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Dude was already in crime at 17. He didn't really have any time with the luxuries of adulthood to figure out his own life.
So, I actually know what I am talking about here, and still lack sympathy. Risk taken, game lost. Simple.
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The average citizen in every country is already willing to commit a crime. The difference between the average criminal and you is a couple of meals.
No amount of missed meals will make me commit a rape, a murder, or other heinous crimes.
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> He had his chances to be a productive, tax paying member of society and he blew it I love this thought that people in the US with felony convictions can just go out and be: "productive, tax paying member of society". I'll place a wager that if you called and ask them if they even HIRE felons, they'll tell you "No, as a matter of corporate policy." So, what then -- work for $10/hr so that you can barely make rent in…
He was not born a drug wholesaler. He made that choice…twice! Rehabilitation is not the sole or even primary goal of incarceration. Nor should it be. But I do agree. People who’ve done their time shouldn’t have to wear a permanent scarlet letter. I just have little sympathy for repeat offenders of very serious felonies. This guy wasn’t a small time street dealer. He is probably partly responsible for many fentanyl ov…
In the US, it is evidently an anti-goal: the US incarceration system is structured as if it were deliberately designed to do the opposite of rehabilitation, to take people who are minor and nonviolent criminals and turn them into major and violent criminals.
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Yeah this guy belongs in jail and clearly doesn’t think what he did was a problem at all. In the midst of an epidemic that kills tens of thousands of Americans a year the dealers of these drugs make the front page and are cheered on as “victims.” The victims here are the families and children of the people whose abuse he profited greatly off of.
Author, here: As a severe opioid addict myself for over 10 years, I am absolutely ashamed of having any part in that life. It is a burden that I will have to continue dealing with every day for the rest of my life. In no way am I trying to say that I did not deserve to go to prison. The focus of this post, was about the facilities made available to those people who do end up in prison, so that they do not return. As…
Totally tangential, but this prison article reminded me of a short story by Cory Doctorow about a monastery for programmers. I imagined living in a room about the size of my home office, a bed, a desk, a decent MacBook Pro and a high-speed connection and just hanging out on the Internet all day reading articles and programming. Food and shelter taken care of, no obligations or responsibilities. Like the pictures of Norwegian prison cells.
That reminded me of a weird Internet streamer collective started by a Twitch streamer named Athene. He started a group called The Singularity Group [1] which allowed people to move into a house to volunteer work on philanthropic projects. They are responsible for the AI Jesus [2] channel on Twitch. There is some controversy since some see the streamer as having tried to start a cult [3]. They also created a few mobile games that run on their own crypto-currency.
At any rate, it is all quite interesting to me. It was very common in the past in almost all cultures for a certain number of men to just reject society and go off into hermitage. Sometimes those hermits would band together into brotherhoods. Often they would make beer, or honey or some other collective task to earn enough money for the members to spend the rest of their time in quiet contemplation. I can imagine such a life might be attractive to a lot of programmers who tend to be introverted and feel alien to normal society.
1. https://singularitygroup.net/
I'm guessing much of the US system (where I understand a lot more for-profit private companies are involved) is at least as broken.
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> it is not an excuse. Things can be a reason without being an excuse. Sure I'm not in jail and on the surface I have my act together, but my entire life has been fucked up by what are now called "ACEs" and it's a miracle I'm as stable as I am. I'm not going to let people off the hook, but I am able to sympathize...especially knowing the wrong person or event at the wrong time would have quickly sent me down the same…
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I'm not whining, but I do think you should try to understand why people end up the way they do because it's almost never as simple as them being a bad person from the get go.
Attitudes like yours aren't helpful and we could make society a far safer place if we could identify problems earlier in people's lives and intervene.
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Dude was already in crime at 17. He didn't really have any time with the luxuries of adulthood to figure out his own life.
I was deep into rave culture at that age. Lets just say I know the "deal". However, I always knew I would never sell, because, surprise, I knew the penalty was not worth it. So, I actually know what I am talking about here, and still lack sympathy. Risk taken, game lost. Simple.