284 karma · joined February 25, 2022
> "if that is allowed discrimination outside certain roles how can those people ever be expected back to society? Ofc, they are going to do more crime if it is their only realistic option for reasonable income."
"Welcome to the Hotel California. You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave!"
I'm not sure why so many people are against it or think it's inhumane. I think it's a bit silly considering most people who hold that opinion have never been to prison.
Thank you for looking though. I think it's important to offer felons the chance to get a decent job in a proper career field too.
There's one organization doing this called "Underdog Devs":
When I caught this charge, I had just turned 18. It really ruined my life.
Currently, I work in tech. For a very long time I was barely making ends meet, working in a fast food restaurant for minimum wage while trying to interview to get a developer job.
I went through 8 interview processes, and received offers from all but one. Each one of them was rescinded when HR learned that I had a felony, as a matter of company policy.
It was really heartbreaking and a lot of times, it made me want to give up on life and just stop trying. I kept interviewing and going to events/networking, and eventually found a very low-paying job at a local place and sort of slowly worked my way back up from there.
If anyone here has some degree of power at a company and wants to make a difference in the world, convince your company to hire felons with non-violent/non-finance related offenses.
If your class wasn't mandatory, then I'm sure you know that most people were just there probably to get extra time out of their cell or to break the monotony. And I assume most of them were complete assholes to you.
After I am financially independent, I want to try to get state/federal funding so that I can go back to prisons and teach programming AND partner with companies to have jobs/interviews lined up for release dates.
The worst part about being incarcerated isn't even always the time you serve, it's that our justice system means that you usually can never get a good job again, regardless of what your charge was (in my case it was one of the lowest class of felonies). It's like a ghost that haunts you forever.
I was being transported to a hospital for a medical procedure, and I was talking to the guard who taking me, to pass the time. I asked him why on earth he would want to be a prison guard -- after all, they are in there with us for 10 hour shifts, and prisons are some of the most bleak/depressing places on earth. That has to take a toll on their mental wellbeing too.
He said that he originally was a regular police officer, but after seeing how much corruption there was in the police force and the things that happened, he felt like a hypocrite, so he said the better alternative was for him to be a guard.
That conversation has stuck with me for a long time now.
After the first two weeks, time started to slowly speed up, and the days all sort of blurred together. Thankfully I was able to get a newspaper every day, and a book every now and then, and so I just read every word of the newspaper (even the ads) for something to do, and slept a lot.
I think I handled it better than a lot of people would have, as I'm sort of introverted by nature. There's research on solitary confinement permanently harming mental health, but I think I got lucky on that one.
The thing I think most law-abiding/normal people don't understand about the types of people in prisons is that they are almost exclusively habitual offenders.
Even in the US, which is heavily punitive instead of rehabilitative, you have to have run-ins with the law a number of times before you are sentenced to serve time, rather than probation or a halfway-house etc.
From my experiences, ~90% of people I saw during my time in jail and prison were coming in and out, constantly being arrested. There's no desire on their part to change, they're a lost cause.
For the tiny handful of people that genuinely do want to have a normal life and not go back to prison, our justice system is awful. No, solitary is not good for that.
You need supportive + rehabilitative programs. They won't solve everything, but for the small number of people who want to get out of the system, they need an honest-to-god out and chance at living.
AMA.
I'll start with: Yes, "fishing" is one of the first things you learn. It's not just for solitary, you use it to get stuff under other people doors when you're not out of your cells on a regular unit too, or when you don't want guards to suspect something.
Another interesting thing fact -- where I was at, in solitary you could trade your 1-hour of your cell a day for an extra tray of food at either lunch or dinner. Because the guards had to let each person in the solitary block out, one-at-a-time, for an hour, they were lazy and would let you forfeit your one hour out to shower/make a paid phone call/walk around the cell block for extra food. Most people took the extra tray.
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Edit: While this is on the front page, want to raise a bit of awareness about US criminal "justice system" and prisons:
I saw things like this regularly:
https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/c567d688cc89f084...
Guards would beat the shit out of you, strip you mostly naked, strap you to a restraint chair and cover your head with a hood, and then wheel you into a back room somewhere and "accidentally forget" about you for +8 hours until you pissed yourself, and then they'd come and laugh at you.
Lots of things I can't unsee from being in there.