The First Year Out of Prison (2020) | Hacker News Reader

The First Year Out of Prison (2020)

marieclaire.com

39 pointsNaOH20 comments

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No hacking was to be found here

A few years back, a politician outlined some simple steps to avoid poverty:

Graduate high school

Have a full time job

Marry before having children

The politician was heavily criticized for his comments. The advice seems timeless, but people don’t want to hear it.

Speaking only for myself, I have zero interest in hearing this from you, because it's clear you were eager to drop this anecdote in a thread with even minimal relevance to the topic. This is not a story about poverty.

Makeda, the subject of the piece, clearly has a high school education because was a legal assistant for the city before she was incarcerated. She educated herself further during her sentence, and after. While working.

The article clearly states she dropped out of high school. ( Although she later went back to get a GED. )

Of the three steps to avoid poverty, she clearly followed one ( the full time job ).

Virtue signalling does not help people. Making clear the guidelines to building a good life IS useful.

I think the article voices many concerns about poverty. Here’s one example: “ The first year out of prison is critical for ex-inmates. They’re often leaving prison with little money, uncertain housing, fractured relationships with family, and no job, not to mention the psychological toll of incarceration. “They’ve got to construct a whole life for themselves: Where am I going to live? How am I going to have money in my pocket to eat, clothe myself, get across town?” says Ann Jacobs, executive director of the Institute for Justice and Opportunity at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.”

I wasn't going to dignify your third piece of advice with further comment and I see you haven't either. For the rest I'd refer you to my other comment regarding cause/effect.

Was the politician suggesting everyone should do those things or just observing one way to do things?

I believe he was suggesting the three steps as a guideline to be followed if at all possible.

You’d have to think that if everybody clearly understood the steps ( and their relationship to success or failure ) that poverty rates would go down. That’s the goal.

You and the politician are making a strange yet unsurprising assumption about the direction of the causal relationships between poverty and these other socioeconomic factors.

What's the rate of high school graduation from families living in poverty?

What's the full-time employment rate for people without a high school diploma?

I don't get it, what point(s) is this article trying to make. It seems to be all over the place.

I read it as a human interest story. I would have liked more citations but it's a magazine article not a research paper so that is not a reasonable expectation.

What I took from it was her points toward the end about how the re-entry process needs to be vastly improved.

On one hand I empathize, on the other hand - she made the poor choices that wound up getting herself incarcerated. There are long-lasting consequences to their actions. When society has to choose between spending a dollar on re-entry or spending it on other more (perceived) worthwhile causes - we know how that goes. Before you all get mad at me for saying that, we don't live in a fantasy world with infinite resources that can do X and also do Y.

You'll have to forgive me for not believing that you empathize, since most of your thoughts here are about rationalizing why there's nothing be to done.

There are other ways of thinking about this problem than as a zero-sum matter of where to allocate tax dollars.

I don’t really give a shit whether you think I’m sincere or not. Lots of people are in shitty situations of their own doing, or not of their own doing - I can emphasize with them and still prefer not to prioritize tax dollars on their situation over others that benefits society more in my opinion.

Fine, you're sincere. But you didn't actually read my comment.

she made poor choices but 8 years for assault where no one was permanently injured seems excessive. She served a year before an appeal had her out, before it was reversed and she went back for another 8 years, I'd call that excessive and as the article entails, really serves no one's best interest, not her daughters, not societies and not the victims.

That's not even budgeting back the costs associated with housing and caring for this person in prison nor the time and energy that's going to go back into reintegrating this person into society.

> we don't live in a fantasy world with infinite resources that can do X and also do Y.

Right, for instance in this world, we have to choose between, say, Jeff Bezos renting Venice for the weekend and school lunches for kids, or Elon Musk buying a presidency or programs to reduce prison recidivism. It’s a tough problem, and we’ve all gotta make sacrifices and make do.

This captures a real person's experience going through a challenging time. Real life is messy, and long form writing in a documentary style doesn't need to make a point so long as it leaves you with an impression.

I suppose it's pointless nonsense unless it's "optimized" for maximum information density?

You do know that there's this thing called a human interest story, and part of its point is to capture something of a narrative for its own sake yes? Stories like this cane make for very interesting reading. They don't have to include technology and hacks.

I think the goal is to understand someone else’s situation

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