims are much more directly involved in sentencing and punishment, and you probably wouldn't want to live in one.

There are certainly differing personal opinions on what they'd like to live under. For instance, Dutch lawyer Michael van Notten moved from the western to to the xeer system in the horn of Africa, and found it superior in his personal estimation from the perspective of serving victims, as documented in his book.

A clan-based blood-money system? I reiterate the claim I made previously: while you might enjoy reading about them, you wouldn't want to live under one.

I don't see it as a binary option. Why can't we learn from one another? I'm more interested in some of the elements found in for instance that system, where the victim can elect to prioritize restitution over retribution when it leads to a higher likelihood they will be made whole. I don't see any requirement that one has to embrace everything about a societies' system to find advantages in elements of it.

Well, I'll just say, when I referred earlier to institutionalized systems wherein victims are given principal roles in meting out justice, I was specifically using that word to contrast with things like xeer clan law --- a system you just implied might be superior to our common law system (it is not). There are "modern" legal systems descended from that kind of oral tradition honor law. You would not want to live under them.

Happy to keep nerding out on comparative legal stuff from around the world! Just keeping this grounded in "you probably wouldn't enjoy living somewhere where your landlord can have you imprisoned for unpaid rent".

I'll be honest, I have not seen a single implemented legal system I would like to live under, although that's not to dismiss all systems as equally bad. I was imprisoned in the USA once because an officer claimed a dog alerted, resulted in being stripped naked and cavity searched -- but that doesn't mean the entirety of our justice system is bad. Which isn't implied to be as bad as, say, a rapist getting away with it via a forced marriage as might happen under Shariah or xeer law.

The fact that someone can be temporarily jailed without any evidence or a change to challenge the charges is a painful compromise that the Founding Fathers made to balance justice (they themselves were at risk of arbitrary imprisonment by the Crown) with order (sometimes you see someone running with a bloody knife and you should arrest him before you trace his steps to find a corpse). Police departments try really hard to push what they can get away with, and there are certainly areas where I wish the courts would constrain them.

You're missing a function: Removal. Locking up criminals prevents them committing additional crimes that impact the general public. Data from the last few years shows that there's definitely a Pareto aspect to criminal populations, and absent an ability to rehabilitate, removal is the next best option for society at large.

I would argue that removal can be analyzed into the other categories, or into something that isn't the province of punishment.

1. the deprivation of freedom is retributive

2. the prevention of additional crimes can be said to be deterrence of an active sort

3. the protection of society isn't part of punishment per se, but a separate end

This becomes clear when we consider imprisonment in relation to various crimes. Violent criminals are imprisoned in part because they are a threat to the physical safety of others. However, is an embezzler or a mayor embroiled in shady accounting a threat to anyone's physical safety? Probably not. So the purpose of their removal is less about crime prevention and more about retribution.

The idea is that if they are making a rational choice to embezzle or not (and have other viable options for living), then knowing jail time is a possible outcome changes the expected payout equation. In that way it can be preventative, but only in those specific sorts of cases.

Would love to read into this research if you have a link or something to search

> Punishment has three ends: retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence.

One might argue a fourth end as well: removal.

When people talk about "cleaning up the streets" they don't mean causing ruffians to clean up their act, what they refer to is removing the ruffians entirely. To "someplace else". To "Not in my backyard". Out of sight, out of mind as is often said.

For profit prisons may view prisoners as cheap labor or levy bait, but for the voting public who gets no cut of that action the real inducement starts and ends with "make the problem go away". Sweep human beings we do not know how to cohabitate with under a rug.

Retribution may appeal to those directly wronged, or to the minority of sadists in a population. Deterrence is oft admired, but few honestly believe it's really possible given that harsh sentences never seem to cause crime to go to zero (sensationalism-driven media that magnifies every mole-hill notwithstanding) and that repeat offenses outnumber first offenses. Rehabilitation appeals to those with compassion, though nobody has a clear bead on how to actually land that plane with more than the lowest hanging fruit of only-slightly-off-course offenders.

So I think the real elephant in the room is that people want/demand/rely upon removal.

>harsh sentences never seem to cause crime to go to zero

Harsh sentences work great when used with the inevitability of punishment. It is obvious that a harsh sentence does not discourage a criminal to commit a crime if they expect to avoid any responsibility

Yeah, and part of the problem is that punishment cannot be made inevitable (any more than crime can be made "zero" as I'd inferred, despite what public expectation might look like xD).

First of all you have criminals who are low-functioning enough for whatever reason to fail to understand how actions connect to consequences in reality. Be it due to mental illness, or overestimation of their abilities. No amount of certainty is enough to dispel the "That won't happen to me" presumption from a pretty big chunk of the population.

Next you have desperate people: either due to "risking punishment may actually be safer than risking privation while obeying the law" and/or due to presumptions of having nothing left to lose.

And finally you have cartels, where folks organize so well that their internal governance and capacity to levy violence actually stands toe to toe against the civil governments that they operate within the jurisdictions of. This is the civil equivalent of a tumor, with all of the oncological complications that that often implies.

So I would caution that "inevitability of punishment" is an unreasonable goal to try to justify harsh sentences, and I would estimate that any historical accounts of governments who have achieved that feat were probably also totalitarian enough to be able to lie about their resulting crime statistics along the path.

I think there's also a fourth "end" to prison punishment, but I don't know the proper name for it.

It's when you remove the dangerous person from a society for a while, so they can't commit crimes for that while. This is very important part of prison punishment with people with criminal tendencies, and this is why recidivists get longer prison sentences for each subsequent repetition of a similar crime.

Unfortunately we have to admit that some (small) percentage of criminals cannot be rehabilitated, so they must be isolated from society.

The technical term is incapacitation. (Other commenters in this thread are also referring to it as “removal”.)

For criminals that act alone, variations in the severity of the sentence doesn’t seem to have the impact you might expect it to have on how much it actually deters people. (And there is the issue that people in prison can share strategies between themselves for how to more effectively commit crime, which is not an ideal outcome.) So indeed, incapacitation is a very important factor. When it’s studied, you often see numbers like “increasing the sentence by 10 years prevents 0.2 crimes due to deterrence and 0.9 crimes due to incapacitation”.

I say this applies to people acting alone because, although I have no proof, I suspect that organized crime is a bit more “rational” in their response to changes in sentencing. If sentencing were set up so that engaging in a category of crime was not profitable for the criminal organization, I’m pretty sure they would realize this and stop. This logic doesn’t apply to individual people, because the average person committing a crime has no idea what the sentence is or their odds of getting caught, and they obviously don’t do it often enough that the random variation is amortized out.

>"It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice"

Oh dang, there's that pesky religious mechanic again! Why can't we build on pragmatism rather than ensuring the Justice God has enough blood-years drained from criminal-victims? Two crimes don't make a justice!

Irrelevant addendum: I think I will mix atheism and anarchism as they are very compatible concepts, in that they stand in skepticism of essentially the same species of entity with two masks: church and state.

I've read the Bible. Especially as you get towards the end, the books don't seem to have an especially lofty view of the criminal justice system.

I will agree with you that a criminal justice system built "on pragmatism" would certainly conflict with the tenants of many world religions. I recently read Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal, which outlines why pure pragmatism needs to be tempered by a respect for, and indeed love of, every person accused or convicted of a crime.

It is important that you pay for your crime for the sake of justice

damn…

Do participants get paid a real wage?

Preston was free to negotiate his pay with us, and we pay him a full salary. Just no health care benefits.

Does he actually get the salary, or does the prison take huge overhead?

they take an (actually very reasonable) cut, but he is free to take his salary.

No cut is reasonable.

They need money to pay for oversight. Any time prisoners talk to someone on the outside, it's a potential conduit for contraband or organized crime.

The exact same is true of people working outside of prison.

I think it's reasonable to assume an additional risk for people in prison.

Even though the enrolled people are completely trustworthy, doing this prevents untrustworthy people to simulate interest in the program just to be able to contact the external world for illegal activities.

Not really, contraband includes many things that are completely legal for non prisoners to have like currency, phones, knives, or alcohol. Sending that stuff to prisoners is illegal https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1791

List of prohibited items: https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?width=840...

You can send phones, knives or alcohol via email or slack?

You can agree to pay for them at a given prices via email or slack. It’s more or less guaranteed that contraband will get into prisons if someone is willing to pay for it. Thus the rules around no cash or phones for prisoners.

Inmates are treated very differently by the legal system than regular people. Thirteenth Amendment: “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”

You can also do that via a butt phone, which are everywhere.

That heavily depends on the facility. Phones aren’t that difficult to track down as a radio device, but such efforts are rare.

Good point, in that case, let’s open it up and let it be a free for all. May as well let them take the drugs in through the front door, while we’re at it.

Of all the things to be concerned about you picked drugs?

I’m just using it to point out the stupidity of your argument. Don’t think too deeply about it, you might hurt yourself.

Shame this account doesn't have the flag button unlocked yet, because you deserve it. Maybe go read the HN guidelines?

Maybe check them yourself? I see nothing but sealioning in your line of questions.

I have no idea what you're talking about. Instead of waving around vague accusations how about you say what you mean?

“Sealioning is a form of online trolling where someone persistently asks insincere questions to provoke frustration, all while pretending to engage in a civil debate.“

That’s about as direct an accusation as it gets.

Sounds like you and the other commenter are trying to troll me into saying something inappropriate. Nice try, though.

Not Retric, no. He just gave the definition, and noted that scott_w was essentially accusing you.

People working outside pay rent. From a third to upto half their salary.

Why would it not be reasonable?

Google feeds staff members and provides rest areas , why are they paid?

For not going to work for competitors.

The government takes a cut then too, both from the employer and employer, in the form of taxes.

Which should be paying for the prisons and the operations society approves of to reform inmates. Prisons should not be a businesses of any kind.

I agree that a prison should not be a business (aka a different model than the US-model). I also think that many prisoners are currently treated unfairly.

However, ideally, I don’t think that it makes sense for someone to go to prison, which costs tax money, and meanwhile earn the same amount of money by remote working from prison as someone in the outside world, who actually has living expenses to pay for (which get taxed also).

So, I think, when it comes to fairness, it wouldn’t be unreasonable if a partial cut goes to the TCOO of holding that prisoner.

Now again, American prisons have their whole incentive model messed up, so I don’t even want to get in an argument about America’s implementation of this system and how it would lead to more problems— because it’s well-known and more than expected.

If my employer payed for my housing and food I would not consider it unreasonable that my paycheck reflected that.

> Why are they paid

Because people have expenses other than food and lodging. Prisoners do to, some save money for after they leave prison others spend it at the commissary.

Presumably the prison is providing the "office" where the person works from, the Internet connection, etc.

Also food and accomodation ..

1) How is this different from any other prisoner

2) They wouldn't have to if they didn't insist on locking him up

It isn't different from any other prisoner. In many states you leave prison owing them back rent. Maine at least charges as a percentage of the prisoners income, rather than having them build debt.

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/04/1084452251/the-vast-majority-...

Maine: https://www.corrections1.com/finance-and-budgets/maine-lawma... "the state can deduct up to 20% of their income — 10% for room and board, which is sent to the state’s general fund, not the Department of Corrections , and up to 10% to cover transportation provided by the department. Since 2020, the state fund has collected a total of $2.4 million.

"No cut" is reasonable, but also "Some cut" is reasonable. However while arguing that "no cut" should be mandatory is reasonable, given that "no cut" would itself be reasonable, it is probably not pragmatic. Therefore in order to best support this kind of thing one should determine exactly how much "some cut" should be.

Isn't this largely just a one off situation that happened to work out? I doubt there will be legions of prisoners working remotely. If that future did come to be, it would be rather dystopian imo.

if, right now, it is not dystopian, then there is no reason to say it would inevitably be dystopian if there were multiple occurrences, although sure, I expect it probably would be considering what the world is like. Of course I am the last person who one would expect to say it but - there is always hope.

More dystopian than people in prison not being able to prepare themselves for a life outside?

The moral hazard is rather high. At the limit, the entire white-collar work force is wrongfully imprisoned, working for slave wages.

. . . ok.

Perhaps it'd be an interesting SFF novel.

Don't you suppose that it's "fair" to request compensation for the room and board if the person is making a "fair" wage?

Forced room and board?

And also medical care. Literally socialism.

To be honest, if he didn't pay a cut of his earnings while living off government allocated funds, wouldn't that put him in a better position than those who haven't been found guilty and sentenced for breaking the laws of the land in which they reside? I can't see a much resistance to the argument that they one really ought to pay the full cost back to the state, as with community service... no?

No, for the simple fact that he'd still be stuck in an American prison where people are brutalized, sexually assaulted, denied access to medical care, abused by guards, etc. regularly. He deserves everything he is able to earn under those conditions, and truthfully it's a miracle he can work at all.

Americans have become too comfortable with their everyday sadism.

No. Prisons should cost society money. If you are taking away someone’s freedoms, there should be a high cost so you don’t do it flippantly when another solution will work.

Wow.

No, they forfeited their freedoms and we're put away by due process, but if that's your point of view then we've nothing further to discuss. Incredible stuff on HN these days.

Incredible for sure. To start with, it sounds like you think due process means that any kind or amount of punishment must be correct and reasonable, which. wow.

For starters this is just a complete non-comment. I mean there's no substance here.

And secondly, he has a good point. We don't want to make locking people up easy or cheap. It should be high-friction, it should take a long time, and it should cost the government lots and lots of money.

Why? Incentives. The government has no reason to prevent crime if locking people up is cheap. It's made even worse by the promise of cheap or free labor. Then, you run into issues where the government actually wants people to fail and do crime, so they can extract labor from them. We see this quite aggressively in some southern states like Georgia. A remnant of Jim Crow era America.

But, if prison is expensive, the government will be incentivized to put some of that money into crime prevention programs. Things like homeless shelters, food banks, job programs.

Are you concerned that if you make prison too expensive society might resort to capital punishment to reduce prison costs? Or we end up releasing prisoners who are legitimate dangers to society.

And to be clear, I'm opposed to capital punishment and dangerous conditions in prisons. I'm just pointing out that I don't think your argument is very good. If you think we as a society are willing to flippantly put people in prison because it's cheap I don't see how you can trust us to no resort to other flippant measures if the cost was high.

No, because they don't want to be there.

I disagree. The cut should support the program itself and then further offset taxpayer expenses related to housing, feeding, and caring for the prisoner. I could even see a case for taking it as a way of ensuring it was saved and returned at release.

Fuck no! Lowering the cost of keeping people in prison would make it even easier for the government to lock people up for smaller crimes and with bigger sentences. It's even worse with the privatised prison system that the US has. They already know the "market price" (what the government is willing to spend) so adding "free money" into the equation just makes it easier for them to raise prices and end up pocketing even more money than they already do.

Framing it as offsetting the cost would also make it very easy to increase the cut, bit by bit, until it gets to a truly unreasonable level. And since the person is already in prison and we have to pay for them no matter what, why would they choose to work if the deal is so bad?

It's even worse with the privatised prison system that the US has.

This is a state by state thing. FWIW in this case, ME doesn't have private prisons. I don't bring this up to imply everything related to their cut is on the up and up, however, I believe Maine is very much incentivized to make this a useful program in terms of keeping people from returning to jail (as opposed to squeezing every dollar from the prisoners).

Fix the problem then, don't perpetuate it. If you think the problem is corrupt and profiteering prisons that will turn to this type of shenanigans, there's a bigger problem to fix.

Huh? Universities take a 60% overhead in some scenarios.

The dude is is prison, slave like conditions are ridiculous, but there should be a healthy overhead.

Even in the case he doesn't, it's still an amazing opportunity to learn that would lead to a better future for sure.

Why not just pay them in exposure? I hope you can think about why the proposal in your reply is problematic.

Sounds fair, and it sounds like an excellent programme. I hope the developer's life continues on this new trajectory.

It's amazing. Absolutely insane that people are incarcerated so long for non-violent drug crimes, though.

Turso also looks really neat for small Payload sites.

Oh absolutely. Voters always favor harsher punishments or making things worse for those already convicted of crimes. You never get any more votes by pushing for lower punishments for any crime or by doing anything to reduce recidivism. I suspect that a pretty solid litmus test for "politician who is actually trying to make the world a better place" based just on how they vote for lowering recidivism.

Justification to abolish democracy, and because everything else is worse I guess we're going to have to go to a voluntarist ancap NAP-respecting society!

I agree with you. This is a crazy high sentence (15-30). But worth nothing that the fact pattern behind it was also pretty crazy.

"Non-violent drug crimes" brings to mind hippies selling weed or mushrooms. But this guy was selling carfentanil. I'm not saying he's to blame for the opioid crisis turning street people into shambling zombies, clogging emergency services with overdoses, and causing death, but he certainly played a part.

He played a lot smaller part than the Sackler family, who ran Purdue Pharma and pushed their drugs into communities. They killed a lot more people than this guy, and yet none of them are in jail.

The Sacklers are comfortably above the law and that's a bad thing, but that doesn't make small time carfentanyl operations any less bad

Evil is a threshold, it's not a competition with limited spots

Sometimes big crime families or notorious serial killers get away with it, but it doesn't lower the threshold for anyone else

It doesn't make it any better that someone else is doing even worse. You don't get to do a little crime, as a treat

"You don't get to do a little crime, as a treat"

Why not? I much prefer a society in which I can get away with some crimes to one where every crime is prosecuted.

Discretionary enforcement is just used as a way to disguise discrimination

Perhaps our laws would be fairer and simpler if enforcement were draconian and uniform

Very interesting spectrum you’re suggesting

The Singapore way

Better a potentially discriminatory society I'm the ingroup in, than a totalitarian utopia where every criminal rule is enforced mercilessly.

Only a minuscule portion of actual crime comes to the attention of the state.

Focus on the bad thing, not piling on the guy who is serving his sentence (while also making a new life for himself).

I wouldn't say he's piling on him, just replying to the guy aboowho made it sound like this guy is in jail for smoking weed.

A few years ago they would have been in jail. Pick the wrong state you still could end up in jail.

Punishing is always a recipe for they punishment going back to society

Evil is a religious concept.

Selling drugs isn't evil. Not selling drug doesn't make you good. People take drugs for various reasons. If a doctor sells them they are good but if someone else sells them they are evil?

The person buying could have been fired and can't afford Doctors prescription so the person selling could be an angel.

A doctor that over-prescribes them would be arrested, too. Or one that prescribed it to someone for a non-medical reason. (There are many of those latter docs.)

People that sell fentanyl (or similar) are very bad for society, to avoid the triggering "evil". Look how many people have died in the last 10 years. It's insane.

EDIT: I personally know a young man that died from a fent overdose and it's likely he didn't know what he took had fent in it. 22 years old and the whole world ahead him. Completely destroyed his family.

They would be arrested for over prescribing now. If you look at the state of the world 20 years ago or more it looks much different from here.

Evil is a moral concept, which is less tied to religion these days.

Drugs are an anti-social drain on society, that sickens its buyers, turning them into zombies or criminals, and turns the sellers into greedy, violent people who corrupt law enforcement.

Your edge case of an angel doesn't translate to the actual realities of drug trafficking and addiction.

Fentanyl takes the fun out of drugs and since its laced in every street drug these days it means that no drug is safe anymore.

It cannot be understated how harmful fentanyl is and how low quality of a drug it is. Low quality as in the high sucks.

(I've never taken drugs and I don't drink)

> Evil is a threshold, it's not a competition with limited spots

No, but our enforcement has limited resources. We can't arrest and jail every offender of every crime, so we pick and choose where to spend our enforcement resources. All the money spent pursuing, arresting, trying, and imprisoning this guy could have been spent going after people like the Sacklers.

Bush and his cronies resulted in the death of far more innocent people than your typical murderer. But we don't stop sending murderers to prison just because Bush/Cheney are not in prison.

I've voted for drug legalization (including possession). However, that doesn't mean that I condone all drug dealing behavior.

Whataboutism. Selling the drug he was peddling kills people. Lots of people. This is not a “no victims” crime.

EDIT: another commentor found that it was MDMA and weed, so this discussion is purely theoretical and doesn’t apply to OP.

MDMA and weed was his initial sentence. He's in prison now for selling synthetic opioids.

Yes, they should be in jail for longer than he is.

It took something like a decade to put Capone away. We still locked up murderers during that period.

The whole thread is silly. I don't think a lot of people here are going to stick up for a 15 year stretch for a 24 year old for selling opiates. Probably don't need to pull the Sacklers into it.

I don't think it is silly to be reminded of the inequalities of our penal system.

> But this guy was selling carfentanil

Do you have a source? It seems that guy was selling MDMA and marijuana. Here's the relevant quote from https://pthorpe92.dev/intro/my-story/

I was caught with MDMA coming in the mail from Vancouver, and some marijuana coming from california (the latter of which is what I am currently serving my time for right now)

From elsewhere in the thread:

* https://apnews.com/general-news-d68dca63e95946fbb9cc82f38540...

* https://www.doj.nh.gov/news-and-media/preston-thorpe-sentenc...

Gluing a few stories together (links included below where I'm not citing to your link) it seems like:

~2012 he was caught selling MDMA and marijuana, and went to prison

~end or 2015 or start of 2016 he was released on probation

[Edit: Added entry] December 2016 police responding to a domestic violence call enter his apartment to make contact with the alleged victim, and discover U-47700 (a synthetic opioid) https://www.courts.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt471/files/docu...

April 2017 the police find traces of carfentanil while executing a search warrant at his place - plausibly but not provably linked to some recent carfentanil deaths - and police announce they are searching for him. https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/man-wanted-suspected-let...

May 2017 he ends up back in prison.

Aug 2017 he pleads guilty to possession of U47700 (a synthetic opioid) with intent to distribute https://www.wmur.com/article/defense-plans-appeal-of-search-...

Oct 2017 he's sentenced to 15-30 years on the above charge, he has not been charged with possessing the carfentanil (yet) despite the apparent evidence https://www.wmur.com/article/man-facing-carfentanil-charge-r...

The articles aren't clear on this, but given his own recounting I assume that a suspended sentence for Marijuana was un-suspended as a result of the new charges and he is serving that sentence first, or concurrently.

Or he's downplaying the seriousness of the crime. Thanks for digging!

> He was picked up for breaking his girlfriend’s arm, a detail that’s missing from his own apologies.

I find it somewhat amusing that I woke up to this post at ~9 AM, and was surprised at the crowding-out of discussion about the article, by people sort of half-groping at a straw or two they picked up, trying to make a definitive case on his...goodness? morality?...based off the straw they're holding.

It is now 4 PM, about to clock out for the day because I gotta wait for CI run thats >30m. I come back here and it's still going on. This is #3 comment I see when I open HN, ensuing thread takes up two pages scrolls on 16" MBP.

It's bad of me to write this because, well, who cares? Additionally, am I trying to litigate what other people comment?

The root feeling driving me to express myself is a form of frustrated boredom -- rolling with that and verbalizing concretely, a bunch of people writing comments with the one thing they're hyperfocusing on their record to drive a conclusion on their value as a person/morality, and then people pointing out that's not some moral absolute, asking for links, discussing the links...

...well, it's all just clutter.

Or YouTube comment-level discussion, unless we're planning on relitigating every case he's been involved in.

This all would be better if it the kangaroo court stuff was confined to a thread with all of the evidence against him, so we didn't have a bunch of weak cases, or if people didn't treat this as an opportunity to be a drive by judge. Article def. ain't about his crimes, and he ain't saying he's innocent or an angel.

(and the idea that "drug crimes" implies "hippie selling weed or psychedelics" so calling them "drug crimes" is hiding the ball...where does that come from? Its especially dissonant b/c you indicate the mere fact he sold an opiod is so bad that this guy is...bad? irredeemable? not worth discussing?...so presumably you care a lot about opiods, so presumably you know that's whats driven drug crime the last, uh, decade or two?)

> trying to make a definitive case on his...goodness? morality?

Speaking for myself, I'm actually just discussing the idea that a non-violent crime like drug dealing necessarily deserves a light sentence in general.

> Sounds like a you thing

It is a me thing. That's why I said "brings to mind".

I'm a product of my time. I remember when weed and psychedelics meant demonization and heavy sentences, and it was absurd because those substances aren't that dangerous.

This is the context in which I'm accustomed to calling drug dealing a "non-violent crime". So, I feel like I need to point out that things are not quite the same with deadly drugs like carfentanil.

They are largely the same though. Small-time dealing of any drug is often just being the guy in your circle of users that does the group buying, maybe it was just your turn. Or your dealer says you can pay for your purchase by driving this package across town. Now you've been caught with enough pills to kill 30 people and the intent to distribute - is that an action that hits your threshold for heavy sentences and bad people?

No but this whole discussion hits my threshold on what the extent of government should be, and people need a lot more sovereignty from police/court harrassment than they get now. We live in a totalitarian police state and have for about a century now.

The state needs to get out of domestic warfare, war on drugs, war on poverty, war on crime, quit abusing its customers (aka "criminals"), and stick only to killing and oppressing foreign tribes! Put a 12 year cap on sentences, the state should have no right to take the life of its customer even if the taking is placing in a box. Also I would like to see UBI go to released felons first as well as the vote, as they have seen significant economic sequelae and injustice at the hands of the state!

Say that to the people he killed selling those drugs. This isn't weed, it's highly lethal pills.

If he killed anyone he should be charged with murder or manslaughter.

Many dealers and addicts who are involved in extremely violent crimes are plead down to drug crimes after having been charged with both drug and violent crimes.

https://www.courts.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt471/files/docu...

>"On December 24, 2016, three Manchester police officers responded to an apartment following a report of a domestic dispute. The report was made by the mother of Ashley Arbogast, who advised that her daughter had called her Stating that her boyfriend had broken her arm during an argument."

Ok, but we should punish people for the crimes they're convicted of, not the crimes we've decided for ourselves they committed.

He is being punished for what he was convicted of; whether you agree with the penalty or not. If we do change the penalties, the convictions will change too.

I just wanted to point out that there is clear evidence that this individual was involved in at least one violent act, as is often the case with ‘non-violent drug convicts’.

Any yet there are coke-cola machines everywhere including inside police stations which kills more people each year.

And only one company is allowed to import the specific leaves/material (coca leafs). The government restricts everyone from importing them unless it's one of the biggest companies in the world.

McDonalds had a location inside the hospital in my metro area. For at least decades, they finally left that location during covid, sometime.

i can't even, and it sounds made up.

A person can have an occasional Coke and it's perfectly fine. Fentanyl, not so much.

He didn't kill anyone, unless he misrepresented the product and the customer used the product incorrectly and died as a result. Even then there's argument for tainted product and considering the persecution around the industry, I as a juror would acquit any charge reliant on that as the underlying logic. Even then, if I foresaw more than 12 years sentence for anyone I would acquit and jury nullify on human rights grounds. Humans must be free. The big moral failure of modern states is their lack of unmolested opt-out.

People like big strong dominating government until it gets replaced with the Mormon church, or a Caliphate, then nooo it's not statesmanship but just religion. (Hint: all states are religions, and codes are religious texts. What do freedom of religion and freedom of association mean in this context, instead of the toothless safe-for-government one you're used to thinking of it in?)

One of the biggest problems with the prison system in the US is that prisoners are often saddled with the debt related to or imposed on them by their incarceration which they can't pay back.

The inability to find a job coupled with the crushing interest is what leads to desperation, and then repeat criminal behavior.

> There is a real risk of exploitation

Centralized systems always have a risk of corruption when power is concentrated in few people. Those job roles also many times attract the corrupt; and even when you have people who go in with a good moral caliber, the regular dynamics of the interactions may also twist them into being corrupt.

Its a rare person with sufficient moral caliber that can survive such a job (as a guard or other prison staff) unscathed and still be a good person afterwards.

Many avenues of education also do not prepare them appropriately for work in the private sector, and some careers are simply prohibited. For example becoming a chemist or engineer when they have a conviction related to ethics violations in such fields.

Wonder if they acquire the skills to break into systems, why would they choose not to do it in this crazy world out there? Particularly if somebody spends long time, or has spent so far.

How do they make sure the prison isn't just employing people already experienced in the field to make the prison money? How do they ensure people are treated fairly (normally prisoners aren't really even allowed sick days, they can't chose not to work overtime if required, etc)? Do they audit to ensure number of sick hours are comparable to non-prison work? Do they ensure prison guards bonus' aren't based on inmate performance (UNICOR does all of the above bad practices resulting in sick people being forced to work overtime in order to get the guards their bonus)?

UNICOR/the Federal system 'strongly encourages' people with CAD experience, etc do the McDonalds remodel contracts, the World Trade Center work, etc. These are people that worked in the industry prior to prison and that are not traditionally been hired back after release, so it's simply being used to make UNICOR money on big contracts based on incarcerated individuals pre-existing training being exploited. In addition having structural CAD work done by people with zero say in their job, their deliverables/quality, their hours, etc seems like a bad idea. I don't know why outside engineers are using this work. The UNICOR McDonalds remodels are probably fine (though you can tell by the current feel of McDonalds that the remodels were literally done by prison inmates), but the UNICOR World Trade Center stuff seems super sketchy.

Yep - turns out the Nordic countries had it right all along. When you focus on rehabilitation and not just punishment you get lower redicivism rates. Who would have thought it?

> When you focus on rehabilitation and not just punishment

From a book I recently read on the subject they seem not just to focus on rehab and lack of punishment. If there are disputes with others within the facilities the ones in the dispute must sit down and talk through their issues and find a resolution. This helps ingrain proper anger management & helps re-acclimate them to normal society where violence is rarely the best option. And it makes a ton of sense, if they never are taught how to talk out their issues they will go back to how they have handled those issues all along.

To be honest, that could certainly be filed under "rehabilitation". Giving people the skills they need to be productive members of society is definitely in that wheelhouse.

Fair I was thinking of the substance abuse definition, and hadn’t included enough into that word.

Up to a point.

Nordic countries have essentially exactly the same 1/3 two year recidivism rate as the US, the one exception being Norway at 1/5, and mostly not for rehabilitation policy reasons.

https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-myth-of-the-nordic-rehabil...

It depends on the crime IMO.

I live in Sweden and now the gangs are recruiting children because they don't get sentenced even for murder (maybe 2 years max).

The other side of prison is keeping the public safe - you also have zero recidivism with the Bukele approach.

Great story, I wish this inspired more prisons around the world to follow suit.

For those who don't want to hit Google, the conviction was for possessing 30g of a synthetic opioid "U-47700". A normal dose is ~1mg, 10mg can be deadly (so this was 30000 trips or killing 3000).

The drug became illegal across the US on November 14, 2016.

"Police said they found the drug in Thorpe’s apartment in Manchester in December 2016" (https://apnews.com/general-news-d68dca63e95946fbb9cc82f38540...)

"Preston Thorpe, age 25, was sentenced by the Hillsborough County Superior Court (Northern District) to 15 to 30 years stand committed in the New Hampshire State Prison for possession of the controlled drug 3,4-dicholo-N-[2-(dimethylamino)-cyclohexyl]-N-methylbenzamide (also known as "U-47700") with the intent to distribute. U-47700 is a synthetic opioid that is classified as a Schedule I drug." (https://www.doj.nh.gov/news-and-media/preston-thorpe-sentenc...)

Wow, 15-30 years seems like an insane amount of time for drug possession. Even if the amount implied dealing, that still seems really high. Don't people typically get less than that for sexual assault or armed robbery?

In Northern Europe you get less than that for murder.

Unlikely...He's an incredibly callous individual that was cutting drugs with a substance orders of magnitude more dangerous than fentanyl so he could drive an Audi and live the high life. Given that they tied several deaths back to his operation, and that it was a multi-state joint effort, I doubt he'd get a slap on the wrist by a European judges.

was an incredibly callous individual.

Agreed $&@!& him, and any company hires him

I don't know. If you are in posession of enough of a controlled substance to kill 300 people I'm kind of okay with a drastic response. For every Preston Thorpe who turns their life around there 100s of others who will just go out and keep endangering lives like this. I think this is a nuanced topic and 10-30 years is too much for drug possession is entirely lacking the necessary nuance to evaluate. Comparison to other crimes is not particularly useful either without going into the relative harms of each as compared to the harms of the other.

"enough of a controlled substance to kill" is an absurd, inflammatory metric. They guy was selling a good to willing and aware buyers and we have no reason to believe he was trying to kill anyone.

He shouldn't be in prison, period.

Drug dealers should face prison time. They know that they are breaking the law and potentially ruining lifes for their own profit.

I really doubt he told the buyers this was synthetic BS, more likely he lied to all his customers about the substance and thus could have killed them due to mis-dosing...

> They guy was selling a good to willing and aware buyers

In general, high-potency opioids are cut (diluted) with other powders and then sold as a different product to unsuspecting buyers.

Most fentanyl overdoses are from people who thought they were consuming a different, more familiar opioid. Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids like this one are preferred by drug dealers because it's much easier to smuggle a tiny amount of powder and cut it 1000X than to smuggle the real product.

It's nearly impossible for amateurs to properly dilute a powder like this, so the end product has a lot of "hot spots" that lead to overdose.

They're sold as some other known opiod and the dealers typically try to dose them to be equivalent because that's all they're getting paid for.

There is no incentive to give out "free drugs", not least because you might kill an otherwise paying customer.

> There is no incentive to give out "free drugs", not least because you might kill an otherwise paying customer.

I take it you’ve never seen Runaway Jury?

>They guy was selling a good to willing and aware buyers

How do you know that they were both willing and aware? Just how aware is your average drug buyer on what they're buying and how upfront your average drug seller on what they're selling?

>> to willing and aware buyers

This part is really debatable, based on what we're seeing with overdoses. The dealers (probably) know what they're selling but I'm not sure the buyers do, which even for a legal good would be a crime.

> They guy was selling a good to willing and aware buyers and we have no reason to believe he was trying to kill anyone.

People have already addressed the "aware" part, but "willing"? Really? Do you understand how addiction works?

I'd bet a lot of money that they saved some number of lives by catching him. He was engaging in an activity that had a high probability of resulting in some deaths. I can sell knives in a store, and I have a reasonable level of confidence that no one died because of those knives. Here, the probabilities are inverted.

> we have no reason to believe he was trying to kill anyone.

If someone gave a loaded hand gun to a small child, there might not be any reason to believe that this person was trying to kill the small child, but when the child inevitably shoots himself or someone else, the one who gave the child the gun in the first place shares at least some of the blame.

You may protest that children are not comparable to adult drug addicts; to this, I’d suggest taking a walk through any major metro area in America and deciding for yourself if “willing and aware” are appropriate words to describe these addicts.

How many deadly chemicals are in an average home? Every time I fill up my car with gas, I buy enough to commit dozens of cases of arson.

Intent matters and there's no reason to believe he intended to harm anyone. I believe it's a crime and should be a felony but this sentence is a bit extreme in terms of punishment fitting the crime.

> Every time I fill up my car with gas, I buy enough to commit dozens of cases of arson.

Did you read the link? They also found scales, baggies, and Carfentanil (a more potent version of fentanyl).

Filling your car up with gas doesn't compare. A better analogy would be if you tried to fill up a 10,000 gallon tank of gasoline that you couldn't possibly use yourself, all while having a truck full of matches and explosives, and a map to a building with a big circle around it.

No evidence this guy was trying to start a massive explosion with a single target. Most evidence is that he was trying to start a lot of tiny fires just like I could with the 20 gallons of gas that's in my tank. Except, not even that because he was just reselling the fuel and the consumer gets to decide how big of a fire they want to create.

Intent to distribute is a huge scam and calculates out to a unjustly long sentence for a lot of minor offenders. I'm not arguing it shouldn't be illegal or even tack on some extra time above just normal possession, but 15-30 years is absurd for what this guy did in my opinion.

Gasoline isn't a controlled substance for one.

the conviction was literally for the intent to distribute; RTFM

I read it and I simply don't think intent to distribute should be synonymous with intent to kill. There are violent crimes with actual victims that serve less time than this. This is a mathematical calculation of damage that could have been done in worst possible scenario, no evidence of that scenario playing out at all.

This math of weights and maximum hypothetical carnage produces very unfair sentencing.

Of course the decision is ultimately up to the individual judge/jury, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find one that would consider it reasonable that an ordinary dealing of drugs be akin to an "intent to harm".

Unless the circumstances of a particular drug transaction directly caused some other harm, like a fight, I highly doubt the charges would be considered 'violent' and hence carry the harm aspect.

I wonder what the sentencing guidelines are for possession of a firearm with enough ammunition to kill 300 people.

3,000 not 300 if my maths are correct (and lethal dose)

A pack of cigarettes is enough nicotine to kill a grown man. Provided you smoke them all at once.

It's a bad measurement.

Unless you do something so heinous it captivates the public or have a bunch of priors the only crimes that reliably will put you away for that kind of time are ones that the government takes specific offense to. Usually that means ignoring their monopoly on violence but seeing as this guy is behind bars for dealing and not murder I'd bet he just got unlucky and happened to sell the dose that some more equal animal or their relative OD'd on.

> Wow, 15-30 years seems like an insane amount of time for drug possession.

The sentence was for intent to distribute. It's an extremely potent substance. This would be like discovering someone had 30,000 pills. You can't really argue that it was for personal use at that point. They also found him in possession of carfentanil (a more potent version of fentanyl), scales, baggies, and other products. This looks like a very clear case of someone importing high-potency synthetic opioids to redistribute.

High potency synthetic opioids are a high priority target for law enforcement. These are most often cut (diluted) and then sold to buyers expecting some other opioid product. As you might expect, perfectly diluting a 1mg dose of a powder into a 500mg - 1000mg pill form is extremely hard to do and there's a high risk of "hot spots" forming in certain pills (or sections of a powdered product). This results in a lot of serious overdoses.

It's a severe problem right now. Most fentanyl overdoses are from users who thought they were taking some other drug. They might have even "tested" it before, but missed the hot spots.

I'll add on, he mentions in his blog that he was making "tens of thousands of dollars a week" selling drugs. He was not a small time dealer and certainly wasn't just buying drugs for himself.

His current sentence also (15-30 years) isn't his first prison sentence. He was released and reoffended which absolutely contributed to the longer sentence.

15-30 years is a bit heavy for 30 million doses even. 1.5-3 years is way more fair.

15-30 years of adulthood is like putting your child in timeout for 6 to 12 years (childhood being 0-19)! Is there anything your child could do to spend half his childhood living in a concrete room, maximum grounding? This is what we are doing to a man.

No. 12 years is public school length so that should be the life sentence, in the interest of keeping government in check. Think it's unfair in your case? Murder him when he gets out and serve your 12. Or... get over it, life goes on, etc. :^)

By what logic? I could just as easily say that 150 years is "way more fair."

A comparison with a literal child is disingenuous, children clearly aren't held to the same standards as adults.

in addition to the other comments, this was also not his first conviction. They get extremely punative.

In Singapore, it's the death penalty.

Preston's recent interview with the changelog podcast[1] explains that he's been convicted twice. Repeat offenders don't usually get light treatments.

[1]: https://changelog.com/podcast/642

Since the top comment seems to be judging the worthiness of this individual to work with databases after prison, for those considering working with or hiring someone with a criminal record, I'd beg you to consider:

You're hiring the person as they are today, long after any punishment, rehabilitation, parold, probation, and personal growth. Not who they were at the time of past actions.

Having your own mini trial, where you sit in judgement over the candidate, from your ignorant position of privilege, using whatever details you can dig up with google may be entertaining for you, but is tells you nothing of what kind of employee they might be. Your mock trial may be especially traumatic to endure for the candidate, because their side of the story is rarely included in any reporting you can dig up. Especially for those unfairly convicted.

With everything going on today, do you really trust our justice system to be fair, especially to someone who is not a wealthy and connected straight white male?

If you're only willing to give people a chance when you judge their offence to be trivial by your own ethics, you're not actually providing second chances for those that need it.

I'm not judging anything at all. What part of my comment makes you think I judge the worthiness? I just decided to share what the crime was since OP left it out.

To make it unambiguous I added a prefix: "Great story, I wish this inspired more prisons around the world to follow suit."

Your comment doesn't seem applicable to this scenario since this is not about "work with databases after prison" or "long after any punishment, rehabilitation, parold, probation, and personal growth". Even the title says it: "from prison". This individual is actually still undergoing their punishment, not long after it.

Turns out TFA lies on his blog:

> and some marijuana coming from california (the latter of which is what I am currently serving my time for right now). (https://pthorpe92.dev/intro/my-story/)

He's downplaying his crime. It wasn't just Marijuana.

Definitely a manipulative framing on his part. He originally was convicted for MDMA and marijuana, was released on probation and then was convicted for synthetic opioids. He's probably serving time right now for the marijuana for breaking his probation but he's not in prison now because of it.

> He was picked up for breaking his girlfriend’s arm, a detail that’s missing from his own apologies.

How does the compensation work? The US prison system has a bit of a nasty reputation when it comes to exploiting prison labor, so I hope those practices aren’t carrying over into these more forward-looking types of initiative… but at the same time, surely Turso isn’t paying full SWE salary?

Just curious, why would you expect him to be paid less? I know historically pay is bad for prisoners, but if he's working the same hours and is just as productive as any other employee, shouldn't he be paid the same? I could potentially see paying someone less if they were coming in with much less experience than what's usually hired for in the role, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

I speculate: Supply and demand. He doesn't have many options, so doesn't have leverage in negotiating.

Well that’s basically what I’m wondering. Is this a normal employment arrangement - subject to same state payroll tax, labor laws, employee rights, etc - with the additional detail that he resides in prison? Or does the employer need to go through some gateway enforced by the prison with maximum compensation or other restrictions?

But otherwise, in terms of why he’d default to being paid less… yes, what the other commenter said: supply and demand, aka leverage. Turso could choose to be a good citizen and pay him the same as any other employee, but that’s subject to all the questions I posed above, regarding the structural requirements placed on them as the employer.

I am the CEO of Turso. We are free to negotiate any salary we want with him, the prison system doesn't put any caps, up or down. We are paying him well, and certainly not trying to enslave him or anything. There are some restrictions on how the payments are made but not the amount.

We also don't pay him healthcare, because he wouldn't be able to use it.

I assume he doesn't have to pay rent while in prison and gets free meals, so unless they take some of his income, he might actually be doing pretty good.

The 13th amendment specifically allows slavery of prisoners.

Edit: I don’t mean to imply the author isn’t paid fairly by Turso. A few posts down, the CEO of Turso asserts that they do pay fairly. The OP in this thread might reasonably wonder about this because several states do in fact use prisoners as unpaid slave labor.

finally, someone who took a humanities class!

There are dozens of us. Dozens!

hacker news: a collection of the smartest tech minds on the internet, but only for code!

If I was a prisoner one day I think I'd rather spend my days in slave labor than weird ethno-status games.

It's unclear whether the carve out for prisoners applies to just "involuntary servitude" or "slavery and involuntary servitude."

In practice, only "involuntary servitude" has been used. "Community service" - unpaid - is a very common low level sentence.

The eighth and fourteenth amendments almost certainly forbid enslavement - permanently becoming human property - as a criminal sentence.

Even before the 13th amendment, enslavement as a punishment not common, if it happened at all.

There is almost no case law on the 13th amendment. There are no legal slaves in the US today, and there have not been since the 19th century.

If we pay people 40 cents an hour just to say they aren't slaves, they they are slaves for all intents and purposes. They are put in poor working conditions working for for-profit companies, making much less than minimum wage. How is it legal for the State to not provide sunscreen or shade for inmates doing outdoor manual labor?

https://theappeal.org/louisiana-prisoners-demand-an-end-to-m...

I don't disagree that 40 cents an hour is ludicrous and is only one notch above slavery, but I do think it worth pointing out that the work for 40 cents per hour is voluntary (i.e. they can quit or choose not to accept the work), whereas "slavery" is very much not.

In many cases the work is not really voluntary, there are sanctions for not taking it. Prisoners in some states are regularly put into solitary confinement for not "volunteering" to work these jobs (a punishment that some areas deem torture). With that amount of coercion I can't see them as voluntary, and so the slavery label is awfully close to the mark.

In those situations, I would agree that is pretty damn close to the slavery mark.

I've worked with a lot of prison facilities though in many states across the US and a few international, and have never seen that. That's not to say it doesn't happen of course, but out of curiosity do you (or anyone else) know of any facilities/jurisdictions that do that?

There is an example in this NPR article.

https://www.npr.org/2023/11/13/1210564359/slavery-prison-for...

A prisoner costs taxpayers around $50k a year on average in US. If their "take-home" wage is $0.40/h, it may still be generous.

That cost should be taken by our government and the tax payer, as a disincentive to locking people up.

If you can lock someone up and get close to free labor for it, then we're going to start locking a lot of people up. I mean, it's free labor. Which is why we used to give people 20 years for possession of marijuana. What, you think it's just a coincidence we were throwing primarily black Americans away in prison for ludicrous amounts of time where they'll spend their days picking cotton?

That's what happens when imprisoning people is cheap.

Do you think prisoners are literally picking cotton?

I don’t think, they literally are. Feel free to look it up. Our prison labor systems in the south are direct descendants of Jim Crow era America.

In some states like Louisiana, picking cotton is still something some prisoners do.

If a prisoner costs $50k a year, and "if" he would work a job where he would make $50k a year and if he didn't receive a dime from it, does it look to you like a free labor? He merely makes up for what he costs the system, not taking into consideration the likely damage that he has done that made him end up in prison in the first place. And I don't expect prisoners to have anywhere close to $50k salary jobs.

The problem here is you’re really asking for abuse with this mentality.

Prisoners should cost money, lots and lots of money. Otherwise we might just decide to imprison you and extract your labor. And that is exactly why we used to see 20 years for possession.

What, did you think we were just burning money for kicks?

That's what I tried to refute in my previous comment. So in case I miss something, explain to me how is it economical for someone to enslave you, if it costs him $50k/year and he will almost certainly extract less value from your work (from data i found $20-$25k/year jobs are common for prisoners). That's the exact opposite of free labor. It is very expensive labor. I would agree if the cost was like $10k and you would extract considerably more from the job done. But it is not the case. Maybe in countries where they don't spend much on prisons what you say works. I don't think it does in US or in any other developed country

Government is not a business, nor is it 0-sum. Well-functioning societies with low rates of recidivism invest much more in their prisoners. We should be investing money into prisoners, so that they can re-integrate into society and become successful tax-paying citizens, just like the premise of the blog post we are commenting on. As the co-founder said, the Department of Corrections in Maine takes a cut of the inmate's salary.

NPR did a great article on the prison system in Norway: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/31/410532066/.... They are quoted as spending $90,000 per prisoner with a recidivism rate at half the US rate.

Cheap labor is still valuable, I don't know what to tell you. 20k salary net is very cheap. I don't know why you think it's expensive, because it's not. What you're maybe missing is the job needs to be done regardless - it's not like if we stop using prisoners for labor that need for labor just - poof - disappears.

Do you mean that the benefit of cheap labor goes to private companies, but the cost stays with the taxpayers? If so, I see the logic. If we are talking about imprisoning someone, because we get cheaper labor for example inside the prison, than that doesn't make sense. Of course I count that the job needs to be done.

Scenario A (person not imprisoned):

- Prison cost: $0

- Labor cost: $25k (hire someone)

- Total cost: $25k

Scenario B (person imprisoned):

- Prison cost: $50k

- Labor cost: $0 (prisoner does it)

- Total cost: $50k

You can make the exact same argument about employers paying different rates depending on the country the employee is based in, and for all the same reasons.

Is there a good reason why a developer in Thailand or India should be paid less than their colleague who works on the same team, but is based in the US? Many companies believe so - there's a significant difference in the cost of living between those two employees, and employers believe it is fair to adjust the salary to provide a similar quality of life to both.

Equally, a person incarcerated in New York City doesn't have the same living costs as a person who has to live in New York City, so you could reasonably argue that any "Cost of living premium" that a company offers to NYC based employees doesn't need to apply to a person who doesn't experience those higher costs.

> and employers believe it is fair to adjust the salary to provide a similar quality of life to both

That's bullshit. E.g. electronics cost the same in all countries.

Actually, no they don't. With various forms of VAT and tariffs, things definitely do not cost the same in all countries.

The point is that they are definitely not cheaper than in the US

Is that true still? I don't go searching prices in foreign markets, but something like the RPi being a UK piece of kit seems like it would now be more expensive in the US compared to UK simply based on recent tariffs being applied.

I generally pay 2x-3x the US price.

There are definitely countries with more expensive electronics.

Sure, but how much of your wage do you spend buying electronics? The vast majority of my salary goes to fixed expenses like housing, food, healthcare, energy, and transport. Those are all highly location-dependent.

In location A you might spend 80% of your salary on fixed expenses, whereas in location B you only need to spend 20% of that same salary to pay for those expenses - leaving you with far more money for discretionary spending.

For sure, but that doesn't justify doing that per country. If you live in SF you could be spending 80% on fixed expenses, but I'm sure that in the US there are places where you could be spending 20%. This applies to other countries as well.

Most companies doing cost-of-living adjustment do it on a finer scale than just country. Someone in SF will indeed be paid more than someone in Dustbowl, USA.

Except prison has some very key differences from living freely in another state or country. You cannot leave and so don't have a choice about where you work. Even if cost of living is low in prison, you often still have to pay for being there and wages are far less than the cost. A prisoner will be released one day and their cost of living will skyrocket overnight. Do we want motivated hard working people leaving prison with nothing so they end up back in the same environment that got them there in the first place?

> Is there a good reason why a developer in Thailand or India should be paid less than their colleague who works on the same team, but is based in the US?

Yes, and that reason is that people in most of the developed world are free to say yes or no to job offers based on their individual preferences. And, it just so happens, in Thailand and India there are many people who will happily say yes to offers that people in the US would say no to. The cost of living explanation that companies give is illusory; the reality is that they have to pay enough to get people to say yes.

Now, you might ask why people in different countries say yes to offers at different compensation levels. But I think the answer is self evident: people will say yes to offers when they believe that there are lots of other people who will say yes to it. Under those circumstances, saying no won't earn a higher offer but cause the company to give the job to someone else.

Ultimately, then, regional prices are set by what the locals are generally willing to say yes to.

My understanding is that top talent gets top pay, regardless of their living arrangements.

Mediocre talent ... maybe not so much, but these are also the folks that could be replaced by AI.

> My understanding is that top talent gets top pay, regardless of their living arrangements.

Indeed. Top talent can say no to lower offers because they are confident that companies are unlikely to find other top candidates who will say yes.

>Many companies believe so - there's a significant difference in the cost of living between those two employees, and employers believe it is fair to adjust the salary to provide a similar quality of life to both.

What a complete bs. If anything, in India it costs MORE to achieve a similar standard of living than in the USA. In India you can spend 3 times what a US worker gets paid - and you'll barely have enough money to get the same level of security that that worker gets.

Companies don't care, they pay the minimum amount that they think will interest the worker for long-term employment. And since in India or Thailand the workers don't have such a wide choice in work - they will be paid less, just enough to get them. And they pay the Americans just enough to get them, it is just happening that for Americans this amount are several times bigger. That's all here is.

I guess if you look at pay as solely a result of 'work done' you'd come to this conclusion, and it should work this way, but really its got more to do with the relationship between employer and employee. A person in prison has a very different legal status than someone who doesnt and they do tend to get paid less.

> but if he's working the same hours and is just as productive as any other employee, shouldn't he be paid the same?

He should, but the median salary of engineers in Taiwan is like, 40,000 USD, vs SF which is 160,000 USD. Or London, if one wants to argue something about English language ability or whatever, is 80,000 USD. Literally half that of SF.

Salaries aren't determined by labor value, they're determined by how well employers can collude in a region to get the lowest possible rate while still being able to hire people. Thus they somewhat tend to correlate with cost of living, but not really, e.g. see London vs SF vs NYC. All correlations are used as excuses, when the core, real, reason always comes down to, employers will pay as little as they can get away with.

This annoyed me enough that I started a co-op about it, and we're doing pretty well. I'm still annoyed though. Apparently glommer, the CEO, pays him "full salary" (market rate?), which makes them a good person, but a bad capitalist. They could easily pay basically a slave wage and leverage this dude's ingrained passion for programming to get huge output for almost nothing - that's what the rest of the industry merrily does.

>Salaries aren't determined by labor value,

In a free market, very little is determined by its "value". Clean drinking water costs pennies, but its value is far higher. People in developing countries routinely spend hours a day getting clean water, which works out to a price far higher than even bottled water from for-profit companies.

>they're determined by how well employers can collude in a region to get the lowest possible rate while still being able to hire people. Thus they somewhat tend to correlate with cost of living, but not really, e.g. see London vs SF vs NYC.

Is there any evidence there's more collusion happening in London?

>employers will pay as little as they can get away with.

You're making it sound like this is some sort of profound insight, or that companies are being extra dishonorable by doing this, but literally everyone in an economy is trying to pay "pay as little as they can get away with". When was the last time you tipped a gas station?

> they're determined by how well employers can collude in a region to get the lowest possible rate

Colluding is only one of the factors that influencing the demand for labor. Moreover, in most regions it is a rather insignificant factor. Typically, this is the degree of economic freedom, protection of investments and capitals, the level of regulation and the tax burden in the region, not the degree of colluding.

> good person, but a bad capitalist.

Capitalism is not about evaluative characteristics, but about descriptive ones. It is not "bad capitalists pay a lot, good ones pay the minimum", but about "people tend to pay minimum, so to pay the minimum is expected behavior of capitalists"

>but if he's working the same hours and is just as productive as any other employee, shouldn't he be paid the same?

Why would the salaries all bump up to big American city salaries instead of resting somewhere in the lowest range worldwide? If we purely judge work completed.

If you're a remote worker your competition is the world not people in the major city the company is based in.

Because US constitution forbids slavery except as a punishment. A lot of prisoners doing labour right now are compensated literally pennies.

Because the level of payment almost always depends on the level of competition for a particular person's work. When you're in prison, there's practically no competition for your work. So it's expected that he'll be paid much less.

I am the Turso CEO. We pay him a full salary, just not health care benefits.

What you're doing is really wonderful.

I am just blessed and thankful that the Lord decided to give me a chance to help what HE is doing on Preston's life.

I've done nothing.

Amen.

yuck

Your doing the Lord's work.

Even if you just paid him the state minimum wage, it would stop him from having a giant employment gap.

The next step would be background check reform. A DUI record isn't relevant to anything not involving driving.

Excluding a very small handful of SVU level crimes everything should be wiped clean after 5 years or so.

I had an experience with a co worker who would brag about robbing people, selling substances and when he got caught his family money made it go away. He's a CTO at a mid sized tech company now. Had he been poor he'd have a record and be lucky to work as a Walgreens clerk.

Was the biggest "tough on crime" person I've ever met. I think people with means don't understand if you don't have money you can't afford bail.

Can't afford bail you'll just be indefinitely detained without trial for months if not years.

Everything about the criminal justice system is about exploitation. Get house arrest, that's a daily monitoring fee. States like Florida are forcing released inmates to repay the state for the cost of incarceration.

It's past fixing tbh, I'm personally hopping to immigrate to a functional country soon.

The Lord is doing His work, in Preston's heart. I am very humbled to given a chance to be a part of this.

Reformed?

If you are asking me about my religion, I am a Catholic convert, after 20+ years of obnoxious militant atheism.

"Militant", really?

I don't read this as he thinks all Atheists are militant, but that his own behaviour was obnoxious? If so, many of us have met those.

It's nice to hear about someone who can change their mind so completely; the trick is not to swing to the other end of the spectrum, trading one absolute for another.

Militant atheists tend to embody anti-theism. It typically manifests as active desire to dissuade anybody from holding religious beliefs or performing religious practices.

Any clergy, whether faithful or secular, has the capacity to act in a militant fashion.

This is well said. I enjoy reading Ryan Burge's articles about religion. He delves into the stark differences between, as you say, "anti-theism" and the "nones" who are not a member of any religious group whatsoever.

yes, and obnoxious too. You should have seen me.

Indeed HE is! Many prayers are being answered! Thank you!

> Excluding a very small handful of SVU level crimes everything should be wiped clean after 5 years or so.

My understanding, is that's what the UK does, with an exemption for certain jobs, like teachers and creche hosts. In the US, I think some states have the ability to expunge convictions. Not sure about federal crimes, though.

The "scarlet letter" of a past conviction is a very real issue, and keeps some folks down. People can get past it, though. I know folks that served time for murder, that have very good careers, and people that have misdemeanor records, that have always struggled.

My state will automatically expunge non violent misdemeanors after 2010, so if it happened before you have to jump through hoops.

I know people who dropped out of college because they had a very small drug charge, no use in finishing if you will have a scarlet letter over your head forever.

That's really unfortunate. I work with people who were formally justice-involved every day and their educations have been an aid to them personally and professionally. A felony or a "bad" misdemeanor (e.g. domestic violence) isn't the end of the world, even in the modern US. People can and do overcome the consequences of their mistakes and thrive.

Different states have rules about expungement, as far as what happens automatically, what can be done if an offender convinces a judge, and how much it all costs.

Federal crimes (and I don't think that applies in this person's case since they're in a Maine DOC prison, although drug crimes of this kind easily could be charged by the feds) aren't usually expunged. Even if you receive a pardon, the original crime (and a note of the pardon) will exist on the record.

It's a really strange system. You're meant to lie and say "no" during interviews after your conviction is expunged if you are asked "have you ever been convicted of a crime," although I believe in many states it's now illegal to ask such a question.

> Was the biggest "tough on crime" person I've ever met. I think people with means don't understand if you don't have money you can't afford bail.

Or maybe they do understand. This kind of politics ensures the privileged stay privileged.

> The next step would be background check reform. A DUI record isn't relevant to anything not involving driving.

This is already the case in some countries, including The Netherlands. A background check is done for a specific "profile", and convictions which aren't relevant for your job-to-be don't show up. Someone with a DUI can't become a taxi driver, but they should have no trouble getting a job as a lawyer. Got convicted of running a crypto pump&dump? Probably can't get a job as a banker, but highschool teacher or taxi driver is totally fine.

A surprising number of US states also drop crimes from your background checks or legally forbid them from being used against you after so many years, 5-10 on average, as long as they aren't directly related to the job.

https://ccresourcecenter.org/state-restoration-profiles/50-s...

>Excluding a very small handful of SVU level crimes everything should be wiped clean after 5 years or so.

It's nice to think that people should be able to fully pay back their debt to society but (a) criminal court proceedings need to be public in a free society and if they are public, people should be able to record and distribute the results as private citizens if we believe in upholding the principle of freedom of speech.

Even if it were possible to prevent this, (b) this does a small but not entirely negligible harm to people that never committed a crime by casting some doubt upon them. This is most apparent for minority groups that are associated with criminality; they experience worse employment prospects when the state makes criminal records unavailable.

Criminal records should be available, but in a controlled way.

Where I live (Poland), only the person itself can request their criminal record from the state. This is a routine procedure required by some employers, you can even do it online these days.

Most if not all criminal offenses "expire" after some years, how long depends on the offense. If there's something you've been charged with but not convicted of, it doesn't appear on the record.

This is easier to implement for us because there are limitations on how media can report on criminals (no last names for example). Even in the US, I think that system could be workable. Instead of attacking distributions of "unedited" criminal records, you'd have to target employers and require them to only acquire the state-approved versions.

> Your doing the Lord's work.

Excellent marketing. They get a remote worker who is (in HN headhunter speak) a great and passionate talent. Of course they have no risks on their side. And they get praised for it on the very grassroots YC Combinator forum.

Is he paid in dollars or in cigarettes?

Bravo Zulu!!!

People like you give me hope for the world.

How does it exactly work in a scenario like this? Do you just pay to his account, or does it somehow go through the prison system?

/me putting on my Law & Order hat

Why should the taxpayers be burdened by the results of his bad decisions?

/me takes off hat

Because that's what a social community would do. But where you probably are, such an approach is falsely labeled as “communism” by MAGA anti-social assholes.

false labeling- Your lack of introspection is wild lol

Ad Hominem is only bad if it's used against my in-group

how does the taxpayer benefit from the inexistence of rehabilitation programs?

It's not mutually exclusive.

Someone can both work towards rehabilitation and pay their 'debt to society'. If they earn over what it costs to house them in a Maine prison then, by all means, let them keep the excess earnings. If they earn $100k/year and the state pays them $1.35/hr then there are deeper institutional issues around prison labor exploitation which should be addressed.

I used to have an uncle who was constantly in and out of prison over drug-related issues and he would do all sorts of work programs just to break up the monotony. Ironically, none of these rehabilitation efforts did any good and what finally 'set him straight' was the Three Strikes Law.

Taxpayers are clearly wasting money on this guy.

Sounds like he gets out in 10 months, and an incredible amount of money gets spent keeping him there.

I wrote a letter to the judge to support his early release. My initial plan was to hire him once he was out. I am very sad he was denied his request.

Imprisoning someone is also a great harm. That harm should have a cost, so that it is not employed flippantly.

> The US prison system has a bit of a nasty reputation when it comes to exploiting prison labor

Do you mean for private interest? If so, I would agree that prison labor should only be used for public benefit. And this labor should be part of the sentence.

Setting up an inmate for success after release is a public benefit IMHO.

Absolutely. But this is a separate question.

No, it's related. In programming, the only employment options are working for a government, for some corporation, or trying to sell directly to individuals?

Somebody who had worked for a recognizable tech company is far more hireable than somebody who is Self Employed or who has worked for the government.

But that's not prison labor. Prison labor specifically refers to penal labor. You receive no pay, because the labor is part of the punishment for the crime. It is the prisoner who is paying off his debt. In those cases, I don't think it is moral for private companies to make use of that labor for private gain. Penal labor should only be used for public benefit.

Here, we're talking about preparing someone for the job market when they leave. Hence, these are two separate concerns. You cannot substitute the former with the latter.

What is your ethical concern in this particular case. The remote work privileges seem to be setting him up for success after he leaves. The company he's working for doesn't seem to be unfairly exploiting his labor. This seems like a great success story for the Maine department of corrections. Who is being harmed here?

To me, it looks like a net benefit for the public, the department of corrections, and the inmate.

If you are worried about the inmate being allowed to build up savings that they can use when they are released, then that's on the judge. If the inmate has met their restitution obligations, then I don't have a problem with them being allowed to leave prison with savings that will enable them to get back on their feet again.

Preston, great to see you made it this far!

We emailed, back when the post about your circumstances was shared here in Nov. 2023. I knew you'd see success.

Huge shoutout to Jessica and UL for all the work they do, and here's to a bright future ahead for you =)

Thanks Gavin! Really appreciate the support.

what if prison ends up becoming the most distraction-free dev environment. no meetings, no slack pings, no linkedin recruiters, just you, a terminal, and 10 years of uninterrupted focus. kinda terrifying how productive that sounds

No pings, just people who may decide to shiv or rape you

Nobody gets shivved or raped in the kind of low-security prisons where non-violent criminals go.

It’s more rare sure, but it still happens. Either way my point was that romanticizing prison is a terrible take

Don’t give our overlords any ideas. Open plan offices are bad enough.

Something like prison probably is the most productive environment one could be in. It almost completely eliminates the need for self discipline because it's all enforced.

If you're not dating anyway and don't own your house outright prison with computer access honestly doesn't sound bad at all.

No need to worry about rent, no need to worry about healthcare, no need deal with all this social crap.

When I had a <3 year old demanding child I often thought about how relaxing prison would be, with relatively normal set sleeping, work patterns, and in some prisons guaranteed personal space at night with at worst an adult roomate.

Just the thought of maybe being able to peacefully read a book for 30 minutes, at times I almost wished to be imprisoned...

So two more years to go you say…

this is something you can freely achieve for yourself without prison -- no need to speak this evil into existence haha.

Not rent, just crippling debt: https://apnews.com/article/crime-prisons-lawsuits-connecticu...

that is horrifying. i really wish i hadn't read that. we live in a cruel world.

What are disadvantages of living in prison?

Disregarding the lack of anywhere to go, and assuming no enemies within the prison, I see no disadvantages.

How's the food in prisons?

You never go on vacation. Your family gets sick. Your friends need your help. You want to travel. You want to go to funerals for people who aren't in your direct family. You want to explore hobbies.

Idk, a few?

You're essentially designated a human of lesser value, which means nobody really cares about you. If guards harm or sexually assault you, nobody cares. If other prisoners harm or sexually assault you, nobody cares. If you get sick, nobody cares. You will not receive good care in any sense of the word. If you have mental health issues, may God have mercy on your soul.

Almost sounds like you haven’t watched season 3 episode 9 of a little documentary called The Office.

PaaS - Prison as a Service

Terrifying that slinging code for years on end is what one aspires to as a free individual pondering asceticism.

You can have that now on the outside if that’s what you want. Start with one room in your house. Remove everything but a dedicated cheap computer and a table and a bed and a bottle of water. Strictly limit the apps you can use or the sites you can access.

The scary thing is that Maine is considered progressive for prison.

My former (brilliant) student developed schizophrenia and tried to rob a bank with a gun because the voices told him to do it. He got 10 years in jail. I think every EU country would treat him for his condition until he was safe to rejoin society. In the US, he was thrown in the slammer.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/irishman-jailed-for-10-years...

> I think every EU country would treat him for his condition until he was safe to rejoin society. In the US, he was thrown in the slammer.

From the article, his parents express frustration at their inability to get him committed for treatment in Ireland. They cite the lack of response there as a key factor in his spiral.

Also, the US facility he was sent to did offer psychiatric treatment and the judge urged him to accept it:

> The judge recommended that Clarke serve his sentence at a prison that would give him access to psychiatric treatment and he urged Clarke to accept it.

I understand your objections to the “slammer” but the sentence was actually as lenient as could be, offered the psychiatric treatment he needed, and had an opportunity for him to return to Ireland in a couple years:

> Speaking on behalf of the Clarke family, solicitor Eugene O'Kelly said that they were relieved at the relative leniency of the sentence and expressed the hope Clarke could be returned to Ireland "within a year or two" to serve out his sentence.

Not everyone is capable of reading an article :)

Why do you call it a facility?

Do i need to explain the difference between treatment at a pyschiatric center vs the offer of psychiatric treatment in a prison?

If you think they are somehow equivalent, you are very much mistaken.

You are putting somebody with pyschiatric illness in with hardened criminals. Do they welcome him with open arms?

> difference between treatment at a pyschiatric center vs the offer of psychiatric treatment in a prison?

The first was rejected by Mr Clarke's own country before committing any crime. The second was offered following a crime which could have cost somebody their life.

It's a very clear difference in my mind.

You're talking out your arse now. This is not true: "The first was rejected by Mr Clarke's own country" The country didn't reject it. He refused to get treatment and actually fled the country to escape it.

So, a crime is a crime even if it is committed by somebody who is insane?

That is insane!

The article you linked quotes Mr Clarke's father:

The hardest thing in my life was to sign a committal form to send Niall to hospital.

And follows with

Irish health authorities refused to commit Clarke

That sure sounds like Mr Clarke's country refused to treat him.

And to your points:

> He refused to get treatment and actually fled the country to escape it.

What you are saying and what I said about Mr Clarke's country refusing to treat him can all be true at once.

> So, a crime is a crime even if it is committed by somebody who is insane?

Is a crime committed by somebody who is insane, who refuses to get treatment, and who flees their own country in avoidance of treatment, a more acceptable crime?

Just because your parent signs a committal form to send Niall to hospital, doesn't mean he is committed. The reason he wasn't committed was because he was not violent. There needs to be evidence of harm by him to himself or others. The country did not refuse to treat him. They followed the law at the time.

Your lack of heart and compassion is shocking, tbh.

This just does not sound right to me.

I want mentally ill people committed when signs of potential violence are evident, before they cause harm to themselves or anyone else.

> My former (brilliant) student developed schizophrenia and tried to rob a bank with a gun because the voices told him to do it. He got 10 years in jail. I think every EU country would treat him for his condition until he was safe to rejoin society. In the US, he was thrown in the slammer.

Is the story supposed to be more sympathetic because he was (brilliant)?

Putting brilliant in parentheses indicates that it is parenthetical. That means it’s an aside, an afterthought, or additional information that isn’t essential to the main point of the sentence.

What is your point?

I think you have rather rose-tinted view of justice in the EU!

I'm glad to hear accounts of people in the prison system who are given the opportunity to do some good. While I am admittedly less sympathetic of dealers, the fact that the author recognises that they were in a bad situation and have been able to make positive progress since being given the opportunity to is really nice to hear

I don't know the circumstances of this case, but in many states, e.g. Texas my home state, simply having above an arbitrarily defined amount of a given controlled substance automatically gets you tagged with "intent to sell." An overloaded court system combined with a pay-to-win "justice" system means a lot of people take the charge in their plea deal even if they aren't dealers.

In the part 1 article, the author mentions "making tens of thousands of dollars a week" in relation to drugs, which is why I talked about dealing. Obviously I've got no proof of that or anything, so I'm happy to be proven wrong.

Drug charges are difficult. In my opinion, if you are using drugs personally, I don't really see a problem. If you commit some crime while under the influence which could harm another person, eg driving while drugged, obviously that's a different story, and coercing other people into it isn't great either, but if you're just smoking in your own home, its your body that you're altering. If you're selling to other people, that feels a bit more iffy to me because you're affecting other people with that... though I do realise that preventing the sale is effectively the same as preventing the usage...

When it comes to selling, the nature of the drug also matters IMO. I don't have a problem with people selling stuff like cannabis or LSD to consenting able-minded adults, but given the nature of opioids, there's no responsible way to consume them outside of medical necessity.

Without judging this guy's current state, he makes it clear in his first blog post that he was a dealer.

"So instead of coming back home broke and apologetic, I ended up pretty deep into this and soon was making tens of thousands of dollars a week, very much unapologetically."

Then, after his first sentence:

"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: and obviously, was back in prison after a short 14 months of addiction and misery."

Yes unfortunately for a long time my whole life revolved around 'drug culture', and so did of all my 'friends' and my entire social circle.

I certainly cannot act like I did not deserve to come to prison, and it's definitely the only reason I am even alive right now. Coming to prison, specifically in Maine, was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Well, yeah, selling drugs is bad, but it keeps happening and nothing we're trying is stopping it. Clearly, the fact that people end up in prison isn't disincentivizing people from choosing the 10-15k in their pocket option. Humans aren't good at understanding risk or connecting long term consequences to short term actions, in aggregate. We should design our society around this fact.

Hence why I typically argue for legalization and regulation. You have a pretty unique perspective though. I suppose in your position you're incentivized to always say you did the wrong thing, drugs are bad, etc etc, but to the extent you're able to discuss it, what's your take on arguments for legalization and regulation?

Yeah, the really interesting thing there for me wasn't what you did, it's the clarity with which you presented your options as you saw them at the time. I am firmly pro-rehabilitation and that means I've got to be aware of the obstacles to getting out of that culture.

Prison is about rehabilitation, anything else is either slavery or poor politics. Very glad to see this blog post!

I've got a lot of experience working with prisoners. I've almost never seen any rehabilitative programs of any value at all. Mostly the programs I see are "learn to mop floors."

I just helped someone to complete a year-long paralegal course and qualification while inside. The Illinois prison system has now banned this since (a) it came with the option of facilities awarding a 6 month reduction in the length of a non-violent sentence, (b) required the facility to allow someone to proctor the final exam.

I’m so glad this is possible. Kudos to Turso for giving this man a new chance. We often criticize people for past bad behavior, but in many cases (not all, of course), they deserve a second chance in life, since most of us can change.

The Changelog recently did a long form interview with this guy: https://changelog.com/news/refactored-in-prison-0X1D

I fear that the distinctly American emphasis on personal independence and deprioritization of root causes has led to our persistent and failed war on drugs.

Unfortunately, many of the laws written and policies enacted presume an idealistic fantasy where humans are much more rationally acting, thoughtful, and informed than they really are.

The clearest example of this is raising statutory penalties from "many years" to "many many years" in prison. What is this supposed to achieve? Do people think that folks out there:

1. know the laws well enough to know how many years they'll get for the crime they're about to commit?

2. (and if knowledgable about penalty changes) think, "oh well I would have done X and risked many years in prison but now that it's many many years, I won't" ?

If huge prison sentences and massive resources spent on crime detection+ enforcement were the answer, America wouldn't have an illegal drug problem.

Very interesting.

I have some basic questions if anyone knows:

a. do all inmates get computer & internet access? (or only some, dependent upon the crime you committed)

b. do the inmates have to pay to use the computer & internet? I ask because I hear commissary is prohibitively expensive in prison.

c. how much time per week do inmate get to use the computer with internet access? (and is that time guaranteed they will get)

d. are there job boards specific to helping inmates find remote friendly jobs that are accepting of incarcerated individuals?

There’s a link to a post on his personal blog that explains a lot of this

This place is an absolute rarity. Almost zero jails or prisons have any access to the Internet at all. Many of the places I know won't even allow a print-out of any information from the Internet (e.g. Wikipedia, Facebook etc) and won't allow any books about computers for security reasons.

Commissary is generally "gas station" prices in jails and prisons.

Some of the inmates I work with right now have tablets that allow music streaming from a small catalog, but I think it is $3/hour to listen to it.

Obviously the families and friends of the loved are the ones burdened with paying for all of these, unless you can get an in-prison job that pays, e.g. dealing drugs is probably the highest paid, sadly.

This needs to be a model for other states to follow. Too often, incarcerated people are left with very few real options to have a viable career beyond some sort of physical trade like construction, hospitality, or food service. And while all of those career options are great, they do not often provide a real living wage.

Hopefully, we see more of this throughout the country!

> preferring instead to spend ~15+ hours a day on projects and open source contributions.

This makes it clear it's not just that the prison provides such opportunities, but that inmates are motivated to take advantage of such. Too many fully law abiding folks spend 15+ hours of screen time just doom scrolling.

There's a real lesson here for similar community services. For folks whose upbringing maybe doesn't afford such advantages, if services can be available where students can find reprieve from harsh daily life and be (very) modestly taken care of, I can see value. At a much lesser level, I benefited enormously from school, church, and community services where I could apply myself, things my family could never afford. So, like school lunches but for practical developer education.

Extremely hopeful that more prison systems adopt work programs like Maine's

Fantastic accomplishment, Preston! Wish you good luck and the very best ahead!

When the Government is so corrupt they can take your ability to work any kind of job away from you without even arresting you for anything, having employment from prison is a real achievement.

This confirms something I’ve occasionally wondered about. As an adult with a job, a side business, a family, and an ancient house, I can still remember the incredible focus of youth. No responsibilities.

I’m not saying that I envy anyone in prison — it sucks whether you’ve “earned it” or not, but I’ve always wondered how productive a person could be while locked up.

Glad to see him making the most of the opportunity. With care and feeding, he’s got a good shot at getting out and staying out.

I've had the chance to interact with both Preston and Clyde (Preston helped Clyde get going in code as well) - Clyde actually completed like all the backend courses on boot dev and is doing great at unlocked labs.

anyhow, thanks for all you did to help Clyde Preston!!! and thanks to glauber and turso for giving Preston a chance, he's such a a cool guy with such a cool story

That is pretty awesome! I can imagine there are so many others that would benefit from programs like the one you are a part of, congratulations!

Locked up, locked in!

On a serious note, I think inmates should have 24/7 laptop computer access with (at least) limited sessions of internet connectivity.

The place I was at you weren't even allowed a book about computers, lest you might gain enough knowledge to somehow access a facility computer and hack your way to freedom.

They had a computer lab, but it was only for Mavis Beacon. I found the C# compiler that's hidden away in the Windows directory and started teaching programming on the sly. Luckily one of the nuns at the facility took pity on me and bought C# Weekend Crash Course on Amazon (with the CD) and sneaked it through the security checks for me so I'd have a good reference to teach from.

For those who might be wondering, facilities/counties/states vary a huge amount on what is and isn't allowed.

In California they teach inmates coding, while in other states all computer-related technical books are banned as security risks. Same with basic electrical work — Promising People has an interesting VR program for teaching electrical helper skills, but in some correctional systems that would be considered unacceptably risky. Tablet and similar system operators/vendors have to shape the material available to the inmates to suit the local restrictions.

A great read, the first part is also worth reading. I’m happy for you Preston and wishing you all the best

Theres something nice about the idea of living in a cell and just programming.

This reminds me of The Office (US) episode where everyone thinks prison sounds better than working at Dunder Mifflin at which point they’re introduced to “Prison Mike” to be scared straight.

I have done 90 hours weeks when I was younger, I really hope he manages to get some exercise and down time. It is not healthy to work that much even if it escapism from a worse situation.

and hear i am browsing hacknews at work on monday morning, wishing I was still asleep. Really gives you perspective, I hope you get out safe and sound and soon and things work out for you.

In Soviet Union having prisoners do soft labor was called Sharashka. This scales and creates incentives to have more prisoners doing cheap labor.

The key delineation here is the work is voluntary. I was uneasy reading the article and weighing it up, realised that the author could choose not to work whilst he serves time.

If he was being coerced into labour however, which the for-profit prison undoubtedly makes profit from, it’s simply unacceptable; indentured servitude, slavery, call it what you will, it’s bad for society in every way because it allows the ruling class to steal labour from the working class under the guise of “rehabilitation”.

Crazy to keep seeing PThorpe from Primes Discord on HNs front page. I hope youre doing alright in there.

This is all good and well. Would people be amenable to the same opportunity for say Hans Reiser?

Is he ever getting out? I'm not too informed on how long his sentence is.

If the answer is yes, then yes.

I heard Hans Reiser is looking for some work behind bars. Talented programmer.

Speaking of incarcerated tech gurus... I've been really liking what Sam Bent [0] has been producing lately.

If you're allowed/able to watch YouTube in American prisons, I would definitely check him out!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Sam_Bent/videos

It’s amazing to me that society still tolerates the torture of human beings who have engaged in activities that have no victims.

This guy did years in solitary (plainly recognized as torture by all unbiased authorities on the matter) for selling marijuana.

I definitely cried reading this. Happy tears.

Inspirational story. Thanks for sharing :)

God bless you.

I think this guy went to prison and realized how much easier it is to sit down and work instead of dealing drugs.

Prison Architect ITT

> I quickly outgrew the curriculum, preferring instead to spend ~15+ hours a day on projects and open source contributions.

TIL from 15-20yrs old I was a prisoner

But seriously, programs like these need to be made available to more people, incarcerated or not. There's millions of people in this country who have basically no access to employment. Remote work could not only be a lifeline to those communities, it's advantageous to employers and good for the economy.

shame were doing a large push to return to the office anyways

there's a good reason for that, fortunately or unfortunately. the numbers don't lie

Now if only someone could produce those numbers...

They don’t lie whether they’re there or not.

which numbers? the property values for big office buildings?

A connection which hasn’t been proven to be meaningfully contributing to RTO.

which makes it worse right?

My take on RTO is that its a soft layoff. You can get rid of a ton of people, reduce headcount, next quarters numbers look good. The other reason? Managers just like the office. Its a spot of manager power, they like that.

what is the good reason, can you tell me

> I've spent just under 10 years of my life in Prison (all for non-violent drug crimes.)

(sigh) another victim of the US obsession with sticking as many people as possible in prison. I wish the regime is overthrown somehow and he can get released.

Reading this, I think it's a crime that this guy is not out on early release. The majority of his sentence was for marijuana, which is now widely decriminalized and in some places legalized.

I agree he should be released but using the mail to transport marijuana across state lines is definitely not legalized or decriminalized anywhere.

No but in my mind on principle because it’s legalized and decriminalized, this should not be a 10 year sentence.

I do not believe this is true. Looking at the record, marijuana is one of a few drugs. The specific incident that led to his current sentence is related to a powerful opioid. This is corroborated by Preston's own personal website.

Blog post said majority of sentence was for marijuana. Where do you find this other stuff?

I mean it would be sad if he was lying - but i don’t see any of that.

https://apnews.com/general-news-d68dca63e95946fbb9cc82f38540...

Saying that he got his time for marijuana seems to be a big stretch.

He received a suspended sentence for the marijuana. But then he breached his probation, and there were later charges including one for carfentanil.

I recall what I read in his blog post was “majority of sentence was for marijuana”

Why would you take him at his word when he's a self-admitted bad actor and therefore likely to be an unreliable narrator?

He broke his gf's arm as part of a prolonged campaign of domestic violence against her.

This was conveniently omitted from both TFA as well as the linked “how I got here” post.

Where did you learn this?

I’m basing my view on what he said in the blog. Where is this said?

Court docs: https://www.courts.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt471/files/docu...

This is an PDF of a bad court decision about an illegal search; he was not convicted of harming anyone. It contains no evidence of him harming anyone.

If police can determine there is probable cause they can immediately search without a warrant. It contains strong evidence of him committing harm directly to his gf at the time. It does not contain a legal decision or conviction, but that's not a lack of evidence - the report's existence itself is by definition evidence.

That’s false. PC needs to be taken to a judge for a search warrant.

What you are probably thinking of is what is called the “exigent circumstances” warrant exception, and it was misapplied here by over-zealous police who violated his rights.

There is no evidence to support that the injuries sustained by the woman in his apartment were caused by him, according to that document.

Somewhat relieved to see that this is the drugs prison guy, and not one of the two pedo prison guys who sometimes post on HN with their fake sob stories pretending to be hard done to while concealing their depravity.

In contrast I'm glad to see this guy has been open and honest, owning up to his mistakes and starting to turn his life around and make amends for the harm he's caused others. Well done.

Edit: Please disregard that last paragraph. Just saw the document @bjorkandkd linked.

I tried to hire someone with a drug-related felony conviction to work on a Rust project with me. The guy was awesome, and he was super excited about the work we were doing.

Unfortunately, due to the circumstances of our world today, he was understandably too anxious to move from his current job. He worried he'd never be able to find employment as an ex-felon if the runway ran out.

I felt really bad for the guy.

I wish things worked differently.

Please see my nested reply to his comment, which shows that @bjorkandkd is not only making assumptions, but that his allegation is unsupported by even by the document that he linked.

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