Hah, reminds me of the plot of "The Blue Nowhere", wherein the protagonist builds a computer (and a modem) from discrete components whilst in prison
Investigation finds inmates built computers and hid them in prison ceiling
51–60 of 202 posts
Re: Investigation finds inmates built computers and hid them in prison ceiling
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. You can learn a lot of Javascript by breaking up old computers. This isn't an "education", its just slave labour.
What's a more likely job for a former inmate: Computer repair technician (rip out broken parts, put new parts in) or Javascript frontend engineer?
JS developer. It's a fairly low-skill job, taught widely, and demand for it far exceeds anything else related to PC support.
Re: Investigation finds inmates built computers and hid them in prison ceiling
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have gone to the prison in the past solely because of the color of their skin or because of their religion. People today go to prison just for possessing a plant or criticizing their head of state. Let's not pretend that being in prison is anything other than a moral judgement rather than an indication of someone's character. It just makes it easier to dehumanize prisoners ("they deserve it") and harder for th…
> Let's not pretend that being in prison is anything other than a moral judgement rather than an indication of someone's character. There's.. a lot of bad people in prison, and for good reason -they've done empirically terrible things, and many without remorse - no matter the "POV"
only most of those "bad things" are things like non-violent drug offences and other such things. I'm not saying they are all good folks, but most of them are just folks that messed up a little bit, and have to pay for it for years.
Once we get people in the system, it is likely they will be in and out of it their entire lives. And what is even worse, it doesn't have to be this way (We refuse to take more compassionate measures like countries with a lower recidivism rate, for example). We choose this. Maybe it is partially our own fault that some folks wind up "bad".
Re: Investigation finds inmates built computers and hid them in prison ceiling
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
People end up in prison for a reason. Though how I wish it wasn't so.
People have gone to the prison in the past solely because of the color of their skin or because of their religion. People today go to prison just for possessing a plant or criticizing their head of state. Let's not pretend that being in prison is anything other than a moral judgement rather than an indication of someone's character. It just makes it easier to dehumanize prisoners ("they deserve it") and harder for th…
>people who knew them will say to the news "I never expected them to do such a thing" or "they were such a sweet person"
The shittiest of people have friends/family who will vouch to journalists "he loved his family"(awesome achievement), "he was always up for a laugh" (or such euphemisms)... they've grown up talking self-serving bullshit and opposing the system in any situation.
Re: Investigation finds inmates built computers and hid them in prison ceiling
#55The article was written tuesday (April 11, 2017) but the computers were discovered in July 2015.
Slow news day...
Re: Investigation finds inmates built computers and hid them in prison ceiling
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Especially in Ohio. I remember years ago listening to the District Attorney of Cincinnati say he didn't believe in rehabilitation! WTF? 1% of Americans have been through the incarceration system. That's insane. These guys are probably just going to be reprimanded and be given more time in prison, when really they should encourage their education and effort to push them to legit computer work when they leave.…
> 1% of Americans have been through the incarceration system. That's insane. That's not quite correct. 1% of American adults are currently incarcerated. There's nearly 2.5M current prisoners, and the US total population is about 310M, so once you remove kids from that 'total pop' count...
Wouldn't that make the number higher then, if you're counting people that have been through the system? Some rough numbers from the US justice website say more than 650000 people are released from prison each year, and two thirds are back within another three years, which seems to me that a lot more than 1% touch the system.
Unfortunately, it's 4 in the morning, and I'd spend a good hour or so looking up better stats and figuring out the math, but I think my point stands.
Re: Investigation finds inmates built computers and hid them in prison ceiling
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
The prison transportation infrastructure vastly subsidizes Arduino Minis for this reason.
I'd say the Pi Zero is a far superior option. Vastly more computing power with only minimal additional pain. Bonus points if you hook it up to a battery and SSH into it during transit. Probably not the best idea to have something inside of you that occasionally catches fire, though. https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/pi-zero/
Re: Investigation finds inmates built computers and hid them in prison ceiling
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say the Pi Zero is a far superior option. Vastly more computing power with only minimal additional pain. Bonus points if you hook it up to a battery and SSH into it during transit. Probably not the best idea to have something inside of you that occasionally catches fire, though. https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/pi-zero/
Or the ESP32! https://espressif.com/en/products/hardware/esp32/overview
Re: Investigation finds inmates built computers and hid them in prison ceiling
#59Re: Investigation finds inmates built computers and hid them in prison ceiling
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
People end up in prison for a reason. Though how I wish it wasn't so.
Yes, they do. Sometimes it's cause cops make up a crime. Sometimes it's because they had a little bit of weed on them at a traffic stop. Sometimes it's because they commit a real crime that actually harms someone. Many times it's because one of the things above happened, they got out, wanted to go straight, and no one would hire them for anything because they had a criminal record. They tried to live straight, get so…
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics [0], 52% of convicted felons in state prisons are there for a violent crime; 18% for property crimes; 18% for drug crimes; and 9% for public order crimes [1]. Violent crimes obviously harm someone. I would guess that property crimes and some of the public order crimes do as well---remember that we're talking about felony convictions, which means crimes that resulted in a sentence of one year or more. For the sake of discussion we'll suppose that drug crimes never harmed anyone. So a reasonable estimate would be that around 3/4 of prisoners in state prisons are there because they committed a real crime that actually harms someone.
Now obviously it's bad that 1/4 of prisoners are there for trivial reasons. In particular, we need to end the drug war. But you seem to think that the prisons are full of people who were caught with a speck of weed or who stole a loaf of bread to feed themselves, and that really isn't true. Minor crimes usually result in a fine, community service, or at most a few months in jail (which is not the same thing as prison). For the most part, people in prison are there because they did something genuinely bad. The original article mentioned one specific prisoner by name, an Adam Johnston; I found what I think is his record [3], and he's serving twenty years for murder.
[0] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p09.pdf
[1] "Public order crimes" means "weapons, drunk driving, court offenses, commercialized vice, morals and decency offenses, liquor law violations, and other public-order offenses".
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Felony_S...
[3] http://www.drc.state.oh.us/OffenderSearch/details.aspx?id=A4...