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My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison

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Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison

#351

Post by aero142 »

reader_mode wrote: post #216
aero142 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I'm more worried about what 13 years in prison did to the person than the original crime. We don't know what the original crime was so it is hard to say in this case. Perhaps they have some deep, anti-social personality flaw and I wouldn't want to sit next to them. I would be concerned about sitting next to an innocent person who spent 13 years in prison, though. For me, that is a root issue. How many crimi…

> Perhaps they have some deep, anti-social personality flaw Like a lot of people in IT ? Not necessarily anti-social but you need to be asocial to some degree to want to spend 8+ hours in front of a screen talking to a computer. It's usually easy to pick out programmers from general population.

You replace my word, "anti-social" with your word, "asocial" which doesn't mean the same thing. Anti-social behavior is a clinical diagnosis. I mean to describe people who react with a lot of violence or anger at situations that might happen at an office.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour

Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison

#352

Post by bredren »

noobermin wrote: post #286
koiz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the USA, background checks are often just part of the process. There's an entire industry built around providing the service.

Americans have been completely conditioned into accepting all sorts of trouble while maintaining the idea of freedom in contradiction to that.

I think freedom and access to power are entangled.

People with access to power or money either don't need to interview for jobs, or don't have criminal records that complicate that process.

So, they are more free by default. Not only do these checks not affect them directly, they create a nerf on a whole set of other people, which creates a contrast of freedom.

I do not think many would go out in public and say they like seeing the poor unfairly burdened. However, I believe in many cases groups in the United States have chosen "power over principals."

This is where the choice to protect power supersedes choosing to act principals or professed beliefs.

I do not think this is a new thing, though I think it has never been so public and given today's politics the contrast is particularly stark.

Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison

#354

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

737maxtw wrote: post #338
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #329

I don't have a record, but, through the extracurricular volunteer work I've done for the last 40 years, I've had a lot of interaction with people who have spent some quality time, getting free room and board; from Minimum Security Federal pens, to supermax and 23-hour solitary. One thing that I can tell you, is that there's no way to apply "one size fits all" templates to them all. Some will shine like you wouldn't b…

I'm kinda surprised your guy got in trouble. Many banking places don't even drug test..

It was a school thing. I never heard the story. He was uncomfortable talking about it, so I never pressed.

Once it's on the record, though, HR will always find it.

I've known folks from the finance industry for thirty years. They are...interesting characters. The Wolf of Wall Street kinda made them look like choirboys.

Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison

#355

Post by alexashka »

mrlala wrote: post #334
alexashka wrote: post #233

> The way that ex-felons are treated in society is despicable, no wonder there's a 55% recidivism rate if you get blocked at every attempt to becoming a productive member of society. What makes you think they want to be a 'productive member of society'? It's not that hard to be a member of free society instead of prison society - don't break the law, repeatedly. There'll always be unlucky exceptions and if your goal…

>It's not that hard to be a member of free society instead of prison society - don't break the law, repeatedly. Wow. It's THAT SIMPLE! Would you like to report this to the media or should I? Most "criminals" are people who are from severely disadvantaged socioeconomic and/or family backgrounds. Gee, what a coincidence. You mean the people who grew up without an opportunity in the world resort to crime to try to stay…

> You mean the people who grew up without an opportunity in the world resort to crime to try to stay afloat?

What opportunities do people who end up criminals lack that immigrants or refugees have?

Let's narrow it down to countries without slavery in their past to simplify matters.

> What makes you think they DO NOT want to be a productive member of society given the proper opportunity?

I didn't make the claim that they do or do not. If you claim there is a teapot in outer space, the onus is you to prove it, not on me to disprove that there isn't.

Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison

#356

Post by oaiey »

vincentmarle wrote: post #5

The way that ex-felons are treated in society is despicable, no wonder there's a 55% recidivism rate if you get blocked at every attempt to becoming a productive member of society. The Last Mile seems like a great program to share our tech skills and knowledge with people who really need a leg up. I will be signing up as a volunteer today.

> A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There is nothing more to say, than this also applies to ex-felons.

Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison

#357

Post by anemoiac »

nickff wrote: post #11
caseyscottmckay wrote: post #8

We need more of this. A criminal record in the US is a curse for life, leaving former criminals with little chance at success and little to live for. People without much to live for are dangerous. We should help our former criminals rather than condemn them for life--it benefits us all.

People are losing their jobs because of offhand tweets completely unrelated to their occupation; how can we expect that a blemish as big as a criminal record will be overlooked?

Smoke weed in Kansas - boom, criminal record. Walk across the Colorado border and smoke weed - no problem, it's completely legal. It's also completely legal to spend your free time carting your AR-15 and Nazi flag down to the village square and recruiting supporters for your "Turn America into a white ethnostate" movement. The point I'm making is that not all criminal behavior is even widely considered objectionable and plenty of legal behavior is.

Thus, why would you consider having a criminal record to be "a [big] blemish" that justifies employment discrimination, yet no personal views extreme enough to allow an employer to disassociate from their employee?

When you consider that the ratio of those affected by criminal record-based employment discrimination to those impacted by twitter-based discrimination is on the order of millions to one, it seems strange to be more concerned about the latter than the former.

Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison

#358

Post by hinkley »

lostlogin wrote: post #230
throwaway894345 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very interested in understanding how much of that recidivism rate is attributable to "ex-felon discrimination" or whatever we might call it as opposed to other variables.

It gets very philosophical fast. Prison is for punishment, rehabilitation, protection of society and is there to serve as a deterrent. Over emphasis on the need to punish seems to cause a lot of long term harm.

One arm of the 'defund the police' camp wants to take rehabilitation and mental health issues away from the criminal justice system.

Although practically, the sharks in the private prison industry have already tasted blood. They are smart enough to pivot, leaving us with the same perverse incentives, or worse. Way more people can forgive a drug conviction than an involuntary commitment to a mental health institution, and abuse is harder report.

Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison

#359

Post by julianapostate »

charlesu wrote: post #319
centimeter wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s funny watching people come up with all these complicated epicycle-ridden theories for why success is heritable, when the true answer is very obvious - most behaviors related to success are highly genetically heritable. This is the incontrovertible conclusion one draws when they critically observe the results of highly controlled and conditioned twin/sibling studies (on incarceration rate, among other things). Of…

> most behaviors related to success are highly genetically heritable And the implications of this are what? See, that's the problem with these claims. They serve no purpose other than to suggest that some people are inherently better or more deserving than others. But we live in a liberal democracy based on equality before the law. It wouldn't matter if some people are more predisposed to crime or smarter or whatever…

the implications are that a bit of gene pool control may go a long way.

Re: My friend starts her job today, after learning to program in prison

#360

Post by jorblumesea »

noobermin wrote: post #286
koiz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the USA, background checks are often just part of the process. There's an entire industry built around providing the service.

Americans have been completely conditioned into accepting all sorts of trouble while maintaining the idea of freedom in contradiction to that.

Many Americans talk about "freedom" but their definition is largely narrow and specific to political issues they feel strongly about. The same people who talk about "small government" simultaneously use the federal government to bludgeon states into submissions on issues such as legalized marijuana. It's usually something that's used to justify a specific political position and not an overall sentiment of allowing actual freedom.

On the contrary, many Americans support policies that are against many ideas of freedom such as the disenfranchisement of felons.

For example, someone might use an example of being able to deny a LGBTQ person a service as "having freedoms" but ignore the fact that by denying them that service, that person is also simultaneously less free.

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