How Prisoners Make Moonshine | Hacker News Reader

How Prisoners Make Moonshine

thefix.com

41 pointscturner56 comments

It's rare for me to read anything about prison without it strengthening my desire to abolish the concept entirely.

If only there was a workable alternative eh. But I can tell you right now I would not feel comfortable letting violent sociopaths roam freely

I'm not suggesting closing prisons tomorrow, but if we do, I just wonder how many violent sociopaths will actually be released. Is it 1% of the prison population? A tenth of a percent? I don't think it's a substantial portion.

I've been to state prison, not county jail, in Florida, for 13 months.

They are loaded with people with whom you would want to keep away from your loved ones. Way more than 1%.

I could tell stories, but what's the point?

Just FYI.

Are a large portion of them inherently violent sociopaths? Or do they seem like people I want to keep away from my loved ones because they've been caged animals for a while?

Since most separate state-run institutions for the housing and treatment of mentally ill people were defunded and dismantled, those people are now either left untreated among the public, or forcibly confined (and possibly still untreated) within the jails and prisons system.

So within a typical jail or prison, you will have mentally ill people whose illnesses have caused them to commit crimes, career criminals who have become dangerous and threatening as a competitive advantage, institutional employees who have become domineering, corrupt, and sadistic due to the need to control the previous two groups, and ordinary people who have become stressed and hyper-vigilant due to forced contact with the previous three groups.

Policy in many institutions is also to expressly reinforce racism, creedism, and other natural divisions among the prisoner population as a means of divide-and-conquer control.

As a result, any person spending a significant amount of time in jails or prisons may have problems readjusting to normal society, similar to soldiers returning from a war zone. They are not inherently violent, but the environment is designed to be hostile and stressful for them, and it does influence subsequent behavior in ways that may be unpredictable.

Well, put it this way..I was a "caged animal" for 13 months, and you would have no issues whatsoever with me around your loved ones, so the logic that the environment is making convicts (the preferred way to label "prisoners" who make it to the state prison level) into monsters is flawed, at least in my case and experience.

I specifically did not say a "large portion", but a significant one, much larger than 1%.

If I remember correctly, approx. 12% of the convicts in the institution I was in (Gulf Correctional Institution[1] in the Florida panhandle) were serving life sentences for murder related convictions.

Does society really want convicted murders roaming freely through it?

[1] http://www.dc.state.fl.us/facilities/region1/150.html

The at-large population of Florida is also loaded with people I would want to keep away from my loved ones.

A huge percentage of the prison population (at least half, in New York) is kids who started out on minor drug charges but then couldn't get out of the system. It's a self-perpetuating problem. You can't get hired for a normal job with a record, but you know all these big-time connects now, so it just grows out of control.

Can you cite credible statistics? Even among drug reformers, the current narrative seems to be that drug enforcement's impact on the prison population is overblown (which is important for legalization advocates --- myself included --- to acknowledge, lest the argument for legalization be upended simply by citation to statistics contradicting it).

Sorry, this is coming purely from personal experience.

Edit: found a source citing Federal Bureau of Prisons: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/10/war-on-drugs-prison...

That's federal prison, which houses a small fraction of inmates, and for more serious offenses. You need to look at the state stats. In California, for instance, drug inmates make up about 14% of the prison population. Violent crime makes up 44% (actually, it's probably quite a bit higher than that, because "burglary" is counted as a property crime).

To see why the federal statistics are misleading, consider how someone ends up in federal prison for burglary.

Having experienced it firsthand, I wonder if those numbers don't tell the full story. There are whole families basically going in and out of jail running the drug trade. I never got the sense that violent criminals had quite the "revolving door" effect.

Edit: then again, it's likely that drug offenders would be much more open about what they're doing time for. Now that I think about it there could definitely be positive selection bias (or whatever) affecting my perception.

Their door revolves too, but because their sentences are longer and parole harder to achieve, it revolves more slowly.

Countries like Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, have a prison population per capita which is about a 1/10 of the US [1]. And these countries are not generally associated with an overabundance of violent sociopaths in the community at large. So, sticking a finger in the air, I'd say it is a number less than 10%. And if it is higher my guess is that you have some kind of structural problem in that society.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...

A majority of prison inmates are incarcerated either for violent crimes or property crimes. The statistics in IL showed (last time I checked) a plurality of inmates convicted of domestic violence. Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands have a fraction of the inmates the US does, but they also have a fraction of the crime.

There are a lot of reasons for that, and discussing them is a politically volatile rabbithole of a discussion to start. But we should at least begin by understanding the right premise. We can and should reduce sentences, particularly for low-level property crimes. But if we did most everything in our penal system "right", we'd still have integer multiples of Scandinavia's incarceration share of population.

Well, the statistics I've seen say violent criminals make up less than half of the prison population.

Educate yourself. Most people in American prisons aren't violent sociopaths, they're nonviolent drug offenders. This is not a new phenomenon, news outlets have been talking about this for a couple of years now.

How would you feel about closing the factories that produce those sociopaths?

There are violent sociopaths, and then there's most of the prison population. Most of them are just people who made a mistake and didn't have any guard rails in their life to keep them on the straight and narrow before they became adults. Most of them would be very possible to rehabilitate but that's just not how the US looks at crime. Our approach, no matter what we call it, is "lock them up and throw away the key".

One could say (with the reduction in violent crime since the 70's) that this works. If that's true and it isn't the result of abortion being legalized (not my theory, don't hate me) then we could keep doing it. Could we as a society do better? I think the answer is yes. I think there's a moral imperative to.

So the question is, how might we reduce violent crime and increase the acceptance of social norms within high risk groups?

> this works. If that's true and it isn't the result of abortion being legalized

Both these theories are based entirely on correlation with no good casual mechanism to explain them. The first is particularly impugned - in fact it's reasonable to say disproven outright - by the very high recidivism rate. The second is outlandish on its face.

At least the lead exposure theory passes the straight face test.

It's hard to be subtly tongue in cheek on HN.

I strongly believe the modern American prison system is something our descendants will look back upon with disgust, much like how we perceive slavery.

I often wonder what our descendants will reproach us. I think prisons may be one thing. An other one is how we tolerate/justify inequalities. In particular, the way people in developing country indirectly serve us is not unlike slavery.

You would think. But every time someone mentions here in HN about how USA slavery was bad there are always people coming out and saying that other countries used to do it too and imply that since others did it it was OK if the US did it. Horrible thinking of course but there you have it.

I have a nagging feeling that that represents the feelings of a sizable chunk of the white USA population. Hope I'm wrong.

Really?

You have a nagging feeling that a sizable chunk of white Americans feel slavery is OK?

Based on what you interpret as an implicit acceptance of slavery in comments on HN, which I guess you just sort of assume must be made by mostly white Americans?

Hate to break it to you but that makes you a racist and nationalist bigot. If I were to say I had a sneaking suspicion that Indians were for the most part lazy and incompetent, how would that seem? Or that American blacks seem to be disproportionately violent?

>>Based on what you interpret as an implicit acceptance of slavery in comments on HN, which I guess you just sort of assume must be made by mostly white Americans?<<

Occam's razor says that it probably is white Americans.

I'm guessing here but maybe one of the reasons why white Americans gets so defensive and angry when this comes up could be that they feel they are being attacked and so they respond by trying to point to other instances where this happened. I grant you, that does not mean that people believe that slavery was OK but if so you should not try to excuse it.

Slavery existed in my own country, Mexico, and it was wrong. It was wrong then and it is wrong now. No excuses. To believe otherwise means that you should not object if other people try to enslave you or people you love. If I'm wrong then correct the error in my logic. I'm willing to learn.

I'm not sure if this is too simplistic or not but whenever you are unsure about whether something is OK or not simply imagine you are the one on the receiving end. If without lying to yourself you still think it is OK then maybe it is OK.

I seriously doubt anybody would make excuses for slavery with a straight face if they were the slaves, regardless of the era.

And now I feel like I'm being patronizing; sorry for that, not my intention.

Occam's razor suggests that your sample size is too small to make any generalizations about what a typical white American would think about anything. Occam's razor also suggests that the nationality of posters depends a great deal on where in the world it happens to be working hours.

Slavery doesn't come up that often on HN. Responses in those threads are biased towards users who care enough about the subject to want to engage in conversation about them. And I would be willing to bet the comments you're describing don't account for the bulk of thread contents. So you're making an assertion about white people and Americans based on a sample size of, what? Maybe a dozen posters, if that? Bear in mind that posting on HN at all is atypical.

I've got no issues with your plea for empathy but you're not making a strong argument that the comments you're talking about (whatever they are) necessarily defend slavery, or that the people making them necessarily believe that slavery is acceptable, or that they're evidence of what what white Americans believe about slavery as an institution, in general. You're literally arguing from the premise that the racism of white Americans can be taken as a constant.

Nah. Top will be the way we treat animals. The material is already out there, we turn a blind eye. They'll be utterly horrified, and the school essays will be comparisons between death camps and the supposedly sophisticated meat-eaters who lived for the century after. How did we get stuck into the Japanese over whaling, yet happily chow down on all those factory-produced chickens.

Keep in mind that you're probably mostly reading stuff that's designed to appeal to upper-middle class left-leaning people, about how many people in prison are oppressed, have so much potential, are caught up in an unfair system that's hard to escape, are subject to institutionalized discrimination, etc. There's no doubt that people like that exist, and are probably even a disturbingly high percentage of the overall number of people imprisoned.

On the other hand, there are also people in prison who actually are dangerous criminals, and really need to be locked away from the general population. That is what we created it for in the first place, and why every society has some sort of prison. But nobody writes stories about those types of people, at least not in "intellectual" sites and magazines. When was the last time you read a story about a truly dangerous criminal and what their experience in the legal system has been?

I'm fairly sure it's possible to isolate dangerous people without putting these dangerous people somewhere they are likely to experience rape and/or torture (aka extended solitary confinement).

The Stanford Prison Experiment calls that premise into question, though I understand that there are questions about the underlying science. Or did you have another means of isolation in mind?

That aside, my personal experience leads me to believe that prison is as horrible as it is because of the people locked inside. Evidence for this can be inferred from the differing degree to which low security prisons are less harsh than higher security prisons.

> That is what we created it for in the first place

Do you have a source for this claim?

As I understand it, this is flatly untrue. Jails were, up until quite recently, designed to hold people awaiting trial, not as punishment.

My belief is that imprisonment for decades as punishment is a 20th century phenomenon.

The only book I've read on this specific matter is "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison" by Michel Foucault, but that was a decade ago; I'm not sure if the details are crisp in my mind.

I can't say that I've researched the history of crime and punishment over the centuries and how imprisonment fits into that. Though I was intending to refer to more recent history, somewhere from around the founding of America to the beginning of modern-era widespread policing.

If you've read anything on it, exactly what were they using for punishment then? Other things I've read of in various places include execution, the stocks, other forms of physical punishments. IIRC, some Islamic societies still recommend cutting the hands off of thieves. All of this stuff makes imprisonment seem rather sanitary and lenient by comparison.

It is definitely more lenient.

But one of the points in the Foucault book jMyles mentioned is that the leniency of imprisonment didn't come about because we're somehow morally superior than earlier societies, it's because it's the most efficient way so far devised for the state to exert its power over a human body.

Someone please correct me if I'm misinterpreting.

Reminded me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRMok0gslpA

A good friend of mine used to teach ESL at San Quentin. He described to me in great detail the "pruno" trade in the prison, including the elaborate exchange of services for scrap fruit and pilfered trashbags from the commissary as well as the even more elaborate system for distribution and payment of the finished product.

In this they're starting with wine - why not just drink the wine? It says they make 5 gal (40 pints) of wine down to 6-8 pints; then drink half a pint - isn't it easier to just drink 2 pints of wine. Presumably the answer is in secretion of the drink.

How do they get hold of 5 gallons (~20 litres) of wine?

Transportation and storage of contraband are both large issues in prison. Concentrating the intoxicant can be quite useful.

They made the wine in the manner the article this one references describes. Where 'wine' is just what they call any sugary liquid that has fermented.

They start with prison wine. I would not want to drink prison wine either.

You make shine with things like potatoes instead of fruit. You're very much not going to want to drink 'wine' made out of potatoes or beets-but if you take that same 'wine' and distill it, you end up with something that doesn't taste so awful.

Incidentally, has anybody read any more by or about the author, Seth Ferranti? It sounds like he managed to get a job as a writer for this "the fix" site while in prison somehow. There's gotta be an interesting story in that.

Reminded me of the movie the Great Escape. There's a scene in which they make potato moonshine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md2GFtBCIh8

Can confirm, although the article shows a more complex recipe than what I understand. All that hose and rubber bands and things aren't easy to come by.

Source: brother is in prison.

Im not sure if the detail listed in this article is a good thing or a bad thing. I would hate to see my kids read this article and get any ideas. I know at that age I was just deviant and nerdy enough to want to try something like this.

I wonder how often they make methanol in these stills as well. Even under semi controlled conditions this is a risk.

How would brewing/distilling your own ethanol through fermentation create methanol? I've heard about methanol contamination, but I've always though it came about by adulteration (someone adding methanol).

When you think about the fermentation process, there isn't really a mechanism to create large quantities of methanol.[1] Yes, there are often traces of methanol and other longer-chained alcohol, but nothing that would be toxic.

[1] http://homedistiller.org/intro/methanol/methanol

If you're fermenting fruits and then distilling them, methanol is the first ingredient to boil out -- the first batch of distilled material will have nearly all of the methanol in the entire run. The background amount of methanol might be very small (<1% in most fruits), but the distilling process necessarily concentrates it and could easily provide a lethal dose if you're working on large volumes.

The very first cut (the "foreshots") really smell like something you shouldn't consume due to the presence of acetone and some other compounds that are detectable in very small concentrations.

If I were you, I wouldn't worry that much -- it's already easy enough to find on the internet the instructions for making alcohol. Additionally, it is next to impossible to censor this kind of stuff out of the internet.

As for your second point, making concentrated methanol from fruits or grains by accident is unheard of.

As long as they are making sugar wash (or wine as the article calls it) instead of a fruit based one the chemistry does not allow for methanol to be created, is my understanding having researched this fairly heavily in college before making my own still.

Also if you did make a fruit based wash when you ferment it the methanol will evaporate first (or at a lower temperature than the ethanol if you have that level of control).

This whole article is rather poor as a guide and there are much better and more complete resources on how to build better distilling equipment with a tea kettle, some copper tubing, and a bucket. It is a good article for understanding how prisoners do it, which is its intent.

I mean if you are a prisoner or you are limited to the same resources as a prisoner; then sure, I guess its a guide that you could use. Otherwise a better guide and $20 bucks at the hardware store will have better results, for home distilling experiments.

Keep in mind home distilling is illegal in most states, some have alternative fuel creation exceptions or small allowable amounts.

> Keep in mind home distilling is illegal in most states, some have alternative fuel creation exceptions or small allowable amounts.

Isn't it still illegal on the federal level?

You know what I never checked the federal level. At the time I was doing this I figured if the state said it was legal in a certain case then the feds didn't have a problem either. I since realized how wrong I was about that logic, although it still makes more sense to me than the reality.

If it is illegal at the federal level, I would think it wouldn't be an enforcement priority if it was allowed by the state. On the other hand, it's probably part of the tax code and that does tend to be a powerful enforcement motivator.

> Isn't it still illegal on the federal level?

For fuel use [0] it is not illegal at the federal level, but does require a permit.

[0] http://www.ttb.gov/industrial/distillation_of_ethanol.shtml

Don't move it across state lines. Unless feds've twisted and contorted commerce clause to cover shine like they did with drugs.

> I would hate to see my kids read this article and get any ideas.

Better keep them away from the library and internet in general then. There's ideas everywhere! (Said jokingly, I get the parental concern)

> I wonder how often they make methanol in these stills as well.

Every time. The distilling process doesn't make it though, it's a natural product of fermentation.

Making and operating a still isn't hard (clearly!) and the risks associated with consuming "homemade" product are greatly overstated. The risks associated with fire/explosion are greater, but should be reduced in this situation since there's not an open flame. I wouldn't be surprised if the prisoners are tossing the "heads cut", but even if they didn't, there shouldn't be enough methanol to cause toxicity (especially when consumed with the ethanol!). I've read that a lot of the methanol toxicity stories originate from the Prohibition era and were caused by failed attempts to remove methanol out of denatured alcohol sold as degreaser, not due to hooch.

edit: I'm sorry to be blunt about it, but "think of the children" and the appeal for censorship is responsible for the abomination that is the modern chemistry set.

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