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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

#621

Post by Broken_Hippo »

ccktlmazeltov wrote: post #506
saxonww wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every job application I have ever filled out asked whether I had been convicted of a felony. All the way back to my first job bagging groceries.

that literally never happened to me

I've never seen a basic job application without it. Fast food asked. Half the places do a drug test as well, some of them (call centers and commericial foodservice) did drug tests, including random hair follicle tests.

You either haven't worked bottom-of-the-barrel jobs or lived in areas where this sort of thing wasn't allowed.

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

#622

Post by Broken_Hippo »

nate_meurer wrote: post #510
BlueGh0st wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I have a very unique name and despite my crime being committed in 2013 my name wasn't publicized widely until 2017. So I have no ability or desire to try to hide from my past, at this point. I'm just trying to own up to my mistakes and do better.

Indeed, I don't know anyone else named BlueGh0st. Have you thought about changing your legal name? It's a bit of a chore, but it might allow to permanently shed a lot of baggage if you change to a common name.

You still have to list your previous names in many cases and pretty much every background check form asks: Married women who have changed their name must do this all the time.

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

#624

Post by tyho »

ponker wrote: post #201
luckylion wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany, that would Intensivtäter (literally intensive perpetrators). It's not rare to have young men with dozens of convictions for assault, breaking and entering, mugging etc. They typically don't get any jail time and will collect more indictments between being arrested and seeing a judge. For Berlin they're having a list of 500 people, almost all male.

I wonder how much better you could make society if you managed to take the worst 1% of scumbags and remove them.

Western Europe did pretty much that for hundreds of years.

> Through its monopoly on violence, the State tends to pacify social relations. Such pacification proceeded slowly in Western Europe between the 5th and 11th centuries, being hindered by the rudimentary nature of law enforcement, the belief in a man’s right to settle personal disputes as he saw fit, and the Church’s opposition to the death penalty. These hindrances began to dissolve in the 11th century with a consensus by Church and State that the wicked should be punished so that the good may live in peace. Courts imposed the death penalty more and more often and, by the late Middle Ages, were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just as many offenders dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, the homicide rate plummeted from the 14th century to the 20th. The pool of violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy, intoxication, or extreme stress. The decline in personal violence is usually attributed to harsher punishment and the longer-term effects of cultural conditioning. It may also be, however, that this new cultural environment selected against propensities for violence.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470491501300...

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

#626

Post by josephg »

csdffsdfsdfsdfs wrote: post #608
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely not, if by "applicable" you mean to suggest that employers would never want to hire such a person for any job. Should a person convicted of theft, who's served their time, paid the fine, made the victims whole, and learned not to steal, be discarded from consideration as a useful member of society? In case it's not clear, I think they should have the same rights as any other human being. No one seriously advoc…

"Same rights" - no sorry, somebody who stole before will be regarded with higher suspicion than other people, and that's OK. How do you know they "learned not to steal"? Can you look inside of their heads? There are jobs with less opportunities to steal, for example. Trust has to be regained, simply "having been in prison" is not really worth much in that respect. You would stay in prison, regardless of your mindset,…

As an Australian, I find that perspective awful. Going to jail is the punishment society has chosen for the crime. Once you've served your time, you rejoin society on an equal footing. Denying jobs to ex-cons makes it much harder for them to integrate back into society, and increases the recidivism rate. (Which you pay for via taxes.)

The equation isn't "bad person -> steals". Its "person maladapted to society / with unhealthy community -> steals". Why would someone be a thief if they have a stable job and community?

And how do you expect someone fresh out of jail, with no connections and community, to make a stable life for themselves if nobody will give them a job?

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

#627

Post by waterhouse »

RobertKerans wrote: post #619
waterhouse wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a rights-based approach in which (a) yes, someone inflicting a harm on you gives you the right to inflict a proportionate harm on them; (b) you can then go to them and threaten to inflict this harm, and usually get them to agree to pay you a fine instead, thus benefiting both of you. Labor could be used to substitute for a fine if someone can't pay, although I think in today's prisons the prisoners don't nec…

This is a jaw-droppingly horrific system you're imagining. Amongst other things you've effectively insulted rich criminals from any repercussions, and basically given them a slave underclass (please, no snarky comments about current justice system). Do you genuinely think this a good idea?

Our current legal system has evolved over many hundreds of years. I merely describe a set of initial conditions and a few possible early developments. The space of things it might evolve into seems pretty wide. I do suspect some of those things would be good. That said, in the meantime:

There have existed societies in which the penalty for murder was to pay a fine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weregild

Also, this doesn't insulate rich criminals from all repercussions. If they have enough money to pay the fines when murdering tens of people... well, you could try killing the criminal directly. You can do that today as well, if you're prepared to pay the price.

A really rich criminal could hire bodyguards, of course, but those would be costly, imperfect, and have some chance of turning against their employer. Ultimately it would become a rich guy in charge of an organized criminal gang, which... is also something that exists today.

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

#628

Post by rimliu »

shadowprofile77 wrote: post #584
poulsbohemian wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in consulting, it was part of our regular contact language that we had verified backgrounds and that we wouldn't place a felon on site with a client. A surprising number of clients even outside banking, finance, government, etc made a point of enforcing this language, even conducting their own background checks. Freelancing was the approach I saw some people do successfully, but there were lots of projects…

This is just puritanical, judgemental idiocy at its most pointlessly discriminatory. Even for felony offenses it often veers into the same territory but flatly refusing to hire people for fucking misdemeanors with absolutely no relevance to most of the work involved? What a closed, almost hatefully punitive mentality some employers have. I can't put myself into another's shoes or context of needs, but if I ran a firm…

Generealizing: if a person is dishonest, do you think his inclination to act dishonestly depends on the work they do or on their personality?

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

#629

Post by rimliu »

lopmotr wrote: post #559
AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a tweet that explicitly promotes superiority or inferiority of one race relative to other races.

What if one race really is superior or inferior to another? For example "Tibetans are better at surviving at high altitudes than Han Chinese" Fact but racist according to that definition. Harsh consequences for scientists talking about their work?

High altitudes are a social construct, duh.

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

#630

Post by InitialLastName »

Tepix wrote: post #602
rendall wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistically, it does? You have a citation, then. Would you share it, please?

Found this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/once-a-criminal-always-a-crimin... 1% of 988 murderers were arrested for a new crime (yet not another murder). Is that higher than average? It sounds like it is.

Let's be clear that being arrested for a new crime is different than being convicted of a new crime. Given that none of the murderers in that overview went back to prison, I'm inclined to think that their conviction rate is low.

Keep in mind also that being an ex-con in a community likely puts you at the top of the PD's suspect list for new crimes, and that reintegration with society is difficult, so imprisonment (regardless of crime) makes recidivism more likely.

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