This Man Built a $3M Business a Year After Four Years in Prison
forbes.com
forbes.com
I'm not sure what what happened but it could also be equally said this guy's code wasn't any good, wasn't used, and so the founders didn't want to pay for it. And the Paypal resolution dispute seems to agree. Something was exchanged but not everyone was happy with what was received.
I totally agree Glass got screwed.
Many years ago I wrote the code for an online store. I outsourced the payment processing and photo upload functions. If the store somehow managed to grow to Amazon size who knows what those 2 developers would say. To me, they played a very small, but essential, role.
But hah originally I thought you were including Noah Glass in your assessment and was either going to inquire about why because his story is so incredibly sad to me.
I can understand why some inmates should not have access to internet to prevent them from directing their activities outside of prison but I'm sure that those are a small minority.
First, you underestimate how bad it is in prison.
Second, giving internet access some some inmates would expose them to threats and blackmail from their less rehabilitated counterparts. "Send this threatening email to my enemy, or you'll drop the soap." And it would expose them to threats from the outside: "I know you're in prison with my enemy. Kill him, or your daughter will suffer."
Third, you underestimate how bad it is in prison.
The rehabilitation is a noble goal but what these guys needs are psychologists, drug therapy and social workers, not internet addiction.
Inmates in most countries can make phone calls only to phone numbers which have been approved, usually only family. You can't make random phone calls. All phone calls are monitored and recorded to prevent abuse. You can't call an inmate afaik, that would be a very low security facility, which I am not aware of.
Visitors are only by request and undergo security checks before, during and after visits. And yes, visitors are a huge security issue in prisons, but if you deny all visitors to prisoners, you're in Guantanamo, not a normal prison anymore. There are different levels of security in prisons.
Internet access is much harder to control. Encryption is, as you as a HN reader know, very easy to do on a computer, but hard using your voice. Hiding information on a computer is easy, but very hard on a voice phone. There have been prisons in the world that allowed internet access to inmates and there are problems with that, much as with visitors or phone calls. It's a balancing act to weigh those problems to the benefits. You just have to go into the discussion with open eyes about the problems that internet access would bring. Imagine a pedophile convicted for sexually harassing children online, and giving him/her internet access in prison. What an outrage. Someone in a low sec jail for DUI could be given internet access, no problems. It happends, I've even seen a CEO run his company from within the jail. He was given supervised internet access to his companys financial system once a month, one guard watching pover his shoulder at all times. Not a very scalable solution though.
It all depends, doesn't it.
That's pretty funny. Contraband cell phones are ridiculously common in prison. I had a buddy of mine in prison, was there for four years. At one point he started calling me from jail, from a contraband phone.
He called me often enough and we chatted long enough on these calls that I got the feeling that there wasn't any sort of real scarcity when it comes to communications in prison.
The phones had Internet access, he would update his Facebook page from prison. At one point he even asked me for money so that he could buy his own contraband cell phone. (I said no)
Every written letter must be opened and read, possibly with an horrible script which takes time to "decipher". Besides, I don't know if they keep copies of all the mail in case something happens, but it would be orders of magnitude harder to index and search than email anyway. Phone calls are even worse, since you need at least as much time to monitor the conversation as the conversation lasts.
Maybe introducing email would shift some of the friends and family to use this cheaper means of communication, reducing costs. Or maybe Jevons paradox applies here and the number of emails would go up to such an extent that the improved efficiency would not make up for the increased traffic.
P.S.: just to make it clear, I'm not advocating for the inmates to have their phone calls replaced for emails.
I agree that psychologists, social workers and drug therapy are needed but I do think that access to internet and the information it contains is a huge help for people to better be prepared to the world as it as evolved.
But you're right I'm rather naive about the conditions of prison, the little I know I know it by having read articles by Michael Santos through HN which while interesting do not provide a complete view of how prison really is.
The thing is from what I've read of reconviction rates in US, France and other countries, the prison system isn't working. It's expensive and doesn't rehabilitate prisoners very well and from the percentage of the population who is convicted in the US, I'm not sure it even works well as a deterrent.
I agree completely with you here. Prisons do not rehabilitate, and they are a poor deterrent. Especially longer stints in prison tends to damage the inmate rather than improve.
There's a enormous difference between what "prison" is in France, US, Sweden, Russia or Thailand. I wish the world would at least move towards the "best practice" of prisons, because there are such things.
Prisons are terrible but honestly does anyone believe the world would be better without them.
I completely agree that they're a necessary evil and that there's a need for a type of prison. I think rehabilitation is really what the focus should be since this is what will bring the biggest benefits to society.
There's also an argument to be made (and made by a lot of people) that there are too many people incarcerated in the US when it's not necessarily in the country's best interest for those people to go to prison (war on drug, ...).
It was interesting discussing with you and if you have any good references on "best practices" I'd be interested in reading them.
That's needlessly turning this into an either/or proposition. Prisons are a tool. In many contexts (drugs) that tool is being overused. In some (rape) it is underused.
Some people think the aim of prison is primarily to punish wrongdoers.
(Are you European by some chance ? No offense intended to anyone.)
I know that people see it as being only punishment but it's rather self defeating as proven by the high reconviction rates across countries. In france, 38% are reconvicted [1] and in US, 51.8% [2] (in 1994)
I feel that the way prisons work now is a waste for society in term of money used and results.
[1] http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/societe/justice/justice-les... [2] http://www.bjs.gov/content/reentry/recidivism.cfm
It reminds of an inmate diary I read some time ago (he was in a French prison). Not only he didn't have access to books. But even clean underwear or blankets were luxury items. I think he could only shower once or twice a week. I can't find the link anymore.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/24/ban-books-pri...
Law enforcement, prison system, healthcare.
Everything else will be imported.
Its interesting that all of those fields are super authoritarian and highly institutional.
Interesting article though. Good for him.
Is that accurate?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Char...
The company provides services that make it easier to communicate with inmates, including "The easiest way to send printed photos to your inmate directly from your computer or mobile phone!"
Now, if this was like his third trip to prison then you would have a point...
The last thing we should do is accept only a community incapable of communication or effective self-promotion. That kind of handicap could reasonably stop a great deal of viable hackers from doing what excites them, and isn't promoting that the entire point?
Not long ago, I wrote something called "Never sanitize your inputs" and the content of the article was why you should never sanitize your inputs. And yet it was still called "link bait".
Maybe I should have just called it "Don't bother reading this, I'm not Jeff Atwood or anyone."