Live data from Hacker News

Study finds most unemployed young men have criminal records

phys.org

151–157 of 157 posts

Re: Study finds most unemployed young men have criminal records

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That points to a major issue of the criminal justice system. You should be clear after your sentence and have repaid your debt to society. If society wants to send people to correctional facilities for life for things like theft or drug charges, then it should be honest and do that.

If you are imprisoned for embezzlement, do your time, get your name cleared, then do it all again, and again, do you want to hire them as your purchasing agent? I think the answer here is going to have to be on a case by case basis. I'd maybe hire someone for that position if their repeat offense was unrelated and unlikely to impact the position directly (such as, I don't know, 2nd degree murder from DUIs). I'd be wa…

Why not leave me in prison then if we're certain I'm going to do it again?

If the chance of me doing embezzlement is the same after I come out of prison than if I had never been to prison, what is the basis for caring whether or not someone has been to prison?

This assumes a justice system that works, at least in the sense that if you commit a crime and get prosecuted, the following actions are sufficient to prevent or deter you from doing it again, which given things like plea deals, etc. is not.

If we just want to reduce our justice system to a social credit verifier and background check database maintainer, or if this is really the best that can be dne, fine, let's admit that so we can try to do it a lot more cheaply than what we're doing now.

Re: Study finds most unemployed young men have criminal records

#152
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok but if I run a bank I don't want to hire Bernie Madoff, no matter how much time he served. So having the government tell me I can discriminate based on conviction for financial crimes but not drug possession more than 5 years ago seems reasonable. At least to improve the status quo.

"Drug possession" is also not monolithic to me. I'd be *much* more leery of hiring someone convicted of possession of addictive drugs than someone convicted of possession of recreational drugs. Recreational use can be done only in appropriate situations. Addictive use likely means they come to work impaired.

> Addictive use likely means they come to work impaired.

For the rest of their lives? There’s a time dimension here that implies being clean for five years.

Re: Study finds most unemployed young men have criminal records

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like at least part of what you are reacting to is blaming racial culture. I agree that is far too broad to be meaningful. Would you agree that part of the transgenerational cycle of poverty and crime involves family and community factors. I think this is true and spans genetic divisions. There are communities that are blighted in noneconomic ways that are difficult to address only with money.

it seems more likely that factors like continued poverty and unfair policing and incarceration rates (minorities are both stopped more frequently and punished more severely) are to blame for both violence and the resulting culture, as these are things we have actual evidence for blaming culture and ignoring measurable factors is almost always lazy racism

I think you are missing my point. I specifically avoided blaming culture. If you magically fixed policing and hiring discrimination tomorrow, it would still take generations for blighted communities to overcome their current inertia. I am simply saying that additional factors exist and are relevant.

Yes, we e have evidence that incarceration is detrimental to outcomes.

We also have data that uneducated single parents are detrimental to outcomes. We also have data that criminal and drug addicted parents are detrimental to outcomes.

Re: Study finds most unemployed young men have criminal records

#154
post #10

In previous centuries, there were plenty of jobs with low trust requirements - chiefly, unskilled manual labor. A criminal record wasn’t such a barrier to that type of employment. Someone could spend time in prison, and then still find work on the outside. Not great work perhaps, but a living - a way forward for them, to re-integrate back into society. A way to slowly rebuild trust. The shift away from unskilled manu…

> In previous centuries, there were plenty of jobs with low trust requirements These still exist in the modern era, primarily in industries with high turnover like the restaurant industry, farm labor, and other unsavory industries such as meat processing.

>restaurant industry

A job for teenagers and aspiring actors.

>farm labor

Okay, but we specifically import people to work for low (often illegally low) wages. Work for an adult, maybe, but not much of a living.

>and other unsavory industries.

Same problem as with farm labor, except now it's "unsavory" instead of "honest work".

It's not right to have a bimodal distribution of "high class professional jobs" and "unsavory jobs with low trust requirements". You need a lower-end but respectable place for people to be that's better than criminality, and you certainly can't say "go work in one of those unsavory industries" if you want them to think its better than being a criminal. In American culture we GLORIFY criminality, and loathe low-class "unsavory" work. Why would anyone choose unsavory work over being a criminal in the current environment?

Re: Study finds most unemployed young men have criminal records

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. When I was a student I worked in a restaurant with an ex convict who described his previous job at the meat packing plant in precisely those terms. He told me it was a hard dangerous s*** job, and back of the house in the restaurant was a lot better. He said safety measures and equipment were inadequate, and some of the other guys that worked there wanted to kill him (his remarks on your other areas of concern w…

Why are you censoring yourself? If a job is a shit job, just fucking say it. Why pretend? > his remarks on your other areas of concern would be ill suited to this forum This isn't a kid's show. Your comment is really interesting to me, and I'd like to hear what he said about these issues.

[deleted]

Re: Study finds most unemployed young men have criminal records

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Those jobs require trustworthy people too. If I were running a meat processing plant, and there was: - Sexual harassment - Racism - Violence - Etc. I'd have a huge liability on my hands. Unfortunately, prison convicts would be much more likely to expose me to those types of liability. If an employee catcalls another employee, that places a lot of burden lands on the employer. This happened largely due to progre…

Yep. When I was a student I worked in a restaurant with an ex convict who described his previous job at the meat packing plant in precisely those terms. He told me it was a hard dangerous s*** job, and back of the house in the restaurant was a lot better. He said safety measures and equipment were inadequate, and some of the other guys that worked there wanted to kill him (his remarks on your other areas of concern w…

(This won't make sense to anyone else but I don't care. I liked your response and I don't want mine to go to waste.)

---

My apologies, that's hilarious.

Not sure what that word is that you don't want to say, but if it's a racial epithet then I have to admit I won't say any of that shit either. I try not to even think those words, lest they become part of my internal monologue that becomes not-so-internal when I get old and demented. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite when I accuse others of self-censoring.

Your friend sounds like trash. I have some super trashy friends and acquaintances, and I can just hear them talking through your description. Trash white people are a tribe, and there's hardly anything trashier than the kind of grifting that painter did to you.

I love that Johnson quote, and it seems ever more prescient now that trash whites are a distinct voting bloc.

That quote applies just as well to black trash. There seems to be a resurgence of black nationalism now, with multitudes of black revolutionaries talking pan-africanism, reparations, and utopian black socialism. Moors and whatever the fuck else. I was reading about a group of these characters that briefly set up shop down in the far corner of my state. Black Hammer, they call themselves. They got a bunch of suckers to gofundme them to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, saying they'd liberate some land and start some sort of black-supremacist commune. Surprisingly it didn't work out and the leaders have since moved on to more mainstream BLM-type activism. And they kept the money obviously.

Re: Study finds most unemployed young men have criminal records

#157
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely unrelated to the thread but > I don't really check who's building my websites or little tools I purchase. How do you sleep at night? Honest question. I want to know the assumptions and reasoning that leads to one being comfortable with this decision. I’m probably more worried than I should be, but every time I look at my puny little openBSD webserver’s log, I find about 2 to 5 new attempts to scan my serve…

So, you never pay for anything on an app store? You host everything on your own hardware? I am far more worried about the air quality that floats into my home than a website that's hosted somewhere else and isn't connected to anything but its own content.

> So, you never pay for anything on an app store?

I buy software from the app store for sure. But I do not pull down .apk binaries from the darkweb and run them on my phone - especially if I don't know who the author was. I doubt most sane people would download and run binaries from random websites (darkweb or not) even today.

> You host everything on your own hardware?

No I don't. I trust my hosting provider, and they have a track record of reputable service, I have a business relationship with them. I would say I know who is hosting my website.

Post reply on HN