While I agree that this is a huge failure of the prison system, I'm also convinced that it shouldn't take more than a month for an ex-convict to catch up with the average computer user. Most people I know are borderline computer illiterate. Even the educated ones.
Out of prison after 30 years and people telling him to find forms on the web
21–30 of 264 posts
Re: Out of prison after 30 years and people telling him to find forms on the web
#22This long form Twitter stuff is so miserable. This seems like an interesting story, but I couldn’t read past the second segment.
And no, Threader doesn’t solve it or help (even taking for granted the extremely unlikely assumption that I was willing to migrate the thread to another service and navigate to that other service just to read it).
This is interesting in conjunction with the story itself, a man having a hard time adjusting to digital interfaces.
So much of it is caused by the abject poorness of digital interfaces foisted on us that we just accept and stumble through.
Re: Out of prison after 30 years and people telling him to find forms on the web
#23In contrast, I am sure we all know some older people who were not in prisson for the past 30 years and still don't know how to write an email, what a zoom call is or when it's appropriate to double-click vs single click items on a computer. I know people in their 50s who pretend that "they don't need this technology" or "I can just go to the bank if I need something". Sure, if you're in your 80s you might want to dod…
That rant, wow. It really resonates deeply with me. People would rather cumulatively spend some 10000 hours yelling at Office for the rest of their lives, instead of spending 10 over the course of some evenings/weekends to brush up on the basics. Even from an immediate-more-important-priorities-perspective it almost doesn’t make sense to me.
[deleted]
Re: Out of prison after 30 years and people telling him to find forms on the web
#24In contrast, I am sure we all know some older people who were not in prisson for the past 30 years and still don't know how to write an email, what a zoom call is or when it's appropriate to double-click vs single click items on a computer. I know people in their 50s who pretend that "they don't need this technology" or "I can just go to the bank if I need something". Sure, if you're in your 80s you might want to dod…
That rant, wow. It really resonates deeply with me. People would rather cumulatively spend some 10000 hours yelling at Office for the rest of their lives, instead of spending 10 over the course of some evenings/weekends to brush up on the basics. Even from an immediate-more-important-priorities-perspective it almost doesn’t make sense to me.
It's fractal, I see this even in the tech industry itself - people are reluctant to sit down with a manual for an hour to figure out how some software (or device) works, and prefer to forever call it "too complicated to use", just because they couldn't grok it in 30 seconds.
Re: Out of prison after 30 years and people telling him to find forms on the web
#25In contrast, I am sure we all know some older people who were not in prisson for the past 30 years and still don't know how to write an email, what a zoom call is or when it's appropriate to double-click vs single click items on a computer. I know people in their 50s who pretend that "they don't need this technology" or "I can just go to the bank if I need something". Sure, if you're in your 80s you might want to dod…
I'm a software engineer yet I don't do online banking (I literally "just go to the bank if I need something"). I don't consider myself a "luddite", I just don't see the advantage over traditional "offline banking". Same with shopping and all the other little nuisances of daily life.
Re: Out of prison after 30 years and people telling him to find forms on the web
#26This seems like an area that the USDS might be able to contribute to.
Re: Out of prison after 30 years and people telling him to find forms on the web
#27I can't imagine that prison life is so disconnected from the rest of society; it certainly isn't in Europe.
The US prison system is all about punishment not rehabilitation.
Theres a very strong “lock them up and throw away the key” mentality in many Americans view of justice.
Re: Out of prison after 30 years and people telling him to find forms on the web
#28This can also be a problem for homeless people. If you are homeless and digitally savvy, the internet and a tablet or smartphone or laptop or even library card can be huge, huge assets that make homelessness vastly less burdensome.
But for some homeless people, job hunting is a nightmare because they don't have the internet savvy and, on top of that, they don't own a laptop and they may not know they can get access to a computer at the library (at least when there isn't a pandemic on).
Kudos to her for taking the time to do this. I don't know how to solve this, though I run some websites and what not aimed at trying to provide useful info to homeless people and people at risk of homelessness and I advocate to whatever degree I can for trying to get smartphones and the like into the hands of homeless individuals and people at risk (and people with prison records are at risk if you can't infer the obvious just from reading these tweets).
Re: Out of prison after 30 years and people telling him to find forms on the web
#29Twitter is such a horrible venue for a blog.
Re: Out of prison after 30 years and people telling him to find forms on the web
#30My first thought is how the prison system failed him. Computer literacy is a fundamental job skill in the 21st century, one that's relatively easily and inexpensively taught. I'd expect computer literacy programs in any prison system built around rehabilitation.
yep, 30 years is enough time to pursue several degrees, let alone basic skills. What facilities do US prisons provide!?
The US prison system isn't designed around rehabilitation, but around profit. Just like the US justice system isn't designed around justice, but around righteousness. The fact that us-amerian judges fund their own election campaigns underlines the absurdity, and yet it's just one facette in a reality that's going well beyond the satirical ideas spun towards the end of the last century.
Sorry if I'm rambling a bit, I don't want to waste anyones time. It's just hard to swallow the delta between ought and is.